The Turnout(8)

So many nights like this with Marie and it felt funny she wasn’t there.

So many nights like this, Marie thumping the TV top with the heel of her hand, like their father used to with his TV downstairs (both likely the last antenna TVs in three counties by now), the images shuddering into focus—an old musical from black-and-white days, pretty girls dressed in feathers, their bodies slicked with jewels.

So many nights like this with Marie, who was now gone, curled instead on her futon at the studio, like some itinerant hobo, grateful for the roof over her head.

“She’ll come back,” Charlie kept saying, but there was something nice in this too. For Dara. Something nice in being, for the first time in their marriage, for the first time ever, living alone with Charlie in the big old house, drafty and familiar and theirs.

Something nice in bed that night, nuzzling herself against Charlie’s back and knowing they were all alone and it was their house now. It was only theirs, all theirs.

We were three and then . . . not.



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*

After all, Charlie had been in their lives for more than twenty years, since he first showed up in their mother’s ballet class at eleven years old, the prettiest boy any of them had ever seen.

The prettiest girl too, joked their father, batting his eyelashes.

Their mother doted on Charlie—her star student, her favorite, her cher Charlie—one of the few boys, the most wildly talented, and eventually he came to be a part of the family, too, staying over for dinner several nights a week when his mother, a nurse, worked late.

Their mother loved having a young man in the house. Their father worked long hours. When he was home, he disappeared into his den. Through the crack in the door, Dara would watch him collapse in his recliner for the ten o’clock news, a six-pack of Old Style on the quaking TV tray beside him.

When Charlie was thirteen, his mother had to move to some damp, distant corner of England to take care of her ailing parents. There was a day of tears in the house until Dara and Marie’s mother decided Charlie should simply stay with them in order to continue his work with the studio. A boy was a valuable thing.

So, for a month, which became nearly a year, which became forever, Charlie moved in with them.

Dara and Marie could barely handle having a boy in the house. Marie began peeing in the neighbors’ yard, too afraid that Charlie might hear her.

How strange to have him in their private space of dotted underpants slung over the shower rod, the stench from the mounded ballet slippers, their mother walking around in her silky robe—her “glamour gown,” the girls called it—her legs bare and mashed and mauled dancer’s feet, feet like a day laborer’s hands, their father used to say.

How their father agreed to the new arrangement was a mystery. Once, they heard him grumble to their mother that she better be prepared because a boy that age is just gonna be jerking himself off the minute the lights go out.

Dara’s mother said nothing, coughing lightly.

You’ll see when you wash the sheets.



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Charlie slept on the pullout sofa in the living room.

In the morning, before Charlie slid the mattress back into the sofa’s mouth, Dara would press her face against the sheets. Marie would look for telltale stains.

Dara liked to go into the bathroom right after Charlie showered, to smell his smells, to touch the sink counter and imagine Charlie’s clothes set there, his undershorts.

Dara liked to stand in the shower and imagine Charlie standing there.



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They had been each other’s firsts, age fourteen. It happened in the basement, the makeshift studio next to the chugging washer and dryer. Each of them stretching on the floor, watching each other from opposite corners, watching each other in the mirrors their mother had mounted on the walls with electrical tape.

It happened in a blur of heat, Dara’s breath catching, and suddenly, she was crawling toward him, her palms slapping on the floor. Her form divine. It was like a moment in a dance. The serpent attacks. The lion seizes its prey.

She crawled toward him and then on top of him, pushing his shoulders to the floor, and he looked surprised the whole time and she wasn’t even sure it had happened until they were both shaking and wet.



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*

Dara should never have told Marie, who immediately told their mother, the words slipping helplessly from her mouth, or so she claimed. Their mother, however, only tilted her head and murmured, C’est logique, c’est logique.

(Later, their mother confided to Dara, If it had been Marie, I would have worried. With you, ma fille mature, I never worry.)

Marie wouldn’t speak to Dara for days, abandoning their bunkbed and sleeping instead in the TV room, on the carpet next to their father’s recliner, the two of them watching late-night talk shows, their father letting Marie sip his beer.

Every evening when he wasn’t traveling, he’d come home from work and navigate stacks of pointe shoes, towers of them in the corners, tights hanging on doorknobs. Music, forever, from the old stereo console, from the turntable upstairs. The sound, forever, of the barre squeaking, Dara’s or Marie’s eager hands on it, their mother’s voice intoning, Lift through the leg! Turn that foot out! Their house was all ballet, all the time.