Girl Through Glass Read Online Free PDF Page A

mother Mira and Val make fun of, the kind who goes up to the barre after recitals and tries to do some of the ballet moves herself, the kind who stands in the doorway and yells “We need a new nutritionist for Laura!”Laura stands with her back to the wall, looking at her mother in dismay. Mira catches sight of Laura’s prissy pink vinyl-shiny ballet shoes. Anger cleaves at her—who is this girl, who are any of them, to flout the sartorial rules of this world that can turn children into princesses and princes?
    Hannah gives Laura’s mother a stony stare. Laura’s mother touches her hair self-consciously and turns. Laura’s mother can’t really yell at the older girls. They are the linchpins of this world.
    â€œCome on,” Hannah says.
    The older girls brush by Mira and Val, Laura’s mother, and the other girls and mothers, with a swish of their warm-up pants and the clunk clunk of pointe shoes against the floor, swaying under the weight of their giant dance bags. When they have passed through, a hush follows.
    To Mira and Val, Laura’s mother says, “Have some respect, would you? Go play outside in the hallway.”
    But even if Mira’s mother were here, she wouldn’t care. Her mother ties ribbons in Mira’s hair when she remembers, and then they loosen, droop, and fall out, and her mother doesn’t even notice. And now, with her father gone, she is even more distracted. In her red kimono or rotating sets of overalls, she is transforming the living room with stuff she carries down from the junk room.
    â€œ One, ” her mother sings, “ singular sensation, ” as she walks upstairs with a beaded lamp shade she commandeered from somewhere in the house. The living room begins to fill up with big plants, throw pillows, and low soft-glow lamps that perch on the floor like sleepy cats. Ashtrays appear, too. Her father hates smoking.
    If only her mother were wailing in the kitchen by the dim light of one bulb, red-faced, tragic and beautiful, Mira would understand. But her mother seems almost cheerful. She seems to have more energy. Her mother zips up and down the stairs, carrying objects from one part of the house to another, loudly humming show tunes Mira didn’t know she knew.

    One night when Mira was much younger, she is awakened by her parents coming home giggling. In the morning, they stand with steaming coffee in their hands in their apartment’s tiny kitchen, and with their faces flushed, they keep breaking up in laughter. Rachel’s laugh is a skittering, uneven thing that can’t seem to stop. Mira’s father’s is a full, throaty laugh that makes Mira nervous. He is normally reserved.
    Her mother does most of the talking. “We’ve bought a house!” she says. “A Victorian house!” The house had been owned by the same family for generations. Some of the rooms upstairs have not been used for decades, Rachel says. They are filled with furniture—lamps, spinning wheels, moth-eaten couches. The elderly brothers who now live there are moving to a small condominium in Florida; what do they need with three floors’ worth of dusty Victorian furniture? They’ve offered her parents all the furniture in the house for one dollar. One dollar! With some reupholstering and repairs, it is probably worth a fortune. How can they refuse? As they speak, her mother uses words she has never heard before: parlor, foyer, banister, wrought iron, parquet.
    When her mother is finished, her father clears his throat and smiles his shiny-penny smile. “It’s a good investment,” he says finally.
    The new house, a clapboard from the 1850s, is in a neighborhood that people describe by telling you about all the famous people who used to live there a hundred years ago. The old slate sidewalks crack and buckle. The rain gutters are full of Q-tips and cellophane. Plastic bags hang in the spindly trees. Sneakers garland