Dara could have left, could have plugged her ears. She had already unpacked and repacked and unpacked her bag three times. She wanted to leave to show Marie how little she cared.
In the end, though, she merely stood there, watching Marie pull two cigarettes from the secret stash in the potted snake plant because there was no smoking at the Durant School of Dance, their mother’s oldest rule.
The matches shook in Dara’s hand.
They both lit up and Marie told everything.
* * *
*
It started two mornings ago, just after six. Unable to sleep, Marie had slunk down the spiral stairs.
She didn’t know anyone was there. No one should have been there.
She started warming up in Studio A, circling her ankles, hips, and shoulders, stretching herself.
First, she heard the echoey sound of a phone vibrating on the floor. It was coming from Studio B, from behind the plastic curtain.
Then she heard the contractor saying something, talking to someone. Talking about how he’s got a lock on something and no one’s going to fuck it up for him and she can say whatever she wants and play the holy martyr, the virgin bride, but he has the texts to—
There was something in the gruffness of his tone that set her pulse racing, that sent her on her feet. Sent her skittering to the pocket powder room, where she set her hands on the corners of the vanity and took a breath.
She could still hear the voice, his voice, and it was making her feel funny inside, like that time she stuck her hand in the hole in the wall at a haunted house and felt a snaky tongue reach her fingers.
But the voice was swiftly louder: Hold up, I’ll call you back, I think one of the sisters is here . . . and his footsteps like a monster movie.
She pressed the toilet handle gently so it barely flushed.
The cheap door popped open like a cork and he was suddenly there.
She thought maybe she let out a sharp cry of surprise, but maybe she didn’t.
It was so fast, after all, the smile on his face, his blistering cologne, the heel of his hand on her shoulder.
What —she started.
I can’t wait any longer, he said, or she did.
He twirled her around like they were dancing.
Tugging her sweatpants down, hand pressed on her leotard, and her heart going like a chop saw.
The mirror, limescaled, showed her herself and she had never seen herself look like this.
She grasped the vanity edges, bracing herself. It was so exciting, she couldn’t bear it.
When he hooked his finger around the loop of her leotard crotch, tearing it cleanly, she gasped.
Everything was going and the vanity shook and she felt so strong like she might tear it loose from its foundation.
The feeling of him, so immense, ten times too big for that tiny pocket, for tiny her, and he pushed himself into her, growling in her ear, Is this what you want?
And it turned out it was. It was, it was.
* * *
*
He assaulted you,” Dara said, her voice throaty, the cigarette blooming.
“No,” Marie said. Pausing, trying to find more words. Giving up. “No.”
* * *
*
He left first, smiling and grabbing her face for their first smeary kiss. The kiss felt more intimate than anything else, the smack of his bristle, the heat of his breath—mint and tar.
(“Oh, that kiss, wet and rough,” Marie said now, tightening her legs, her hands on her thighs.)
The door shut behind him soundlessly, the pocket open, then shut.
She sat down on the toilet seat, her right leg shaking so hard she couldn’t do anything.
Her right leg shaking like a newborn foal trying to stand, trying to make the limbs work.
The paper towel up and down her thighs, the smell of everything in that tiny space.
She sat down again.
She couldn’t stop grinning.
* * *
*
When she came out a few minutes later, she heard him tell Gaspar to go and fix the bathroom vanity. It got busted and you got no idea how.
She saw him through the plastic, a red curl on his neck, which she knew was the red curl from her own fingernail, pressing into him, gouging.
* * *
*
You’re burning.”
“What?” Dara said.
Marie reached out with licked fingers and snuffed Dara’s burning cigarette. It was only then Dara felt it, shaking it off, sitting up straight.
* * *
*
There was something wrong about the story—or a hundred things wrong, but also something missing. Dara couldn’t figure it out until she did.
“Why were you wearing a leotard?” Dara said, remembering Marie’s white leotard the other day, and that very morning. Pearl white, bone white. Degas white.
“What?”
“Nearly every day this week. You never wear one to warm up. Or to teach. You wear leggings, shorts. Not a leotard. And not a white one.”
Marie looked at her, blinking her eyes.
“You wanted him to look at you,” Dara said. “You wanted to entice him.”
“It’s just a leotard,” Marie said, averting her eyes.
* * *
*
Dara was thinking of something else. The day before, after an exhausting fouetté demonstration, a dozen whipping pirouettes, for all the potential Sugar Plum Fairies (Leg higher, whip, whip, whip, relax that hip), she’d seen Derek staring at her from the doorway, the plastic curtain draped over one shoulder like a counterfeit cape. The stare was hard and insistent and it was only later, turning, that she saw what he’d been looking at: the sweat on her leotard, under her arms, between and under her breasts and blooming darkly between her legs. And, as she turned again, a slow fouetté, a dark line between her buttocks.
It reminded her of something. How when they were twelve, thirteen, fourteen, Dara and Marie would sweat so much down there their mother would only let them wear black leotards so you couldn’t see it. So it looked not like a stain but a shadow.
Me and my shadow, Marie used to say.
* * *
*
Remember when he tore down the wall?” Marie was saying, clasping Dara’s hands, pressing Dara’s ash-scorched knuckles.
Dara pulled her hands back. She rose. She said she had to leave.
But Marie was not done with her yet. Rising, she followed Dara as she gathered her things once more. As she put on her coat and closed the window and checked the ashtray for burning stubs. She followed Dara, explaining how she’d snuck down to Studio B late that night after the walls came down, after everyone was gone and the air still thick with dust. How she’d stepped barefoot across the plastic sheeting to the far corner where it sat, the thing.
Derek’s long-frame hammer, leaning against the wall, hickory handled, its steel head glinting.
She (Can you believe this, Dara?) dropped to her knees, touching it. Finally, lifting it, feeling its weight. It tingled under her fingertips.
What must it be like, she wondered, to so utterly destroy something?
* * *
*
I told him,” Marie said. “I told him later. What it felt like. Watching him take it down. Do you know what I said?”
“I don’t care,” Dara said, her fingers to her brow.
But she knew what Marie had said.
I want you to tear me open.
It made Dara want to laugh, to gag, to cry.
Dara looked at her sister, this little pervert, and said nothing.
I want you to tear me apart.
GASH
After, Dara was so happy to leave the studio, to retreat to the house, to leave them to it, to whatever they did and would do, Marie and that man.
The studio was tainted now, and home forever felt safe, reassuring. Setting foot inside, she felt her shoulders settle, her hand touching all the familiar doorknobs, the light cord in the hallway that you had to pull twice.
The more she thought about it, the angrier she was at herself. For listening to Marie, for indulging her in this troubling behavior. Taunting behavior.
But then Marie hadn’t been herself in a long time, since she moved out of the house and became a squatter in their own place of business. Since she left in the middle of the night, heaving a pair of milk crates and one overstuffed shopping bag out the front door of their home, onto the uneven pavement, stumbling into the waiting Shamrock cab. Later, they found the message taped on their bedroom door. “Gone for air. Not coming back.”
* * *