The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

  Soon enough, Dara’s students, changing to leave, were drawn in, too, watching Marie play the Sword Swallower, lifting the sword above her head and then taking it into her mouth.

  She wants everyone to see, Dara thought, and she thought she even spotted Derek lingering by the doorway, watching as Marie sank one, two, three cardboard foils into her mouth, head thrown back, her throat like a pale lily.

  * * *

  * * *

  At the end of the day, Dara hurried to the back office to find Charlie, wanting, so badly, to go home.

  But Charlie wasn’t alone. Seated at his desk, he was signing something, a coffee-stained contract. And, looming over him, was Derek, his shoulders hunched, cologne swirling, his hair powdered with soot.

  “Hello,” Dara said, stopping short.

  “Got a lot done today,” Derek said, grinning, tugging his damp shirt from his chest, the fleshy chest of one of those old-time wrestlers, beefy and staggering around the ring.

  Beside him, Charlie looked so small and wan, a wilting petal.

  “I think that’s it,” Charlie said, handing over the sheaf of papers.

  Derek began looking them over. “So you own the building?”

  “We do,” Dara said, walking in, Derek’s eyes lifting to her. “It’s been good for us. Plenty of space. Close to home.”

  “You live on Sycamore?” he said, eyes still on the papers.

  “Yes,” Charlie said. “That cul-de-sac behind the old train tracks.”

  “I know that street,” Derek said, looking up, eyes newly bright. “Big old houses. Red brick, gables, low stoops. Built in the twenties for the white-collar types working at the mill. Until the neighborhood turned.”

  “Well, it’s different now,” Dara said, bristling at the word turned, remembering when they were the only ones on their street who didn’t have a car on blocks in the front yard.

  “It sure is,” Derek said. “I worked deconstruction over there once, years ago.”

  “Deconstruction?”

  “I was just a kid, dumb but big. Our job was working those abandoned houses over on Van Buren, strip ’em one by one for parts. Leaded glass, copper piping, mantelpieces. Once we found a human leg. Just the knee down. We left that there. R.I.P.”

  Derek looked at Dara like he was waiting for her to laugh. She didn’t.

  “Boss taught us all kinds of things. How to pry loose a perfect piece of old-growth pine without splitting it. Like unhooking your mother’s bra, boss used to say. Then we’d get out the backhoe and take the whole house down.”

  The office felt far too small with him in there. Dara stepped toward the window, open a crack. The way he’d looked at her when he said unhooking your mother’s bra.

  “After,” he continued, “we’d take the remaining rubble and fill the basement with it. Choke the whole thing up. Drop some dirt down, some seed. Go by a month later, there’s a little grass growing there. It’s like prairie. Like the house was never there at all.”

  Dara didn’t say anything. Her eyes were on the spiral staircase behind him. He was leaning against it. It was like the other day, his hand on its railing, the way he’d yanked it, the feeling she had like he might yank one more time and bring everything down.

  “Kinda sounds like you were a vulture,” Charlie said, reaching for his coat. “Licking the bones of the dead.”

  Derek smiled, showing all his teeth. “Except we didn’t lick them. We sold them.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Dara stayed late, arranging a ride home for Bailey Bloom, whose mother failed to appear at pickup.

  “I guess she forgot,” Bailey said, her brow pinched. “My dad can come. Or something.”

  When Mrs. Bloom finally answered her phone, she sounded frazzled, teary.

  “I’m so sorry, Madame Durant. Is it just you two left there?”

  “Yes. But—”

  “I’m on my way. Please forgive me. I thought her father . . . well, I’m sorry.”

  Dara assured her it was not a problem. At least not yet. It was the first week of Nutcracker season. The hand-wringing, tears, drama, had only just begun.

  * * *

  * * *

  She’s always been an odd one,” Charlie reminded Dara later. “Remember last year? The hair?”

  Then Dara did remember. For a few weeks, Mrs. Bloom had gone from a sleek brunette to an icy, near platinum blonde. How embarrassed she seemed, her locks pulled back tightly, slicked with spray to hide their brightness.

  The girl at the salon had talked her into it, she swore.

  It reminded Dara of something their mother, whose hair fell nearly to her waist, always said: Never let anyone under thirty touch your hair.

  The worst part is the name, Mrs. Bloom had confided to Dara, blushing and tucking phantom wisps into her chignon.

  Hot Buttered Blonde, she whispered, blushing again.

  * * *

  * * *

  As she was leaving, Dara spotted Marie lingering in the darkened Studio B, creeping along the tarp, her bony feet coated in dust.

  She watched as her sister knelt down and ran her finger along the snaky seam where the wall had stood, the one the contractor had torn through, like a sideshow dare.

  “Boo,” Dara said, sneaking behind her.

  Marie looked up, her face aflame, that morning’s lipstick on her teeth.

  * * *

  * * *

  I think Marie’s got a crush,” Charlie said that night. “On the contractor.”

  “What do you mean?” Dara asked, shaking loose Charlie’s vitamins and herbal remedies, setting out his daily allotment.

  Charlie shrugged. “Just the way she looks at him.”

