The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

  “We could do that,” she’d said. “We don’t have to live here forever.”

  “Is that so?” Dara had said. “You wanna run away with the circus?”

  But Marie kept looking, her fingers on the windowpane like when she was little.

  “We could put it up for sale.”

  It hurt to hear. That house of their childhood, however varied and unsettled, their mother crying at her vanity table, her chignon slipping loose, their father raging down the hall, knocking his fist into that peeling plaster and demanding respect in his own home, or at least attention.

  “We could,” Dara said pointedly, reminding Marie of the facts. “Charlie and I could. Because it’s our house. But we wouldn’t.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Did you say something to Derek?” Marie asked later.

  “About what?” Dara replied. Her sister had come upon her as she exited the powder room—the one she could never set foot in without thinking of her sister and Derek in there. The way the sink now wobbled on its base.

  “I don’t know. He left early. He didn’t even say goodbye.”

  Dara didn’t say anything, suppressing an unexpected smile.

  “What if he’s done with me?”

  “Marie. Marie.” There was something so desperate about it. Her sister who knew how she felt, her disapproval over this entanglement. But who else could Marie talk to?

  “When he says he has to go, I follow him out the door. I chase him down the spiral stairs. I beg him to stay.”

  “Pathetic,” Dara said as coolly as she could even though Marie’s intensity—her face pressed so close, her mascara sweat-stippled—was making her hot, confused.

  “I don’t care. I don’t care. I have no shame. He ate away all my shame.”

  “No wonder he’s getting tired of you,” Dara said. “I’m tired of you.”

  “I need to hear his voice at night. I can’t sleep without his voice in my ear, talking and talking, all night.”

  It was just like when they were little, Marie always begging to sit with their father while he drank his beers and watched Columbo reruns, old movies. How she would ask him to explain everything and he would, on and on. See, he looks like a magician, but he’s really a Nazi. I mean, Christ, look how clean he is.

  “He’d promised he’d stay over tonight.” She looked up at Dara, her eyes bewildered like a child’s. “Why is he doing this to me?”

  Dara shook her head. Everything he said was a con.

  “I’ve done everything he asked me to. Such filthy things,” she said, voice rising, “I’ve done it all and liked it.”

  Dara paused a moment, pictures flashing in her head. Marie’s degradation. Hairy and ugly and splotchy, his great tufted back, his made-to-order teeth, the marks his socks left on his ankles. Battering away at her, splitting her open, slapping her softness, fist wrapped in her hair.

  “That was your mistake,” Dara said. “You have to hold something back. Now you’re no longer his conquest. Now you’re just his whore.”

  But Marie wasn’t listening.

  * * *

  * * *

  The next morning, Dara approached the back office, following the sound of Marie’s lilting titter.

  She saw the look on Charlie’s face first.

  She heard him say, “Marie, what did you do? What did you do?”

  And Dara thought she might walk into the back office to find Marie with a black eye like out of a cartoon, a pink slab of steak pitched over it.

  “I don’t know, Charlie,” Marie was saying, her voice softly shrugging. “I just did it. I just did it.”

  That was when Dara saw it. Marie’s hair. Caught up in a ponytail and stripped from sandy blond to near whiteness.

  The whole office smelled sweet and chemical.

  “You look ridiculous,” Dara said.

  “Only to you,” Marie replied coolly. Then touching her hair a little nervously, patting it.

  Seated at the desk, Charlie didn’t say anything, just kept staring.

  Well, it was impossible not to. She looked like an old-time pinup who should be lounging in silver lingerie, in bright lamé. A gangster’s moll. Or maybe a hooker, high-end. The kind their dad, when he had a load on, talked about seeing in the port cities when he was in the Merchant Marines. Always a few with a fancy doll look you’d pay extra for just to come in their faces.

  “Derek likes it,” she said, touching the nape of her neck, slipping the elastic free. “I like it.” Leaning down, whispering hotly in Dara’s ear, “He liked it so much he fucked me all night.”

  Dara coughed loudly, feeling sick. That wasn’t a word Marie used, or didn’t use without stumbling over it, like she had the other night.

  “Well,” Charlie said. “That’s that.” And reaching for his back pills, shaking the container, pills tumbling across the desk felt.

  Something was hovering near the front of Dara’s head, but she couldn’t name it.

  Suddenly: A phrase floated forward in her brain.

  Hot Buttered Blonde.

  She couldn’t get it out of her head, every time she saw Marie that day, her head like the fizzy top of a dandelion, a daffodil’s crimped corona.

  It was many hours later that it came to her. That time last year, Mrs. Bloom submitting to the hairdresser, to the tantalizing name: Hot Buttered Blonde.

  A coincidence, surely.

  Mrs. Bloom, the year before, a brazen blonde. Her shame over it.

  Marie, of course, had no shame.

  * * *

  * * *

  He tells me things, Dara. He tells me what I do to him.

  He says when he leaves here, he smells of it. All the heat and cunning.

  The smell of the studio, which is the smell of me. Musk, baby powder, sweat.

