The Turnout(72)

Dara thought she could hear him talking to himself in there.

She climbed the stairs and put her ear to the door, wet from the steam.

His whisper, rising and falling, and all she could make out was it’s over, it’s over, it’s over.



* * *



*

All evening, Marie left the den only once, appearing in the kitchen, looking for matches. She left as soon as she saw Charlie.

He was standing at the stove, making tea for the toddies, and he pretended he didn’t see her either.

As the tea steeped, he counted softly to himself, something he hadn’t done in years. The way, as a barely pubescent dancer, he couldn’t stop himself, his voice cracking slightly, his Adam’s apple rising and falling, a tremor as he counted off his pirouettes.



* * *



*

We’re never going to talk about it, Dara realized at some point. Neither Charlie nor Marie seemed strong enough to talk about it. To face it.

She felt, obscurely, like Clara in her nightgown, alone on the dark stage.

In the end, their mother used to tell her, hands on Dara’s shoulders as she waited in the wings, it’s only you out there.

In the end, you only have you.



* * *



*

It wasn’t until the final hour of that endless day that was really two days that it all fell on Dara. She lay in bed and her thoughts flung back to the things he’d said, the insinuations, the accusations, the lurid pictures he’d painted. But most of all the looks on Charlie’s and Marie’s faces as it happened.

It was a look that was uncannily familiar though she couldn’t place it.

She was touching the corners of something. She could feel it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

She didn’t cry, not once. And she felt very strong, somehow. Something had happened at last, she thought. A pressure released. A valve turned, a window thrown open.

Marie was back home. They were all here again.

Everyone could forget.





DON’T LOOK


Once in the night, Charlie sleeping beside her, his throat thick with sleeping pills, breathing funnily, she woke to a piercing sensation beneath her right brow.

A flash came of some murky nightmare of eye sockets, rolling eyeballs, her slipper slipping over a jellied orb.

A flash then of another, Derek running up the spiral staircase and suddenly their mother running down, darkly luminous in a nightgown as white as Clara’s.

Their mother, her long hand twined around the iron railing, and then Derek was gone, their mother falling. Falling, slumping, her nightgown mounded around her like a sunken flower.

Don’t look, Charlie was saying. Don’t look at her eyes.



* * *



*

In the kitchen, she poured a splash of the cream brandy their Nutcracker lighting vendor gave them every year into their morning coffee and watched Charlie shuffle around numbly.

At some point in the night, he’d slunk out of bed, down the hall, down the stairs to the sofa bed where she found him, mummy-tight in the old afghan, crocheted snowflakes yellowed with age.

“We can do this,” he kept saying, but he seemed less sure today. No longer fired by adrenaline, the snaky spring of fear.

The blue of the veins at his temple, his skin nearly translucent in the morning light.

She would never not want to touch him, to stroke his skin, to fondle and caress. He was too beautiful and also half-forbidden, that half-broken body.

Charlie, Charlie, she thought and remembered their mother once saying, So beautiful, like spider silk, and not strong enough by half.



* * *



*

They had both heard Marie at four a.m.

“I thought I was dreaming,” Charlie said, rubbing his eyes, “that she was coming after us with a hammer.”

It was a hammer, pounding, pounding. That singular cacophony of her sister taking what sounded like a ball-peen to a pair of pointe shoes.

Waking them both up, keeping them up.

“Are you going to stop her?” Charlie had asked.

“No,” Dara had replied tiredly, wanly. “Let her. Let her.”



* * *



*

The ritual would soothe her. Soothed all dancers, Dara thought.

The shoes, the shoes. The shoes were everything.

Pink satin fantasies from afar, from the audience, enthralled. But if you moved too close, you’d see that they’d already been battered, scored, disemboweled.

Those shoes, so intimate, soaked with your sweat until they sealed themselves to your feet, until, soon after, they fell to pieces.

Pink satin fantasies we beat into submission so they can be used and then discarded.

Pink satin fantasies created to give pleasure but destroyed in the process.

This, their mother said when she held out Dara’s very first pointe shoe, is what we are.

This, she said, handing her the shoe, Dara’s stubby nine-year-old fingers touching it, feeling a static charge, is you.



* * *



*

She’s in no condition to work today,” Charlie was saying as they finished their coffee. “We can’t have her in front of parents.”

Dara didn’t say anything, holding on to the last sly tang of brandy, trying to calm herself, when Marie appeared in the kitchen doorway.