*
After all, Charlie had been in their lives for more than twenty years, since he first showed up in their mother’s ballet class at eleven years old, the prettiest boy any of them had ever seen.
The prettiest girl too, joked their father, batting his eyelashes.
Their mother doted on Charlie—her star student, her favorite, her cher Charlie—one of the few boys, the most wildly talented, and eventually he came to be a part of the family, too, staying over for dinner several nights a week when his mother, a nurse, worked late.
Their mother loved having a young man in the house. Their father worked long hours. When he was home, he disappeared into his den. Through the crack in the door, Dara would watch him collapse in his recliner for the ten o’clock news, a six-pack of Old Style on the quaking TV tray beside him.
When Charlie was thirteen, his mother had to move to some damp, distant corner of England to take care of her ailing parents. There was a day of tears in the house until Dara and Marie’s mother decided Charlie should simply stay with them in order to continue his work with the studio. A boy was a valuable thing.
So, for a month, which became nearly a year, which became forever, Charlie moved in with them.
Dara and Marie could barely handle having a boy in the house. Marie began peeing in the neighbors’ yard, too afraid that Charlie might hear her.
How strange to have him in their private space of dotted underpants slung over the shower rod, the stench from the mounded ballet slippers, their mother walking around in her silky robe—her “glamour gown,” the girls called it—her legs bare and mashed and mauled dancer’s feet, feet like a day laborer’s hands, their father used to say.
How their father agreed to the new arrangement was a mystery. Once, they heard him grumble to their mother that she better be prepared because a boy that age is just gonna be jerking himself off the minute the lights go out.
Dara’s mother said nothing, coughing lightly.
You’ll see when you wash the sheets.
* * *
*
Charlie slept on the pullout sofa in the living room.
In the morning, before Charlie slid the mattress back into the sofa’s mouth, Dara would press her face against the sheets. Marie would look for telltale stains.
Dara liked to go into the bathroom right after Charlie showered, to smell his smells, to touch the sink counter and imagine Charlie’s clothes set there, his undershorts.
Dara liked to stand in the shower and imagine Charlie standing there.
* * *
*
They had been each other’s firsts, age fourteen. It happened in the basement, the makeshift studio next to the chugging washer and dryer. Each of them stretching on the floor, watching each other from opposite corners, watching each other in the mirrors their mother had mounted on the walls with electrical tape.
It happened in a blur of heat, Dara’s breath catching, and suddenly, she was crawling toward him, her palms slapping on the floor. Her form divine. It was like a moment in a dance. The serpent attacks. The lion seizes its prey.
She crawled toward him and then on top of him, pushing his shoulders to the floor, and he looked surprised the whole time and she wasn’t even sure it had happened until they were both shaking and wet.
* * *
*
Dara should never have told Marie, who immediately told their mother, the words slipping helplessly from her mouth, or so she claimed. Their mother, however, only tilted her head and murmured, C’est logique, c’est logique.
(Later, their mother confided to Dara, If it had been Marie, I would have worried. With you, ma fille mature, I never worry.)
Marie wouldn’t speak to Dara for days, abandoning their bunkbed and sleeping instead in the TV room, on the carpet next to their father’s recliner, the two of them watching late-night talk shows, their father letting Marie sip his beer.
Every evening when he wasn’t traveling, he’d come home from work and navigate stacks of pointe shoes, towers of them in the corners, tights hanging on doorknobs. Music, forever, from the old stereo console, from the turntable upstairs. The sound, forever, of the barre squeaking, Dara’s or Marie’s eager hands on it, their mother’s voice intoning, Lift through the leg! Turn that foot out! Their house was all ballet, all the time.
The only room left untouched was the den, their father’s sanctuary, with the cabinet TV he refused to throw away, insisting even the tubes were valuable antiques, and the shag carpet that offended their mother and the Igloo cooler alongside the furry nubbed recliner, the autumn floral with the corduroy ridges that Marie liked to run her hands along, sitting on their father’s lap, sharing popcorn from the foil dome and watching their dad’s monster movies, dubbed to English and with great spouts of the thickest, reddest blood she’d ever seen.
Marie was the only one allowed to join him in there, the only one permitted to talk to their father at all while he was “unwinding” from his day and it was best to avoid him. Marie, who would curl up in his Pendleton blanket and watch Night Stalker reruns until their father drifted into a beery snore and their mother dispatched Dara to get her sister to bed.
Dara didn’t want to spend time in there anyway. The room smelled funny and there were always crumbs in the carpet that she felt under her feet. Dara would so rather sit at their mother’s dressing table and put her fingers in all the lotions and creams and tonics and watch their mother do stretches on the floor and tell her stories about the time she danced at the Royal Opera House in London and drown in the perfumes and loveliness of their mother’s attentions.
* * *
*
Soon enough, Dara began sneaking Charlie into the bunkbed with her, both of them curled together, their bodies locked. They did all kinds of things, figuring it all out. If their mother knew, she never said.
Marie sleeping like a kitten in the bunk above.
Or so they thought. A few weeks later, Marie spilled all to their father too. He raged for days, telling their mother she had only herself to blame, turning their house into a brothel. Their father took Charlie into the garage and had a long talk with him and Charlie returned an hour later, his face white and his wrists red.
He told me, Charlie confided to Dara years later, that I would never be any kind of man if I stayed here. He told me that no man could be any kind of man in this house. And then he started to cry.
A boy was a valuable thing.
* * *
*
Charlie had moved in and never left. Finally, Dara always said, explaining it to others, one of us had to marry him.
And so, they went to city hall one year to the day of the car accident, their father’s Buick drifting across the icy-ribbed highway into oncoming traffic.
The driver behind them dazedly told a reporter it would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been so terrible. Watching, he said, it looked like their parents’ car was almost flying.
* * *
*
When I was a child and she was a child, recited Charlie, the poem that became their vow. It was their mother’s favorite poem and you didn’t usually read poems at city hall weddings, but Charlie insisted.
We loved with a love that was more than love—
* * *
*
Marie had served as witness, wearing glitter on her eyes and their mother’s rabbit blanket as a fur stole, and had cried endlessly at the Italian restaurant after. Had cried and held on to her sister and crawled onto her lap.
Marie, who they promised would live with them forever.
Dara and Charlie moved into her parents’ room, even slept on their sheets that first night, their wedding night, before Dara took them all to Goodwill the next day.
FIRE, FIRE