  He says he can smell it on his shirt cuffs, in the creases of his shoes. All the bodies so close, daring eyes and straining limbs. The salty brine of hunger and pain. Bodies, he never knew they could be so complicated, so tortured. He never knew how much girls like to torture themselves.

  It was impossible. That man, with his two phones and his big voice and his swagger. A cliché of what women supposedly liked, secretly, under the skin.

  This man—he was a nothing. There was no center to him. No feeling. And he didn’t care about Marie and would toss her aside soon enough or already had because a man like that—

  He says he thinks about me when he’s driving home on the highway. When he’s pumping gas or rolling a cart down the grocery store aisle, the pink stacks of meat.

  He thinks about having me again. Spreading me open. Pinning me like a butterfly.

  His glove compartment—did you know, Dara—he keeps one of my leotards in there. He pulled it off my bedroom floor, pressed his face against its soft, wet crotch. Stuffed it in his pocket when I wasn’t looking. At stoplights, when he’s stuck in traffic, when the light goes red, he pops it open, puts his hand in there, thinks of me.

  * * *

  * * *

  Maybe we should call someone,” Dara said to Charlie that night, finally home from his PT appointment, the Shamrock taxi pulling up just after nine.

  “Like who?” he said, a muzzy look in his eye. “The sex police?”

  “You don’t get it. You don’t get Marie.”

  Charlie looked her.

  “I get Marie,” he said. “Believe me.”

  * * *

  * * *

  You never really knew what went on in other people’s bedrooms, in their heads, Dara thought.

  But this thing, this desire to be bossed around, dominated—such a cliché. Such an old, dusty woman thing she’d never understand. She’d never felt it herself.

  But with Marie, it made sense, in a way.

  She’d always been willfu
l, resistant.

  Yet it turned out she couldn’t wait to be bent, broken, split in two.

  The stronger they are, the harder they fall.

  That’s what their mother used to say about dancers. How you had to break them. Their stubborn bodies, their stubborn wills. The more defiant and resistant they were, the harder you must be. The more violent, the stronger hands on their bodies, bending them, pressing, turning them out.

  The stronger they are, the faster to their knees.

  But, Dara thought, no one is stronger than me.

  TWO

  THE TURNOUT

  Every ballet dancer must achieve her turnout. The ability to rotate her body one-hundred-eighty degrees, from the hips down to the toes.

  Imagine your thigh muscles wrapping around your bones, their mother always told them. Imagine your leg as a spinning barber pole.

  She loved to tell them how, when she was ten years old, she was one of four dancers in her province to undertake special training with a Great Diva, a severe Russian beauty famous for having her feet surgically broken, her bones realigned so she might have a more natural line, a more perfect pointe.

  Every day for the six weeks of the program the Great Diva scolded and berated their mother for her turnout.

  Every day she yanked and dragged their mother’s legs, twisting them, muscles straining, bones nearly twanging until they rotated so far at the hips that the knees, the feet turned outward. But still, it was not enough.

  Mademoiselle Durant, entendez! Tailbone down! Over toes, not over heels!

  Every night, their mother sobbed into her pillow, sobbed from the pain of cranking her body like an old motor.

  Then, one day, when the Great Diva demanded once more that she turn, turn, turn, their mother felt something rise inside her, something powerful.

  Suddenly, something snapped inside and her hips and legs felt infinitely pliable, soft taffy, a slinky expanding.

  Her hips, hot and newly supple, opened like a book from the center of her body. It felt glorious and so painful she saw stars.

  But she did not stop.

  Why would she? That feeling, that sensation hot in the center of her.

  She kept turning until her feet pushed past one-hundred-eighty degrees, until they turned backward like a doll with its legs put on backward. Like a circus freak.

  It was, she told them, the greatest feeling of my life.

  It will be, she told them, for you too.

  * * *

  * * *

  When Dara achieved her turnout at age ten years, six months, she saw the same stars. It was a feeling she recognized from her own furtive confusions, in the claw-foot bathtub, under her bunkbed blankets, her hands tingling, her thighs gaping like a keyhole, and that feeling after, like her whole fist would not be enough.

  * * *

  * * *

  It’s the dancer’s body opening itself to the audience, their mother always told them.

  Giving them everything.

  The moment you achieve it, you’ve become a dancer. You’ve become a woman.

  BRAZEN

  The bruise was very high up Marie’s inner thigh, ringlet-shaped, florid, a cherry bursting.

  Dara was trying to lead Corbin Lesterio and Oliver Perez, her Nutcracker Prince and the Mouse King, through their epic swordfight, the climactic clash in the first act.

  But there was a visitor lurking in the doorway. And this time it wasn’t Derek. Inexplicably, it was Marie, her bright new hair like a queen’s crown, you could not miss her. Nor could you miss the monstrous bruise on the inside of her thigh. Standing there with one leg turned out, flashing it like a hooker flashing her garter.

  “It appears we have a surprise guest,” Dara said tightly. “Or a Peeping Tom.”

  Marie took this as an invitation, strolling in, still panting a little from leading her four-year-olds, sweat wreathed beneath her breasts.

  The purple neck marks from the week before had grown yellow, a sticky highlighter across her collarbones. But now there was this, fresh. On her thigh. Open. Impossible to miss.

