The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

Early the next morning, at the studio, Dara was able to forget everything. It was a lovely moment of stillness, of dancer and dancer, the mirrors, the movement, a body arching, turning, flying.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

“Remember your turnout. The more you rotate that hip, the higher the leg. You must open yourself out to the audience.”

“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.”

She danced, their mother said, with the intensity of a bad dream. You did not forget her.

It was better, after all, to be memorable than lovely.

“Watch out for a bad woman, and never trust a good one.”

Because, every time, Dara thought she just might die from the feeling. Every time, she saw stars, just like with the turnout.

Her eyes glowing, wolflike, in the dark, she liked to point her finger at Dara as if to say I know you.

This was the turning, the deepening she’d been feeling. It was a breach. A betrayal.

The flood became an excuse for chaos, for falling behind.

This was why you needed routine, rigidity, timeliness. One slip, a wrist turned too far, a pointe shoe sliding from a dancer’s heel, a faulty space heater, and everything could change in an instant. Everything could fall apart.

The simplest things were always the hardest.

But, as always with the Nutcracker Prince, the big moments were never the problem. It was the small, the elemental things. The port de bras. The movement of the arms, fluid, elegant.

It was so difficult anywhere, anytime, to be a boy who wanted to dance.

At one time, teachers used to touch all the time, used to manhandle. Their mother used to tell them her former teachers would be appalled to know it was now considered unsuitable, worse. Épater la bourgeoisie, she used to mutter. They’re the ones with the filthy minds.

“You must understand, Corbin,” she said, “that you have wings.”

There was something so precious, always, in the shyness of the boys.

She could smell him. That sharp, clean smell. Breath mints, aftershave, that big bar of Lava soap from the powder room. And something else. Beer, and something more intimate.

Dara turned and began walking, her body tight and not her own.

What is it, Dara kept asking herself. What is it we’ve let in our studio, our mother’s studio. My sister’s bed. My sister’s body. Our lives.

“You want to do something, Dara,” he said, like ice, “do it.”

That was Derek’s greatest trick. You could never prove anything. But every provocation felt like a deeper threat. You couldn’t prove it, so he was going to just keep going. Until he got what he wanted.

His breath so familiar, the same as hers. All his smells, her smells. She moved against him, her right hand in his, her left palm on his chest. She could feel his heart beating, slow and sluggish, but there.

Besides, she needed to talk to Mrs. Bloom anyway, about Bailey. Nervous, fearful Bailey, who began Nutcracker season with a throng of friendly classmates happy to braid her bun, to invite her for hot chocolate at Dreusser’s after class, and who now faced straight pins in her shoes, ketchup on the crotch of her stowed leotard, cold stares around the rehearsal space. Poor Bailey, who now stood, like Clara, on the dark stage alone.

“He has something he wants,” she said, her voice sliding in Dara’s ear like a blade. “He’ll hold it close until he’s ready.”

Marie, her legs like a spider’s, head lowered, hiding itself, or something else.

What, Dara thought, could anyone find in that other than love?

She supposed it was like all children’s stories, all fairy tales—always much darker, stranger than you guessed. Children themselves much darker, stranger than you guessed.

There was no more room for error. They were all hungry for correction. Desperate to be stretched, yanked.

This is what happens, Dara thought, when you’ve entered the ballet. When you’ve finally gone beyond your old ideas of your body’s limits, of what you would push yourself through. The pain is real and abiding. The pain is bracing and makes you feel alive. The pain is your friend. The pain is you.

He has something he wants. He’ll hold it close until he’s ready.

“Everyone,” Marie said, staring at her bruise, stroking it with one finger, “wants something. Even you.”

She hated this feeling, this wild thing inside. Something was inside her.

It was big and old, but all that bigness and age mattered.

The house stirred with past moments like these, good and bad, dark and fulsome. The house was a living, breathing, saggy, and gasping thing.

The true terrorism of girls is the accuracy of their aim.

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.

“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.”

“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 man. It’s a parable, no? Of first sexual experience. The pleasure and danger. Drosselmeier seduced her. And she is glad.”

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

Most of the time, you never truly saw your own house from the outside.