Girl Through Glass by Sari Wilson

age when my father moved out, and so much changed—and I had run down the carpeted stairs, through the deserted lobby, and into a packed and thundering proscenium of carpeted walls blaring with lights. I had fought my way through the black stockinged legs andgold-clasped purses to within sight of the stage. But then it was too crowded. I couldn’t move anymore—and I couldn’t see more than a sliver of the stage. A face in the crowd turned toward me, a slight man—it was him. He reached down, said something like, “Poor thing. You can’t see, can you?” He helped me up on the armrest of a seat and held me there while I balanced over the crowd. I remember the small face, the thin mustache, the oddness of his smell, like apples and something sour. I remember his face was bright with rapture, with reflected stage lights. With his help, I balanced feet away from the stage. The male dancer’s face was orange with makeup, the female dancer’s muscles stretched like rubber bands over bone. I shouted my Bravos at the dancers until I was hoarse.
    A girl and a man meet. A girl and a man, too old for her, meet and are changed, though they don’t know it yet.
    Something is hardening in me—and something else is softening. I put on my running shoes and, despite the ice, take the path back across campus. I head to Baker. No one is usually using these studios now, what with the new Art Center. The Baker studios were never converted to a state-of-the-art facility. The floors are wood, the windows rattle, the rafters are strewn with old bits of rope and old props. But I like them, these old Baker studios. There’s a dreaminess to them, like a stage set from long ago, and the air above you is vast.
    I don’t turn the lights on. It’s easier to dance in the dark tonight. If I move, I keep my thoughts at bay. They are unproductive, tangled. They lead me back only to questions and an old pain. Coming through the high windows is a still, bright moon that casts long blue shadows across the floor.
    I shuck off my coat. I skip a warm-up and just start moving. The shapes my body makes are interesting. At first I don’t recognize them. My upper body is doing one thing and my lower body is doing another. My arms are beating a rhythm. Then the rhythm changes—I’m following it—and it becomes faster and more violent. In the midst of a series of contract and releases—a release fall to the floor,a roll, a pitch upward with a side extension—I realize I am actually threading ballet steps in. God love me, it’s been years but my body remembers: pas de bourrée, glissade, jeté, the first sequence I learned as a girl and which we would do at the end of class and it would feel like we were flying. It’s been ages since I’ve choreographed something original, but there is something interesting in these sequences. Now I’m close to the floor, locking in a plié, my arms shoot out, I tumble, I roll.
    I’m not dancing for anyone. I’m just following the patterns. Then I am good and sweaty and everything is less precious, everything is flowing. My body is cooking. I am moving in space. There is the vastness of this once-gym, its 1920s bones, all you have to do is look up and see the steel poles and nets made of a kind of string no one uses anymore.
    I’m moving in and out of the shadows, circling: fall, roll, jeté.
    I am dancing .
    And then the lights turn on. They thunder on across the rafters and the landscape of blue shadow is replaced by a false yellow sunshine that shows every decade of scuff and bang to the floors.
    I’m left blinking, gasping for breath.
    â€œOh my God! Professor Randell! You scared me!” says a voice. And I look and then I see—I can’t believe it, what are the chances—it’s Sioban. Her hands, one of those on my wrist, the same hands, the color of ash in this light, flutter to her face and then