The Turnout(37)

“Well,” Charlie said. “That’s that.” And reaching for his back pills, shaking the container, pills tumbling across the desk felt.

Something was hovering near the front of Dara’s head, but she couldn’t name it.

Suddenly: A phrase floated forward in her brain.

Hot Buttered Blonde.

She couldn’t get it out of her head, every time she saw Marie that day, her head like the fizzy top of a dandelion, a daffodil’s crimped corona.

It was many hours later that it came to her. That time last year, Mrs. Bloom submitting to the hairdresser, to the tantalizing name: Hot Buttered Blonde.

A coincidence, surely.

Mrs. Bloom, the year before, a brazen blonde. Her shame over it.

Marie, of course, had no shame.



* * *



*

He tells me things, Dara. He tells me what I do to him.

He says when he leaves here, he smells of it. All the heat and cunning.

The smell of the studio, which is the smell of me. Musk, baby powder, sweat.

He says he can smell it on his shirt cuffs, in the creases of his shoes. All the bodies so close, daring eyes and straining limbs. The salty brine of hunger and pain. Bodies, he never knew they could be so complicated, so tortured. He never knew how much girls like to torture themselves.

It was impossible. That man, with his two phones and his big voice and his swagger. A cliché of what women supposedly liked, secretly, under the skin.

This man—he was a nothing. There was no center to him. No feeling. And he didn’t care about Marie and would toss her aside soon enough or already had because a man like that—

He says he thinks about me when he’s driving home on the highway. When he’s pumping gas or rolling a cart down the grocery store aisle, the pink stacks of meat.

He thinks about having me again. Spreading me open. Pinning me like a butterfly.

His glove compartment—did you know, Dara—he keeps one of my leotards in there. He pulled it off my bedroom floor, pressed his face against its soft, wet crotch. Stuffed it in his pocket when I wasn’t looking. At stoplights, when he’s stuck in traffic, when the light goes red, he pops it open, puts his hand in there, thinks of me.



* * *



*

Maybe we should call someone,” Dara said to Charlie that night, finally home from his PT appointment, the Shamrock taxi pulling up just after nine.

“Like who?” he said, a muzzy look in his eye. “The sex police?”

“You don’t get it. You don’t get Marie.”

Charlie looked her.

“I get Marie,” he said. “Believe me.”



* * *



*

You never really knew what went on in other people’s bedrooms, in their heads, Dara thought.

But this thing, this desire to be bossed around, dominated—such a cliché. Such an old, dusty woman thing she’d never understand. She’d never felt it herself.

But with Marie, it made sense, in a way.

She’d always been willful, resistant.

Yet it turned out she couldn’t wait to be bent, broken, split in two.

The stronger they are, the harder they fall.

That’s what their mother used to say about dancers. How you had to break them. Their stubborn bodies, their stubborn wills. The more defiant and resistant they were, the harder you must be. The more violent, the stronger hands on their bodies, bending them, pressing, turning them out.

The stronger they are, the faster to their knees.

But, Dara thought, no one is stronger than me.





TWO





THE TURNOUT





Every ballet dancer must achieve her turnout. The ability to rotate her body one-hundred-eighty degrees, from the hips down to the toes.

Imagine your thigh muscles wrapping around your bones, their mother always told them. Imagine your leg as a spinning barber pole.

She loved to tell them how, when she was ten years old, she was one of four dancers in her province to undertake special training with a Great Diva, a severe Russian beauty famous for having her feet surgically broken, her bones realigned so she might have a more natural line, a more perfect pointe.

Every day for the six weeks of the program the Great Diva scolded and berated their mother for her turnout.

Every day she yanked and dragged their mother’s legs, twisting them, muscles straining, bones nearly twanging until they rotated so far at the hips that the knees, the feet turned outward. But still, it was not enough.

Mademoiselle Durant, entendez! Tailbone down! Over toes, not over heels!

Every night, their mother sobbed into her pillow, sobbed from the pain of cranking her body like an old motor.

Then, one day, when the Great Diva demanded once more that she turn, turn, turn, their mother felt something rise inside her, something powerful.

Suddenly, something snapped inside and her hips and legs felt infinitely pliable, soft taffy, a slinky expanding.

Her hips, hot and newly supple, opened like a book from the center of her body. It felt glorious and so painful she saw stars.

But she did not stop.

Why would she? That feeling, that sensation hot in the center of her.

She kept turning until her feet pushed past one-hundred-eighty degrees, until they turned backward like a doll with its legs put on backward. Like a circus freak.