“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