The Turnout(26)

She saw him through the plastic, a red curl on his neck, which she knew was the red curl from her own fingernail, pressing into him, gouging.



* * *



*

You’re burning.”

“What?” Dara said.

Marie reached out with licked fingers and snuffed Dara’s burning cigarette. It was only then Dara felt it, shaking it off, sitting up straight.



* * *



*

There was something wrong about the story—or a hundred things wrong, but also something missing. Dara couldn’t figure it out until she did.

“Why were you wearing a leotard?” Dara said, remembering Marie’s white leotard the other day, and that very morning. Pearl white, bone white. Degas white.

“What?”

“Nearly every day this week. You never wear one to warm up. Or to teach. You wear leggings, shorts. Not a leotard. And not a white one.”

Marie looked at her, blinking her eyes.

“You wanted him to look at you,” Dara said. “You wanted to entice him.”

“It’s just a leotard,” Marie said, averting her eyes.



* * *



*

Dara was thinking of something else. The day before, after an exhausting fouetté demonstration, a dozen whipping pirouettes, for all the potential Sugar Plum Fairies (Leg higher, whip, whip, whip, relax that hip), she’d seen Derek staring at her from the doorway, the plastic curtain draped over one shoulder like a counterfeit cape. The stare was hard and insistent and it was only later, turning, that she saw what he’d been looking at: the sweat on her leotard, under her arms, between and under her breasts and blooming darkly between her legs. And, as she turned again, a slow fouetté, a dark line between her buttocks.

It reminded her of something. How when they were twelve, thirteen, fourteen, Dara and Marie would sweat so much down there their mother would only let them wear black leotards so you couldn’t see it. So it looked not like a stain but a shadow.

Me and my shadow, Marie used to say.



* * *



*

Remember when he tore down the wall?” Marie was saying, clasping Dara’s hands, pressing Dara’s ash-scorched knuckles.

Dara pulled her hands back. She rose. She said she had to leave.

But Marie was not done with her yet. Rising, she followed Dara as she gathered her things once more. As she put on her coat and closed the window and checked the ashtray for burning stubs. She followed Dara, explaining how she’d snuck down to Studio B late that night after the walls came down, after everyone was gone and the air still thick with dust. How she’d stepped barefoot across the plastic sheeting to the far corner where it sat, the thing.

Derek’s long-frame hammer, leaning against the wall, hickory handled, its steel head glinting.

She (Can you believe this, Dara?) dropped to her knees, touching it. Finally, lifting it, feeling its weight. It tingled under her fingertips.

What must it be like, she wondered, to so utterly destroy something?



* * *



*

I told him,” Marie said. “I told him later. What it felt like. Watching him take it down. Do you know what I said?”

“I don’t care,” Dara said, her fingers to her brow.

But she knew what Marie had said.

I want you to tear me open.

It made Dara want to laugh, to gag, to cry.

Dara looked at her sister, this little pervert, and said nothing.

I want you to tear me apart.





GASH


After, Dara was so happy to leave the studio, to retreat to the house, to leave them to it, to whatever they did and would do, Marie and that man.

The studio was tainted now, and home forever felt safe, reassuring. Setting foot inside, she felt her shoulders settle, her hand touching all the familiar doorknobs, the light cord in the hallway that you had to pull twice.

The more she thought about it, the angrier she was at herself. For listening to Marie, for indulging her in this troubling behavior. Taunting behavior.

But then Marie hadn’t been herself in a long time, since she moved out of the house and became a squatter in their own place of business. Since she left in the middle of the night, heaving a pair of milk crates and one overstuffed shopping bag out the front door of their home, onto the uneven pavement, stumbling into the waiting Shamrock cab. Later, they found the message taped on their bedroom door. “Gone for air. Not coming back.”



* * *



*

    Who needs her here anyway, Dara thought, walking through the front door, that familiar scent of mildew, paste, old perfume. Who needed Marie’s buzzy, antic energy, her nighttime pacing and her bad dreams, the way she used all Dara’s tampons and ate all the sardines?

Instead, Dara could do what she did. Sit for a while in the kitchen with her fenugreek tea and give Charlie his anti-convulsant pill for his nerve pain and take her arnica tablets for sore muscles and warm up their hot-water bottles and pad off to bed.

And, as she adjusted the pillows to help Charlie find the best position for his back, she was doubly glad she hadn’t told him about Marie. If she had, they’d be talking about her sister now—all those conversations they’d had to have over the years about Marie and her troublesome behavior and her impulsiveness and willfulness—instead of turning off all the lights together, the great old house slowly darkening. Retreating to the bedroom, the old woven cane bed and the fireplace that smelled like hickory.