The Turnout Read online

  There was something so sad about the whole setup. Is this the best you can do, Marie? As if Marie were forever twelve, weepily dragging her sleeping bag into the backyard when they had a fight.

  Since then, Dara had never seen any reason to go up there again. And Marie hadn’t invited her anyway.

  Dara still thought of the third floor as their mother’s domain, her sanctuary, the place she’d retreat to, sometimes for several hours or even a day at a time. It smelled, then, of their mother’s perfume, her lily candles, her favorite milled soap. Now it just smelled like Marie.

  * * *

  * * *

  It’s up! It’s up!” The screeching and trill, the hush and cursing. While Dara and Marie taught their final classes of the day, Charlie had posted the final Nutcracker cast list on the changing room door. Most of the dismissed students had returned for it, and many had never left at all, killing hours on their phones in the changing room, stretching in Studio B, running to the drugstore for contraband soda and sour candies.

  By the time Dara approached, a rosy swirl of girls surrounded Bailey Bloom, this year’s Clara, the part of all parts, the brave girl venturing into the adult world of dark magic, of broken things, of innocence lost. Dara had targeted her months ago. Knew she had the skills but also the focus, the commitment the part required. Earnest, self-critical, relentless Bailey Bloom, who now stood, eyes darting, among her clambering classmates, their mouths full of congratulations but their eyes twinkling with envy and spite.

  “Madame Durant,” Bailey said, spotting her, “I can’t hardly believe it.”

  And she smiled widely, showing her dimples—which, Dara realized, in Bailey’s four years at the school, she had never seen—like sharp cuts, stigmata deep.

  * * *

  * * *

  At six or seven all the parents began arriving, decamping from their parade of heaving SUVs and fogged sedans, Dr. Weston and Ms. Lin, and Mr. Lesterio, looking weary and mildly alarmed after learning his son Corbin would be the Nutcracker Prince, an immediately controversial decision among the other five boys who thought him too old, an ancient fourteen. And Mrs. Bloom, of course, her chest heaving with excitement, calling out her daughter’s name. When Bailey ran into her arms, her face nearly collapsed with complicated joy, her mouth opening as if to cry out. Her voice catching and disappearing in her throat.

  Watching her, Dara suspected Mrs. Bloom, like so many of the mothers (and, every once in a while, a father), had once harbored ballet fantasies of her own, her fingers curling around Bailey’s tidy bun, her eyes full of tears.

  * * *

  * * *

  Just as the day’s last classes had ended, just as Dara was about to wrench loose the cork from the half-full wine bottle stashed in the deep drawer of the office desk, delivery men arrived and she had to sign for yet another box of new pointe shoes ordered especially for The Nutcracker.

  Distracted from their changing, jeans half-tugged over their leotards, the eight- and nine-year-olds, a year or two from going on pointe, surrounded the box with ooohs and aaahhhs as if it were the ark of the covenant. Their feet now so round and pristine, eventually to be like the older girls’. Blood blisters, soles like red onions, feet that peeled fully tip to toe every month or so, calluses thick as canvas, toes curled sidewise, necrotic, ulcerated toes, their nails slipping off, clattering to the floor.

  A bold one snuck her hand along the top seam and peered inside, giggling. Wanting in, wanting to touch, to feel this thing that would one day become a part of her, a new organ, tender and virginal, ready to be used, abused, destroyed.

  Approaching, Marie took one look at the box, her eyes burning.

  “Like lambs to the slaughter,” she said softly, before Dara shushed her.

  * * *

  * * *

  It was after eight and Dara and Charlie were putting on their coats, or Dara helping Charlie with his, his body stiff and tender.

  Watching from the desk, Marie finished the last acidic sludge of wine, turning the bottle over so it balanced on the long spike of their mother’s ancient metal bill holder. (There are few greater pleasures, she used to say, than impaling every bill as it comes in.)

  Marie, suddenly so tiny at the big old splintery desk, a cardigan wrapped around herself like a cocoon.

  Charlie looked at Dara, who looked back at Charlie.

  “Marie,” he said, “come over for dinner? I’m making my famous thirty-second omelet.”

  Dara raised her eyebrows at Charlie, surprised.

  Smiling faintly, Marie said no, she didn’t think so, propping her dirty feet on the desk, rolling her fingertips over her blood-sick toes.

  “She doesn’t want to,” Dara said briskly to Charlie. “She has plans, I guess.”

  Marie looked at them and said, “I don’t have anything.”

  * * *

  * * *

  You’re so prickly with her,” Charlie said in the car. “So prickly with each other.”

  “No, we’re not,” Dara said, hiding a flinch. “This is how we always are.”

  “Okay,” Charlie said, his hand on hers.

  “She left,” Dara reminded him. “It changes things.”

  “We almost left once,” he reminded her.

  “That doesn’t count,” Dara said, putting on her sunglasses even though it was dark out. “That was years ago.”

  “It was,” Charlie conceded, pulling his hand away to turn the steering wheel.

