This time, however, it had been eight months. Yet she hadn’t gotten very far, camping out right here in the studio, up the spiral staircase to the third floor, amid the files and glue traps and old recital tutus shivering with dust. Using the powder room and its stand-up shower as her personal toilette, which didn’t seem sanitary at all. But Marie often gave off the grimy energy of someone never fully clean.
Only once had Dara climbed the spiral stairs to see what accommodations Marie had made. It turned out she’d made hardly any. The banker boxes were merely shoved in the corner except for one she seemed to be using as a bedside table. There was a metal futon covered with their father’s pilling Pendleton blanket, a gooseneck lamp, a jade plant given to her by their longtime Nutcracker partner Madame Sylvie in the dormer window, and, on its ledge, a mysterious knot of crystals, a gift from Brandee Hillock’s mom, who practiced Reiki and promised to heal Marie’s troublesome right ankle.
There was something so sad about the whole setup. Is this the best you can do, Marie? As if Marie were forever twelve, weepily dragging her sleeping bag into the backyard when they had a fight.
Since then, Dara had never seen any reason to go up there again. And Marie hadn’t invited her anyway.
Dara still thought of the third floor as their mother’s domain, her sanctuary, the place she’d retreat to, sometimes for several hours or even a day at a time. It smelled, then, of their mother’s perfume, her lily candles, her favorite milled soap. Now it just smelled like Marie.
* * *
*
It’s up! It’s up!” The screeching and trill, the hush and cursing. While Dara and Marie taught their final classes of the day, Charlie had posted the final Nutcracker cast list on the changing room door. Most of the dismissed students had returned for it, and many had never left at all, killing hours on their phones in the changing room, stretching in Studio B, running to the drugstore for contraband soda and sour candies.
By the time Dara approached, a rosy swirl of girls surrounded 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. Dara had targeted her months ago. Knew she had the skills but also the focus, the commitment the part required. Earnest, self-critical, relentless Bailey Bloom, who now stood, eyes darting, among her clambering classmates, their mouths full of congratulations but their eyes twinkling with envy and spite.
“Madame Durant,” Bailey said, spotting her, “I can’t hardly believe it.”
And she smiled widely, showing her dimples—which, Dara realized, in Bailey’s four years at the school, she had never seen—like sharp cuts, stigmata deep.
* * *
*
At six or seven all the parents began arriving, decamping from their parade of heaving SUVs and fogged sedans, Dr. Weston and Ms. Lin, and Mr. Lesterio, looking weary and mildly alarmed after learning his son Corbin would be the Nutcracker Prince, an immediately controversial decision among the other five boys who thought him too old, an ancient fourteen. 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.
* * *
*
Just as the day’s last classes had ended, just as Dara was about to wrench loose the cork from the half-full wine bottle stashed in the deep drawer of the office desk, delivery men arrived and she had to sign for yet another box of new pointe shoes ordered especially for The Nutcracker.
Distracted from their changing, jeans half-tugged over their leotards, the eight-and nine-year-olds, a year or two from going on pointe, surrounded the box with ooohs and aaahhhs as if it were the ark of the covenant. 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.
Approaching, Marie took one look at the box, her eyes burning.
“Like lambs to the slaughter,” she said softly, before Dara shushed her.
* * *
*
It was after eight and Dara and Charlie were putting on their coats, or Dara helping Charlie with his, his body stiff and tender.
Watching from the desk, Marie finished the last acidic sludge of wine, turning the bottle over so it balanced on the long spike of their mother’s ancient metal bill holder. (There are few greater pleasures, she used to say, than impaling every bill as it comes in.)
Marie, suddenly so tiny at the big old splintery desk, a cardigan wrapped around herself like a cocoon.
Charlie looked at Dara, who looked back at Charlie.
“Marie,” he said, “come over for dinner? I’m making my famous thirty-second omelet.”
Dara raised her eyebrows at Charlie, surprised.
Smiling faintly, Marie said no, she didn’t think so, propping her dirty feet on the desk, rolling her fingertips over her blood-sick toes.
“She doesn’t want to,” Dara said briskly to Charlie. “She has plans, I guess.”
Marie looked at them and said, “I don’t have anything.”
* * *
*
You’re so prickly with her,” Charlie said in the car. “So prickly with each other.”
“No, we’re not,” Dara said, hiding a flinch. “This is how we always are.”
“Okay,” Charlie said, his hand on hers.
“She left,” Dara reminded him. “It changes things.”
“We almost left once,” he reminded her.
“That doesn’t count,” Dara said, putting on her sunglasses even though it was dark out. “That was years ago.”
“It was,” Charlie conceded, pulling his hand away to turn the steering wheel.
WHEN I WAS A CHILD AND SHE WAS A CHILD
That night, Charlie and Dara spent hours with the big calendar clipped to the old, brass-tarnished easel stand and planned the Nutcracker schedule, from early practices through the final, New Year’s Day performance, just as their mother always had.
They tried to account for everything that might arise—the errant injuries, strep throat epidemics, the death of a grandparent, any and all disruptions.
They spoke their shorthand, standing back and studying the calendar, Dara raising an eyebrow, pointing at a particular date, a particular name, and Charlie replying, “Fixed, fixed,” as he struck his pencil across one date, drew an arrow to another.
They had tea from the Merry Mushroom teakettle, its ’70s orange and brown softened with age. They smoked cigarette after cigarette and didn’t feel bad about it, and then they curled on the bed in their master bedroom and watched an old movie with the sound off until they drifted to sleep.
So many nights like this with Marie and it felt funny she wasn’t there.
So many nights like this, Marie thumping the TV top with the heel of her hand, like their father used to with his TV downstairs (both likely the last antenna TVs in three counties by now), the images shuddering into focus—an old musical from black-and-white days, pretty girls dressed in feathers, their bodies slicked with jewels.
So many nights like this with Marie, who was now gone, curled instead on her futon at the studio, like some itinerant hobo, grateful for the roof over her head.
“She’ll come back,” Charlie kept saying, but there was something nice in this too. For Dara. Something nice in being, for the first time in their marriage, for the first time ever, living alone with Charlie in the big old house, drafty and familiar and theirs.
Something nice in bed that night, nuzzling herself against Charlie’s back and knowing they were all alone and it was their house now. It was only theirs, all theirs.
We were three and then . . . not.
* * *