by Megan Abbott
“I can’t feel anything,” he said, looking down at her, at Dara on her knees before him.
* * *
* * *
All day, there were thunderous tremors from Studio B, leaving a haze of debris, the smell of mold, mice. The silt from decades of young girls: stray earring studs, hair elastics, dusted ribbons, Band-Aids curled with browned blood.
Charlie holed up in the back office with heating pads and ibuprofen; Dara had to manage alone. Would have to explain the way the floors shook to parents. To instruct the girls not to be distracted by the tiny earthquakes under their feet.
* * *
* * *
You gotta watch that. Believe me, I know.”
It was Derek’s smoke-thick voice. She could hear it the minute the last of the fourteen-year-olds filed out of class and the strains of Giselle ceased.
She followed his voice through the sooty brume of Studio B, past Benny and Gaspar, their faces covered by safety masks so large and thick that Dara wondered what she and her little students were inhaling every day.
“This is the sweet stuff,” Derek was saying. “Sweet as mom’s milk. Well, not as sweet as my mom’s, but she was neighborhood tops.”
The laugh—the cartoonish har-dee-har-har—making Dara’s teeth grind as she opened the office door to see Derek and Charlie.
Derek inexplicably lifting Charlie’s shirt up, examining him under the desk lamp. On the felt blotter were two pill bottles, penny-orange.
“You gotta get ’em to hit this spot,” he said, his Hawaiian Tropic hands splayed on Charlie’s blue-white back. “They put the needles right here. But in the meantime, try those pills.”
“Dara,” Charlie said, eyes wide with surprise. This, she thought, is what it would feel like to catch him at something. It was a funny kind of feeling.
“Comparing war wounds,” Derek said, spotting Dara.
“So you’re a doctor too,” Dara said, picking up one of the pill bottles. “I guess you fix everything.”
“Dr. Feelgood,” Derek said, smiling as ever while Charlie tugged his shirt down. “Old rotator cuff tear, high school football. Used to have nerve pain so bad I’d get tears in my eyes. My ex knew some tricks.” He stretched his shoulder, his shirt straining. So big in their small office, the wingspan of an eagle or vulture. “I try to spread the wealth. Just for friends.”
Dara handed him back the pill bottles, watched him closing his palm over them, the big lion’s paw. His hands, in that brief brushing of hers against his, felt like the bottom of those pointe shoes after sixty strokes with her X-acto.
Dara adding, finally, “We don’t have friends.”
* * *
* * *
Charlie’s body was a glorious wreck—his jumper’s knee, the rotator cuff tendonitis, the hip arthritis from overuse, and most of all his spine, which had never been the same since the surgeries. Since they put his spine back together with wires, plates, screws.
They didn’t even know when he’d done it, but it could have happened at any performance, any rehearsal. They wouldn’t have believed it if the X-rays hadn’t been right before them like that old Lite-Brite game their father picked up for them at a garage sale once.
They called it a hangman’s fracture because of the way your neck snapped back.
It started with a broken bone—C2, a neck bone second from the skull, a bad one to break. Typically, it was the result of a very bad fall, or a very bad car crash.
Charlie wasn’t even certain how it happened. It could have been any number of falls, collisions, a dancer aloft in his arms crashing down into him. That was how it was for a dancer.
When he himself was a boy, the doctor told them, his best friend sustained a hangman’s fracture his very first time at the high dive.
What a thing, he told them. What a thing.
The problems started with the broken bone, but it affected everything else. Nerve damage doesn’t discriminate. Sensation tentative. Arousal too. Everything was connected, you see. All the parts—each so delicate—forming a precarious whole.
* * *
* * *
You don’t know anything about his injuries,” Dara told Derek later, finding him in the stairwell, texting with one hand, other hand on a tilting cup of takeout coffee.
“True,” he said, finishing his text before looking up. “But I know about pain. You don’t work long in my business without your fair share of that.”
“You should never touch a dancer’s body.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Only dancers get to touch dancers, that how it works?”
He gave her a look full of meaning, a meaning she couldn’t grasp.
“Pain is different for us,” Dara said. The pain threshold of ballet dancers was three times greater than that of anyone else. That was what their mother always said, told her pupils, told them. Three times greater, maybe four. Maybe ten.
“I guess you know a lot about it,” Derek said, putting his phone in his pocket as if the conversation interested him at last. “Pain. I guess you come to like it.”
“No,” Dara said, her face warm, the stairwell starting to fill with incoming students. “We just make it our friend.”
“So,” he said, as if catching her in something, “you have a friend, after all.” Students were passing, but he tried to hold her gaze, to catch it at all.
She would not give it to him but couldn’t seem to make herself move. Couldn’t seem to draw her face into a scowl, a dismissal. Couldn’t seem to, maybe, breathe.
Hearing a creak, she turned. Looking up the stairwell, she saw a shadow she knew was Marie.