  “That’s impossible,” Dara said. Marie was a person who kept to herself. After a few semi-tragic romances with fellow dancers in her early twenties, after a prolonged fixation on a married cellist of some note who passed through town a few times a year and dallied with her heart, Marie was a lone wolf.

  “Marie’s bored,” Dara said. “Or something.”

  “Marie,” Charlie said softly, “is lonely.”

  Dara looked up from the pile of pills and said nothing.

  THE PINK

  Within a few days, it was quieter, the initial demolition past and the air heavy with new smells, sulfurous plaster, chalky dry wall, the tang of mildew.

  Dara was sure the parents would protest, but there were few complaints. They were too consumed with The Nutcracker, when they would receive the rehearsal schedule, whether or not last year’s sound system issues would be resolved, and isn’t it time to replace the mouse heads? That glue is definitely toxic.

  She smoked restlessly between classes and marveled at Marie, who seemed to be unaffected, leading her four-year-olds through hops and jumps. The endless plonk-plonk of the piano and Marie’s faint, high voice, arms up, fingers, fingers to the sky.

  “He’ll move fast,” Charlie kept saying. “He’s in high demand.”

  But Dara didn’t see how that was possible based on the state of Studio B, which resembled the scooped-clean inside of a volcano.

  “I promise,” Charlie said.

  The plonk-plonk and Marie flitting from corner to corner with her little girls, and not noticing the clouds of dust wafting in, or the occasional trills of the drill, the sharp punch of the hammer.

  And poor Bailey Bloom, her eyelids covered with dust, approaching them. “My mom can’t come here anymore,” she said dolefully, which was how she said everything. “Construction makes her sick.”

  “Well,” Charlie said, “she can start coming again when rehearsals start at the Ballenger.”

  “Everything will be better then,” Dara said. “Everything.”

  * * *

  * * *

  You wanted this,” Charl
ie reminded her later. “It’s only been a few days.”

  “You wanted this,” Dara reminded him. “And then we all did.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Maybe it was because he was always there, the contractor. And you always knew it, whether he was shouting instructions to Benny and Gaspar (“Get that hot mud, it shapes up nice and quick”) or enmeshed in one of his long phone calls conducted as he sat on the open windowsill or paced the entrance area (“So I told her, put it in an envelope if it looks that good . . .”), his wheezing laugh echoing through every studio.

  And then the meal times, delivery boys streaming in and out, their faces red from the chill, delivering greasy breakfast sandwiches, submarines for lunch, the mid-afternoon pizza whose oily smell made all the students sick with disgust and longing.

  The students staring with such yearning, half of them subsisting on strange diets Dara did not support—lettuce leaves with hot sauce, cotton balls coated with ranch.

  * * *

  * * *

  There was no time for distractions. The growing Nutcracker pressures, the urgency on the students’ faces—it was consuming, and Dara could hear their mother’s voice in her head. Never forget, ma chère, each year is someone’s first Nutcracker. Then adding, If you can give them that, you have them for life.

  Dara knew it was true. She still remembered every exquisite detail of her first year dancing in it, four years old, playing one of the Kingdom of Sweets Polichinelles, the dozen little clowns who pop loose—surprise!—from under Mother Ginger’s giant hoop skirt to the audience’s delighted gasps.

  How, for so long, it seemed—though it was surely less than a minute—she scurried blindly beneath Mother’s hoops, crinolines hot against her face, hidden from the audience but feeling their presence, their anticipation.

  How she could barely breathe, how she couldn’t wait to burst out, leaping forward and bounding across the stage, drunk from the escape, and, somehow, from that captivity.

  * * *

  * * *

  It just breaks my heart,” Mr. Lesterio said, furrowing his brow.

  Dara hadn’t even noticed him standing in the doorway. She’d been lost in concentration, watching his son Corbin, feet like sparrow wings, as he practiced his pas de chat, his knees apart, legs high.

  “The guys on the soccer team found out,” Mr. Lesterio said discreetly. “They call him Dancing Queen. That’s the nicest thing they call him.”

  “He really shouldn’t be playing soccer,” Dara said. “He’s our Nutcracker Prince. He could injure himself.”

  Mr. Lesterio shook his head, curling his hands around his coffee thermos. It wasn’t the response he’d expected. Dara thought about what Charlie always said, about softening her tone with the parents. Their mother never had, she’d remind him.

  “Ms. Durant, you have to understand,” Mr. Lesterio was saying as Corbin, distracted, was watching them both now, stuttering through his glissade. “I lettered in four sports and spent two years in the U.S. Army Reserve.”

  “If he were injured in a game,” Dara said, “you’d never forgive yourself.”

  You must be firm, their mother always said about parents, or they will dominate you.

  Mr. Lesterio didn’t say anything for a moment.

  They both looked as Corbin landed, sweeping his hair from his eyes as a pink frill of girls in the back of the room snuck glances, whispering behind their hands.

  “It embarrasses him,” Mr. Lesterio said, nearly under his breath. “Being looked at like that.”

