The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

  “I’m not afraid,” Marie said, smiling faintly, moving away from Charlie, smoothing her scarf, untangling its fringe. “Of that, at least.”

  “Your back must be feeling better,” Dara said to Charlie, reaching for his mug and dumping his tea bag into the trash, cold tea splashing.

  “Stop!” Marie let out a gasp and Dara looked over in time to see Charlie yanking Marie’s hideous scarf free. (“Free Marie! Liberate the neck!”)

  Charlie, teasing Marie like he used to years ago in dance class, calling her Snap-Crackle because of the way her hips used to pop-pop-pop.

  Abruptly, Charlie froze, Marie’s scarf still in his hand, drooping and forlorn.

  Dara turned and saw too. Marie, the marks on Marie. On her neck this time, and fresh. They were violet and obscene. Dara couldn’t stop looking at them. Fleshy dabs from Derek’s fleshy thumbs. Like little Jack Horner, his finger in the pie.

  “Jesus,” Charlie said, voice low. “Did Tessa Shen kick-spin you again?”

  “No,” Marie said, running her hand across her throat, stroking it.

  The gesture undid something in Dara, who could feel her chest burning. This whole business, the scarf—another way of drawing all the attention. Marie and her body, like a golden hummingbird. Marie and her mysterious sex organs, the part she had that no other woman had. Marie, Dara thought, the freak. Marie and her freakshow.

  “Stop showing off,” Dara said, fingers to her temples. “Nobody cares.”

  Charlie turned and looked at Dara.

  “What is this?” he asked, gesturing to the bruises. “Did you know about this?”

  Both of them looked at Dara, as if she were the problem.

  “Didn’t you?” Dara said. Then, “Marie likes it rough.”

  Charlie’s gaze wobbled to Marie, a look on his face like a lost child’s.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ask her,” Dara said, her eyes fixed on the violet, imagining the contractor’s meaty fingers pressing. She thought she might choke from the thought, from the picture in her head.

  “Someone better tell me,” Charlie said.

  Marie looked at him, both her hands wrung around her neck.

  “My sister’s screwing the help,” Dara said.

  * * *

  * * *

  His hands,” Marie whispered, both of them lying on their backs in the empty studio in between classes, holding on to their ankles, feeling like they might crack, “remind me of that belt Dad used to have, remember? The leather splintered, but he wouldn’t stop wearing it. He said it was made from gators. Maybe it was.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it.” Dara didn’t want to hear about hands like belts, like their father.

  “If I had to hurt him,” Marie said, eyes shining. “I’d hurt his hands. I’d break his fingers, one by one.”

  “Smash them with a hammer,” Dara said dryly. “Like your poor pointe shoes.”

  But Marie only nodded, breathless. “Because of all the things they do to me—I never want him to do those things to anyone else.”

  And she smiled and smiled.

  Jesus, Dara thought.

  “You’re like a teenage girl,” Dara said. “After her first fuck.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Charlie hadn’t wanted to talk about it, about Marie. They’d talk about it later. But, really, what is there to talk about, he’d said, reaching for his jacket. She’s a grown woman.

  Leaving Dara the car, he took a Shamrock cab to Helga for a last-minute PT session. Helga always understood the pressures of Nutcracker season, even once sending Charlie home with a paper plate of peppermint cookies tied with yarn ribbon. (She’s very thoughtful, Charlie said. Or she has a crush, Dara teased.)

  But with Charlie gone, the students had chosen that day to be little monsters, all except Bailey Bloom, who snuck in the powder room before and after classes, not wanting to change in front of the other girls, their snipes.

  At day’s end, Dara and Marie retired to the fire escape, tarry and quivering, the sun burning through the skyline.

  They’d been drinking. Mr. Higham had left them a champagne split four-pack as a thank-you for his little Jamie’s entry into the City Academy of Dance. The splits were chilled and he warned Dara they’d “skunk” if they didn’t drink them right away. And Dara didn’t want to go home anyway, feeling strange about the day, about the marks on her sister and about Charlie and about everything changing, slowly and all at once.

  “It is my first fuck,” Marie said, tripping slightly over the word. “In a way.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

  “I disagree,” Marie said.

  They sipped their tiny straws. Dara could feel her thighs inflating, her belly blooming. Sugar, sugar. She couldn’t stop.

  “Maybe,” Marie said, lying on her back, her hands on herself. “Maybe I’m in love.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Does he only take you from behind? Like an animal? It’s not very attractive, you know.

  It’s not a good look for you. Bone and rope, that’s all you’ve got back there.

  Not all, Dara . . .

  * * *

  * * *

  They were drunk, they were drunk and Charlie finally called Dara. He was home and making their fenugreek tea. He was home and getting ready for bed. Where was she.

  “Marie,” Dara said, finally, rising shakily to her feet, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Her sister looked up, her hair falling from her face, and slowly smiled.

  “Dara,” Marie confided, “the things he does to me . . .”

  The violet splotches on her neck, they seemed to move and dance and Dara wanted, suddenly, to touch them. She wanted to—

  “But what?” Dara said, her head throbbing. “What does he do?”

