It reminded Dara of something their mother, whose hair fell nearly to her waist, always said: Never let anyone under thirty touch your hair.
The worst part is the name, Mrs. Bloom had confided to Dara, blushing and tucking phantom wisps into her chignon.
Hot Buttered Blonde, she whispered, blushing again.
* * *
*
As she was leaving, Dara spotted Marie lingering in the darkened Studio B, creeping along the tarp, her bony feet coated in dust.
She watched as her sister knelt down and ran her finger along the snaky seam where the wall had stood, the one the contractor had torn through, like a sideshow dare.
“Boo,” Dara said, sneaking behind her.
Marie looked up, her face aflame, that morning’s lipstick on her teeth.
* * *
*
I think Marie’s got a crush,” Charlie said that night. “On the contractor.”
“What do you mean?” Dara asked, shaking loose Charlie’s vitamins and herbal remedies, setting out his daily allotment.
Charlie shrugged. “Just the way she looks at him.”
“That’s impossible,” Dara said. Marie was a person who kept to herself. After a few semi-tragic romances with fellow dancers in her early twenties, after a prolonged fixation on a married cellist of some note who passed through town a few times a year and dallied with her heart, Marie was a lone wolf.
“Marie’s bored,” Dara said. “Or something.”
“Marie,” Charlie said softly, “is lonely.”
Dara looked up from the pile of pills and said nothing.
THE PINK
Within a few days, it was quieter, the initial demolition past and the air heavy with new smells, sulfurous plaster, chalky dry wall, the tang of mildew.
Dara was sure the parents would protest, but there were few complaints. They were too consumed with The Nutcracker, when they would receive the rehearsal schedule, whether or not last year’s sound system issues would be resolved, and isn’t it time to replace the mouse heads? That glue is definitely toxic.
She smoked restlessly between classes and marveled at Marie, who seemed to be unaffected, leading her four-year-olds through hops and jumps. The endless plonk-plonk of the piano and Marie’s faint, high voice, arms up, fingers, fingers to the sky.
“He’ll move fast,” Charlie kept saying. “He’s in high demand.”
But Dara didn’t see how that was possible based on the state of Studio B, which resembled the scooped-clean inside of a volcano.
“I promise,” Charlie said.
The plonk-plonk and Marie flitting from corner to corner with her little girls, and not noticing the clouds of dust wafting in, or the occasional trills of the drill, the sharp punch of the hammer.
And poor Bailey Bloom, her eyelids covered with dust, approaching them. “My mom can’t come here anymore,” she said dolefully, which was how she said everything. “Construction makes her sick.”
“Well,” Charlie said, “she can start coming again when rehearsals start at the Ballenger.”
“Everything will be better then,” Dara said. “Everything.”
* * *
*
You wanted this,” Charlie reminded her later. “It’s only been a few days.”
“You wanted this,” Dara reminded him. “And then we all did.”
* * *
*
Maybe it was because he was always there, the contractor. And you always knew it, whether he was shouting instructions to Benny and Gaspar (“Get that hot mud, it shapes up nice and quick”) or enmeshed in one of his long phone calls conducted as he sat on the open windowsill or paced the entrance area (“So I told her, put it in an envelope if it looks that good . . .”), his wheezing laugh echoing through every studio.
And then the meal times, delivery boys streaming in and out, their faces red from the chill, delivering greasy breakfast sandwiches, submarines for lunch, the mid-afternoon pizza whose oily smell made all the students sick with disgust and longing.
The students staring with such yearning, half of them subsisting on strange diets Dara did not support—lettuce leaves with hot sauce, cotton balls coated with ranch.
* * *
*
There was no time for distractions. The growing Nutcracker pressures, the urgency on the students’ faces—it was consuming, and Dara could hear their mother’s voice in her head. Never forget, ma chère, each year is someone’s first Nutcracker. Then adding, If you can give them that, you have them for life.
Dara knew it was true. She still remembered every exquisite detail of her first year dancing in it, four years old, playing one of the Kingdom of Sweets Polichinelles, the dozen little clowns who pop loose—surprise!—from under Mother Ginger’s giant hoop skirt to the audience’s delighted gasps.
How, for so long, it seemed—though it was surely less than a minute—she scurried blindly beneath Mother’s hoops, crinolines hot against her face, hidden from the audience but feeling their presence, their anticipation.
How she could barely breathe, how she couldn’t wait to burst out, leaping forward and bounding across the stage, drunk from the escape, and, somehow, from that captivity.
* * *
*
It just breaks my heart,” Mr. Lesterio said, furrowing his brow.
Dara hadn’t even noticed him standing in the doorway. She’d been lost in concentration, watching his son Corbin, feet like sparrow wings, as he practiced his pas de chat, his knees apart, legs high.
“The guys on the soccer team found out,” Mr. Lesterio said discreetly. “They call him Dancing Queen. That’s the nicest thing they call him.”
“He really shouldn’t be playing soccer,” Dara said. “He’s our Nutcracker Prince. He could injure himself.”
Mr. Lesterio shook his head, curling his hands around his coffee thermos. It wasn’t the response he’d expected. Dara thought about what Charlie always said, about softening her tone with the parents. Their mother never had, she’d remind him.
“Ms. Durant, you have to understand,” Mr. Lesterio was saying as Corbin, distracted, was watching them both now, stuttering through his glissade. “I lettered in four sports and spent two years in the U.S. Army Reserve.”
“If he were injured in a game,” Dara said, “you’d never forgive yourself.”
You must be firm, their mother always said about parents, or they will dominate you.
Mr. Lesterio didn’t say anything for a moment.
They both looked as Corbin landed, sweeping his hair from his eyes as a pink frill of girls in the back of the room snuck glances, whispering behind their hands.
“It embarrasses him,” Mr. Lesterio said, nearly under his breath. “Being looked at like that.”
“He wouldn’t be dancing if he didn’t want to be looked at,” Dara said.
But of course Corbin—his fine features and frame, the way he moved—would have been noticed anywhere, under any circumstances. Those things, however, fathers were blind to.
“Every day,” Mr. Lesterio said, cradling the thermos now, holding it close to his chest, “I expect him to come home and say, I can’t take the pink anymore.”
Dara looked at him. “Don’t count on it.”
* * *
*
You showed him,” someone said, low and intimate.
Dara, standing at the barre, looked in the mirror and there was Derek the contractor, emerging from Studio B, running his hand through his dark scrubby hair.
“I can’t take the pink anymore,” Derek said, imitating Mr. Lesterio’s gruff tone, his squeamishness. “Get a load of that.”
“Can I help you with something?” Dara said. His ingratiation worse, somehow, than his thoughtlessness, his careless swings with his drill, his sledgehammer.
“Your John Hancock,” he said, handing her a sheaf of papers. Their construction contract, barely more than a computer template, something called “Contractor Services,” its corners bent, a copy of a copy.
“I thought we were done with the paperwork,” Dara said.
“Bureaucrats,” Derek said. An answer that wasn’t an answer.
“I’ll show these to my husband,” Dara said. “He handles the administration.”
Derek nodded and tipped his head. He did a funny little backward dance like a courtier bidding adieu to the queen.