* * *
*
More than once, the floor shook with a rumbling from Studio B. Some kind of enormous drill or maybe a pneumatic device thundering through the walls.
The boys pretended not to notice, focused on their grands battements at the barre.
But it was impossible not to notice and Dara, pacing, counting off, felt each pulse from the machine ripple up her spine.
After, she peered into Studio B, a cloud of smoke and Derek the contractor covered in soft gray powder, wiping his brow, drinking heartily from a tumbler of some kind.
* * *
*
The day skittered along, the crushes of girls bolting into the changing room, unwinding scarves, kicking off boots, tearing off coats, yanking down jeans, stripping down to sameness, lining up in their identical black leotards, pink tights, tight buns knotted atop their worried faces.
Dara led the advanced students in their mother’s beloved Studio C while Marie taught her little darlings in the cramped but serviceable Studio A.
Meanwhile, in Studio B, the carnage took hold. Dust, debris, ash, grit, thunder, fury. The slick-slack of tape, the hard thunk of nail guns, the grinding rage of the drill, the tinny drone of box fans. The younger girls couldn’t concentrate, the six-year-olds slapping their chubby palms over their ears. But the older ones continued to pretend to be untouched by any of it, their devotion to the dance far greater than any squalid disruption.
As the day closed, Marie, mysteriously in high spirits, gave all the students an unplanned lesson in swordplay, showing her Level IIs how to handle the cardboard foils for the Mouse King battle. Marie, her sweater a swirl on the floor, wearing a filmy white leotard Dara had never seen before.
Soon enough, Dara’s students, changing to leave, were drawn in, too, watching Marie play the Sword Swallower, lifting the sword above her head and then taking it into her mouth.
She wants everyone to see, Dara thought, and she thought she even spotted Derek lingering by the doorway, watching as Marie sank one, two, three cardboard foils into her mouth, head thrown back, her throat like a pale lily.
* * *
*
At the end of the day, Dara hurried to the back office to find Charlie, wanting, so badly, to go home.
But Charlie wasn’t alone. Seated at his desk, he was signing something, a coffee-stained contract. And, looming over him, was Derek, his shoulders hunched, cologne swirling, his hair powdered with soot.
“Hello,” Dara said, stopping short.
“Got a lot done today,” Derek said, grinning, tugging his damp shirt from his chest, the fleshy chest of one of those old-time wrestlers, beefy and staggering around the ring.
Beside him, Charlie looked so small and wan, a wilting petal.
“I think that’s it,” Charlie said, handing over the sheaf of papers.
Derek began looking them over. “So you own the building?”
“We do,” Dara said, walking in, Derek’s eyes lifting to her. “It’s been good for us. Plenty of space. Close to home.”
“You live on Sycamore?” he said, eyes still on the papers.
“Yes,” Charlie said. “That cul-de-sac behind the old train tracks.”
“I know that street,” Derek said, looking up, eyes newly bright. “Big old houses. Red brick, gables, low stoops. Built in the twenties for the white-collar types working at the mill. Until the neighborhood turned.”
“Well, it’s different now,” Dara said, bristling at the word turned, remembering when they were the only ones on their street who didn’t have a car on blocks in the front yard.
“It sure is,” Derek said. “I worked deconstruction over there once, years ago.”
“Deconstruction?”
“I was just a kid, dumb but big. Our job was working those abandoned houses over on Van Buren, strip ’em one by one for parts. Leaded glass, copper piping, mantelpieces. Once we found a human leg. Just the knee down. We left that there. R.I.P.”
Derek looked at Dara like he was waiting for her to laugh. She didn’t.
“Boss taught us all kinds of things. How to pry loose a perfect piece of old-growth pine without splitting it. Like unhooking your mother’s bra, boss used to say. Then we’d get out the backhoe and take the whole house down.”
The office felt far too small with him in there. Dara stepped toward the window, open a crack. The way he’d looked at her when he said unhooking your mother’s bra.
“After,” he continued, “we’d take the remaining rubble and fill the basement with it. Choke the whole thing up. Drop some dirt down, some seed. Go by a month later, there’s a little grass growing there. It’s like prairie. Like the house was never there at all.”