How she tilted her head so far back, you could see all the flames climb up her throat. The flames like a scarf swallowing her throat.
The Fire Eater, the Sword Swallower. They were both women, dark and fair and fearless, their heads pitched back, their mouths wide open, everything laid bare.
They could take these things inside them and emerge unscathed. Dangerous things, deadly things. They could take these things inside and remain untouched, immaculate. The same forever. Forever the same.
THE DOOR FROM CHILDHOOD
All evening, Dara and Marie sat two rows apart, going over The Nutcracker cues with the Ballenger stage manager and with silver-haired Madame Sylvie, the head of the Mes Filles Ballet Company, their partner for more than a dozen holiday seasons and with their mother long before that. Madame Sylvie, who served as their legal guardian when their parents died and who signed the consent to let Charlie and Dara marry at the tender age of sixteen. Anyone who’s been through what you three have, she’d said, has wisdom far beyond your years.
Every year, Madame Sylvie’s dancers performed the “adult” roles and the most technically advanced ones: Clara’s parents, the adult partygoers, the luminous Sugar Plum Fairy, and Clara’s godfather, the enigmatic Drosselmeier, who appears in his white wig and his eyepatch to give Clara the Nutcracker doll and launch her dark, shimmering adventure.
“I think you’re going to love this year’s Drosselmeier,” she whispered to Dara with a wink. “He’s quite beguiling.”
Every year, Madame Sylvie, with her deep maple-syrup tan and silver bangles from her annual trip to Anguilla, would sit with them through the cues, through the treacherous early tech rehearsals and the frantic dress rehearsals. She always watched with such calm, her knitting needles in hand, endlessly clacking, a pile of wool, her eyes scanning the stage over the top of her reading glasses.
The cues, there were hundreds of them, and they rarely changed. Everyone had their expectations, many of these parents having seen their first Nutcracker when their mother still led the school. It was foolish to amend anything, to redo what worked so well, what made everyone so happy. Everything the same as it always was.
Except this year, Dara sat with Madame Sylvie while Marie crouched two rows ahead, jotting notes with a dull pencil and doodling countless sketches of pointe shoes, a habit since childhood, the toes of her shoes always sharp as blades, like a guillotine falling.
To Dara, it was conspicuous, even aggressive, but Madame Sylvie didn’t appear to notice, needles rattling, eyes lifting again and again to the stage.
* * *
*
Charlie couldn’t join us?” Madame Sylvie asked.
“No,” Dara said. “His back’s been bothering him.”
Dara noticed Marie’s head twitch two rows ahead, roots showing now beneath the snowy dye.
“Every time I see your husband,” Madame Sylvie said, “I think of how much your mother adored him. Mon gar?on chéri!”
“Yes,” Dara said. “She did.”
The dancer playing Drosselmeier had taken center stage, adjusting his black eyepatch as the lighting crew, somewhere up above, experimented with gels, with top lights, so that the white of his powdered wig glowed, drawing the eye, holding it.
“See! Isn’t he something?” Madame Sylvie whispered, feigning to fan herself with a free hand. “But then Drosselmeier’s always been my favorite.”
Dara squinted up at the stage. He was older for a dancer, maybe thirty—maybe even as old as Charlie—but with a heavy brow and thicker neck. He reminded her of so many other Drosselmeiers over the years, with their felt eyepatches and their wigs like great clouds, how scary they were when she was very young, in the way children love to be scared.
“When he makes his first entrance, you think he’s the villain. I mean, the eyepatch!” Madame Sylvie said. “But then little Clara is drawn to him. It confuses her. It excites her. It confuses us, excites us. It’s a seduction.”
“I suppose,” Dara said, her eyes flashing on Marie, also watching the stage now, her fingers curled around the top of her notepad.
At age four or five, Marie would shove her fingers into her mouth, her chin shaking, at the sight of Drosselmeier. What’s he going to do? she’d ask, jerking Dara’s arm. Don’t take it! she once cried out when that year’s Clara reached for the proffered Nutcracker doll in Drosselmeier’s spindly white hands.
“I mean, he’s no Freddy, but . . .” Madame Sylvie said with a wink.
Dara smiled faintly. A young dancer named Freddy had played Drosselmeier four years in a row beginning when Dara was ten or eleven. How she and Marie desired him, so handsome in his waistcoat, so elegant in his dark cape. How they would talk about him at night in their bunkbed, Marie on top, legs twitching all night, Dara on the bottom, her foot dangling through the footboard, stretching her feet, her blackened toes. How Marie wanted to, inexplicably, pull Drosselmeier’s eyepatch from his face and run her hand over the sunken hole she imagined there. How Dara liked to place herself near him in the party scene and brush against him, to feel his hipbone jutting, to push herself into his waistcoat.
“Can we get him the prop?” Madame Sylvie called out.
And someone appeared onstage to hand Drosselmeier one of the six Nutcracker dolls they would have on hand for the performances.
“Much better,” Madame Sylvie said. “What is Drosselmeier without his Nutcracker?”
Dara remembered watching their mother tell a dozen Claras that, when Drosselmeier gives her the Nutcracker, she must feel as if it comes alive in her hand.
Dara remembered wanting to hold the Nutcracker too. It seemed like a magic totem. A totem that becomes a boy, the Nutcracker Prince.
“C’est très érotique,” Madame Sylvie was saying, voice low and cracking now. “She becomes fixated with her little Nutcracker. So fixated she sneaks back out to find him after the family goes to bed. She falls asleep with it in her arms, lost in fantasy until the doll comes alive as a full-size man. It’s a parable, no? Of first sexual experience. The pleasure and danger. Drosselmeier seduced her. And she is glad.”
Madame Sylvie’s needles tick-ticked and Marie’s pencil flew.
“But you can’t let the Claras know any of this, of course,” Madame Sylvie said. “We must keep their innocence intact. That’s what we must do with our Claras. But on some level they already know, don’t they?”
Two rows apart, but Dara could hear Marie breathing. She could feel her like a little girl panting, overworked. Like their father used to say to Marie, a day of dancing, her body whirring and unstoppable, Little girl, you run so hot, you’re gonna burn up.
“You know who he is? Drosselmeier?” Madame Sylvie said, smiling into her knitwork.
Dara wanted to leave suddenly.
“He’s the promise of what’s beyond the door,” Madame Sylvie said, her voice husky now, pointed. “The door from childhood.”
* * *
*
When they were finally finished, close to ten o’clock, Madame Sylvie pulled Dara aside and said, smiling, “I lost a husband and two lovers during Nutcracker season. I’m sure you and Marie will make up on the other side of Clara.”
* * *
*
All Dara wanted was to get Marie alone, to get some answers. What did she mean by calling the county register? What do you—what does he want with our house?
But by the time they moved through the last set of cues, the elaborate sleigh flight that takes Clara away to unknown lands, she couldn’t find her.
Hurrying to the lobby, she looked through the large glass walls only to see Marie disappearing into the evening mist like a phantom. Her orange car receding in the distance, like a faint flame.
HE’S IN THE HOUSE