The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

  Seeing it always reminded her of their father taking them to the traveling carnival that appeared one weekend every year in the parking lot of St. Joan’s. This was when she and Marie were very young and he still did things like that. Darkness would always be just falling and you could see the tents like great bright blobs on the horizon. When they walked past the ticket takers, they gasped because it was all so dazzling, the colorful costumes and the guess-your-weight booth and the ball-and-basket games their father said were a scam even before he sank sixteen dollars into one to win a two-dollar beanie toy for Marie.

  There was, always, the sound of eyelash-curling screams coming from the dark ride, Deathbone Alley, where couples disappeared into the shadowy center of an enormous painted mouth lined with glistening silver teeth. Their father did not permit them to go inside.

  The sideshow tent was their favorite anyway. Dara favored the Fire Eater, but Marie only had eyes for the Sword Swallower, swinging her golden hair back, in her hands an electrified sword made of glass that lit up her throat. How she threw her head so far back, it seemed to disappear. How she looked like she had no head at all, just throat, gullet.

  I could do it, Marie kept saying, trying to shove her whole fist into her mouth. Experimenting for days with paintbrushes and wooden spoons.

  Marie, who kept trying until she stuck a kitchen skewer down there, gagged, and threw up blood.

  For years, she dreamt of objects caught in her throat: a knitting needle, the back-scratcher their father kept in the side pocket of his recliner.

  For years, she’d wake up gasping for air.

  * * *

  * * *

  Marie loved the Sword Swallower, but Dara loved the Fire Eater.

  Flinging her head back, that curtain of black hair, tongue stuck out wide and flat, setting the wick of the torch on its pink center, her mouth forming an O.

  How she tilted her head so far back, you could see all the flames climb up her throat. The flames like a scarf swallowing her throat.

  The Fire Eater, the Sword Swallower. They were both women, dark and fair and fearless, their heads pitched back, their mouths wide open, everything laid bare.

  They could take these things inside them and emerge unscathed. Dangerous things, deadly things. They could take these things inside and remain untouched, immaculate. The same forever. Forever the same.

  THE DOOR FROM CHILDHOOD

  All evening, Dara and Marie sat two rows apart, going over The Nutcracker cues with the Ballenger stage manager and with silver-haired Madame Sylvie, the head of the Mes Filles Ballet Company, their partner for more than a dozen holiday seasons and with their mother long before that. Madame Sylvie, who served as their legal guardian when their parents died and who signed the consent to let Charlie and Dara marry at the tender age of sixteen. Anyone who’s been through what you three have, she’d said, has wisdom far beyond your years.

  Every year, Madame Sylvie’s dancers performed the “adult” roles and the most technically advanced ones: Clara’s parents, the adult partygoers, the luminous Sugar Plum Fairy, and Clara’s godfather, the enigmatic Drosselmeier, who appears in his white wig and his eyepatch to give Clara the Nutcracker doll and launch her dark, shimmering adventure.

  “I think you’re going to love this year’s Drosselmeier,” she whispered to Dara with a wink. “He’s quite beguiling.”

  Every year, Madame Sylvie, with her deep maple-syrup tan and silver bangles from her annual trip to Anguilla, would sit with them through the cues, through the treacherous early tech rehearsals and the frantic dress rehearsals. She always watched with such calm, her knitting needles in hand, endlessly clacking, a pile of wool, her eyes scanning the stage over the top of her reading glasses.

  The cues, there were hundreds of them, and they rarely changed. Everyone had their expectations, many of these parents having seen their first Nutcracker when their mother still led the school. It was foolish to amend anything, to redo what worked so well, what made everyone so happy. Everything the same as it always was.

  Except this year, Dara sat with Madame Sylvie while Marie crouched two rows ahead, jotting notes with a dull pencil and doodling countless sketches of pointe shoes, a habit since childhood, the toes of her shoes always sharp as blades, like a guillotine falling.

