The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

For my dad, my hero Philip Abbott (1944–2019)

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good. —KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

They were dancers. Their whole lives, nearly. They were dancers who taught dance and taught it well, as their mother had.

Had one of them reached out to the other in those final moments, the reporter wondered to readers, or had they been holding hands all along?

Marie and their father were both mysterious to Dara. Mysterious and alike somehow. Primitive, their mother called them privately.

She talked about all the different kinds of love and how it changed and turned and you couldn’t stop it. Love was always changing on you.

Then she told them their favorite story, the one about a famous ballerina named Marie Taglioni, whose devotees were so passionate they once paid two hundred rubles, a fortune at that time, for a single pair of her discarded pointe shoes. After the purchase, they cooked, garnished, and ate the pointe shoes with a special sauce. That, their mother told them, is love.

turnout, rotating their legs from their hip sockets, bodies pushed to contortion. Pushed so far, the feeling ecstatic. Her first time, Dara felt split open, laid bare.

They came with sprightly dreams and limber bodies and hard little muscles and hungry, lean bellies and a desire to enter into the fairy tale that is dance to little girls and a few special little boys.

Charlie nodding patiently as mothers spoke in hushed tones about their own long-ago ballet aspirations, of the mad fantasy of tutus and rosin, satin and tulle, floodlights and beaming faces, leaping endlessly into a lover’s waiting arms.

Dara was cool, but Marie was hot. Dara was dark, but Marie was light. Dara and Marie, the same but different.

Dancers have short lives, of course.

His body, still as lean and marble-cut as the day their mother brought him home, was a living reminder of how quickly things could turn, how beautiful things could be all broken inside.

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.

We have a different relationship to pain, their mother used to say. It’s our friend, our lover. 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.

Never, she wanted to add, reaching to fill her thermos, tea splashing, her joints aching as ever, the only way, some mornings, she knew she was alive.

The energy—the constant buzzing of anxiety and distress, of hunger and self-critique—was always high at the Durant School, but today it was much higher. It was inevitable. It happened every year at this time, the chill in the air, the twinkle in all the girls’ eyes, their arms high in fifth position. It was Nutcracker season.

A necessary evil, The Nutcracker was.

The Nutcracker. The story was so simple, a child’s story, but full of mystery and pain.

At her family’s holiday party, a young girl named Clara finds herself transfixed by her dark and charismatic godfather, Drosselmeier. He gives her a miniature man, a Nutcracker doll she sneaks into bed with her, dreaming him into a young man, a fantasy lover who ushers her into a dream world of unimaginable splendor. And, at ballet’s end, she rides off with him on a sleigh into the deep, distant forest. The end of girlhood and the furtive entry into the dark beyond.

They wanted to wear Clara’s stiff white party dress, her flowing white nightgown. They wanted to hold the grinning Nutcracker doll like a scepter. This yearning, so deep among the young girls, was like money in the bank.

Privately, their mother confided she never cared much for Clara. She never does anything, a little dormouse of a thing. And she would read to them the original story, which was much darker, the little girl so much more interesting, intense. And her name in the story was not Clara, which means bright and clear, their mother explained, but Marie, which means rebellious.

But each step Dara took up the staircase throbbed with that same feeling, that jittery energy. Or, as it turned out, it throbbed with Marie.

Even when, as young dancers, they went through three pairs a week, their mother forbid the hammer. It was too rough, too brutal. It was lazy. Instead, one should stick the shoe in the hinge of a door, closing it slowly, softening its hardness, breaking it down.

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.

It was all about finding one’s own way to fuse the foot to the shoe, the shoe to the foot, the body.

Their mother told them stories of older girls hiding broken glass in other girls’ shoes, which sounded like a dark fairy tale, but was there any other kind?

Ballet was full of dark fairy tales, and how a dancer prepared her pointe shoes was a ritual as mysterious and private as how she might pleasure herself. It was often indistinguishable.

Pink tights, black leotard, hair fastened for girls; black tights, white tees for boys. The rules were so simple and never changed.

The only place they’d ever lived at all, every scuff and scratch their own.

Bailey Bloom, this year’s Clara, the part of all parts, the brave girl venturing into the adult world of dark magic, of broken things, of innocence lost.

And Mrs. Bloom, of course, her chest heaving with excitement, calling out her daughter’s name. When Bailey ran into her arms, her face nearly collapsed with complicated joy, her mouth opening as if to cry out. Her voice catching and disappearing in her throat. Watching her, Dara suspected Mrs. Bloom, like so many of the mothers (and, every once in a while, a father), had once harbored ballet fantasies of her own, her fingers curling around Bailey’s tidy bun, her eyes full of tears.

Their feet now so round and pristine, eventually to be like the older girls’. Blood blisters, soles like red onions, feet that peeled fully tip to toe every month or so, calluses thick as canvas, toes curled sidewise, necrotic, ulcerated toes, their nails slipping off, clattering to the floor.

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.

(There are few greater pleasures, she used to say, than impaling every bill as it comes in.)

A boy was a valuable thing.

It happened in a blur of heat, Dara’s breath catching, and suddenly, she was crawling toward him, her palms slapping on the floor. Her form divine. It was like a moment in a dance. The serpent attacks. The lion seizes its prey.

Dara would so rather sit at their mother’s dressing table and put her fingers in all the lotions and creams and tonics and watch their mother do stretches on the floor and tell her stories about the time she danced at the Royal Opera House in London and drown in the perfumes and loveliness of their mother’s attentions.

When I was a child and she was a child, recited Charlie, the poem that became their vow. It was their mother’s favorite poem and you didn’t usually read poems at city hall weddings, but Charlie insisted. We loved with a love that was more than love—

The fire was a big mouth,” Marie had said on the phone, her voice dizzy with shock. “A big mouth swallowing everything.”

It reminded Dara of something their mother used to say, Ballerinas are girls forever. Nothing ever changes. Ballet is like Eden that way.

“Have you ever heard the one about the Phoenix rising from the ashes?” “Sure.” “Why can’t that be you?”

Their mother, that swan neck, those elegant arms. Her dark hair gathered up tightly with her grandmother’s dragonfly combs. So dignified, so refined, carrying so much inside all the time. Surrounded all day by mirrors and never letting anyone see.

“Yes,” Marie said, flicking tobacco from her trembling thumb. Taking another long drag. Smoking for dear life.

You show someone your damage and they know all your weak spots. They know everything.

We rise from the ashes.”

“Maybe it’s a mistake,” Charlie continued, “to always play it safe.”

And you were competing with what some considered a dying art. The misty pink hothouse of ballet.

Slowly, Dara felt the certainty rising in her chest, like a sharp stone her lungs brushed up against with every breath.

Marie, who had so few attachments, obligations, connections that sometimes she felt like she was going to float away, ascend. But Dara could never tell if this was what she wanted, or her greatest fear.