* * *
* * *
When he comes near me, I can’t breathe.
All afternoon, the hammer-slapping, the slow drone of a hundred machines next door, Dara puzzled over it. Over Marie.
Though she herself had lost her breath with him, it was different. It was because he’d overstepped his boundaries. But to be so . . . taken with that man. That backslapper, glad-hander, noisemaker with his white teeth, like the dusty mints they used to have at nice restaurants? That smell beneath the aftershave, like crushed cigarettes and Speed Stick. The telltale white spots of a tanning booth rash, the furry forearms of a primate.
But then she remembered the way Marie looked at him, so shy, recessed even, as if his presence, the expanse of him, was overwhelming. His big, aging footballer shoulders, that heavy cologne, his stomping feet and his constant jiggling of the keys in his pocket. A lumberjack who could take down a wall, could crack anything in half with his bare hands.
They were all strong. Dara, Charlie, Marie. Everyone there was strong. Charlie, in his heyday, could lift dancers above his head as if they were mere butterflies, fluttering between his hands.
Still, looking at the contractor, Dara felt certain he could snap her in two like a wishbone.
It made her pause. It made her need to sit down a moment.
* * *
* * *
The next morning, Dara brought it up to Marie again. It had been bothering her.
“He’s not attractive,” Dara said.
Marie didn’t say anything.
They were sitting on the floor of Studio A, Dara helping Marie rub ointment on her legs, vibrating with old nerve pain.
“He’s really not,” Dara continued, pushing her thumbs into her sister’s narrow thighs. Pushing as hard as she could. It was the only way it worked.
“Maybe,” Marie said, “we have different ideas about attractive.”
* * *
* * *
Later, Dara spotted Marie contemplating Derek’s work boots, abandoned on the tarp when he disappeared for a two-hour lunch, swapped for his fancy bit loafers, shined to butterscotch. The boots were big, like Herman Munster shoes. Brown and mottled like a baked potato. Speckled with mi
lky paint, or chemicals, thick orange laces snaking up the center.
They were so big, like another person in the room. Like a man in the room, demanding to be noticed. Assuming he would be.
Marie’s eyes stayed on them as she walked slowly around the tarp, as if circling.
They’d feel hard and crusty beneath your fingers, Dara knew that.
It looked like Marie wanted to touch them, badly, but they were too big for her small hands.
* * *
* * *
You always,” Dara said later, when they were hunting among the lobby chairs, searching for Brielle Katz’s lost muffler, “found Charlie handsome. You said he looked like the groom on the top of the wedding cake.”
“I did,” Marie said, reaching for something, an abandoned winter hat studded with dust motes, “say the thing about the wedding cake.”
By any objective measure, Charlie was handsome. His body so slender and beautiful, his features so delicate, his gleaming blondness, like the handsomest boy ever at the cotillion in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story.
He was handsome to everyone. Everyone.
How could anyone look at Derek, his wooly arms and spreading belly, his whitened teeth and his winking ways, and at Charlie and think they were both the same anything?
* * *
* * *
We don’t have to like him,” Charlie said as they prepared to leave that night, sawdust thick in the air and the thumps of Europop still galloping from the boom box in Studio B. “No one likes their contractor.”
Dara didn’t say anything.
“Besides,” Charlie said, gesturing to the clear vinyl curtain now hanging in the doorway to Studio B, “he takes orders pretty well.”
Dara walked over. She’d imagined something more discreet, a zip door or a tented partition. But it was only strips of heavy plastic, like at the car wash.
It made everything inside Studio B look a little like a funhouse.
She could see Derek, stripped to his T-shirt white as his whitened teeth. The plastic rippling, he looked enormous, a funhouse Derek, holding a large rubber mallet, swinging it like a caveman club.
“I didn’t say I didn’t like him,” Dara said.
Charlie smiled, one hand on Dara’s shoulder, lightly kneading it.
“But,” Dara said, “I don’t like him.”
“Here’s an idea,” Charlie said, hands on both her shoulders now, turning her away. “Don’t look behind the curtain.”
* * *
* * *
That night, Charlie’s back spasmed.
Dara had been watching him sleep, his bare, broad back, the V of his waist. She couldn’t help herself, her hand reaching out to touch his shoulder blade, to draw him close, that skin so cool and soothing to her. The instant her fingers touched his skin, it came: a violent stiffening, and immediate, urgent, violent retreat.
A terrific jolt, reminding Dara of sleeping with Marie, who resided in the bunk above her all those years. Marie and her restless legs. Ma chère Marie’s dancing in her sleep, their mother used to say.
She yanked her hand back as if she’d touched an open flame.
* * *
* * *
Seeing the look on her face, he apologized even as he was instantly immobile with pain.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, closing his eyes. “I knew it was coming. I tried to get in to see my PT today, but . . .”
“Let me,” Dara said. “Please.”
