The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

  Putting on her parent face, Dara turned to him at last.

  “Dr. Weston,” she said quietly, moving closer to him, “now is not the time.”

  In her head, she was frantically conjuring excuses. (My sister’s become deranged, she’s having a psychotic break . . .)

  “But tomorrow’s November first!” Dr. Weston said, more loudly now, a sheen of sweat on his brow.

  “Pardon?”

  “And how will my Pepper—or, of course, any of her fellow dancers—have time to truly prepare the Waltz of the Snowflakes when one studio is unusable?”

  The Nutcracker. The goddamned Nutcracker. Dara took a sharp breath of relief. That’s all it was about. Of course. That’s all they cared about, these parents.

  They were relentless and Dr. Weston, a dermatologist with the tight, tan face of a stock photo dad, was one of the worst, worse even than Mrs. Cartwright, almost never missing a chance to explain why his ungraceful twelve-year-old daughter, Pepper, would be the Clara for the ages. (Innocent but spirited! Refined yet feisty! Pepper has all those qualities, Ms. Durant.)

  Marie could be running a whorehouse out of the third floor as long as the show went on. . . .

  “I assure you, Dr. Weston,” Dara said, “it’ll all be over very soon.”

  * * *

  * * *

  I’m sure it’s fine,” Charlie said later, when Dara called him. He was at the hardware store and she imagined him standing, paralyzed, before a display of fuses as long as a Christmas tree.

  “It’s unprofessional. There were students downstairs. Her students.”

  “Maybe . . . maybe she felt sick.”

  In fact, descending the spiral stairs, Marie had tried to claim to Dara that she had suddenly felt weak in the knees. She’d had the nerve to tell Dara that with her skin still flushed, her lipstick blurred and, Dara knew, that man still inside her, dripping down her leg.

  “I could hear them,” Dara said to Charlie.

  “You think you could. You didn’t go up there, did you?”

  “No,” Dara said after a pause. “Dr. Weston was there.”

  “I don’t see why it bothers you so much,” Charlie said.

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” Dara said.

  Charlie didn’t say anything for a moment, and Dara could hear the sound of the store speaker announcing a big sale on big tools for big men.

  “Is it because he works with his hands?” Charlie said. “After all, your father—”

  “That’s not it,” Dara said. “And he doesn’t work with his hands. Does he even work at all? He’s on that phone all day long when he’s supposed to be—”

  “So what is it? Because he’s older? Because he’s not handsome or—”

  “She’s making a spectacle of herself. She’s making a fool of herself.” Though Dara couldn’t say why, exactly. It was so clear. She shouldn’t have to explain.

  Besides, she knew it bothered Charlie too. He had barely looked at Marie since the bruises. He avoided her like she was contagious.

  “I guess,” Dara ventured, “I guess I thought you’d be more upset.”

  There was a silence between them, the line almost crackling. It was like the sulfur that morning, Dara thought. Still hovering.

  “It won’t last,” Charlie said finally. “I promise.”

  * * *

  * * *

  It was time to begin her five o’clock class, but Dara wasn’t ready yet.

  “Fifteen minutes at the barre,” Dara told her assembled students and ducked into the office. “I’ll be back.”

  Charlie had gone to meet with Madame Sylvie and the directors at the Francis J. Ballenger Performing Arts Center to talk about Nutcracker promotion, marketing.

  Marie was playing catch-up in Studio A, working with this year’s Nutcracker tiny Polichinelles who emerge from beneath Mother Ginger’s enormous hoop skirt and gambol across the stage.

  “Écoutez, mes petite chéris . . .” she was saying, her voice with such a lightness to it, so carefree, so pleased with herself. “Oui, oui, plus rapide! Faster!”

  There was now an electrician in Studio B, yet another bill to add to the teetering pile, and Dara could hear Derek’s running commentary on prewar buildings and archaic fuses and the dangers of the grid.

  “Are you sure,” Dara could hear the electrician ask, “you prepped this site according to code?”

  * * *

  * * *

  Sitting in the back office, Dara sorted mail. She smoked a cigarette. The furnace came on, everything rumbling. The spiral staircase trembling behind her.

  Moments later, a scent caught her. She looked behind and noticed Marie’s scarf, that ugly fringed thing, flung across the radiator. A singeing smell wafting.

  Dara reached out and grabbed it, curling it into her fist. Marie will burn this place down if it kills her.

  That was when she saw it. Proof, as if she needed any. A mud track on the third step of the spiral staircase that led to the third floor, to Marie’s futon, her hideout, her love nest. The third step, and the fifth too. It was a sight Dara knew well, mud tracks, his signature tattoo, his imprint all over the studio every day. The tread of natty boots, of a man who goes as he pleases, who knows no boundaries, who leaves messes in his wake.

  * * *

  * * *

  Dara stood on the first step, the stairs shuddering beneath her as she stared at the ugly shoe treads. Then she found herself taking another step.

  There was no one up there, not now.

  From Studio A, she could hear the shaking of the tambourines and Marie’s voice a faint, lilting hum as she guided her girls through the “Mother Ginger” routine.

