The Turnout(5)

That’s me! Marie used to say every time their mother turned to the first page.

Dara’s name, alas, had no such story. Their mother could never remember how she picked it, only that it sounded right.

The irony, their mother told Dara once, is you’re the Marie.



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Madame Durant!” squeaked a voice, one of the nine-year-olds, as Dara moved past them all and in the front door of the building. “Madame Durant, who will be Clara? Who?”

Because today was not only one of those nerve-shredding Nutcracker season days but, short of opening night, it was the day. The cast announcements when everyone would find out what Dara had decided the night before. Who would be their Clara, their Prince, their mechanical dolls, their harlequins, their itty-bitty bonbons and wispy little snowflakes.

“I can barely stand it!” Chlo? Lin lisped, clutching at one of her leg warmers, sliding down her shin as she ran. “If I have to wait any longer I’ll die!”

The door shutting behind her, Dara took a breath.

But each step Dara took up the staircase throbbed with that same feeling, that jittery energy.

Or, as it turned out, it throbbed with Marie.



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BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

The Durant School of Dance was full of noise, a sharp, focused banging that felt like a nail gun at Dara’s temple.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

It was a sound Dara knew well. She’d heard it thousands of times, ever since her sister was ten years old and their mother first raised her up on her preternaturally tapered toes. You, my dear, were made for en pointe.

“Sister, dear sister,” Dara called out.

And there she was, Marie, face flushed, legs spread on the floor of Studio A, taking their father’s rust-red claw hammer to a new pair of pointe shoes.

“The claw returns,” Dara said, lifting an eyebrow.

“It’s the only thing that works,” said Marie, holding out the shoe for Dara to see, its pinkness split open, its soft center exposed.

Even when, as young dancers, they went through three pairs a week, their mother forbid the hammer. It was too rough, too brutal. It was lazy. Instead, one should stick the shoe in the hinge of a door, closing it slowly, softening its hardness, breaking it down. Marie never had the patience.

“Look,” Marie said, showing off her handiwork, settling her finger inside the shank, poking it, stroking it. “Look.”

Dara felt her stomach turn and she wasn’t sure why.



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Satin, cardboard, burlap, paper hardened with glue—that’s all they were, pointe shoes. But they were so much more, the beating heart of ballet. And the fact that they lasted only weeks or less than an hour made them all the more so, like a skin you shed constantly. Then a new skin arrived, needing to be shaped.

As soon as their dancers went on pointe, Dara and Marie made them learn how to break them in, how to experiment, fail, adapt, customize. They’d sit on the changing room floor, their legs like compasses, their new shoes between them like a pair of slippery fish.

Crush the box, pry up and bend the shank, bend the sole, soften it, make it your own. Thread a needle with dental floss—far thicker than thread—to sew in elastic bands and satin ribbons at just the right spot, a cigarette lighter on the ribbon edges to stop fraying. Pliers to tug out the nail, an X-acto to cut away the satin around the toes to make them less slippery. That was Dara’s favorite part, like peeling a soft apple. After, taking the X-acto and, thwick, thwick, thwick, thwick, scraping the shoe bottom, X patterns or crosses, giving it grip.

It was all about finding one’s own way to fuse the foot to the shoe, the shoe to the foot, the body.

The shoe must become part of you, their mother always said. A new organ, snug and demanding and yours.

If you didn’t prepare them correctly, if you left out any step, took any shortcuts—too smooth a sole, too low an elastic—it could mean a fall, an injury, worse.

Their mother told them stories of older girls hiding broken glass in other girls’ shoes, which sounded like a dark fairy tale, but was there any other kind?

Ballet was full of dark fairy tales, and how a dancer prepared her pointe shoes was a ritual as mysterious and private as how she might pleasure herself. It was often indistinguishable.



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BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

Marie was not going to stop, her teeth sunk into her lip, her eyes unfocused. She was going to prepare one, two, three pairs.

It was all ridiculous, a waste. Marie, Dara wanted to say, what are these even for? Marie, you’re a teacher now, not a dancer.

And the little girls she taught were years away from going on pointe, their feet still clad in pink slippers.

But Dara was too tired to scold. To say what her mother would have said, You are abusing yourself, ma chère. This is self-abuse.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

Marie would not stop until Dara finally unlocked the front door and the first students pushed through, a gaggle of chirpy eight-year-olds, two bursting into tears at the gossamer pile before Marie, at her gutted shoes.



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Everything was a mad crush that day, Saturdays always were, but especially now, with the class schedule overloaded to make up for audition time and their regular substitute, a sprightly college student named Sandra Shu, felled by a snapping hip that, at long last, popped.