The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

She still said she didn’t know what to do in a full-size bed. She said she felt lost.

It made Dara think about a story their mother told them once. About the famous ballerina in the nineteenth century, a gas lamp catching on her skirt, enveloping her in flames before the entire audience’s eyes. How she spun and spun, the blaze consuming her until she was rescued. She lingered a few months after, her corset melted to her ribs. The surviving scraps of her costume still hung in the Musée de l’Opéra in Paris. That, their mother told them, is love.

But was Marie living at all, or merely burrowing in?

“Just remember,” she whispered, a quiver in her voice, “you’re the one who invited him in.”

The holes looked like dark pinwheels. Looked like bruises.

They were always so intently focused—they had to be—the boys. They faced so much social dismissal.

She wants everyone to see, Dara thought, and she thought she even spotted Derek lingering by the doorway, watching as Marie sank one, two, three cardboard foils into her mouth, head thrown back, her throat like a pale lily.

“Kinda sounds like you were a vulture,” Charlie said, reaching for his coat. “Licking the bones of the dead.” Derek smiled, showing all his teeth. “Except we didn’t lick them. We sold them.”

It reminded Dara of something their mother, whose hair fell nearly to her waist, always said: Never let anyone under thirty touch your hair.

Never forget, ma chère, each year is someone’s first Nutcracker. Then adding, If you can give them that, you have them for life.

How she could barely breathe, how she couldn’t wait to burst out, leaping forward and bounding across the stage, drunk from the escape, and, somehow, from that captivity.

You must be firm, their mother always said about parents, or they will dominate you.

“It embarrasses him,” Mr. Lesterio said, nearly under his breath. “Being looked at like that.” “He wouldn’t be dancing if he didn’t want to be looked at,” Dara said. But of course Corbin—his fine features and frame, the way he moved—would have been noticed anywhere, under any circumstances. Those things, however, fathers were blind to.

“When he comes near me,” Marie said, her neck instantly red, “I can’t breathe.”

Marie never let you forget she was there, even when she wasn’t. Even when she didn’t live there anymore.

When he comes near me, I can’t breathe.

Marie liked softness, gentleness, refinement in men.

To her, all dancers’ feet were beautiful, beautiful not in spite of but because of their hardness, their contortions, their battle against nature, against the body itself. What could be more beautiful, she used to say, than a will like that?

To instruct the girls not to be distracted by the tiny earthquakes under their feet.

His hands, in that brief brushing of hers against his, felt like the bottom of those pointe shoes after sixty strokes with her X-acto.

They called it a hangman’s fracture because of the way your neck snapped back.

Everything was connected, you see. All the parts—each so delicate—forming a precarious whole.

“You should never touch a dancer’s body.”

“Pain is different for us,” Dara said. The pain threshold of ballet dancers was three times greater than that of anyone else.

“Pain. I guess you come to like it.” “No,” Dara said, her face warm, the stairwell starting to fill with incoming students. “We just make it our friend.”

She would not give it to him but couldn’t seem to make herself move. Couldn’t seem to draw her face into a scowl, a dismissal. Couldn’t seem to, maybe, breathe.

They were all strong. Dara, Charlie, Marie. Everyone there was strong. Charlie, in his heyday, could lift dancers above his head as if they were mere butterflies, fluttering between his hands. Still, looking at the contractor, Dara felt certain he could snap her in two like a wishbone. It made her pause. It made her need to sit down a moment.

They were so big, like another person in the room. Like a man in the room, demanding to be noticed. Assuming he would be.

“Here’s an idea,” Charlie said, hands on both her shoulders now, turning her away. “Don’t look behind the curtain.”

The instant her fingers touched his skin, it came: a violent stiffening, and immediate, urgent, violent retreat.

She yanked her hand back as if she’d touched an open flame.

You, he murmured finally, his feet arching with pleasure, his forehead sticky, hands reaching behind for her, finding that place between her legs. You have all the power.

It would, she knew, be weeks or months before it came again. The lightning bolt splitting his shoulder blades. The lightning bolt that brought them, fleetingly, right to the center of things, shuddering them both to life. You shouldn’t wish for such things. Yet Dara did.

Never cry over pain, their mother told them. Those are wasted tears.

She explained how, if you were a dancer, you were always protected. Feet strapped into pointe shoes, body strapped into a leotard and tights, hair strapped into a bun—no one could touch you, your entire life.

Like animals, she said to herself later. Like animals.

Still, it sat in her brain like a spider.

Could let her body—make her body—do those things with that man? She, who was trained, raised to make her body only do beautiful things.

That was how their mother had been with her students. Aloof, remote. A marionette does not become a dancer, she used to say. She never touched her male students, their bodies, after age seven or eight. Never touch them once they’re old enough to know better. And, most of all, Never touch the ones who want to be touched.

Once she’d landed on the idea, she wanted, needed to go immediately.

Oh, the look on Marie’s face. Dara had never seen it. Thirty years of watching her sister’s face and she’d never seen this look. Her skin. Like it was radiating. Like it was on fire. Like it had been pressed in acid and shorn itself and formed itself anew.

What must it be like, she wondered, to so utterly destroy something?

She only wished that, in bed that night, she could touch the cool alabaster of Charlie’s muscled back again, like slipping beneath a museum’s velvet rope to lay hands on the smooth marble of a Greek god.

“I’m so happy,” she whispered from across the expanse of the bed, “to be home.”

“Clara is yours to lose.” What she wanted to say was, Bailey, steel yourself.

It’s the only favor ballet ever granted its men, Charlie once told her. Brushing and pressing up against bodies all day, the heat and closeness, it was impossible to hide anything. Worn under tights, the dance belt concealed every adolescent boy’s secrets. Too slender a garment to protect them from a misplaced foot, an errant elbow, it protected them only from fleeting boy shame.

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.

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.

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.

The tread of natty boots, of a man who goes as he pleases, who knows no boundaries, who leaves messes in his wake.