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD AND SHE WAS A CHILD

  That night, Charlie and Dara spent hours with the big calendar clipped to the old, brass-tarnished easel stand and planned the Nutcracker schedule, from early practices through the final, New Year’s Day performance, just as their mother always had.

  They tried to account for everything that might arise—the errant injuries, strep throat epidemics, the death of a grandparent, any and all disruptions.

  They spoke their shorthand, standing back and studying the calendar, Dara raising an eyebrow, pointing at a particular date, a particular name, and Charlie replying, “Fixed, fixed,” as he struck his pencil across one date, drew an arrow to another.

  They had tea from the Merry Mushroom teakettle, its ’70s orange and brown softened with age. They smoked cigarette after cigarette and didn’t feel bad about it, and then they curled on the bed in their master bedroom and watched an old movie with the sound off until they drifted to sleep.

  So many nights like this with Marie and it felt funny she wasn’t there.

  So many nights like this, Marie thumping the TV top with the heel of her hand, like their father used to with his TV downstairs (both likely the last antenna TVs in three counties by now), the images shuddering into focus—an old musical from black-and-white days, pretty girls dressed in feathers, their bodies slicked with jewels.

  So many nights like this with Marie, who was now gone, curled instead on her futon at the studio, like some itinerant hobo, grateful for the roof over her head.

  “She’ll come back,” Charlie kept saying, but there was something nice in this too. For Dara. Something nice in being, for the first time in their marriage, for the first time ever, living alone with Charlie in the big old house, drafty and familiar and theirs.

  Something nice in bed that night, nuzzling herself against Charlie’s back and knowing they were all alone and it was their house now. It was only theirs, all theirs.

  We were three and then . . . not.

  * * *

  * * *

  After all, Charlie had been in their lives for more than twenty years, since he first showed up in their mother’s ballet class at eleven years old, the prettiest boy any of them had ever seen.

  The prettiest girl too, joked their father, batting his eyelashes.

  Their mother doted on Charlie—her star student, her favorite, her cher Charlie—one of the f
ew boys, the most wildly talented, and eventually he came to be a part of the family, too, staying over for dinner several nights a week when his mother, a nurse, worked late.

  Their mother loved having a young man in the house. Their father worked long hours. When he was home, he disappeared into his den. Through the crack in the door, Dara would watch him collapse in his recliner for the ten o’clock news, a six-pack of Old Style on the quaking TV tray beside him.

  When Charlie was thirteen, his mother had to move to some damp, distant corner of England to take care of her ailing parents. There was a day of tears in the house until Dara and Marie’s mother decided Charlie should simply stay with them in order to continue his work with the studio. A boy was a valuable thing.

  So, for a month, which became nearly a year, which became forever, Charlie moved in with them.

  Dara and Marie could barely handle having a boy in the house. Marie began peeing in the neighbors’ yard, too afraid that Charlie might hear her.

  How strange to have him in their private space of dotted underpants slung over the shower rod, the stench from the mounded ballet slippers, their mother walking around in her silky robe—her “glamour gown,” the girls called it—her legs bare and mashed and mauled dancer’s feet, feet like a day laborer’s hands, their father used to say.

  How their father agreed to the new arrangement was a mystery. Once, they heard him grumble to their mother that she better be prepared because a boy that age is just gonna be jerking himself off the minute the lights go out.

  Dara’s mother said nothing, coughing lightly.

  You’ll see when you wash the sheets.

  * * *

  * * *

  Charlie slept on the pullout sofa in the living room.

  In the morning, before Charlie slid the mattress back into the sofa’s mouth, Dara would press her face against the sheets. Marie would look for telltale stains.

  Dara liked to go into the bathroom right after Charlie showered, to smell his smells, to touch the sink counter and imagine Charlie’s clothes set there, his undershorts.

  Dara liked to stand in the shower and imagine Charlie standing there.

  * * *

  * * *

  They had been each other’s firsts, age fourteen. It happened in the basement, the makeshift studio next to the chugging washer and dryer. Each of them stretching on the floor, watching each other from opposite corners, watching each other in the mirrors their mother had mounted on the walls with electrical tape.

  It happened in a blur of heat, Dara’s breath catching, and suddenly, she was crawling toward him, her palms slapping on the floor. Her form divine. It was like a moment in a dance. The serpent attacks. The lion seizes its prey.

  She crawled toward him and then on top of him, pushing his shoulders to the floor, and he looked surprised the whole time and she wasn’t even sure it had happened until they were both shaking and wet.

  * * *

  * * *

  Dara should never have told Marie, who immediately told their mother, the words slipping helplessly from her mouth, or so she claimed. Their mother, however, only tilted her head and murmured, C’est logique, c’est logique.

  (Later, their mother confided to Dara, If it had been Marie, I would have worried. With you, ma fille mature, I never worry.)

  Marie wouldn’t speak to Dara for days, abandoning their bunkbed and sleeping instead in the TV room, on the carpet next to their father’s recliner, the two of them watching late-night talk shows, their father letting Marie sip his beer.

