The Turnout(2)

I’m in love, Marie said, like always, talking about the fifth-grade boy with the birthmark who pulled her pants down, who had once hid under her desk and tried to stick a pencil between her legs.

That’s not love, their mother said, stroking Marie’s babyfine hair, brushing the back of her hand against Marie’s forever-pink cheek.

Then she told them their favorite story, the one about a famous ballerina named Marie Taglioni, whose devotees were so passionate they once paid two hundred rubles, a fortune at that time, for a single pair of her discarded pointe shoes. After the purchase, they cooked, garnished, and ate the pointe shoes with a special sauce.

That, their mother told them, is love.



* * *



*

Now, more than two decades later, the Durant School of Dance was theirs.

All day, six days a week for the past more-than-a-dozen years, Dara and Marie taught in the cramped, cozy confines of the same ashen building where their mother had once reigned. Steamy and pungent in the summer and frigid, its windows snow-blurred, in the winter, the studio never changed and was forever slowly falling apart. Often thick with must, overnight rain left weeping pockets in every ceiling corner, dripping on students’ noses.

But it didn’t matter, because the students always came. Over a hundred girls and a few boys, ages three to fifteen, Pre-Ballet I to Advanced IV. And a waitlist for the rest. In the past six years, they’d advanced fourteen girls and three boys to tier-one ballet schools and thirty-six to major competitions.

Every summer, they hired two additional instructors, three on weekends, but during the school year, it was just Dara and Marie. And, of course, Charlie, once their mother’s prize student, her surrogate son, her son of the soul. And now Dara’s husband. Charlie, who couldn’t teach anymore because of his injuries but who ran all the business operations from the back office. Charlie, on whom so many students had passing crushes, a rite of passage, like the first time they took a razor blade to their hardened feet, or the first time they achieved turnout, rotating their legs from their hip sockets, bodies pushed to contortion. Pushed so far, the feeling ecstatic. Her first time, Dara felt split open, laid bare.



* * *



*

The Durant School of Dance was an institution. Children, teens came from three counties to take classes with them. They came with sprightly dreams and limber bodies and hard little muscles and hungry, lean bellies and a desire to enter into the fairy tale that is dance to little girls and a few special little boys. They all wanted to participate in the storied Durant tradition set forth by their mother thirty or more years ago. Encore, échappé, échappé, watch those knees. Their mother, her voice subdued yet steely, striding across the floor, guiding everything, mastering everything.

But now it was Dara’s and Marie’s voices—Dara’s low and flinty (Shoulders down, lift that leg, higher, higher . . .) and Marie’s light and lilting, Marie calling out Here comes the Mouse King! to all her five-year-olds and bending her feet and hands into claws, the girls screaming with pleasure . . .

Charlie in the back office listening to parents bemoan their child’s lack of discipline, the exorbitant cost of pointe shoes, the holiday schedule, Charlie nodding patiently as mothers spoke in hushed tones about their own long-ago ballet aspirations, of the mad fantasy of tutus and rosin, satin and tulle, floodlights and beaming faces, leaping endlessly into a lover’s waiting arms.

Everything worked, nothing ever changed.

And yet gradually the Durant School of Dance, decades after opening in a former dry goods store with a drooping ceiling, had become a major success.

“I always knew it could be,” Charlie said.



* * *



*

Which one does your daughter have? Dara or Marie?

They look so much alike, but Dara’s dark to Marie’s fair.

They look so much alike, but Dara has the long swan neck and Marie the long colt legs.

Both carry themselves with such poise. They show our daughters grace and bearing.

They bend and twist our squirmy, pigeon-breasted little girls into lithe and lissome dancers. Our girls walk into the Durant School shrill and strident, with the clatter of phones and the slap of flip-flops, and an hour later, they have been transformed into the strong, sweated stillness of an empress, a czarina, a Durant.



* * *



*

Our daughters love them both, especially Marie.

Marie, because she taught the younger ones. Because she would get down on the floor with them, would fix their loose braids and, when they burst into tears, secretly give them strawberry sugar wafers. After class, she might even teach them how to do that dance like their favorite pop singer if they showed her first on their phones. At day’s end, Dara would peek into Marie’s studio, the pastel crush of wafer crumbs, the abandoned hair ribbons and bent bobby pins, and wonder if Marie understood little girls too well.

Dara followed their mother’s model. In her studio, she stood queen-like, her chin jutting like a wolf’s—that’s how Charlie described it—quick to correct, quick to unravel them, the girls with the lazy extension, the girls pirouetting with bent knees.

Someone had to keep up the tradition of rigor, of firm discipline, and it inevitably fell to Dara. Or suited her best. It was hard to tell the difference.