  She took two more steps, nearing the spiral’s final coil.

  Are you there, she thought suddenly. She nearly said it aloud without knowing what it meant. Are you there? Is who there?

  Stepping backward, she flashed on their mother swaddled up on the third floor after a fight at home with their father. Dara, age fifteen, rushing to the studio with good news (Mother, I’m going to be one of the Dewdrops in The Nutcracker), hearing their mother’s voice upstairs and taking one tentative step after another, the staircase shivering as she did. So unsafe, their mother used to say. Not for you.

  And another voice, a voice saying her mother’s name.

  And she held tight and tighter, her hand gripping the steel so tight it might cut her.

  Mother . . .

  * * *

  * * *

  Dara.”

  Dara turned to the door with a start, jerking her hand from the railing.

  It was Marie, waiting like a cat.

  It was then that she realized she still had Marie’s scarf in her hand, curled up into a ball. Discreetly, she dropped it into her sweater pocket, damp and crushed.

  “What are you doing?” Marie asked, biting her thumbnail, a nervous habit since childhood, but one Dara hadn’t seen in a long time.

  “Nothing,” Dara said, walking back down the steps. “Cleaning the mud tracks maybe.”

  “That’s mine, up there,” Marie said, gesturing to the third floor. “That’s my space.”

  “Is it now,” Dara said, pushing past her. Not liking her tone. “Funny. Because we own the building. Charlie and me. Just like we own the house.”

  Marie stepped back slightly, teetering on one heel.

  “So,” Dara continued, “guess who’s trespassing?”

  Marie stood, her thumb between her teeth, like a child who knows there’s nothing she can say.

  * * *

  * * *

  Dara hadn’t intended to say it. She tried never to mention that kind of thing, the business arrangements. Just like when Marie sold her share of the house to them five years ago to go to Europe. When she returned, Dara was careful never to remind
Marie that she was technically now their guest.

  Marie didn’t really have a home, Dara thought suddenly. A wave of something—sadness—coming over her before she fought it off. Pushed it away.

  * * *

  * * *

  That night, she told Charlie as they sat at the kitchen table drinking refrigerator wine.

  “Well,” Charlie said, “she can do what she wants up there, can’t she?”

  “It’s not appropriate. It’s our place of business.”

  “I don’t know, Dara. But you really shouldn’t be up there. I mean, that’s her home.”

  “That’s not her home,” Dara said. “This is her home.”

  “She left,” Charlie said with a new coolness, his mouth slightly slack, his muscle relaxants taking hold. “Remember.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Dara was getting ready for bed that night when Marie’s scarf fell from her pocket and landed on the carpet like a sad rag, its red polka dots like a clown.

  Swiftly, she picked it up and threw it in the trash. Then reached down and buried the scarf beneath the trash, the old Band-Aids, the bent bobby pins.

  HOT BLONDE

  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.

  All she heard was the soft thrush of Corbin Lesterio’s feet on the floor. The occasional crunch of his knee, the pop of an arching foot. Corbin’s breath, nervous and then calmer. His form strong and then stronger. His bearing becoming, slowly, the bearing of a prince.

  He’d persuaded his father to pay for private lessons to help him with his Nutcracker audition, and then with the part itself. And Corbin was so eager to please, showing her again and again his tour en l’air. Legs together, Dara called out again and again, studying him.

  After, she found herself talking to Corbin in the changing room, chatting about the role of the Nutcracker Prince, helping him with his coat, his hands fumbling with the buttons. Teasing him a little bit about his Adam’s apple, and how it might ruin his form.

  He was so nervous the whole time, his voice speeding up, cracking. He was so nervous and forever blushing, which was so charming.

  * * *

  * * *

  For the first time in days and days, she felt like herself, her studio free of intrusions, the speakers soundless, the drills unplugged, her focus fixed and intent. She wanted to hold on to it.

  Before the arrivals began, the needy, anxious students, whispered chattering and endless preening. Before the parents—Mrs. Briscombe, whose seven-year-old had taken up the habit of eating the drywall, paper, and dirt in Studio B, the endless queries from Dr. Weston, whose daughter Pepper had been caught breaking the shanks of Bailey Bloom’s pointe shoes, which was better than the razor blade but hardly ideal.

  Before Derek. The sound of his lumbering gait, the raucous ring tone, his voice barking or cooing into his phone, talking to parties unknown, or sometimes, loudly, to Bambi, their insurance adjuster and apparently everyone’s, given how much Derek spoke to her and with such familiarity. (Oh-ho! Next time you gotta go to Aruba. Trust me, cocktails on Pelican Pier and you’ll be in heaven. I can get you a deal . . .)

  Before Derek might be watching her from behind the plastic curtain.

  Instead, everything was so innocent, and right.

  It ended quickly, however. Marie descended, her hair tousled and collarbone splotched pink, exuding après-sex smugness.

  Behind her was Derek, wearing yesterday’s shirt untucked, the collar points spread, in stocking feet with gold toes, prim loafers looped by his thick fingers.

