Walking to the lobby, she felt her breath catching, but she didn’t know why.
Their mother loved that spiral staircase. Their mother said it was cosmopolitan. Bohemian. Recherché.
Their mother, that swan neck, those elegant arms. Her dark hair gathered up tightly with her grandmother’s dragonfly combs. So dignified, so refined, carrying so much inside all the time. Surrounded all day by mirrors and never letting anyone see.
* * *
*
When she returned to the office, the contractor was writing something on a pad of paper, looming over slight Marie and slender Charlie as they waited, two pale figurines, cut like glass.
“I got a tight, lean crew that works like beasts,” he was saying as he wrote. “Sweetheart deals with the best suppliers. They trust me. Your insurance company trusts me. Your claims adjuster, Bambi, we go way back.”
“That’s fine, but—” Charlie started.
“You can go cheap and easy,” he said, slapping the paper into Charlie’s hand. “Or you can transform your little school into that ballet palace you always wanted. Make every little girl’s fantasy come true.”
* * *
*
Suddenly, he had to go, he was in a hurry. His phones were ringing, his beeper. He shook his head like, What can I do, so popular, everyone wants me.
“We’ll let you know,” Charlie said, walking him out. “But it sounds like more than we have in mind.”
* * *
*
Halfway out the door, the contractor stopped, hand on the jamb, one last aftershave gust.
“So,” he said, grinning, eyes dragging across all three of them, “who decides?”
“We’re partners,” Dara said. “We make decisions as a—”
“I do,” Marie said, her voice low but insistent. “I decide.”
Derek looked at her and laughed.
Then Charlie laughed, too, the hollow, soundless laugh he used when mothers asked if he could help them correct their posture. Dara didn’t laugh. Marie didn’t laugh either.
“I thought so,” Derek said to Marie, grinning, opening the door, his eyes now only on her. “I thought you were the one.”
* * *
*
So you’re the big boss now,” Dara said after, her lip curled, both of them smoking feverishly, the visit feeling so big, “Princess Marie?”
“I wanted him to look at me,” Marie said.
Dara looked at her.
“The Big Bad Wolf,” Marie said, her cigarette shaking slightly in her hand.
Dara shook her head. “Well, it’s all over now.”
“Yes,” Marie said, flicking tobacco from her trembling thumb. Taking another long drag. Smoking for dear life.
* * *
*
He was gone more than an hour before Dara felt her shoulders relax, her arms hanging lamely at her sides.
Strangers were in and out of the studio all the time, new parents, servicemen, the mail carrier. But this felt different, invasive. You show someone your damage and they know all your weak spots. They know everything.
For the next hour, Dara dragged a mop and bucket and she scrubbed all the floors, every place he’d stepped, the gray sludge his shoes left behind.
* * *
*
That night, at home, the itchy feeling in her palms she’d felt all day was finally gone.
Taking the kettle off the stove, she poured Charlie a cup of white tea. She sat down and put her feet, thick and throbbing, in his lap and he rubbed them delicately.
Everything was right again. Dara hadn’t even bothered to look at the estimate the contractor had left them, a sheet of paper torn from a spiral notebook like a schoolboy.
“I’ll get some more contractor recommendations,” Charlie said. “I’ll find us someone good who can just do the job we asked for.”
“I know you will,” Dara said. Charlie always fixed everything.
“Unless you think maybe . . .” Charlie said, glancing at the estimate on the table.
Dara felt a stab in the arch of her foot, a nerve firing.
“It’s just,” Charlie started, “he had some good ideas. Things we’ve been talking about for years. More space. A real expansion. Room to breathe.”
Dara didn’t say anything, pulling her feet away swiftly, drawing them close.
“Maybe this is what we’ve been waiting for,” Charlie said. “Maybe the fire wasn’t such a bad thing. We rise from the ashes.”
Dara wrapped her hands around her feet and squeezed them until they hurt.
“Maybe it’s a mistake,” Charlie continued, “to always play it safe.”
HOTHOUSE
It wasn’t like they hadn’t considered renovating, expanding before, Dara thought in bed that night, her hand on Charlie’s back, smooth as an ivory tusk. Smooth and cool and pure.
“Just think about it,” Charlie murmured. “See how it feels.”
Designed to accommodate sixty or seventy students, the school now served twice that. And there were always new competitors—two new competition dance schools in the past year alone, splashy and mercenary, crowded with aspirants, sparkled, sprayed, and glued together like party dolls, offering up a promise of YouTube stardom and hot, fleeting fame.
You had to compete with that. And you were competing with what some considered a dying art. The misty pink hothouse of ballet.
And did you stand a chance when your space was cramped with only three studios and a floor in Studio B that, even before the fire, was pocked with age, warped with spring-thaw leaks? Maybe, while they were already making repairs, it was time to pull it up, to put in a new sprung floor with layers of wood and padding to absorb shock and enhance performance. To patch up the ice-dam damage, the king rat stain on the ceiling before winter arrived.
And there was Charlie. Dara and Marie spent their days turning out the knees, pointing the feet, bending the backs, pushing in the pert bottoms of endless little girls. To them, any business matter was a blur in the background. Charlie, however, could see the big picture.
And Charlie, after all, needed something. Something other than bookkeeping, designing little display ads for the local paper, soothing anxious parents, seeing his doctors—all his doctors—about his half-broken body. That magnificent, blinding marble thing that had, slowly and then all at once, cracked.
“It could be just what we need,” Charlie said. “What your mother would have wanted.”
* * *
*
Slowly, Dara felt the certainty rising in her chest, like a sharp stone her lungs brushed up against with every breath.
Maybe Charlie was right. Maybe their mother—who’d put twenty years of toil and affliction into their cramped, sweaty, stenchy place, ripe as the hollow of a dancer’s pointed foot—would want this.
* * *
*
Marie will be hard to convince,” Dara said. Marie didn’t like disruption or change or intruders from out there. None of the Durants did. Dara could only remember a handful of occasions—a meter reader once, an animal control officer that time a raccoon got caught in the screen door—when anyone outside of their family set foot inside their house their entire childhood.
Still, Charlie pointed out, Marie was the one who had in fact moved out of the house, taken a leap.
But, Dara replied, look how far she got.
* * *
*
Charlie kept asking Dara and Dara kept saying it was best not to pressure Marie, which Charlie should know by now.
Marie didn’t like to think about things. Business decisions, all decisions, hung like a weight around her neck.
Marie didn’t like to sign papers, to put her name on things, to have too many keys.
Marie, who had so few attachments, obligations, connections that sometimes she felt like she was going to float away, ascend. But Dara could never tell if this was what she wanted, or her greatest fear.
Marie, who’d slept in their childhood bunkbed for years, only moving down the hall to the sewing room when she began having back pain from the slender mattress. She still said she didn’t know what to do in a full-size bed. She said she felt lost.
* * *
*
I’m the one who has to live with it,” Marie said, later that day.