by Megan Abbott
Me and my shadow, Marie used to say.
* * *
* * *
Remember when he tore down the wall?” Marie was saying, clasping Dara’s hands, pressing Dara’s ash-scorched knuckles.
Dara pulled her hands back. She rose. She said she had to leave.
But Marie was not done with her yet. Rising, she followed Dara as she gathered her things once more. As she put on her coat and closed the window and checked the ashtray for burning stubs. She followed Dara, explaining how she’d snuck down to Studio B late that night after the walls came down, after everyone was gone and the air still thick with dust. How she’d stepped barefoot across the plastic sheeting to the far corner where it sat, the thing.
Derek’s long-frame hammer, leaning against the wall, hickory handled, its steel head glinting.
She (Can you believe this, Dara?) dropped to her knees, touching it. Finally, lifting it, feeling its weight. It tingled under her fingertips.
What must it be like, she wondered, to so utterly destroy something?
* * *
* * *
I told him,” Marie said. “I told him later. What it felt like. Watching him take it down. Do you know what I said?”
“I don’t care,” Dara said, her fingers to her brow.
But she knew what Marie had said.
I want you to tear me open.
It made Dara want to laugh, to gag, to cry.
Dara looked at her sister, this little pervert, and said nothing.
I want you to tear me apart.
GASH
After, Dara was so happy to leave the studio, to retreat to the house, to leave them to it, to whatever they did and would do, Marie and that man.
The studio was tainted now, and home forever felt safe, reassuring. Setting foot inside, she felt her shoulders settle, her hand touching all the familiar doorknobs, the light cord in the hallway that you had to pull twice.
The more she thought about it, the angrier she was at herself. For listening to Marie, for indulging her in this troubling behavior. Taunting behavior.
But then Marie hadn’t been herself in a long time, since she moved out of the house and became a squatter in their own place of business. Since she left in the middle of the night, heaving a pair of milk crates and one overstuffed shopping bag out the front door of their home, onto the uneven pavement, stumbling into the waiting Shamrock cab. Later, they found the message taped on their bedroom door. “Gone for air. Not coming back.”
* * *
* * *
Who needs her here anyway, Dara thought, walking through the front door, that familiar scent of mildew, paste, old perfume. Who needed Marie’s buzzy, antic energy, her nighttime pacing and her bad dreams, the way she used all Dara’s tampons and ate all the sardines?
Instead, Dara could do what she did. Sit for a while in the kitchen with her fenugreek tea and give Charlie his anti-convulsant pill for his nerve pain and take her arnica tablets for sore muscles and warm up their hot-water bottles and pad off to bed.
And, as she adjusted the pillows to help Charlie find the best position for his back, she was doubly glad she hadn’t told him about Marie. If she had, they’d be talking about her sister now—all those conversations they’d had to have over the years about Marie and her troublesome behavior and her impulsiveness and willfulness—instead of turning off all the lights together, the great old house slowly darkening. Retreating to the bedroom, the old woven cane bed and the fireplace that smelled like hickory.
It was such a respite from the churn inside her, the hot splotches that came the minute she closed her eyes: images of Marie and that man . . . Marie and her strange little colt body and her neck thick and ringed red, his hands on her shoulders, wringing them red.
Looking over at him, she only wished Charlie weren’t having to treat his body with such care, propped up on pillows, a homemade heating pad packed with rice. She only wished that, in bed that night, she could touch the cool alabaster of Charlie’s muscled back again, like slipping beneath a museum’s velvet rope to lay hands on the smooth marble of a Greek god.
“I’m so happy,” she whispered from across the expanse of the bed, “to be home.”
* * *
* * *
Sleep came very late, not until she toe-tap-touched her feet five hundred times on the footrest, an old trick, a compulsion from childhood, from those nights in the wagon-wheel bunkbed, her body awake, her brain awake, her body itching.
Every night, bunkbed top to bunkbed bottom, Dara and Marie twitched and fidgeted, stretching the growing pains from their narrow, muscled limbs, their faces pressed against the bedpost, its shellacked wood cool on their cheeks.
The bunkbed had arrived in a kit when they were very little, still sleeping with their mother every night. It was a big jumbly box of pieces, popped into place by their father. Their father who could fix anything, lift anything, barrel-chested and forever hotted up on something, some inner unhappiness, entombed in a house filled with tutus, with dangling tights and nervous females. Back then, whenever he came in to kiss them good night with beery breath or to tell them to turn their goddamn lights off, to stop giggling and go to sleep, he seemed to take up the whole room. When he set a hand on the bunkbed post, you felt like he could lift the whole thing into the air, could tear the bunkbed into kindling, could crush the whole thing with one swoop.
But by the time they were ten or eleven, he no longer came in to kiss them good night, rarely came upstairs at all, and the bunkbed was only theirs, the forever of their childhood. Dara had probed every groove and beetle hole with her fingers. Thousands of nights, she’d lain there, trying to sleep, listening to their mother pacing the hallways, listening to their father’s TV crackling old movies into the night, reciting her French conjugations for tomorrow’s lessons, cracking her toes and doing dégagés.
