The Turnout(30)

“I don’t want to hear about it.” Dara didn’t want to hear about hands like belts, like their father.

“If I had to hurt him,” Marie said, eyes shining. “I’d hurt his hands. I’d break his fingers, one by one.”

“Smash them with a hammer,” Dara said dryly. “Like your poor pointe shoes.”

But Marie only nodded, breathless. “Because of all the things they do to me—I never want him to do those things to anyone else.”

And she smiled and smiled.

Jesus, Dara thought.

“You’re like a teenage girl,” Dara said. “After her first fuck.”



* * *



*

Charlie hadn’t wanted to talk about it, about Marie. They’d talk about it later. But, really, what is there to talk about, he’d said, reaching for his jacket. She’s a grown woman.

Leaving Dara the car, he took a Shamrock cab to Helga for a last-minute PT session. Helga always understood the pressures of Nutcracker season, even once sending Charlie home with a paper plate of peppermint cookies tied with yarn ribbon. (She’s very thoughtful, Charlie said. Or she has a crush, Dara teased.)

But with Charlie gone, the students had chosen that day to be little monsters, all except Bailey Bloom, who snuck in the powder room before and after classes, not wanting to change in front of the other girls, their snipes.

At day’s end, Dara and Marie retired to the fire escape, tarry and quivering, the sun burning through the skyline.

They’d been drinking. Mr. Higham had left them a champagne split four-pack as a thank-you for his little Jamie’s entry into the City Academy of Dance. The splits were chilled and he warned Dara they’d “skunk” if they didn’t drink them right away. And Dara didn’t want to go home anyway, feeling strange about the day, about the marks on her sister and about Charlie and about everything changing, slowly and all at once.

“It is my first fuck,” Marie said, tripping slightly over the word. “In a way.”

“I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

“I disagree,” Marie said.

They sipped their tiny straws. Dara could feel her thighs inflating, her belly blooming. Sugar, sugar. She couldn’t stop.

“Maybe,” Marie said, lying on her back, her hands on herself. “Maybe I’m in love.”



* * *



*

Does he only take you from behind? Like an animal? It’s not very attractive, you know.

It’s not a good look for you. Bone and rope, that’s all you’ve got back there.

Not all, Dara . . .



* * *



*

They were drunk, they were drunk and Charlie finally called Dara. He was home and making their fenugreek tea. He was home and getting ready for bed. Where was she.

“Marie,” Dara said, finally, rising shakily to her feet, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Her sister looked up, her hair falling from her face, and slowly smiled.

“Dara,” Marie confided, “the things he does to me . . .”

The violet splotches on her neck, they seemed to move and dance and Dara wanted, suddenly, to touch them. She wanted to—

“But what?” Dara said, her head throbbing. “What does he do?”



* * *



*

    No one ever really did anything you hadn’t thought of before, Dara kept saying to herself. In the bedroom, wherever, with bodies in the dark. There were only so many ways bodies fit together or didn’t.

Oh, Dara, Marie kept saying, I can only tell you how it feels.



* * *



*

But then Marie started to talk about the things—about the trick with fingers, and the heel of his hand on her throat until—

Stop.

And best of all that thumb. Had she seen his thumb? The curve in it that was just the right shape and size—

Marie, I need you to stop.

Marie, don’t you know you can never let them know.

Let them know what?

How much we . . . how much we . . .

Oh, Dara, she said. Oh, Dara, he knows. That’s what I’m talking about. He looks at you and he knows. . . .



* * *



*

That was when she knew. Right there on the fire escape. It wasn’t going to be a fling. It wasn’t going to be a passing affair, a pickup, a sex thing. Not for Marie at least.

Whatever it was, it was already happening. And there was no stopping it.



* * *



*

That night, Dara dreamt she was walking through the studio and it was ten times its size, the renovation far beyond their budget or the laws of physics, gravity, the ceiling four stories high with stained-glass windows at the top like a cathedral.

Walking through it, wending from empty room to empty room, its mirrors shimmering, she began to hear something, like a few years ago when Marie left the water running in their mother’s old claw-foot tub. The kitchen ceiling puckering above Dara’s head, the smell of rotten wood and rust.

It was like that, a straining. Like the beams holding the ceiling aloft might snap. Like everything had been put together with cardboard and paste, like pointe shoes, the smell of mentholated spirits emanating from them, dead after every use.