“The claw returns,” Dara said, lifting an eyebrow.
“It’s the only thing that works,” said Marie, holding out the shoe for Dara to see, its pinkness split open, its soft center exposed.
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. Marie never had the patience.
“Look,” Marie said, showing off her handiwork, settling her finger inside the shank, poking it, stroking it. “Look.”
Dara felt her stomach turn and she wasn’t sure why.
* * *
*
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.
As soon as their dancers went on pointe, Dara and Marie made them learn how to break them in, how to experiment, fail, adapt, customize. They’d sit on the changing room floor, their legs like compasses, their new shoes between them like a pair of slippery fish.
Crush the box, pry up and bend the shank, bend the sole, soften it, make it your own. Thread a needle with dental floss—far thicker than thread—to sew in elastic bands and satin ribbons at just the right spot, a cigarette lighter on the ribbon edges to stop fraying. Pliers to tug out the nail, an X-acto to cut away the satin around the toes to make them less slippery. That was Dara’s favorite part, like peeling a soft apple. After, taking the X-acto and, thwick, thwick, thwick, thwick, scraping the shoe bottom, X patterns or crosses, giving it grip.
It was all about finding one’s own way to fuse the foot to the shoe, the shoe to the foot, the body.
The shoe must become part of you, their mother always said. A new organ, snug and demanding and yours.
If you didn’t prepare them correctly, if you left out any step, took any shortcuts—too smooth a sole, too low an elastic—it could mean a fall, an injury, worse.
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.
* * *
*
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
Marie was not going to stop, her teeth sunk into her lip, her eyes unfocused. She was going to prepare one, two, three pairs.
It was all ridiculous, a waste. Marie, Dara wanted to say, what are these even for? Marie, you’re a teacher now, not a dancer.
And the little girls she taught were years away from going on pointe, their feet still clad in pink slippers.
But Dara was too tired to scold. To say what her mother would have said, You are abusing yourself, ma chère. This is self-abuse.
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
Marie would not stop until Dara finally unlocked the front door and the first students pushed through, a gaggle of chirpy eight-year-olds, two bursting into tears at the gossamer pile before Marie, at her gutted shoes.
* * *
*
Everything was a mad crush that day, Saturdays always were, but especially now, with the class schedule overloaded to make up for audition time and their regular substitute, a sprightly college student named Sandra Shu, felled by a snapping hip that, at long last, popped.
The air was thick with anticipation for the final cast list, which Dara, following their mother’s storied tradition, never posted before the end of the day. Otherwise, all afternoon she’d have to endure the crying and mute stares, the sullen faces and despair, the incessant needling of the chosen leads under whispered breaths.
Still, with the pitch of The Nutcracker humming all ears, there were more than the usual share of fretful students, a turned ankle, a jammed thumb, two girls fainting from a secret diet of celery and watermelon juice, the student toilet choked with vomit, a boy’s dance belt come asunder, one girl teasing another about her body hair, the fine down emerging nearly overnight to keep her floss-thin body warm, and Dara losing her temper with Gracie Hent for crowding the other girls, or with the Neuman sisters for coming to class again in black tights. (Black tights like an Italian widow, their mother would say, tsk-tsking.) Pink tights, black leotard, hair fastened for girls; black tights, white tees for boys. The rules were so simple and never changed.
Charlie came in late, moving slowly and warily after a session with his PT. Helga, Dara and Marie had dubbed her, with Marie often imitating an imagined Germanic patter at the massage table. (Elbow sharp as a shiv for my dah-link . . .) It didn’t matter that her name wasn’t Helga and she wasn’t German but some local mom who, as Charlie loved to tell them, had gone back to school for her degree to support her children and make up for a useless husband. For Dara and Marie, she’d forever be Helga, built like bull with hands of iron!
During the hours of his absence, all the problems Charlie typically forestalled had accumulated. There was no one to handle the parents, the niceties, the back office schedule changes, the vomit-and then tampon-clogged toilet, and the boy dancer who wanted to talk, man to man, about how to maneuver himself into that dance belt. (Pull everything up and to the front, Charlie always explained, like it’s high noon.)
And then there was Marie. Mercurial Marie, who had become even more mercurial of late. The morning hammering gave way to a kind of dreamy listlessness as she drifted between classes to the third floor, her upstairs bunker, playing raspy old 45s on her windup Cinderella record player with the handle shaped like a glass slipper. Twice, she missed the start of her own class.
Late in the day, when one of Dara’s mild corrections made Liv Lockman run into the changing room to cry, Marie knelt down and pulled the girl’s sob-racked body close, nearly weeping with her.
“Madame Durant,” whispered Pepper Weston, watching the spectacle from behind Dara, “is it true that the other Madame Durant—”
“Mademoiselle Durant,” Dara corrected.
“That Mademoiselle Durant sleeps in the attic now?”
Dara didn’t say anything for a moment, then, glancing at the metal clock on the wall, announced, “Depêchez-vous. à la barre.”
* * *
*
Eight months ago, Marie had moved out of their home, the one they grew up in, with its knotty pine and sloping ceilings and time-worn floors and side-sinking stairs and the smell, forever, of their mother’s Blue Carnation perfume. The only place they’d ever lived at all, every scuff and scratch their own.
There hadn’t been a discussion or even an explanation. Marie just kept saying it felt right, stuffing fistfuls of clothing into a duffel bag and running down the stairs as if, Charlie later said, fleeing a fire.
They both thought she’d be back in a day, a week. After all, she’d left once before, years ago. Left with a moth-eaten velvet rolling trunk of their mother’s, intent on traveling the world. But the world had taken a month, more or less.