He paused a moment, mouth tight in a grimace. But then, surprisingly, he let her.
Gingerly, she helped him flip over on his stomach.
“I’ll be so careful,” she said.
“I know.” His voice muffled in the pillow.
And he let her, her fingers hard on his hot mangled back, the heel of her hand driving hard between his shoulder blades, white and wide like wings cresting.
She liked touching it and it was the only time she felt allowed, as if his spine were so delicate—like a slender fishbone—after the four surgeries, the halo neck brace, the rehabilitation.
She liked to run her fingertips across it, liked to dig her clenched fist into it.
She went harder that night, grinding herself into him, elbows forging downward, sharp and relentless.
She was chasing the pain, she told him sternly.
It made her dizzy, and damp between the legs.
You, he murmured finally, his feet arching with pleasure, his forehead sticky, hands reaching behind for her, finding that place between her legs. You have all the power.
* * *
* * *
In the morning, she slid his shirt over his head, tentatively dressing him, his body rigid and afraid. This part was always sad.
It was like he’d given her something and then taken it away.
It would, she knew, be weeks or months before it came again. The lightning bolt splitting his shoulder blades. The lightning bolt that brought them, fleetingly, right to the center of things, shuddering them both to life. You shouldn’t wish for such things. Yet Dara did.
* * *
* * *
You will never have to reckon with pain, their mother told them long ago. You both understood it from the start.
They never even thought of it as pain.
Once in a while, their mother came to breakfast with a purple hinge of skin over one eye, or a bruised cheek. Their father at the coffee maker with tiny marks like red stitches up his neck, blaming the cat, even though the cat had no claws and had disappeared days ago anyway.
No one said anything, though sometimes Marie would want to touch their mother’s face, her heavy-lidded eye, her twisted elbow, and then she would cry.
Never cry over pain, their mother told them. Those are wasted tears.
She explained how, if you were a dancer, you were always protected.
Feet strapped into pointe shoes, body strapped into a leotard and tights, hair strapped into a bun—no one could touch you, your entire life.
ANIMALS
A week, more or less.
That was all the time it took, Dara would marvel later.
That was all the time it took to eat the apple, for Eden to fall.
* * *
* * *
It was the following morning, a week after he’d started with them. The contractor. Derek.
Dara arrived at the studio early, and alone.
She’d fantasized Charlie might wake cured, thanks to her ministrations. But when he’d sat down that morning to put on his shoes, his face went white and stricken. Dara settled him on the worn chaise in the bedroom (the fainting sofa, their mother called it), its tufts settling to flatness, its velvet shiny with age. There, he awaited a call from his PT, hoping she could fit him in today, could soothe him with her firm hands, a mysterious knuckle technique that left him breathless.
Dara arrived at the studio early, and alone, and immediately heard the sounds.
* * *
* * *
The thick plastic curtain across Studio B, its strips rippling from the furnace huffs.
Approaching, her pace slowing, Dara could see something behind it.
Approaching, she heard the sounds.
The sounds of her sister, sounds she knew so well. The short, nervous breaths like after a near fall. Soft groans like when she hyperextended her knee. But then a low moan she’d never heard before, ever.
She moved closer and thought, Oh, no, she’s hurt herself.
The blur of her sister’s body—the flesh of her flesh, the sweated sheer of that white leotard—moving.
* * *
* * *
Like animals, she said to herself later. Like animals.
* * *
* * *
Dara’s finger V-ing, splitting the plastic st
rips, squinting between them to see.
Her sister’s palms slapped on the floor, her knees grinding against it, head thrown back, her neck long and snaky, her hips narrow and relentless.
That’s not how she looks, Dara thought, but she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of anything.
That’s not how I look.
* * *
* * *
Dara’s fingers on the curtain, hot to the touch from the breathless furnace.
Her sister on all fours and behind her, that thing, grunting. Red T-shirt rippling like a bullfighter’s cape. The laugh that seemed caught in his throat.
The whir of her leotard, bone-white, its crotch wrenched to one side.
One breast slipping loose from the half-tugged leotard, his belt buckle clack-clack-clacking.
His blue hands clamped on her shoulders, the bright blue nitrile gloves coated in dust.
Oh, Marie’s mouth open like a baby doll’s, her eyes clicking back like a baby doll’s.
And the sounds coming from her mouth, sweet and surprised.
The curtain, turning everything into a funhouse mirror.
And through its rippled plastic, her sister, face tight with feeling. Her knees blazing red the rest of the day.
* * *
* * *
Give me that, he was saying. Red Riding Hood’s wolf. Grunting words.
Show me. Wider. Let me see all of it.
The gloves falling to the floor like blue birds. His hands, the slap of his undone belt.
Now here, here. Open, open. All those pretty teeth. Pretty tongue.
Marie turning, her mouth wide, waiting.
* * *
* * *