  To Dara, it was conspicuous, even aggressive, but Madame Sylvie didn’t appear to notice, needles rattling, eyes lifting again and again to the stage.

  * * *

  * * *

  Charlie couldn’t join us?” Madame Sylvie asked.

  “No,” Dara said. “His back’s been bothering him.”

  Dara noticed Marie’s head twitch two rows ahead, roots showing now beneath the snowy dye.

  “Every time I see your husband,” Madame Sylvie said, “I think of how much your mother adored him. Mon garçon chéri!”

  “Yes,” Dara said. “She did.”

  The dancer playing Drosselmeier had taken center stage, adjusting his black eyepatch as the lighting crew, somewhere up above, experimented with gels, with top lights, so that the white of his powdered wig glowed, drawing the eye, holding it.

  “See! Isn’t he something?” Madame Sylvie whispered, feigning to fan herself with a free hand. “But then Drosselmeier’s always been my favorite.”

  Dara squinted up at the stage. He was older for a dancer, maybe thirty—maybe even as old as Charlie—but with a heavy brow and thicker neck. He reminded her of so many other Drosselmeiers over the years, with their felt eyepatches and their wigs like great clouds, how scary they were when she was very young, in the way children love to be scared.

  “When he makes his first entrance, you think he’s the villain. I mean, the eyepatch!” Madame Sylvie said. “But then little Clara is drawn to him. It confuses her. It excites her. It confuses us, excites us. It’s a seduction.”

  “I suppose,” Dara said, her eyes flashing on Marie, also watching the stage now, her fingers curled around the top of her notepad.

  At age four or five, Marie would shove her fingers into her mouth, her chin shaking, at the sight of Drosselmeier. What’s he going to do? she’d ask, jerking Dara’s arm. Don’t take it! she once cried out when that year’s Clara reached for the proffered Nutcracker doll in Drosselmeier’s spindly white hands.

  “I mean, he’s no Freddy, but . . .” Madame Sylvie said with a wink.

  Dara smiled faintly. A young dancer named Freddy had played Drosselmeier four years in a row beginning when Dara was ten or eleven. How she and Marie desired him, so handsome in his waistcoat, so elegant in his dark cape. How they would talk about him at night in their bunkbed, Marie on top, legs twitching all night, Dara on the bottom, her foot dangling through the footboard, stretching her feet, her blackened toes. How Marie wanted to, inexplicably, pull Drosselmeier’s eyepatch from his face and run her hand over the sunken hole she imagined there. How Dara liked to place herself near him in the party scene and brush against him, to feel his hipbone jutting, to push herself into his waistcoat.

  “Can we get him the prop?” Madame Sylvie called out.

  And someone appeared onstage to hand Drosselmeier one of the six Nutcracker dolls they would have on hand for the performances.

  “Much better,” Madame Sylvie said. “What is Drosselmeier without his Nutcracker?”

  Dara remembered watching their mother tell a dozen Claras that, when Drosselmeier gives her the Nutcracker, she must feel as if it comes alive in her hand.

  Dara remembered wanting to hold the Nutcracker too. It seemed like a magic totem. A totem that becomes a boy, the Nutcracker Prince.

  “C’est très érotique,” Madame Sylvie was saying, voice low and cracking now. “She becomes fixated with her little Nutcracker. So fixated she sneaks back out to find him after the family goes to bed. She falls asleep with it in her arms, lost in fantasy until the doll comes alive as a full-size ma
n. It’s a parable, no? Of first sexual experience. The pleasure and danger. Drosselmeier seduced her. And she is glad.”

  Madame Sylvie’s needles tick-ticked and Marie’s pencil flew.

  “But you can’t let the Claras know any of this, of course,” Madame Sylvie said. “We must keep their innocence intact. That’s what we must do with our Claras. But on some level they already know, don’t they?”

  Two rows apart, but Dara could hear Marie breathing. She could feel her like a little girl panting, overworked. Like their father used to say to Marie, a day of dancing, her body whirring and unstoppable, Little girl, you run so hot, you’re gonna burn up.