  Every evening when he wasn’t traveling, he’d come home from work and navigate stacks of pointe shoes, towers of them in the corners, tights hanging on doorknobs. Music, forever, from the old stereo console, from the turntable upstairs. The sound, forever, of the barre squeaking, Dara’s or Marie’s eager hands on it, their mother’s voice intoning, Lift through the leg! Turn that foot out! Their house was all ballet, all the time.

  The only room left untouched was the den, their father’s sanctuary, with the cabinet TV he refused to throw away, insisting even the tubes were valuable antiques, and the shag carpet that offended their mother and the Igloo cooler alongside the furry nubbed recliner, the autumn floral with the corduroy ridges that Marie liked to run her hands along, sitting on their father’s lap, sharing popcorn from the foil dome and watching their dad’s monster movies, dubbed to English and with great spouts of the thickest, reddest blood she’d ever seen.

  Marie was the only one allowed to join him in there, the only one permitted to talk to their father at all while he was “unwinding” from his day and it was best to avoid him. Marie, who would curl up in his Pendleton blanket and watch Night Stalker reruns until their father drifted into a beery snore and their mother dispatched Dara to get her sister to bed.

  Dara didn’t want to spend time in there anyway. The room smelled funny and there were always crumbs in the carpet that she felt under her feet. Dara would so rather sit at their mother’s dressing table and put her fingers in all the lotions and creams and tonics and watch their mother do stretches on the floor and tell her stories about the time she danced at the Royal Opera House in London and drown in the perfumes and loveliness of their mother’s attentions.

  * * *

  * * *

  Soon enough, Dara began sneaking Charlie into the bunkbed with her, both of them curled together, their bodies locked. They did all kinds of things, figuring it all out. If their mother knew, she never said.

  Marie sleeping like a kitten in the bunk above.

  Or so they thought. A few weeks later, Marie spilled all to their father too. He raged for days, telling their mother she had only herself to blame, turning their house into a brothel. Their father took Charlie into the garage and had a long talk with him and Charlie returned an hour later, his face white and his wrists red.

  He told me, Charlie confided to Dara years later, that I would never be any kind of man if I stayed here. He told me that no man could be any kind of man in this house. And then he started to cry.

  A boy was a valuable thing.

  * * *

  * * *

  Charlie had moved in and never left. Finally, Dara always said, explaining it to others, one of us had to marry him.

  And so, they went to city hall one year to the day of the car accident, their father’s Buick drifting across the icy-ribbed highway into oncoming traffic.

  The driver behind them dazedly told a reporter it would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been so terrible. Watching, he said, it looked like their parents’ car was almost flying.

  * * *

  * * *

  When I was a child and she was a child, recited Charlie, the poem that became their vow. It was their mother’s favorite poem and you didn’t usually read poems at city hall weddings, but Charlie insisted.

  We loved with a love that was more than love—

  * * *

  * * *

  Marie had served as witness, wearing glitter on her eyes and their mother’s rabbit blanket as a fur stole, and had cried endlessly at the Italian restaurant after. Had cried and held on to her sister and crawled onto her lap.

  Marie, who they promised would live with them forever.

  Dara and Charlie moved into her parents’ room, even slept on their sheets that first night, their wedding night, before Dara took them all to Goodwill the next day.

  FIRE, FIRE

  It happened sometime in the night. That very night, the Nutcracker schedule finalized and the air outside crisp and cutting.

  It happened while Dara, unable to sleep, was pacing their mother’s familiar insomniac route from the master bedroom to the sewing room, to their dusty childhood bedroom, its maple bunkbed gleaming from the hall light, their old furnace chugging as the temperature fell.

  It happened while Charlie was lost in slumber, the dreamy haze of his s
leeping pill, flat on his back, hands folded on his chest like a tragic young prince in his burial state.

  Exactly two miles away, all the lights off at the studio except the gooseneck lamp on the third floor where Marie was squatting, it happened.

  * * *

  * * *

  The fire was a big mouth,” Marie had said on the phone, her voice dizzy with shock. “A big mouth swallowing everything.”

  By that point, the firefighters were already there and the sprinkler system spouting old brown water everywhere.

  And by the time Dara and Charlie had pulled into the parking lot, there was only smoke left, a great fog from which emerged a baby-faced fireman carrying an old metal space heater, its center mussel-black.

  Now, hours later, they stood in the morning mist, the parking lot slowly filling. Charlie’s arm around Dara, Marie shuddering under the Pendleton blanket, all three of them soaked from the fire hoses. Charlie on the phone with the insurance company, some humorless agent named Van who kept asking about candles and flat irons, cigarettes and kitchen grease.

  * * *

  * * *

  It was the space heater, of course. That ancient contraption their father used to drag from room to room when he’d forgotten the heating bill. The one with the coils that ran so lovely red that you wanted to touch them until you did. Their mother had eventually brought it to the studio, keeping it on the third floor, where she liked to take naps and think. The third floor that Marie had now made her own.