The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

  * * *

  * * *

  He was gone more than an hour before Dara felt her shoulders relax, her arms hanging lamely at her sides.

  Strangers were in and out of the studio all the time, new parents, servicemen, the mail carrier. But this felt different, invasive. You show someone your damage and they know all your weak spots. They know everything.

  For the next hour, Dara dragged a mop and bucket and she scrubbed all the floors, every place he’d stepped, the gray sludge his shoes left behind.

  * * *

  * * *

  That night, at home, the itchy feeling in her palms she’d felt all day was finally gone.

  Taking the kettle off the stove, she poured Charlie a cup of white tea. She sat down and put her feet, thick and throbbing, in his lap and he rubbed them delicately.

  Everything was right again. Dara hadn’t even bothered to look at the estimate the contractor had left them, a sheet of paper torn from a spiral notebook like a schoolboy.

  “I’ll get some more contractor recommendations,” Charlie said. “I’ll find us someone good who can just do the job we asked for.”

  “I know you will,” Dara said. Charlie always fixed everything.

  “Unless you think maybe . . .” Charlie said, glancing at the estimate on the table.

  Dara felt a stab in the arch of her foot, a nerve firing.

  “It’s just,” Charlie started, “he had some good ideas. Things we’ve been talking about for years. More space. A real expansion. Room to breathe.”

  Dara didn’t say anything, pulling her feet away swiftly, drawing them close.

  “Maybe this is what we’ve been waiting for,” Charlie said. “Maybe the fire wasn’t such a bad thing. We rise from the ashes.”

  Dara wrapped her hands around her feet and squeezed them until they hurt.

  “Maybe it’s a mistake,” Charlie continued, “to always play it safe.”

  HOTHOUSE

  It wasn’t like they hadn’t considered renovating, expanding before, Dara thought in bed that night, her hand on Charlie’s back, smooth as an ivory tusk. Smooth and cool and pure.

  “Just think about it,” Charlie murmured. “See how it feels.”

  Designed to accommodate sixty or seventy students, the school now served twice that. And there were always new competitors—two new competition dance schools in the past year alone, splashy and mercenary, crowded with aspirants, sparkled, sprayed, and glued together like party dolls, offering up a promise of YouTube stardom and hot, fleeting fame.

  You had to compete with that. And you were competing with what some considered a dying art. The misty pink hothouse of ballet.

  And did you stand a chance when your space was cramped with only three studios and a floor in Studio B that, even before the fire, was pocked with age, warped with spring-thaw leaks? Maybe, while they were already making repairs, it was time to pull it up, to put in a new sprung floor with layers of wood and padding to absorb shock and enhance performance. To patch up the ice-dam damage, the king rat stain on the ceiling before winter arrived.

  And there was Charlie. Dara and Marie spent their days turning out the knees, pointing the feet, bending the backs, pushing in the pert bottoms of endless little girls. To them, any business matter was a blur in the background. Charlie, however, could see the big picture.

  And Charlie, after all, needed something. Something other than bookkeeping, designing little display ads for the local paper, soothing anxious parents, seeing his doctors—all his doctors—about his half-broken body. That magnificent, blinding marble thing that had, slowly and then all at once, cracked.

  “It could be just what we need,” Charlie said. “What your mother would have wanted.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Slowly, Dara felt the certainty rising in her chest, like a sharp stone her lungs brushed up against with every breath.

  Maybe Charlie was right. Maybe their mother—who’d put twenty years of toil and affliction into their cramped, sweaty, stenchy place, ripe as the hollow of a dancer’s pointed foot—would want this.

  * * *

  * * *

  Marie will be hard to convince,” Dara said. Marie didn’t like disruption or change or intruders from out there. None of the Durants did. Dara could only remember a handful of occasions—a meter reader once, an animal control officer that time a raccoon got caught in the screen door—when anyone outside of their family set foot inside their house their entire childhood.

  Still, Charlie pointed out, Marie was the one who had in fact moved out of the house, taken a leap.

  But, Dara replied, look how far she got.

  * * *

  * * *

  Charlie kept asking Dara and Dara kept saying it was best not to pressure Marie, which Charlie should know by now.

  Marie didn’t like to think about things. Business decisions, all decisions, hung like a weight around her neck.

  Marie didn’t like to sign papers, to put her name on things, to have too many keys.

  Marie, who had so few attachments, obligations, connections that sometimes she felt like she was going to float away, ascend. But Dara could never tell if this was what she wanted, or her greatest fear.

  Marie, who’d slept in their childhood bunkbed for years, only moving down the hall to the sewing room when she began having back pain from the slender mattress. She still said she didn’t know what to do in a full-size bed. She said she felt lost.

  * * *

  * * *

  I’m the one who has to live with it,” Marie said, later that day.

  Dara was watching Marie at the barre, stretching, her skin ruddy with heat.

  “We’ll all be living with it,” Dara said. “We’ll have to rearrange our whole schedule around it. We might have to rent space at the Y to cover classes.”

  The parents wouldn’t like it, and the younger girls—the five-, six-, seven-year-olds Marie taught—would use it as an opportunity for laziness, every disruption an excuse to giggle and play rather than practice.