  Corbin looked away discreetly, but Oliver seemed rapt, his sword falling to his side.

  “Let’s start from the top,” Dara said, drawing the boys’ roaming eyes back to her.

  Marie watched for a few moments, Corbin and Oliver circling each other, their arms lifted, then swooping, all leading up to Corbin’s double saut de basque before landing the death blow.

  “You know what?” Marie interjected suddenly. Corbin and Oliver looked at her, alarmed. No one ever spoke in Dara’s studio but Dara. “I think the change could be faster. Like this.”

  And Dara watched as Marie moved toward Corbin and Oliver and reached out to position Oliver’s arm. Making a correction to Corbin’s hip.

  Unlike Dara, Marie always touched her students, but Marie’s students were all little girls. Yet Marie, now, had one hand on each of their narrow hips. Get up on your legs. Don’t sink those hips on me. Her hands like tiny white moths fluttering around them both. Their hard bodies, their stiff energy. The boys red-faced, eager.

  Dara watched.

  Oliver pressing Corbin, Corbin swaying backward before pitching forward, coming back stronger, the force of his body, the swoop of it, straight into his turns.

  Marie’s change made it more dynamic. Marie’s change felt frenetic, surprising. When Oliver lunged, the sword tip pressed against the hollow in Corbin’s neck, Dara felt herself gasp.

  She was remembering that Sword Swallower they used to see at the carnival as children. How she crossed two swords down her throat at the same time. Her head thrown back, her throat like an elegant vase, the swords’ round handles like bright flowers blooming forth. Dara covering her eyes, while beside her Marie kept saying, Look! Look!

  The boys finished, breathless, looking over to Dara for approval.

  “Well, then. We must set Mademoiselle Durant free,” Dara said, walking past Marie. “She’s done enough.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Do you want me coming in your studio?” Dara asked later. “Do you want me to advise your little moppets on how to play Candy Canes, to do cartwheels?”

  But Marie didn’t say anything, cross-legged on her studio floor, licking her finger and turning the pages of some kind of flashy brochure.

  “What is that?” Dara asked.

  Marie spread open the brochure like a centerfold, revealing an array of cars shiny as candy wrappers gliding across a great expanse, a desert, or climbing up a grand terrain. Everest. “Luxury in motion,” it read.

  “Why are you looking at cars?”

  Marie shrugged maddeningly, her eyes on the shiny pages, fingers digging into that silky silvery hair of hers.

  Behind them, the drill started up again in Studio B, the floors shaking suddenly.

  Dara covered her ears, hopelessly.

  Marie looked up and smiled at her, like she was the crazy one.

  * * *

  * * *

  I’m trying, Madame Durant. I swear.”

  They were rehearsing a hallowed moment in their Nutcracker when Clara slowly, beautifully, goes into an arabesque, standing on one leg, the other extended behind her in a perfect line, as she lifts the Nutcracker doll—or, for now, a paper towel roll because Dara couldn’t find the prop—like a torch. It’s the moment in which, in some way, she gives herself over to the Nutcracker, this funny little man with his funny big teeth who will become her prince.

  If a dancer hasn’t mastered her turnout, there’s no hiding it in the arabesque en pointe.

  And Bailey Bloom was flailing. All the Level IVs tittering behind their hands. Her balancé was somehow both wobbly and tense, her body keeling backward.

  “Mademoiselle Bloom,” Dara said, “would you rather have a broken nose or a broken ba
ck?”

  Bailey lifted herself upright. “Neither,” she said tentatively. “I mean—”

  “Weight forward,” Dara said, moving toward her, Bailey’s eyes now dinner-plate wide. “Remember your turnout. The more you rotate that hip, the higher the leg. You must open yourself out to the audience.”

  “I am,” Bailey said. “I mean, yes, Madame Durant.”

  Pa-thet-ick, came the stage whisper from Pepper Weston, flicking a bobby pin in the air in the far corner of the studio. The ringleader, Dara thought, of that little pink pack. Glancing over at them. Pepper, Iris Cartwright, Gracie Hent and her extravagant sighs. One or more of them had planted the razor blade in Bailey’s shoe, had filled another of her shoes with rubber cement. Little monsters.

  “Again,” Dara said, twirling her finger at Bailey, who scurried back to position.

  “Imagine a string tied around your sternum,” Dara said, watching Bailey raise her leg. “Someone is gently pulling that string. Lifting your chest upward and out. Back wide. No shoulder blade creep. Keep breathing.”

  The other girls watched, waited.

  “Rotate that hip,” Dara said. “Give yourself over.”

  Bailey’s body steadied, her arms outstretched, the paper towel roll damp in her hand. Dara moved closer.

  “Shut them out,” Dara said, her voice low and stern at Bailey’s ear. “Listen to me. They don’t exist. Listen only to me.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Dara and Marie had done well enough as dancers. Both had been in the corps of the same small regional company. Once, Marie accepted an offer from a larger touring company—only to return three weeks later after fainting in a hotel lobby, her body whittled down to wishbone. (I forgot about eating, she told Dara. I couldn’t remember to do it.)