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a rite of passage, like the first time they took a razor blade to their hardened feet, or the first time they achieved turnout, rotating their legs from their hip sockets, bodies pushed to contortion. Pushed so far, the feeling ecstatic.
It was the three of them. Always the three of them. Until it wasn’t. And that was when everything went wrong. Starting with the fire. Or before.
When you wake up and the pain is gone, do you know what that means? What, they’d ask every time. You’re no longer a dancer.
Satin, cardboard, burlap, paper hardened with glue—that’s all they were, pointe shoes. But they were so much more, the beating heart of ballet. And the fact that they lasted only weeks or less than an hour made them all the more so, like a skin you shed constantly. Then a new skin arrived, needing to be shaped.
A bold one snuck her hand along the top seam and peered inside, giggling. Wanting in, wanting to touch, to feel this thing that would one day become a part of her, a new organ, tender and virginal, ready to be used, abused, destroyed.
yikes!
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.
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.
I'm sorry, WHAT?
“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?”
In the end, their mother used to tell her, hands on Dara’s shoulders as she waited in the wings, it’s only you out there. In the end, you only have you.
It was all so tacky, so déclassé, a voice inside said. It was all so cheap. So unbearably sad.
The tortuous waiting of childhood. Waiting for parents, forever, waiting while adults do their adult things. Wanting to understand, the doors always closed. Until the adults finally decide to open them and then there’s no shutting the door again.