  “He wouldn’t be dancing if he didn’t want to be looked at,” Dara said.

  But of course Corbin—his fine features and frame, the way he moved—would have been noticed anywhere, under any circumstances. Those things, however, fathers were blind to.

  “Every day,” Mr. Lesterio said, cradling the thermos now, holding it close to his chest, “I expect him to come home and say, I can’t take the pink anymore.”

  Dara looked at him. “Don’t count on it.”

  * * *

  * * *

  You showed him,” someone said, low and intimate.

  Dara, standing at the barre, looked in the mirror and there was Derek the contractor, emerging from Studio B, running his hand through his dark scrubby hair.

  “I can’t take the pink anymore,” Derek said, imitating Mr. Lesterio’s gruff tone, his squeamishness. “Get a load of that.”

  “Can I help you with something?” Dara said. His ingratiation worse, somehow, than his thoughtlessness, his careless swings with his drill, his sledgehammer.

  “Your John Hancock,” he said, handing her a sheaf of papers. Their construction contract, barely more than a computer template, something called “Contractor Services,” its corners bent, a copy of a copy.

  “I thought we were done with the paperwork,” Dara said.

  “Bureaucrats,” Derek said. An answer that wasn’t an answer.

  “I’ll show these to my husband,” Dara said. “He handles the administration.”

  Derek nodded and tipped his head. He did a funny little backward dance like a courtier bidding adieu to the queen.

  Dara turned, heading toward the back office, away from his aftershave smog and the bigness of him.

  But she could still see him in the mirror. Derek, tilting his head knowingly, and saying something to her in a voice so low and tawdry, she’d wonder later if she’d misheard.

  “Me,” Derek said. “I like the pink.”

  * * *

  * * *

  He didn’t belong in her studio, in Studio C, which was hers.

  Why was he even here at all when Benny and Gaspar were doing all the work, the spectacle of the wall-demolishing now past. And yet a dozen times a day, he seemed to find an excuse to saunter through every room, clipboard clasped, his too-tight dress shirts, his dual phones, his throbbing beeper.

  * * *

  * * *

  I think you should tell him,” Dara told Charlie later, “there should be some kind of divider. A barrier between Studio B and our studios. To protect the students.”

  Charlie looked at her.

  “A few of the parents have mentioned it,” Dara said. A white lie, she told herself. They were sure to complain soon. And didn’t Mrs. Bloom’s refusal to set foot inside count?

  “I’ll say something to Derek,” Charlie said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  * * *

  * * *

  In the back office, Dara sat at the desk, going through the invoices impaled on the metal bill holder. Three hundred pounds of artificial snow for The Nutcracker, wigmaster services, two replacement toy soldier uniforms, four replacement mouse heads.

  “Were you talking to him earlier?”

  Dara looked up. It was Marie, skin pink with heat, that white leotard now sweated through, translucent. You could see everything.

  “To Derek. What were you talking about?” Marie said. “Tell me.”

  Dara raised an eyebrow, a gesture inherited from their mother.

  “Nothing,” she said, setting down the bill holder. “It was nothing.” There was a sneaking pleasure in this, a flash of jealousy from her sister.

  Marie paused, touching her neck with an open hand.

  “I could never talk to him,” she whispered.

  Dara looked at her. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “When he comes near me,” Marie said, her neck instantly red, “I can’t breathe.”

  THE CURTAIN

  The next morning, Dara woke up with a thought of Marie, that perennial swirl of her fine hair caught in the drain of their mother’s old claw-foot tub.

  Marie never let you forget she was there, even when she wasn’t. Even when she didn’t live there anymore.

  Marie, who’d wasted an hour or more on that cardboard sword
stunt the other day, making such a spectacle of herself. In that obscenely sheer leotard, feigning the Sword Swallower, plunging the foils into her mouth as the contractor watched.

  When he comes near me, I can’t breathe.

  * * *

  * * *

  It didn’t make sense. Marie liked softness, gentleness, refinement in men. The ones she’d dallied with in her twenties, tousle-haired golden boys who played guitar for her and padded around her studio in bare feet so as not to scuff the maple floor. The studio dads with the wool blazers and the smooth hands who thanked her so very much for the elegance and refinement she’d given their daughters.

  These were the men Marie liked.

  * * *

  * * *

  I can’t feel,” Charlie said, leaning over at the kitchen table.

  Dara looked down at his feet, long and marbled. Six years after he’d been forced to stop, his feet were still dancer’s feet. Hard and gnarled and hoof-like. But not half as mangled as hers, ugly like a crow’s, or Marie’s, which their father used to call the boomerangs.

  Jolie-laide, their mother always insisted. To her, all dancers’ feet were beautiful, beautiful not in spite of but because of their hardness, their contortions, their battle against nature, against the body itself. What could be more beautiful, she used to say, than a will like that?

  Kneeling down, Dara wrapped her hand around one of Charlie’s feet. It felt like the bedpost on her parents’ bed.

  “Can you feel this?” she asked Charlie, gently squeezing his arch. After the last surgery, he was supposed to get sensation back. They always said he’d get sensation back.