The Turnout(23)

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Give me that, he was saying. Red Riding Hood’s wolf. Grunting words.

Show me. Wider. Let me see all of it.

The gloves falling to the floor like blue birds. His hands, the slap of his undone belt.

Now here, here. Open, open. All those pretty teeth. Pretty tongue.

Marie turning, her mouth wide, waiting.



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Marie. Marie. What did he do to you?

Marie. What have you done.



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Dara hid in the stairwell, palms clammy, mind racing, until she heard a door closing, the fan in the powder room burring to life. Marie’s footsteps like a feral cat’s claws on smooth wood. She imagined it. Marie in the powder room, its fan wailing now, a spin and tug of the towel dispenser. Marie cleaning herself, running a scratchy towel between her trembling thighs. Marie dirty. Dirty Marie.

I like the pink, she thought suddenly, then covered her mouth. She might be sick.

Minutes passed. Dara hurried, head down, to the back office. Then came the sudden, piercing fuzz of a drill, and, moments later, the hum of Benny’s motor scooter outside, the chattering of arriving students, some mild changing-room teasing of Bailey Bloom, that slippery whiff of a girl, now dubbed Bailey Boom after falling three times yesterday while practicing jumping from Clara’s bed, and, somehow, everything kept going.

Within an hour, Dara was standing amid the whorls of smooth-haired girls in their pattering pink slippers, the “Waltz of the Flowers” plinking through the speakers, the crush of parents in overcoats with phones and tall cups of takeout coffee and hands reaching to smooth their daughters’ hair, to unstick the leotards from the clefts of their bottoms.



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All day, Dara taught in Studio C, barking instructions (I see rubber legs. They should be scissors!), adjusting the girls with her hands, shaping a foot, turning a leg, as the power saw next door thundered, the floor shaking from it. We can’t have this. We can’t do this. We must correct this.

The girls’ teeth rattling, and their laughter, giddy and confused.

All day, Dara taught, she made corrections, she issued commands.

Get that leg behind. Eyes up. Rib cage closed. Chin up, lift, lift . . .

She vowed to think about none of it, focusing instead on the rhythm of class, the unending, unbending flow of repetition. Tendu, front, side, back. The same Nutcracker movement, strings echoing jollily through the speaker. Il faut le répéter, as their mother always said, pour affiner.

Still, it sat in her brain like a spider.

Sneaking glances into Studio A. Sneaking glances at Marie, standing before her bumblebee throng of six-year-olds, their errant hands always running up and down the soft front of their leotards, their downy skin quilling beneath.

Marie, with what seemed a slight curl of her lip as though smiling to herself. A slight tremor to her hands, the way she kept touching herself discreetly, her hand on her neck, her arm across her chest, brushing against her breasts.

When Dara passed her at one point, she caught a whiff of it, of them. She covered her nose, her mouth.

Marie at the mirror, teaching the little girls. But all Dara could think of was Marie in Studio B that morning, with her red, rubbed-raw knees and her plaster-spackled palms and that sly little smile on her face that made Dara feel hot and enraged.

In Studio B, Benny and Gaspar had covered all the mirrors with some kind of protective film that looked like smoke. Like there was smoke everywhere from some kind of fire no one could see. Was that how Marie could do it? Could let her body—make her body—do those things with that man? She, who was trained, raised to make her body only do beautiful things.

If she had caught a glimpse of herself, of him, could she have possibly let herself participate in such animal horrors?

Her body crouching, his tan-mottled hands on her, his chest a big coffin, twisting and turning her, swiveling her around so roughly. Turning her inside out. Turning her out. That impeccable body—a golden hummingbird, she was called by the director of the regional ballet company they were invited to join and then, after two years of uneventful service in the corps, asked to leave—that exquisite body humiliated and grotesque. Revealing itself, laying itself so bare. Her golden throat stretched, her mouth open, begging for it.



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Madame Durant, like this?”

Corbin Lesterio’s face pinched as he stood at the mirror, unhappy with himself, his perennial weakness a slight swayback, his pelvis tipped forward ever so little.

“Tilt that tailbone down,” she said. It was her usual correction for him. Often, he corrected himself the minute he saw her head turn.

“Can you,” he said, his voice cracking, “show me?”

Dara paused, looking at his hips, his hips pressed too far forward. It would be so easy.

“You know what to do,” Dara said. “Do it.”

That was how their mother had been with her students. Aloof, remote. A marionette does not become a dancer, she used to say. She never touched her male students, their bodies, after age seven or eight. Never touch them once they’re old enough to know better. And, most of all, Never touch the ones who want to be touched.

She stepped back to watch Corbin start again.