  “So then,” Marie said, “why do it?”

  Marie watched herself in the mirror. Her body pulling itself into long, stretchy pieces of taffy. Not very elegant, Marie, Dara thought.

  “Don’t you want more space,” Dara said. “Isn’t that why you moved here to begin with.”

  Neither of them were questions exactly.

  “Maybe this way,” Dara said, staring at Marie, bent over at the waist now, the whiteness near her scalp, so white against the ruby face, “we can avoid any more fires.”

  Marie didn’t say anything. What could she say?

  * * *

  * * *

  Later, Dara was tidying the changing room, collecting abandoned sweaters, twirls of toe tape, curls of elastic ribbon, scruffs of lamb’s wool popped loose from pointe shoes.

  She could hear Charlie talking to Marie in the back office.

  “It’s time,” Charlie was saying.

  “Is it,” Marie said.

  There was a pause, Dara leaning closer, trying to hear.

  “It’s time for something,” Charlie said finally. “We need something.”

  * * *

  * * *

  In the middle of the day, their claims adjuster, Bambi, a petite, solidly built woman of indeterminate middle age, arrived to review the damage.

  She moved quickly, taking pictures with her phone.

  “Have you hired someone yet?” she asked Charlie.

  “No,” he said, but then he mentioned Derek and that maybe the adjuster knew him.

  “Sure,” Bambi said, blinking. “I’m surprised you can get him. He’s in high demand.”

  “Really?” Charlie said.

  “He must’ve liked you,” Bambi said, handing Charlie her card as she began to leave. “He
must’ve seen something he liked.”

  * * *

  * * *

  That evening, Dara stayed late with a few students, including her Clara and her Nutcracker Prince, Bailey Bloom and Corbin Lesterio, both of whom wanted extra practice.

  But even with all the windows open, one by one, they started coughing, Bailey’s peashoot body shaking from it.

  The smoke was gone from the air, but it had tunneled in deep, sunk itself into the wood, the drywall. Corbin’s big dark eyes blurred with tears. The fire was gone, but it wasn’t.

  It made Dara think about a story their mother told them once. About the famous ballerina in the nineteenth century, a gas lamp catching on her skirt, enveloping her in flames before the entire audience’s eyes. How she spun and spun, the blaze consuming her until she was rescued.

  She lingered a few months after, her corset melted to her ribs.

  The surviving scraps of her costume still hung in the Musée de l’Opéra in Paris.

  That, their mother told them, is love.

  * * *

  * * *

  The following morning, Dara and Charlie arrived to find Marie sitting on the floor of Studio B, her face sweaty, her long neck and chest glistening, her legs tangled up.

  Spread around her were the proposed plans. The design layout, the sketches, Derek’s scribbled estimate, his slashing hand, the frill of the schoolbook paper.

  She was still catching her breath, palm pressed on the papers.

  “Marie,” Charlie said, “what say you?”

  She looked up, bewildered somehow, as if they had appeared suddenly from inside her own head, her own dream. She turned her face up, staring up at the skylight, and whispered something softly.

  “Yes, Your Highness?” Dara asked, looking down at her sister.

  “I say it’s time,” Marie said softly, tapping her toe once on the scuffed floor. Dara nodded and Marie lifted her head, her face pink and decisive. “It’s past time.”

  * * *

  * * *

  There was a toast with champagne—the bubbly pink kind from the corner store, in paper cups with blue flowers—and cigarettes on the fire escape. Those pink sugared biscuits their mother ordered in bulk from France and stockpiled in the pantry, these at least a decade old.

  Charlie kissed them both on their cheeks, his lips cool and lovely.

  Dara watched Marie enjoying her bubbles, her moment. It was infuriating. Why had she given Marie such power? Marie wasn’t a full partner anyway. Marie was squatting here, a non-residential space not fit for living. But was Marie living at all, or merely burrowing in?

  Marie, that foxlike face of hers, running her tongue along the waxy rim of her cup.

  When Charlie went inside to get fresh matches, Dara said, “What are you so happy about?”

  Marie looked at her a moment, then leaned closer, her lips smelling like Dixie-cup wax.

  “Just remember,” she whispered, a quiver in her voice, “you’re the one who invited him in.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The next morning, when Dara and Charlie arrived at the studio at seven thirty, Derek the contractor was already there, standing in the middle of Studio B, legs astride like the figure on the cover of their mother’s copy of The Fountainhead.

  In the corner, Marie stood, watching. Watching as Derek gave instructions to his crew: two young men with heavy tool belts and tape measures, one with drop cloths looped around his arm, his arm braided with muscles.

  Dara squinted. Something was different about Marie.

  And then Marie turned and she saw it. Marie’s forever-pale mouth was painted fire engine red. Like a warning, a five-alarm.

  Dara pictured Marie strolling to the drugstore late the night before, or early that morning, trying on lipsticks under the fluorescent, fly-specked lights.

  “Good morning,” Charlie said, nudging Dara forward, moving to shake hands with Derek. “Looks like things have already started.”

