In moments, they’ll all be transformed, Dara thought, standing in the wings, watching the Ballenger Center fill with wool and glitter and Christmas plaid.
In a few minutes, the music would start. Audiences always forgot how well they knew it until it began. From those first strains of the overture, their bodies would begin to shift and lift, their eyes opening wider, a glimmer there, something stirring inside, a holiday long ago, an aching memory of a broken toy, the smack of a chocolate orange on the tabletop, a parent after too much eggnog crashing into the Christmas tree, the forever-feeling of standing at a church pew, the candle melting off its paper collar into your hand. Watching the audience, you can see them tunneling back, the ache of it all. Their hearts opening. And then Clara appears, in her party dress.
Clara, who is us, Dara thought.
She hovers anxiously behind a pair of enormous drawing room doors, waiting for permission to enter as her parents prepare for the holiday celebration.
She tries to peep into the keyhole, into the adult world beyond. Let me in, she seems to say, frantically climbing on the chair, pressing her ear against the door. It’s ecstatic and unbearable and it makes everyone in the audience lean forward, clamp their fingers, hold their breath.
Everyone remembers that feeling, Dara thought. The tortuous waiting of childhood. Waiting for parents, forever, waiting while adults do their adult things. Wanting to understand, the doors always closed. Until the adults finally decide to open them and then there’s no shutting the door again.
* * *
*
There was something so astonishing about Clara’s hunger, Dara thought, a pinch over her chest. She’s so eager, desperate even, to escape her safe, warm, cloying home, overstuffed with things. With history, the past.
All she wants is what’s behind the doors. Beyond the doors.
The Nutcracker and The Nutcracker grants her everything. Her fantasy takes over the ballet. A dark and sumptuous world where she’s a hero and a queen. Where everything is new and strange and waiting for her.
And home and family are now the foreign country and she need never go back.
* * *
*
Everyone was moving through the dark behind her. Backstage whispers and sweat and glitter and terror. It was happening, it was finally happening. And Dara felt her breath catch with excitement for the first time in more Nutcrackers than she could recall.
But where was her Clara?
Searching the shadowy masses of girls in party dresses, of boys in stiff suits, she couldn’t find her. Instead, there was Marcus, this year’s Nutcracker Prince, sneaking past the curtain, waving to his parents in the front row, his Adam’s apple dancing with fear.
He would do well, Dara knew, but she felt a twinge remembering Corbin Lesterio, who had succumbed at last to his father’s pressures and quit ballet not long after the cancellation of last year’s performances.
Over the summer, she’d been driving by the high school football field when she saw him. She might not have even recognized him—already so changed, from the football, yes, but also from time. But though that particular fleeting beauty was gone—the beauty of boys before their necks thickened, their features coarsened—she could still see the ghost of that boy inside him.
Her foot gently on the brake, she took a moment to watch him jogging to the sidelines under the bank of lights. Glowing like an old painting. He stopped and seemed to see her. Seemed to move toward her, toward the fence.
Just as she began to pull away, he stepped forward, pulling off his helmet with such grace, such gentility, like a medieval knight lifting his vizor.
The same way Marcus now cupped the Nutcracker mask in the crook of his arm, his face clear and soft and impossibly young.
* * *
*
Dara, darling, I have something for you.”
It was Madame Sylvie sailing over with her trailing scarves.
“Better late than never,” she said, handing over a bright foil tin. Her annual rum cake, slick with glaze.
“You didn’t need to,” Dara said.
“But I did, my dear,” she whispered, a hand on Dara’s shoulder, the smell of her “Nutcracker nog” on her breath. “We must keep up traditions. They make us who we are.”
* * *
*
The entire time Tchaikovsky was composing The Nutcracker, Madame Sylvie told Dara once, he was mourning his beloved sister Sasha. He reanimated her through Clara. It explained the strange heaviness of the ballet, its grand melancholy, its piercing nostalgia. And the deathlessness of its vision of childhood, of innocence and escape. Our almost unbearable awareness that everything we’re seeing is disappearing even as we watch, fluttering past us as the dancers do, slipping away like smoke.
Every year, when the grand pas de deux—the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Prince—begins, the audience’s eyes fill with tears. Those shimmering sounds of the celesta, like bells clear and pure, and we are flung backward. Time is conquered for a brief, luminous moment. Dara remembered one parent telling her that prayers from the Russian funeral mass were hidden in its opening bars. We don’t hear it, he told her. But we feel it nonetheless.
Just like that moment, her favorite moment, Clara on the stage alone, nightgown, like a white flower, like a handkerchief caught in the wind.
Spot one on Clara . . . go.
Clara searching, darting across the stage . . . alone but brave.
Clara, golden under the lights, her head lifted, throat glowing like a torch, like the Fire Eater.
* * *
*
Marie,” Dara found herself whispering, her hand on her chest. She turned to look for her, as if expecting to see her sister’s foxen face.
But, of course, Marie wasn’t there. She’d left two months after Charlie died, after they’d walked through the ash-shook carcass of their house, the sky white and pure. She’d stayed, Dara knew, as long as she could, longer—until finally she couldn’t wait anymore. The day she left, she’d thrown herself into Dara’s arms with such force it took her breath away. Standing on the front lawn, Dara watched her drive away in that vivid flame of a car. The one, it turned out, she hadn’t bought for him at all. She’d bought it for her new life, for her beyond.
The most recent sunbaked postcard came from Greece, which she’d found her way back to, to the beginning of civilization, before history, but not before family.
The photo was of some kind of statue, a soldier, or an angel, arms raised above the head, hands grappling a magnificent flaming sword.
“Marie,” Dara whispered again, her eyes filling. Loving her. Loving her sister who had carried everything for all of them. What a terrible burden. What an albatross to free herself of. How glad Dara was that she had.
“Marie,” Dara whispered once more, her hand on her chest, “can I too?”
* * *
*
Madame Durant.”
Dara turned and it was Bailey Bloom. In the smoky half-light, her hair slicked and gleaming into its bun, her face painted, her doll lashes affixed, her brows a slash. The pearlescent white of her face.
“Mademoiselle Bloom,” Dara said, nodding approvingly. “Clara at last.”
Bailey in Clara’s party dress, forest green and darted, sequins sewn into the trim.
Bailey, finally getting to dance Clara a year late, the burgundy sash on her dress lowered to accommodate her new breasts.
What a difference a year had made. The Bailey of last fall, suffering through the pins in her pointe shoes, the tainted cookies, the dead rat. And then the canceled Nutcracker performances after the fire, after Charlie.
How strong Bailey had been, how stoic. And now this year, unshaken by anything, she stood before Dara so poised, so eager, so hungry to get out onstage.
Behind her in the audience, Dara spotted Bailey’s mother in the front row. Mrs. Bloom, dear Mrs. Bloom with all her loneliness and her ravenous longing—a longing that felt like an X-ray into herself that she never wanted to see.