  “Sorry,” he said, his voice still thick with sleep, when he spotted Dara saying goodbye to Corbin. “Was hoping to find a coffeepot or something.” Then a pause before looking at Corbin, then back at Dara.

  “Didn’t mean to interrupt,” he added, smiling.

  Dara looked at him, said nothing.

  “Madame Durant, look,” Corbin was saying, his left leg extended backward, his center line strong, his swayback now gone, a perfect piqué arabesque, a thing of beauty that made Dara’s hands tremble at her sides. “Look at me.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The rain came all day that day, painting the windows, shuddering along the awnings, filling the building’s swollen gutters.

  From Studio B, its windows forever open to release the dust, came the incessant metallic plink of drops against all the plastic sheeting. Surely, Dara thought, they could close the windows for a few hours. Surely, because she couldn’t even hear any work being done.

  Finally, when Dara noticed Chloë Lin nearly slip on a growing puddle, she traversed the matted path to Studio B, where she found only Gaspar, sweeping the foam-and-wood subfloor with long, methodical strokes, his headphones on.

  “What’s going on?” Dara said.

  Gaspar explained that a delivery of subflooring had ended up at the Durant house rather than the studio, so Mr. Derek and Benny had gone to retrieve it.

  “Yes,” Charlie confirmed, arriving late after a trip to the bank. “Some kind of mix-up with the vendor.”

  “A half day that cost us,” Dara said. “And I still haven’t seen anything from the insurance company. How are we paying for all this?”

  “We’re not, yet,” Charlie said. Then turning, his hand on his wool scarf. “Is it me or is it damp in here?”

  * * *

  * * *

  The maritime conditions did not forestall more Clara drama, Dara eventually ordering a sobbing Pepper Weston from rehearsal. Bailey Bloom was not pretty enough, Pepper insisted, wringing her eyes, and she hyperextended. She should be Clara, she was supposed to be Clara, and it was not too late to make a change. Her father told her so.

  “There’s always next Christmas,” Dara said, nudging her into the changing room, “if you work hard. Much harder than you are now.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Later, she ran into Derek in the parking lot, one of his phones forever at his ear, gesturing commands at Benny and Gaspar ahead of him carrying heavy bags of grout, cement, whatever else had somehow ended up at their house, clogging their driveway, the truck bed filling with rain.

  She tried to move around him, but he kept blocking her, like a little boy might do, a little boy with a crush he didn’t understand.

  Up close, she saw a signet ring gleaming from his right hand, his ring finger.

  Up close, the leather from his car coat reminded her of something. She couldn’t name it, but she pulled back quickly, turning away.

  So rare that she was so close to him, but he was standing so close to her, the smell of the leather, the powder room’s oozing soap.

  “Nice house you got over there, on Sycamore,” he said. “Big, a beast. They don’t make ’em like that anymore, eh?”

  Forever that blinding white smile, that signet ring flashing. Aftershave like burying your head in animal hide, in fur.

  Dara nodded, trying to move past. Why is he talking about our house?

  “Was that the house you grew up in?” he asked, tilting his head. Making conversation as if they were friendly, as if everything was fine and he wasn’t debasing her sister nightly.

  “Yes,” Dara said. “I need to get back inside—”

  “It’s awfully big for just the two of you. Have you ever thought of selling it?”

  “No. Never.”

  “You may not see its value on the open market,” he continued. “That part of town is no longer the wrong side of the tracks. The tracks moved. You could flip it like a flapjack. Make a pretty penny.”

  “Absolutely not,” Dara said. “That’s our family home. We would never sell it.”

  Derek lifted his eyebrow
s.

  “I’m starting to get the feeling you don’t like me,” he said, smiling again, this time almost as though embarrassed, or something. “But there’s no reason we can’t be friends. And your sister . . .”

  “I don’t have to like you,” Dara said, moving past him, a blast of the leather scent in her face. “You’ll be gone soon.”

  The look on his face, surprise and something else, a wounded look, something.

  It was satisfying, unexpected. A little boy’s face, his mother abandoning him at the mall.

  She could feel him looking at her even as she walked away, walking as fast as she could.

  * * *

  * * *

  The conversation hummed in her ear unpleasantly long after. What did he know about their house anyway? Yes, it was old, leaky, drafty, their house. There were uneven floors, windows painted shut, plaster crumbling, and roots growing in the pipes.

  And it was big, far too big, their parents managing a down payment when the neighborhood was on its heels. No grocery store in five miles but at least three bars. No streetlights their first ten years there, no matter how many times their father called the city.

  And it was true that the neighborhood had transformed in recent years, the corner deli replaced with a light and bright café, the public pool filled with concrete and replaced with a health spa, and all those creaky, charming prewar houses sold, razed, and replaced overnight with gaudy palaces.

  The house was nothing to a man like Derek. The land was everything.

  A man like Derek, he could never understand it was their home. It was their whole childhood. More than that, Dara thought, her eyes blurring.

  Suddenly, she remembered something Marie had said, months ago, before she moved out.

  They had been looking out the front window at the old weather-beaten colonial across the street, the sold sign on the weedy lawn. The latest of many.