The Turnout(6)
The air was thick with anticipation for the final cast list, which Dara, following their mother’s storied tradition, never posted before the end of the day. Otherwise, all afternoon she’d have to endure the crying and mute stares, the sullen faces and despair, the incessant needling of the chosen leads under whispered breaths.
Still, with the pitch of The Nutcracker humming all ears, there were more than the usual share of fretful students, a turned ankle, a jammed thumb, two girls fainting from a secret diet of celery and watermelon juice, the student toilet choked with vomit, a boy’s dance belt come asunder, one girl teasing another about her body hair, the fine down emerging nearly overnight to keep her floss-thin body warm, and Dara losing her temper with Gracie Hent for crowding the other girls, or with the Neuman sisters for coming to class again in black tights. (Black tights like an Italian widow, their mother would say, tsk-tsking.) Pink tights, black leotard, hair fastened for girls; black tights, white tees for boys. The rules were so simple and never changed.
Charlie came in late, moving slowly and warily after a session with his PT. Helga, Dara and Marie had dubbed her, with Marie often imitating an imagined Germanic patter at the massage table. (Elbow sharp as a shiv for my dah-link . . .) It didn’t matter that her name wasn’t Helga and she wasn’t German but some local mom who, as Charlie loved to tell them, had gone back to school for her degree to support her children and make up for a useless husband. For Dara and Marie, she’d forever be Helga, built like bull with hands of iron!
During the hours of his absence, all the problems Charlie typically forestalled had accumulated. There was no one to handle the parents, the niceties, the back office schedule changes, the vomit-and then tampon-clogged toilet, and the boy dancer who wanted to talk, man to man, about how to maneuver himself into that dance belt. (Pull everything up and to the front, Charlie always explained, like it’s high noon.)
And then there was Marie. Mercurial Marie, who had become even more mercurial of late. The morning hammering gave way to a kind of dreamy listlessness as she drifted between classes to the third floor, her upstairs bunker, playing raspy old 45s on her windup Cinderella record player with the handle shaped like a glass slipper. Twice, she missed the start of her own class.
Late in the day, when one of Dara’s mild corrections made Liv Lockman run into the changing room to cry, Marie knelt down and pulled the girl’s sob-racked body close, nearly weeping with her.
“Madame Durant,” whispered Pepper Weston, watching the spectacle from behind Dara, “is it true that the other Madame Durant—”
“Mademoiselle Durant,” Dara corrected.
“That Mademoiselle Durant sleeps in the attic now?”
Dara didn’t say anything for a moment, then, glancing at the metal clock on the wall, announced, “Depêchez-vous. à la barre.”
* * *
*
Eight months ago, Marie had moved out of their home, the one they grew up in, with its knotty pine and sloping ceilings and time-worn floors and side-sinking stairs and the smell, forever, of their mother’s Blue Carnation perfume. The only place they’d ever lived at all, every scuff and scratch their own.
There hadn’t been a discussion or even an explanation. Marie just kept saying it felt right, stuffing fistfuls of clothing into a duffel bag and running down the stairs as if, Charlie later said, fleeing a fire.
They both thought she’d be back in a day, a week. After all, she’d left once before, years ago. Left with a moth-eaten velvet rolling trunk of their mother’s, intent on traveling the world. But the world had taken a month, more or less.
This time, however, it had been eight months. Yet she hadn’t gotten very far, camping out right here in the studio, up the spiral staircase to the third floor, amid the files and glue traps and old recital tutus shivering with dust. Using the powder room and its stand-up shower as her personal toilette, which didn’t seem sanitary at all. But Marie often gave off the grimy energy of someone never fully clean.
Only once had Dara climbed the spiral stairs to see what accommodations Marie had made. It turned out she’d made hardly any. The banker boxes were merely shoved in the corner except for one she seemed to be using as a bedside table. There was a metal futon covered with their father’s pilling Pendleton blanket, a gooseneck lamp, a jade plant given to her by their longtime Nutcracker partner Madame Sylvie in the dormer window, and, on its ledge, a mysterious knot of crystals, a gift from Brandee Hillock’s mom, who practiced Reiki and promised to heal Marie’s troublesome right ankle.
There was something so sad about the whole setup. Is this the best you can do, Marie? As if Marie were forever twelve, weepily dragging her sleeping bag into the backyard when they had a fight.
Since then, Dara had never seen any reason to go up there again. And Marie hadn’t invited her anyway.
Dara still thought of the third floor as their mother’s domain, her sanctuary, the place she’d retreat to, sometimes for several hours or even a day at a time. It smelled, then, of their mother’s perfume, her lily candles, her favorite milled soap. Now it just smelled like Marie.
* * *
*
It’s up! It’s up!” The screeching and trill, the hush and cursing. While Dara and Marie taught their final classes of the day, Charlie had posted the final Nutcracker cast list on the changing room door. Most of the dismissed students had returned for it, and many had never left at all, killing hours on their phones in the changing room, stretching in Studio B, running to the drugstore for contraband soda and sour candies.