  “You know who he is? Drosselmeier?” Madame Sylvie said, smiling into her knitwork.

  Dara wanted to leave suddenly.

  “He’s the promise of what’s beyond the door,” Madame Sylvie said, her voice husky now, pointed. “The door from childhood.”

  * * *

  * * *

  When they were finally finished, close to ten o’clock, Madame Sylvie pulled Dara aside and said, smiling, “I lost a husband and two lovers during Nutcracker season. I’m sure you and Marie will make up on the other side of Clara.”

  * * *

  * * *

  All Dara wanted was to get Marie alone, to get some answers. What did she mean by calling the county register? What do you—what does he want with our house?

  But by the time they moved through the last set of cues, the elaborate sleigh flight that takes Clara away to unknown lands, she couldn’t find her.

  Hurrying to the lobby, she looked through the large glass walls only to see Marie disappearing into the evening mist like a phantom. Her orange car receding in the distance, like a faint flame.

  HE’S IN THE HOUSE

  Moments later, Dara turned down Sycamore, the street fogged and furtive, inching along until she saw their big old house, its bleary windows, roof tiles loose like whiskers.

  It made her chest ache suddenly. Most of the time, you never truly saw your own house from the outside. It was impossible. But she was seeing it now. Seeing her home, her childhood, her family. Drafty, pocked, hungry.

  This is ours. It is ours. No one can take it. Never.

  She needed, urgently, to be inside. To sit with Charlie at the kitchen table, with their tumblers of wine, now fully replacing the fenugreek, the chamomile, their new nightly routine, Charlie’s shiny orange medicine bottles, his pills and vitamins plotted on the table like a tic-tac-toe game. Together, they were a family. Together, they would protect their home, everything.

  * * *

  * * *

  But when she arrived at the front door, she saw the note taped to the graying green paint. Charlie had gotten the last available PT appointment. He wouldn’t be home for another hour or more.

  * * *

  * * *

  She poured some wine for herself then, balancing the tumbler in the crook of her arm, headed upstairs to wait in the bedroom. They had to band together now. They had to. And she’d felt so close to him on the phone earlier, remembering about the snow.

  Maybe Charlie’s back would feel better. Maybe he would come back into the bed that night. Maybe he’d let her hands rest on him, find him again in the blue-dark of the late night, his pills working their gentle ministrations.

  The thought made her instantly feverish, and the warmth dipped to her hips, between her legs as she climbed the stairs. Charlie.

  Halfway up, in the band of light from a second-floor window, she saw the first one.

  A footprint, faint but muddy, on one of the carpeted steps.

  Looking up, she saw another. Tracks, like tracking a mountain lion, a great black bear.

  But these tracks were familiar, the gray-brown slurry she knew so well, trailed daily across the floors of their studio. She even recognized the shoe print, the natty toes of the contractor’s natty boots.

  He’s in the house, a cry racing up her throat.

  Reaching the top step, she saw the open door at the end of the dark hall. Their childhood bedroom.

  She never left that door open. She seldom went in there at all, except maybe once a year to dust it, to polish the old wood of the furniture set—the dresser and, of course, the bunkbed. The bunkbed, Marie on top, Dara on the bottom, like a pair of twins pressed tight in the womb. The bunkbed, with Marie’s teeth clicking in her sleep, and Dara, restless, her foot kicking against the footboard slats, her arches wrapping around them, her thoughts drifting to that year’s Drosselmeier, the feel of his hipbone against hers as she brushed past, her foot pressing, pressing on the slat, as she pushed into the feeling . . .

  Standing there, Dara saw the open door. She saw the shadow thrown on the floor.

  He’s in the house. He’s in the bedroom.

  Dara set the tumbler of wine on the banister and took a few steps.

  The streetlamp outside made the door unnaturally bright, beckoning to her.

  * * *

  * * *

  Who’s there,” she called out, her voice like a bark.