And everything shared from bunkbed top to bunkbed bottom was sacrosanct, never to be discussed elsewhere.
So many nights, half sleeping, they whispered secrets about their bodies.
About the thing Dara heard an old man at the drugstore call a “gash,” a dirty magazine open in his hands. Look at that gash, he said to the weary cashier, his hands shaking, waving the centerfold in the air, its fleshy center. Great big slit between her legs, looks like murder.
Or that night Marie confided that she had an extra part of her anatomy that no one else had. Something inside, hidden, that she could coax out if she thought a certain way, or imagined that boy who always skateboarded by their house.
Dara didn’t believe her and explained the things she’d figured out, touching herself down there, dreaming about Harry Perez, the only boy in her ballet class, and how he’d lifted her over his head, his fingers finding things he hadn’t known to find, her leotard soaked through at the crotch by class’s end.
But I have something no one else has, Marie insisted.
We all have it, Dara kept saying, but Marie wouldn’t stop.
I’m touching it now, she said. And Dara kept making faces even though Marie couldn’t see.
Dara even threatened to sneak down to their father’s TV room and bring back the Encyclopaedia Britannica and show her a picture of what it looked like down there, pink and accordioned like the most elaborate tutu in the world.
But Marie insisted that she was different and she said if Dara didn’t believe her she could come up and see for herself.
Marie never stopped insisting and Dara was never really sure.
BREATHE
The old floor was coming up; it was coming up, tooth by tooth. That’s what it reminded Dara of, like their childhood dentist and his tangly forceps. Their father always told them they were lucky they didn’t face the squeaky pliers he’d endured as a boy.
The old floor was coming up that day, and Dara still had not told Charlie.
&n
bsp; She’d planned to, over breakfast, on the way to the studio. But something kept stopping her, an inexplicable panic about what the look on Charlie’s face might be like. There was something she was afraid of seeing, though she wasn’t sure what it was.
In the past, Marie’s romances were always intense and brief. There’d only been three as far as Dara knew. (But who knew what had happened on her trip around the world? For years after Marie would refer vaguely to her European experiences, her eyes going soft.) There had been Claude, the French Canadian boy who first nestled his head between Marie’s legs, an act they knew about only from a few stolen glimpses of cable TV, peeping into the next-door neighbor’s house. But I had no idea what it would feel like, Marie said after. No one told her it would feel like that. Claude came to rehearsal the next day with a bruise on his cheek like a wet slap, Marie’s thigh snapping against his face like she might never let him free again. Alas, like the two to follow, it was over nearly before it began, Marie too distracted to make sense of the bus schedule to get to his apartment, two transfers, for a quick clinch, wilted deli roses, and then having to listen to Claude recite his poetry while they sat on the floor of his basement apartment. A week later it was over. Marie couldn’t manage most things.
This, too, will be over soon, Dara told herself. Maybe it already was.
One day, she told herself, Marie will learn to control herself.
* * *
* * *
Besides, there was no time for it. No time at all. As soon as they arrived at the studio, Charlie rushed to the back office to catch up on paperwork and Dara faced the gauntlet. Nutcracker preparations were already dominating their days, the frenzy of auditions past and performance panic already setting in, all alongside the low grumble of a hundred disappointed or resentful girls bemoaning the loss of Clara, the role they were all born to dance, to that little nothing Bailey Bloom.
Immediately when Dara arrived, it emerged that, the day before, Bailey had found a razor blade cunningly hidden in her demi-pointe shoe. Fishing it out with her fingers, she’d shorn off a flap of skin.
“Why did it take you so long to tell?” Dara asked gravely as she inspected the girl’s foot, tender and pulped.
“I was afraid,” Bailey said, “you’d take Clara away.”
“Bailey,” Dara said, “Clara is yours to lose.”
What she wanted to say was, Bailey, steel yourself.
It happened every year. There would have to be a meeting to discuss company loyalty, spirit, healthy competition. Another thing to do.
Marie and the contractor. Maybe it would go away.
* * *
* * *
Mrs. Cartwright, you knew the schedule before we even began auditions,” Dara was explaining to one of her most frustrating mothers, always swooping in in her camel-hair coat and gold-rimmed sunglasses, striding over to Dara with My life is crazy right now, Ms. Durant, you must understand . . .
“But these rehearsals,” she said, “why, they press right up against Thanksgiving. We always go to Bermuda for Thanksgiving. Iris is counting on it.” Then, lowering her voice, “And, well, she’s just a Candy Cane. Which was, of course, your choice, not mine.”
And there it was. It was never really about the schedule demands, Saturday rehearsals. It wasn’t about the weeknight costume fittings or the shared carpool duties. It was about who was Clara, and who was not.
“Mrs. Cartwright,” Dara said, snapping her fingers at the dawdling Level II students, Marie’s pigeon-breasted seven-year-olds, ushering them into Studio A, “we made it clear that all the parts bring the same demands. Even the Candy Canes.”