  A HAMMER OVER MY HEART

  It was fast, so fast. Faster than the fire even.

  They were watching the walls come down.

  Dara and Marie wore the safety goggles and dust masks he handed them, though Derek himself went barefaced. They stood at the spot on the floor he dictated, a safe distance.

  The two workers, Benny and Gaspar, watched too. Stood back and observed. Benny, lithe and goateed, and Gaspar, thick and sinewy, saying things to each other in Portuguese under their breath.

  Derek lifted a long-frame hammer from the floor.

  “It only hurts the first time,” he said, winking at Dara and Marie.

  Like a caveman and his club, he began swinging the hammer, punching starter holes into the wall.

  Punching again, nearly bursting through his shirt, wiggling the drywall back and forth.

  The holes looked like dark pinwheels. Looked like bruises.

  Marie covered her ears with the heels of her hands.

  Next came the saw. The one with the long blade—how he hoisted it up high, making a long vertical cut from the ceiling down, down, down, splitting the wall. Tearing the bisected panel with his big catcher’s mitt hands.

  It was as if, somehow, the saw were sinking down her own spine, Dara thought. That was how it felt.

  Beside her, Marie was breathing so hard, her dust mask puffing up, then disappearing into her mouth.

  * * *

  * * *

  Next came the crowbar, prying the baseboards and trim free, great splintering sounds that made you want to scream. Made Dara want to scream.

  Knocking the studs free, the veins in his arms straining.

  The long hammer back, its claw tearing a monstrous hole, his hands plunging inside, ripping, rending. Tearing again, tearing everything. Everything. Until there was nothing left.

  Until Derek set down the hammer to answer his phone—one of his phones—disappearing into the stairwell, shaking the dust from his hair.

  Dara looked where the wall had been moments before, now only an ugly seam on the ground, the subfloor thick with sawdust sneaking through.

  Her safety goggles fogging, Dara thought for a second she might cry. What is wrong with me? she thought. What is wrong?

  “Is it over?” Dara asked, clawing the goggles from her face.

  But Marie wasn’t listening, tearing off her dust mask as if suffocating. She was looking at the hammer, leaning against the wall now. “It’s still hot,” she said, her fingers on its rubber handle. “It’s still hot.”

  * * *

  * * *

  That afternoon, as the students began to arrive, Dara distracted herself from everything going on in Studio B, the huffs of debris, the makeshift tarp path taped to the molding floors so one could pass through.

  She tried not to think about the wall, the wreckage. The dust on her eyelashes, the smell of rot at the center of their beloved space. Second to their home, the most beloved space.

  “It’s the right thing,” Charlie assured her. He’d spent the morning filling out insurance paperwork. There was a lot of paperwork and Derek seemed to keep giving them more.

  “I know,” Dara said. Besides, there was no time for sentiment. Her three o’clock students were arriving, Level III boys, the soft slap of their canvas shoes against the floor in the dressing room, faces blazing from the cold, earnest and anxious footsteps pad-padding to the barre, side glances at Dara, enthralled by Dara.

  * * *

  * * *

  It wasn’t long before she lost herself in the churn of the day. In her first class, the boys in their black tights and white tees, straining. She devoted so much more of herself to the boys. After Charlie couldn’t teach anymore, she’d taken over them and found she liked it. They were always so intently focused—they had to be—the boys. They faced so much social dismissal. It gave the
m a special intensity, especially Malik, Tony, and, of course, her Nutcracker Prince Corbin, thoughtful and quiet, their voices softly breaking, their faces faintly dotted with acne, their chests like ship prows yet waists so dainty, like prim bows.

  * * *

  * * *

  More than once, the floor shook with a rumbling from Studio B. Some kind of enormous drill or maybe a pneumatic device thundering through the walls.

  The boys pretended not to notice, focused on their grands battements at the barre.

  But it was impossible not to notice and Dara, pacing, counting off, felt each pulse from the machine ripple up her spine.

  After, she peered into Studio B, a cloud of smoke and Derek the contractor covered in soft gray powder, wiping his brow, drinking heartily from a tumbler of some kind.

  * * *

  * * *

  The day skittered along, the crushes of girls bolting into the changing room, unwinding scarves, kicking off boots, tearing off coats, yanking down jeans, stripping down to sameness, lining up in their identical black leotards, pink tights, tight buns knotted atop their worried faces.

  Dara led the advanced students in their mother’s beloved Studio C while Marie taught her little darlings in the cramped but serviceable Studio A.

  Meanwhile, in Studio B, the carnage took hold. Dust, debris, ash, grit, thunder, fury. The slick-slack of tape, the hard thunk of nail guns, the grinding rage of the drill, the tinny drone of box fans. The younger girls couldn’t concentrate, the six-year-olds slapping their chubby palms over their ears. But the older ones continued to pretend to be untouched by any of it, their devotion to the dance far greater than any squalid disruption.

  As the day closed, Marie, mysteriously in high spirits, gave all the students an unplanned lesson in swordplay, showing her Level IIs how to handle the cardboard foils for the Mouse King battle. Marie, her sweater a swirl on the floor, wearing a filmy white leotard Dara had never seen before.