  He appeared suddenly, his body taking up the entire doorframe. Like a monster in a dollhouse, like he could reach his arm up and take the whole thing apart in one glancing blow.

  “Hey,” he said, swiveling. “Sorry. Did I scare you?”

  He looked surprised, he was surprised. But not that surprised.

  “I gotta tell you, it’s a trip, being here,” he said. “Marie talks about this house all the time.”

  * * *

  * * *

  He was enormous, looming, his shadow making him twice his size, and the only light from the streetlamp outside.

  “Easy, easy,” he kept saying.

  “What are you doing in our house?” Her voice low, tremulous. “How dare you come into our house.”

  “I’m sorry I scared you. I thought Charlie would be home,” he said. “I wanted to talk to him about my idea. This house, its potential. But he wasn’t here, and it’s just so damn good-looking—well, great bones at least—I had to take a peek.”

  “Trespassing. Breaking and entering,” Dara said, steadying herself. “I want you out now, or I’m calling the police.”

  “It’s only trespassing,” he said, lifting his arms above his head, resting his fingertips on the top of the doorframe, “if you aren’t given a key.”

  Fucking Marie, Dara thought. Goddammit, Marie. It was so much worse, every time, than she thought it could be.

  “Your sister wanted me to see it,” Derek said. “She wanted an outsider’s take. Someone with some expertise, some perspective. Given everything. Given how it all went down.”

  “How what went down?”

  “How she came to lose it. Her piece of it.”

  Here it is, Dara thought. It had been coming for so long. Dara saw it now. If he couldn’t win it, he’d try to take it.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I know what she told me,” he said. There was something heavy in his voice even though he was smiling. “She was in a vulnerable state. That’s how it sounded to me.”

  “Marie’s lived her whole life in a vulnerable state,” Dara said. “And this is none of your business.”

  “Marie’s business is my business,” he said quickly, icily—a tone Dara had never heard from him before.

  “Why?” she replied. “Because she opens her legs to you? She opens her legs forty times a day for a living and it doesn’t mean a goddamned thing.”

  “You got a mouth on you,” he said, tight and cool. “Quite a mouth.”

  “Get out,” Dara repeated. “Go. Or I call the police.”

  Derek looked at her. For the first time, she thought she could feel a little desperation on him, a slick of dampness growing on his brow.

  “I’ve seen everything I need to,” he
said. Dara let herself breathe.

  But as he turned, he took one last look into the bedroom behind him. His eyes darting.

  “I like to imagine you two in there,” he said wetly, like his mouth was resting on a bottle neck. “Two of you, two little ballerinas, like the tops of a music box. Pink and perfect, tucked tight into a little boy’s bunkbed.”

  How do I get him to leave? How will I ever get him to leave? Dara thought, suddenly, of their mother crying over her father, all those nights. How can I get him to leave, which always sounded like, Will he never come home? Those two, their endless tango . . .

  “My brother and me had a bunkbed just like it,” he said. “Except it was a ship’s wheel instead of a wagon wheel.”

  He paused, then grinned widely. “We had this routine. My brother would do this voice, Miss Touissant, the hot French teacher at De La Salle. Parlez en français, mes garcons! And we’d both jack off—lower bunk, upper bunk—in time.”

  He looked at her, then added, “One time, I came so hard I kicked out a slat on the footboard.”

  Dara’s breath caught. In a flash, she was ten again, her own foot snapping, the crack of the wood, the slat darting across the room like a bat.

  “Snapped it right in half,” he continued, watching her. “How about that? Told a girlfriend once and she said there was something sick about it. My brother and me. Something unnatural. I told her, if that’s unnatural, sign me up.” He paused. “Do you, Madame Durant, think that’s unnatural? Any of it?”

  Dara reached out for the wall, her legs shaking. Thinking of the broken slat, Marie’s face peeking through.

  Marie, she thought, her mind racing, Marie, you gave it all away. You gave us all away.

  * * *

  * * *

  That’s the greatest trick women ever pulled on us,” he said. “Making us believe they’re different.”