Mrs. Cartwright paused, eyebrows lifting.
“You know,” she said, “your sister is more polite.”
* * *
* * *
Past the gauntlet, Dara finally approached Studio A and Marie. You couldn’t miss her with that garish lipstick she persisted in wearing but also, today, with an improbable scarf flung around her neck. Garish polka dots and fringe, like something she’d dug out of the lost-and-found bin.
“You can’t teach like that,” Dara said. Charlie appeared in the doorway, his posture stiff.
“I can and I have,” Marie said.
“She can’t teach like that,” Dara said to Charlie, making a face.
“I can do anything,” Marie replied, looking at Charlie in a way that irritated Dara. And what was it with that lipstick, like a red gash across her face.
“She can do anything,” Charlie said wryly to Dara, with a shrug.
* * *
* * *
So Dara threw herself into the day, trying to avoid Studio B, avoid seeing him. Twice, she saw Marie lingering at the plastic curtain between classes, her fingers tangled in the edges of that ridiculous scarf of hers, the little ones scrumming past her. She wasn’t doing anything, but Dara didn’t like it.
* * *
* * *
No, no,” Dara said, watching dear, long-lashed Corbin Lesterio struggling with his entrechats, his legs scissoring with dizzying speed but no form. “No flapping like a duck.”
“I’m sorry, Madame Durant. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just be better.”
He tried again.
“Where is my flutter?” Dara called out. “Your legs should be moving sideways, not swinging back and forth.”
She had no intention of touching him, but he didn’t seem to understand, and when she approached, he stepped back abruptly, his face coloring. His voice, half-broken, stuttering an apology.
“I didn’t know. I mean, you can, but I . . .” he began, then stepped back again, his arms twined around each other, his hands spread as if covering himself, as if Adam with his fig leaf. His eyes darted all around, catching on the plastic curtain to Studio B. “Please, I want you to show me. I just . . .”
Dara looked at him, his radiant blush. His hands hovering beneath his waist.
She understood now. “Do you want to talk to Monsieur Charlie?” she asked.
Every boy ended up needing to talk to Charlie about certain things—the particularities of the male body, puberty. Not all of them felt comfortable explaining to their mothers about needing support, about dance belts, those filmy thongs with the pouches meant to keep everything in place.
It’s the only favor ballet ever granted its men, Charlie once told her. Brushing and pressing up against bodies all day, the heat and closeness, it was impossible to hide anything. Worn under tights, the dance belt concealed every adolescent boy’s secrets. Too slender a garment to protect them from a misplaced foot, an errant elbow, it protected them only from fleeting boy shame.
“Class is over anyway,” Dara said gently, “and he’d be happy to talk to you—”
“Madame Durant,” Corbin said, his face as red as Marie’s mouth, “I don’t want to talk to anybody.”
* * *
* * *
Moments later, she was in the parking lot, smoking, when Derek appeared, pulling out a drugstore vape. She had the feeling he’d followed her out.
It felt strange being alone with him after what she’d seen. After the things Marie had told her. And the way he was looking at her now. She drew her sweater tight across her chest.
“Can’t be easy for a boy,” he said, shaking his head. “Jesus.”
“What?” Dara said. Then realizing he must have seen her with Corbin. Must have been watching from behind the plastic curtain.
“I almost feel sorry for the kid,” he said, a whisper of a smile. “Quite a spot you put him in.”
Dara felt her face grow hot.
* * *
* * *
Back in the stairwell, she took three long breaths, shook the forgotten cigarette free from her hand, the ash burning her knuckles.
She would simply have to tell Charlie. Marie
had emboldened him, this contractor. Now he felt like he could say anything, do as he pleased. Charlie had to know. She would have to tell him.
Tonight, she resolved, smearing the cigarette butt with her shoe, a black smudge the shape of an X.
* * *
* * *
But it turned out she didn’t need to.
Just before the late-afternoon crush, Dara was heading to the back office when she heard his voice.
“Who do you think you are,” Charlie was saying, a laugh in his voice, light and delicious like she seldom heard anymore, “Isadora Duncan?”
Dara stood outside the door for a moment. That laugh, that tone—it reminded her of the sneaky elation they once felt, after the grief over their parents’ death, after a year or more of nightly check-ins from Madame Sylvie and quarterly visits from the nice woman with the thick brown shoes from Child Protective Services. Suddenly, they were grown-ups, with an entire big house to themselves, and they’d spend those evenings, bodies loose and muscles springy and hot, making pots of spaghetti they’d barely eat, drinking party-store wine, trying on their mother’s dressing gowns, Charlie wearing that foil top hat from the party-store spin rack.
She opened the door just as Charlie’s hand reached out, his fingers tangling in the fringe on Marie’s scarf.
“Dara,” Charlie said, straightening himself. “You’re just in time. Can you remind your sister of Isadora’s fate?” He made a jerking motion across his neck.
Dara winced. A hangman’s fracture. There were so many ways to injure yourself. Like poor Isadora, one of her famous long scarves caught in the wheels of a car.