  * * *

  * * *

  No one ever really did anything you hadn’t thought of before, Dara kept saying to herself. In the bedroom, wherever, with bodies in the dark. There were only so many ways bodies fit together or didn’t.

  Oh, Dara, Marie kept saying, I can only tell you how it feels.

  * * *

  * * *

  But then Marie started to talk about the things—about the trick with fingers, and the heel of his hand on her throat until—

  Stop.

  And best of all that thumb. Had she seen his thumb? The curve in it that was just the right shape and size—

  Marie, I need you to stop.

  Marie, don’t you know you can never let them know.

  Let them know what?

  How much we . . . how much we . . .

  Oh, Dara, she said. Oh, Dara, he knows. That’s what I’m talking about. He looks at you and he knows. . . .

  * * *

  * * *

  That was when she knew. Right there on the fire escape. It wasn’t going to be a fling. It wasn’t going to be a passing affair, a pickup, a sex thing. Not for Marie at least.

  Whatever it was, it was already happening. And there was no stopping it.

  * * *

  * * *

  That night, Dara dreamt she was walking through the studio and it was ten times its size, the renovation far beyond their budget or the laws of physics, gravity, the ceiling four stories high with stained-glass windows at the top like a cathedral.

  Walking through it, wending from empty room to empty room, its mirrors shimmering, she began to hear something, like a few years ago when Marie left the water running in their mother’s old claw-foot tub. The kitchen ceiling puckering above Dara’s head, the smell of rotten wood and rust.

  It was like that, a straining. Like the beams holding the ceiling aloft might snap. Like everything had been put together with cardboard and
paste, like pointe shoes, the smell of mentholated spirits emanating from them, dead after every use.

  She dreamt she finally reached Studio B, where, inexplicably, her classes were now to be held. The plastic curtain still hung across the threshold and she was excited to look.

  Blood rushing through her, she watched, pressing her face against the plastic, her nose poking it. She tried to see. She squinted and tried to see.

  She felt her heart beating, a dampness between her legs.

  But instead of bodies, instead of secrets, something lurched forward, a dark blur and a pair of eyes looking straight back at her. Looking at her as if excited and appalled.

  UP THE SPIRAL STEPS

  It’ll pass,” Charlie said over soft-boiled eggs the following morning. “It’s a fling.”

  Dara didn’t say anything.

  She’d come home late after drinking with Marie and crawled into bed, pushing herself against him, her head hot. She tried to wake him, her hands gently roving, but he didn’t move, the thick brume of his meds. So she made herself so small, curling into a ball, feeling—under the crinkly duvet—like a fetus, lima-bean size.

  He was sleeping. He was sleeping and didn’t care to talk about it. It’s Marie’s business. She’s a grown woman.

  After a fashion, Dara had thought.

  And now they were eating soft-boiled eggs in their mother’s chipped porcelain egg cups. The ones their father used to make fun of, holding them with one pinkie perched. Your mother thinks she’s a grand lady, he’d say. Some kind of aristocrat kidnapped by a piggish pauper.

  The eggs that morning smelled funny. A puff of sulfur when she cracked the shell.

  “It’ll run its course,” Charlie said again, resting his head on his hand. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Dara still didn’t say anything, just let him go on, the sulfur thick between them.

  “He has to finish that renovation sometime,” Charlie was saying now. “The floor is gone.”

  The floor is gone, Dara thought.

  * * *

  * * *

  She’s already got one family member keeping close watch,” he said as they stepped outside, the late October air sharp, stinging. “She doesn’t need another.”

  * * *

  * * *

  When they arrived at the studio, the stairwell was choked, Benny and Gaspar heaving enormous sprung floor panels up the steps, great maple hardwood bands to be woven together like a basket.

  Dara lowered her head and moved quickly, bracing herself to see him, to have to pass through Studio B, a temporary path made of narrow mats strewn over the old subfloor.

  But Derek, it turned out, was nowhere to be found and her sister was hungover, sprawled on the floor of Studio A, drinking coconut water from a box, squeezing it until nothing was left.

  “What’s wrong?” Dara asked, because it was so clear Marie was dying to be asked, nearly reaching for Dara’s ankle as she walked past.

  “I called him all night,” she said. “He never called me back.”

  “Did you try his beeper?” Dara said. “Or his other beeper?” Charlie gave her a scolding look and continued on into the back office.

  Marie looked up and Dara saw her eyes were pink, swollen, like wet buds.

  Pathetic, Dara thought, a coldness settling in her. This was all too much to ask. Too much. Why did everything Marie do have to be so big, so all-consuming? Look at me! Look at me!

  As if on cue, the grumble of a truck came from outside.

  Marie jumped to her feet, tossing the coconut water into the trash. Smoothing her hair back. Heading for the window like an excitable bird. Like a desperate thing.

  “It’s not . . .” she said, peering out the window, her fingers pressed on the cloudy glass. “It’s just the delivery man.”

  “You’re humiliating yourself,” Dara said, moving toward the back office, seeing Charlie there, giving her another look.

  “I don’t care.”

  “You’re humiliating us.”

  But Marie didn’t say anything, her head down. Her thoughts remote, mysterious.

