Girl Through Glass by Sari Wilson Page A

partnering. It is nothing like it looks: two bodies seamlessly flowing into and away from each other. It is nothing like dancing on your own, feeling the power of your own body transporting you. No, partnering is all sweating and grunting and hard-edged bones, hip bones jabbing into finger bones and taut thighs ricocheting, straining against a heaving shoulder, slick with sweat. It is unseemly and difficult, without the reward of self-mastery.
    She surprises herself. “Maybe it’s not me, maybe it’s you, ” she says.
    He looks at her. He looks tired, his face too long, his eyes too blurry, his skin sickly, his hair dank, too old and too young at once. There is something wrong wrong wrong with him. Then he steps back and regards himself. With the smudges beneath them, his eyes appear deeper set, his skin paler, his hair blonder. “It’ll be fine,” he says. “You’ll figure it out. Just keep practicing.”
    She looks down—her turtleneck has hearts on it. How babyish!
    She remembers Maurice’s story of Rostova and her partner. How he looked out for her. How he saved her when she caught fire. To trust and then leap. She needs to find a way to leap, she needs to close her eyes, she needs to ignore the hitch of his knees buckling, the unstableness of his stance, and the soft grunts that he might not even know slip out from somewhere in his slick-with-sweat throat. That is the job of the ballerina.
    â€œSorry—” she says.
    He pulls his bangs back, rubs his fingers lightly over the skin of his forehead, investigating his pimples. “Are you going to audition in the fall?” he says.
    She and Val had said they would audition for SAB and ABT someday, but it had been far off, an idea. Now she sees that it’s not far off at all. She must have nodded because he says, “SAB or ABT? Or both?”
    For her only one shining, glittering acronym matters—the one owned by the wise, shadowy face she saw at the Russian Tea Room with Maurice. “SAB,” she says. “I met Mr. Balanchine once.”
    He cocks his head and smiles, though it’s really more of a smirk.
    I will go there. Next year. But she has to wait for August when they famously line girls up along a barre and lift their legs and check their arches and say which ones have a chance before they even dance. They wait for the last minute, a minute before September classes start, to hold the audition.
    He nods. “You should. You’ll probably get in. You have the right line. No hips. They hate hips.”
    â€œI’m only eleven,” she says.
    â€œYeah, well,” he says. “When I was your age, I was already the Nutcracker prince.”
    â€œI know that.” She smoothes her white turtleneck with the hearts on it.
    He laughs. “Of course you do. Did you read that book about me?”
    She looks down and feels her face fill with blood.
    He smiles slowly. “That’s all right,” he says. He is enjoying himself. He rubs his eyes quickly, almost violently, and shakes his hair.
    He is about to leave. Suddenly, she doesn’t want him to go. She doesn’t want to be alone in the studio in the fading afternoon. She doesn’t want to go home on the train to her Brooklyn self, to her mother, to her absent father. She thinks about Gary, who, despite what he said, is over at the house all the time clattering away on a typewriter and lurking about, his hungry wolf’s face saying hello to Mira so that before Mira has to pee, she sticks her head out into the hallway to see if he is there. She thinks of her father with his head in his hands at the steamy diner. Her father’s new place: that brightapartment with the brown couch and squat black phone. She wants to say something to Christopher that will encompass all of this.
    â€œMy father skipped out.” Skipped out. She’s never said that before. She doesn’t even know what it means, exactly. It