*
In the morning, she slid his shirt over his head, tentatively dressing him, his body rigid and afraid. This part was always sad.
It was like he’d given her something and then taken it away.
It would, she knew, be weeks or months before it came again. The lightning bolt splitting his shoulder blades. The lightning bolt that brought them, fleetingly, right to the center of things, shuddering them both to life. You shouldn’t wish for such things. Yet Dara did.
* * *
*
You will never have to reckon with pain, their mother told them long ago. You both understood it from the start.
They never even thought of it as pain.
Once in a while, their mother came to breakfast with a purple hinge of skin over one eye, or a bruised cheek. Their father at the coffee maker with tiny marks like red stitches up his neck, blaming the cat, even though the cat had no claws and had disappeared days ago anyway.
No one said anything, though sometimes Marie would want to touch their mother’s face, her heavy-lidded eye, her twisted elbow, and then she would cry.
Never cry over pain, their mother told them. Those are wasted tears.
She explained how, if you were a dancer, you were always protected.
Feet strapped into pointe shoes, body strapped into a leotard and tights, hair strapped into a bun—no one could touch you, your entire life.
ANIMALS
A week, more or less.
That was all the time it took, Dara would marvel later.
That was all the time it took to eat the apple, for Eden to fall.
* * *
*
It was the following morning, a week after he’d started with them. The contractor. Derek.
Dara arrived at the studio early, and alone.
She’d fantasized Charlie might wake cured, thanks to her ministrations. But when he’d sat down that morning to put on his shoes, his face went white and stricken. Dara settled him on the worn chaise in the bedroom (the fainting sofa, their mother called it), its tufts settling to flatness, its velvet shiny with age. There, he awaited a call from his PT, hoping she could fit him in today, could soothe him with her firm hands, a mysterious knuckle technique that left him breathless.
Dara arrived at the studio early, and alone, and immediately heard the sounds.
* * *
*
The thick plastic curtain across Studio B, its strips rippling from the furnace huffs.
Approaching, her pace slowing, Dara could see something behind it.
Approaching, she heard the sounds.
The sounds of her sister, sounds she knew so well. The short, nervous breaths like after a near fall. Soft groans like when she hyperextended her knee. But then a low moan she’d never heard before, ever.
She moved closer and thought, Oh, no, she’s hurt herself.
The blur of her sister’s body—the flesh of her flesh, the sweated sheer of that white leotard—moving.
* * *
*
Like animals, she said to herself later. Like animals.
* * *
*
Dara’s finger V-ing, splitting the plastic strips, squinting between them to see.
Her sister’s palms slapped on the floor, her knees grinding against it, head thrown back, her neck long and snaky, her hips narrow and relentless.
That’s not how she looks, Dara thought, but she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of anything.
That’s not how I look.
* * *
*
Dara’s fingers on the curtain, hot to the touch from the breathless furnace.
Her sister on all fours and behind her, that thing, grunting. Red T-shirt rippling like a bullfighter’s cape. The laugh that seemed caught in his throat.
The whir of her leotard, bone-white, its crotch wrenched to one side.
One breast slipping loose from the half-tugged leotard, his belt buckle clack-clack-clacking.
His blue hands clamped on her shoulders, the bright blue nitrile gloves coated in dust.
Oh, Marie’s mouth open like a baby doll’s, her eyes clicking back like a baby doll’s.
And the sounds coming from her mouth, sweet and surprised.
The curtain, turning everything into a funhouse mirror.
And through its rippled plastic, her sister, face tight with feeling. Her knees blazing red the rest of the day.
* * *
*
Give me that, he was saying. Red Riding Hood’s wolf. Grunting words.
Show me. Wider. Let me see all of it.
The gloves falling to the floor like blue birds. His hands, the slap of his undone belt.
Now here, here. Open, open. All those pretty teeth. Pretty tongue.
Marie turning, her mouth wide, waiting.
* * *
*
Marie. Marie. What did he do to you?
Marie. What have you done.
* * *
*
Dara hid in the stairwell, palms clammy, mind racing, until she heard a door closing, the fan in the powder room burring to life. Marie’s footsteps like a feral cat’s claws on smooth wood. She imagined it. Marie in the powder room, its fan wailing now, a spin and tug of the towel dispenser. Marie cleaning herself, running a scratchy towel between her trembling thighs. Marie dirty. Dirty Marie.
I like the pink, she thought suddenly, then covered her mouth. She might be sick.
Minutes passed. Dara hurried, head down, to the back office. Then came the sudden, piercing fuzz of a drill, and, moments later, the hum of Benny’s motor scooter outside, the chattering of arriving students, some mild changing-room teasing of Bailey Bloom, that slippery whiff of a girl, now dubbed Bailey Boom after falling three times yesterday while practicing jumping from Clara’s bed, and, somehow, everything kept going.
Within an hour, Dara was standing amid the whorls of smooth-haired girls in their pattering pink slippers, the “Waltz of the Flowers” plinking through the speakers, the crush of parents in overcoats with phones and tall cups of takeout coffee and hands reaching to smooth their daughters’ hair, to unstick the leotards from the clefts of their bottoms.
* * *
*
All day, Dara taught in Studio C, barking instructions (I see rubber legs. They should be scissors!), adjusting the girls with her hands, shaping a foot, turning a leg, as the power saw next door thundered, the floor shaking from it. We can’t have this. We can’t do this. We must correct this.
The girls’ teeth rattling, and their laughter, giddy and confused.
All day, Dara taught, she made corrections, she issued commands.
Get that leg behind. Eyes up. Rib cage closed. Chin up, lift, lift . . .
She vowed to think about none of it, focusing instead on the rhythm of class, the unending, unbending flow of repetition. Tendu, front, side, back. The same Nutcracker movement, strings echoing jollily through the speaker. Il faut le répéter, as their mother always said, pour affiner.
Still, it sat in her brain like a spider.
Sneaking glances into Studio A. Sneaking glances at Marie, standing before her bumblebee throng of six-year-olds, their errant hands always running up and down the soft front of their leotards, their downy skin quilling beneath.
Marie, with what seemed a slight curl of her lip as though smiling to herself. A slight tremor to her hands, the way she kept touching herself discreetly, her hand on her neck, her arm across her chest, brushing against her breasts.
When Dara passed her at one point, she caught a whiff of it, of them. She covered her nose, her mouth.
Marie at the mirror, teaching the little girls. But all Dara could think of was Marie in Studio B that morning, with her red, rubbed-raw knees and her plaster-spackled palms and that sly little smile on her face that made Dara feel hot and enraged.
In Studio B, Benny and Gaspar had covered all the mirrors with some kind of protective film that looked like smoke. Like there was smoke everywhere from some kind of fire no one could see. Was that how Marie could do it? Could let her body—make her body—do those things with that man? She, who was trained, raised to make her body only do beautiful things.