The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

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

“Family secrets,” Derek said, his parting shot, “are the very worst kind, aren’t they?”

You never knew what people would do. You never knew when blood ran hot. That was why it was always best, like their mother always said, to keep it cool. To not let it get to you. To still your heart, or slow it down.

Everything looked slightly exaggerated, like the time Dara tried on another girl’s glasses and the world instantly drew into unimaginable focus.

The beauty of dancing a pas de deux is that you are never alone. There’s always a hand outstretched to accept yours. Someone’s eyes seeking yours. But you must never forget, a pas de deux is also about power, gaining it, losing it, giving it away.

The Nutcracker, a young girl’s dream of peering over the precipice into the dark furrow of adulthood and finding untold pleasures. Of the eye, of the mouth.

Because, foremost, The Nutcracker was a dream of hunger, of appetite. Consider the exquisite torture of all those little girls never allowed to eat dancing as costumed Sugar Plums, as fat Bonbons gushing cherry slicks. Tutus like ribbon candy, boys spinning great hoops of peppermint, and everywhere black slathers of licorice and marzipan glistening like snow.

It was a warning for those who become lost to desire.

This isn’t a matter of life or death. That’s what she used to tell herself back in her dancing days. Before a big performance, or after one. Before an audition, a solo. But your body doesn’t know the difference.

The body knows so much better than you do what it needs to survive.

“Well,” he said, shrugging, sliding his notebook into his pocket, “do any of us really know anyone?”

For all the damage two people staying together can do. Two circling rivals locked in an endless, fatal embrace.

Sometimes what happened just doesn’t feel like what really happened.

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.

She was touching the corners of something. She could feel it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

Those shoes, so intimate, soaked with your sweat until they sealed themselves to your feet, until, soon after, they fell to pieces. Pink satin fantasies we beat into submission so they can be used and then discarded. Pink satin fantasies created to give pleasure but destroyed in the process. This, their mother said when she held out Dara’s very first pointe shoe, is what we are.

It happened slowly; all of them moved closer together, forming a huddle. Something old and childlike. Their heads brushing against one another like tentative animals, like feral creatures exiled and now returned.

“Police photographs, measurements, they don’t tell the whole story. But if you can get in there and see the space, lay your hands on it, sometimes things become instantly clear.”

How when he was dancing, he seemed to go some other place, exalted and forbidden. How when he stopped, he looked immediately lost and forlorn.

Like a boy in a painting, their mother used to say, looking at him. Caravaggio.

It was like one’s first grand jeté. How students were never ready until suddenly they were and they had to do it right away, or the moment would pass.

And when she reached out again Charlie’s back was hot, tortured. It felt like putting your hand on a tangle of lighting cables, illuminating everything.

Unnatural. The word like a cold lash. Once, twice, three times.

“Well, it’s the world we live in,” he said, his voice echoing through the lobby as Dara turned and began walking away. “Sick, sick.”

“Surprised like he didn’t recognize us,” Marie said, eyes on the mirror. She and Dara twinned there. Dara was cool, but Marie was hot. Dara was dark, but Marie was light. “Like we were these alien things.”

Everyone was tired. All the excitement eaten away by the rigors of the day, its small victories and humiliations.

Nightgown ballooning, Bailey streaked across the stage, scooped the abandoned Nutcracker into her arms. Sleeves like white wings, she hoisted it into the air like a totem, a godhead, then lifted herself into an elegant arabesque, her neck so long and her leg so high in the way you can when you’re fourteen, fifteen, your body both feather-light and molten, and everything is forever and nothing ever changes.

The gaze, hot and relentless, felt like love. It was love.

Onstage, her arms in a perfect port de bras, cradling the Nutcracker between them, Bailey looked out into the dark theater, her face blue in the spotlight. Her eyes wide and face open, with all Clara’s fear and wonder. That’s it, Dara thought. That’s Clara.

“Our Clara is relentless,” Madame Sylvie whispered over Dara’s shoulder. “She’s sending a message,” Dara said.

You have to leave them to it, their mother used to say about the plight of Claras every year. It’s jungle logic. You have to let them handle it amongst themselves.

She remembered what it was like, your big moment and you’re missing everything.

She used the three- or four-minute walk to try to center herself. To bring herself together the way one did before performing, drawing all one’s energies and spiky fears into one sharp point, a mighty saber, an immutable and unfeeling thing.

Everyone loves a pretty dancer, their mother used to say. But strong is better.

Dara felt pinpricks on her neck, her wrists, her hips. Something was happening.

A man in her house and her husband forever out of town, like every glossy paperback on the library spinner rack. There was a reason those books were so worn, their covers peeling.

Dara turned from her, reached for a paper towel, wiped her face. All this making her feel ugly. It was like being trapped in Mrs. Bloom’s life, her head. Cashmere and desperation.

“You think I’m pathetic,” she said, “don’t you? You think we all are. You women.” Dara didn’t say anything. “Just you wait,” she said, “until it happens to you.”

The sense that her mind, her thoughts were veiled, remote. That she knew things she would never say. She didn’t have the words to say them.

Something faint in the back of Dara’s head was slowly getting louder. The slither of that snake tail now emerging from the muck.

There was a fire before the fire.

There was a feeling inside Dara of something falling and falling as she watched.

Marie had done all the crying for both of them, that angry, jagged cry. The kind when you can’t tell the anger from the grief because they’re the same somehow. Something ending suddenly before you knew it could ever end at all. And, as fated as the ending feels when it comes, you still never said okay. You never gave permission and it all came crashing down anyway.

“I was so afraid,” Marie started tentatively, “that it was all my fault. That I’d made all this happen myself. That it was me. Like saying Bloody Mary in the mirror three times and then she appears.”

What does it mean to destroy your own body, to grind your bones down to soft powder?

It all unfurled like a mink from a femme fatale’s shoulders in an old film noir. All those tales of a taloned beauty with expensive tastes, her callow lover, the unwitting husband, a staged accident for a big insurance payout. They never ended well.

He’d left without ever leaving, which was worse.

The way he was standing, in his navy peacoat, his cheeks too red from the cold, his eyes too bright, she thought suddenly of the Nutcracker, of all the Nutcrackers. For a split second, she thought he might open his mouth and show two rows of sharp white teeth.

“I thought we’d let a monster in,” she said, rising to her feet. Charlie nodded. “We did,” he said. “But he’s gone now. He’s—” “—but it turned out the monster was you.”

“It just . . . happened and then other things happened and suddenly, everything was happening and there was no stopping it.”