  * * *

  * * *

  Dara couldn’t help finding a sneaking pleasure in it. In Derek standing her up, abandoning her. Missing a late-night rendezvous with a very drunk Marie, her bruises ready for re-bruising. Aching for it.

  Maybe he had other girlfriends. No wedding band, but that didn’t mean there weren’t girlfriends. Maybe a live-in one, or even a common-law wife, who knew. Men like that, who knew.

  And when Derek eventually showed up for work, hours later, mirrored sunglasses on, like a cop, and looking distracted, it was even more satisfying to see him stroll right to Benny and Gaspar, to never make it to Studio A at all, to Marie, who stood in the doorway, her five-year-olds clustered behind her like a pile of downy dandelion heads.

  Maybe, Dara thought, Charlie was right, after all.

  Maybe it will pass.

  * * *

  * * *

  Clatter, clatter, the silver-sprayed swords unsheathed for the mice.

  In Studio C, Dara was walking students through The Nutcracker’s fight scene, Clara’s battle with the Mouse King and his furry legion.

  But the thud-thud-thudding from Studio B didn’t stop, and three times the lights flickered, the circuits strained from all the power tools.

  “Madame Durant,” Bailey Bloom was saying, as five “mice” surrounded her, batting her, swatting her like a piñata, nearly pressing her jonquil body into the corner, trapping her, indeed, like a rat. “When do I get to throw my slipper at the Mouse King?”

  “No swordplay,” Dara called out to the aggressive mice. “You’re not there yet.”

  Szzzzzt. The lights flickered above and then dimmed to brown.

  “Taking care of it,” Charlie said, emerging from the back office, one hand on his ailing back, and moving quickly to Studio B.

  Dara looked around at the students all staring at her in the semi-darkness, hands wrapped around the cardboard swords, four of them drooping, one bent from being packed hastily after last year’s production.

  “Madame Durant, when do we get to do it with the mouse heads?” peeped Carly Mendel, her brow pinched. “Because I heard they make it hard to breathe.”

  There was a clamor of voices from Studio B, Charlie’s low tones and Gaspar’s hurried apologies, and the whir of Benny rushing past to the circuit box.

  Finally, the lights rose again and Charlie left for the hardware store to buy a new fuse, or maybe just to leave, to have some respite. Dara could hardly blame him.

  “Vite, vite,” Dara called out, quickly directing the Mouse King, Oliver Perez, his sword the largest but its tip creased and bent, to the center of the space for his dramatic fall after Clara hurls her slipper at him. “Take your positions.”

  “Madame Durant,” Bailey said and Dara turned, exasperated.

  “What now?”

  Bailey pointed to the doorway, where a trio of seven-year-olds stood, clutching one another, shaken by the gravity of stepping over the threshold into Studio C, the older-girl studio, the forbidden space for which they longed.

  “Why aren’t you in class?” Dara asked them. “You three should be in Studio A with Mademoiselle Durant.”

  The seven-year-olds looked at one another before pushing forth the tallest one, a bowlegged girl whose name Dara couldn’t recall.

  “But, Madame,” she lisped, her arms interlocked with the girl beside her, “where is Mademoiselle Durant?”

  * * *

  * * *

  Dara pushed past the students entering for her three o’clock class. Pushed into Studio B, through the plastic curtain, which tangled her arm.

  Benny and Gaspar looked up, surprised, a pneumatic tool of some kind shuddering in Benny’s hand, both their faces covered i
n masks.

  “Where is he?” Dara asked. “Your boss.”

  But Benny only gestured at his ear guards helplessly and Gaspar looked away.

  * * *

  * * *

  She wouldn’t dare, Dara thought, her head tilting up to the third floor. She wouldn’t.

  * * *

  * * *

  Running back through Studio A, past her whispering, eager pupils, Dara took long breaths. She pushed into the empty back office and pinned her hand on the railing of the spiral staircase that led upstairs. One foot on its bottom step. But she could feel it. The iron rail vibrating, its steps vibrating, slithering up to the third floor, where her sister was fucking the afternoon away with this stranger in their mother’s private-most space.

  * * *

  * * *

  Ms. Durant, we need to talk.”

  It was only moments later, and Dara pretended to not quite hear Dr. Weston, keeping her gaze on her students across the room, warming up in what seemed an appallingly lazy manner.

  Upstairs, she could hear Marie moving, could hear her little cat feet.

  “Ms. Durant.” Dr. Weston lowered his voice discreetly. “I can’t be the only one concerned about what’s going on in there.”

  Dara pursed her lips, her eyes on Chloë Lin’s sickled foot.

  “Mademoiselle Lin,” she called out, poker-faced, “inside of your heel forward, s’il vous plait. Do not give me ugly feet.”

  Inside, her mind raced. Had Dr. Weston heard? Had one or more parents—and they all talked, ceaselessly in that gossip nest of a waiting room—spotted Marie and Derek together? Caught them in one of their slippery and grotesque ruttings.

  That would be the end of it, of course. The school, everything.

  “Ms. Durant,” Dr. Weston said again, his neediness so insistent, so abrasive.