The Turnout(21)

But then she remembered the way Marie looked at him, so shy, recessed even, as if his presence, the expanse of him, was overwhelming. His big, aging footballer shoulders, that heavy cologne, his stomping feet and his constant jiggling of the keys in his pocket. A lumberjack who could take down a wall, could crack anything in half with his bare hands.

They were all strong. Dara, Charlie, Marie. Everyone there was strong. Charlie, in his heyday, could lift dancers above his head as if they were mere butterflies, fluttering between his hands.

Still, looking at the contractor, Dara felt certain he could snap her in two like a wishbone.

It made her pause. It made her need to sit down a moment.



* * *



*

The next morning, Dara brought it up to Marie again. It had been bothering her.

“He’s not attractive,” Dara said.

Marie didn’t say anything.

They were sitting on the floor of Studio A, Dara helping Marie rub ointment on her legs, vibrating with old nerve pain.

“He’s really not,” Dara continued, pushing her thumbs into her sister’s narrow thighs. Pushing as hard as she could. It was the only way it worked.

“Maybe,” Marie said, “we have different ideas about attractive.”



* * *



*

Later, Dara spotted Marie contemplating Derek’s work boots, abandoned on the tarp when he disappeared for a two-hour lunch, swapped for his fancy bit loafers, shined to butterscotch. The boots were big, like Herman Munster shoes. Brown and mottled like a baked potato. Speckled with milky paint, or chemicals, thick orange laces snaking up the center.

They were so big, like another person in the room. Like a man in the room, demanding to be noticed. Assuming he would be.

Marie’s eyes stayed on them as she walked slowly around the tarp, as if circling.

They’d feel hard and crusty beneath your fingers, Dara knew that.

It looked like Marie wanted to touch them, badly, but they were too big for her small hands.



* * *



*

You always,” Dara said later, when they were hunting among the lobby chairs, searching for Brielle Katz’s lost muffler, “found Charlie handsome. You said he looked like the groom on the top of the wedding cake.”

“I did,” Marie said, reaching for something, an abandoned winter hat studded with dust motes, “say the thing about the wedding cake.”

By any objective measure, Charlie was handsome. His body so slender and beautiful, his features so delicate, his gleaming blondness, like the handsomest boy ever at the cotillion in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story.

He was handsome to everyone. Everyone.

How could anyone look at Derek, his wooly arms and spreading belly, his whitened teeth and his winking ways, and at Charlie and think they were both the same anything?



* * *



*

We don’t have to like him,” Charlie said as they prepared to leave that night, sawdust thick in the air and the thumps of Europop still galloping from the boom box in Studio B. “No one likes their contractor.”

Dara didn’t say anything.

“Besides,” Charlie said, gesturing to the clear vinyl curtain now hanging in the doorway to Studio B, “he takes orders pretty well.”

Dara walked over. She’d imagined something more discreet, a zip door or a tented partition. But it was only strips of heavy plastic, like at the car wash.

It made everything inside Studio B look a little like a funhouse.

She could see Derek, stripped to his T-shirt white as his whitened teeth. The plastic rippling, he looked enormous, a funhouse Derek, holding a large rubber mallet, swinging it like a caveman club.

“I didn’t say I didn’t like him,” Dara said.

Charlie smiled, one hand on Dara’s shoulder, lightly kneading it.

“But,” Dara said, “I don’t like him.”

“Here’s an idea,” Charlie said, hands on both her shoulders now, turning her away. “Don’t look behind the curtain.”



* * *



*

    That night, Charlie’s back spasmed.

Dara had been watching him sleep, his bare, broad back, the V of his waist. She couldn’t help herself, her hand reaching out to touch his shoulder blade, to draw him close, that skin so cool and soothing to her. The instant her fingers touched his skin, it came: a violent stiffening, and immediate, urgent, violent retreat.

A terrific jolt, reminding Dara of sleeping with Marie, who resided in the bunk above her all those years. Marie and her restless legs. Ma chère Marie’s dancing in her sleep, their mother used to say.

She yanked her hand back as if she’d touched an open flame.



* * *



*

Seeing the look on her face, he apologized even as he was instantly immobile with pain.

“It’s not your fault,” he said, closing his eyes. “I knew it was coming. I tried to get in to see my PT today, but . . .”

“Let me,” Dara said. “Please.”

He paused a moment, mouth tight in a grimace. But then, surprisingly, he let her.

Gingerly, she helped him flip over on his stomach.

“I’ll be so careful,” she said.