“Everything will be better then,” Dara said. “Everything.”
* * *
*
You wanted this,” Charlie reminded her later. “It’s only been a few days.”
“You wanted this,” Dara reminded him. “And then we all did.”
* * *
*
Maybe it was because he was always there, the contractor. And you always knew it, whether he was shouting instructions to Benny and Gaspar （“Get that hot mud, it shapes up nice and quick”） or enmeshed in one of his long phone calls conducted as he sat on the open windowsill or paced the entrance area （“So I told her, put it in an envelope if it looks that good . . .”）， his wheezing laugh echoing through every studio.
And then the meal times, delivery boys streaming in and out, their faces red from the chill, delivering greasy breakfast sandwiches, submarines for lunch, the mid-afternoon pizza whose oily smell made all the students sick with disgust and longing.
The students staring with such yearning, half of them subsisting on strange diets Dara did not support—lettuce leaves with hot sauce, cotton balls coated with ranch.
* * *
*
There was no time for distractions. The growing Nutcracker pressures, the urgency on the students’ faces—it was consuming, and Dara could hear their mother’s voice in her head. Never forget, ma chère, each year is someone’s first Nutcracker. Then adding, If you can give them that, you have them for life.
Dara knew it was true. She still remembered every exquisite detail of her first year dancing in it, four years old, playing one of the Kingdom of Sweets Polichinelles, the dozen little clowns who pop loose—surprise!—from under Mother Ginger’s giant hoop skirt to the audience’s delighted gasps.
How, for so long, it seemed—though it was surely less than a minute—she scurried blindly beneath Mother’s hoops, crinolines hot against her face, hidden from the audience but feeling their presence, their anticipation.
How she could barely breathe, how she couldn’t wait to burst out, leaping forward and bounding across the stage, drunk from the escape, and, somehow, from that captivity.
* * *
*
It just breaks my heart,” Mr. Lesterio said, furrowing his brow.
Dara hadn’t even noticed him standing in the doorway. She’d been lost in concentration, watching his son Corbin, feet like sparrow wings, as he practiced his pas de chat, his knees apart, legs high.
“The guys on the soccer team found out,” Mr. Lesterio said discreetly. “They call him Dancing Queen. That’s the nicest thing they call him.”
“He really shouldn’t be playing soccer,” Dara said. “He’s our Nutcracker Prince. He could injure himself.”
Mr. Lesterio shook his head, curling his hands around his coffee thermos. It wasn’t the response he’d expected. Dara thought about what Charlie always said, about softening her tone with the parents. Their mother never had, she’d remind him.
“Ms. Durant, you have to understand,” Mr. Lesterio was saying as Corbin, distracted, was watching them both now, stuttering through his glissade. “I lettered in four sports and spent two years in the U.S. Army Reserve.”
“If he were injured in a game,” Dara said, “you’d never forgive yourself.”
You must be firm, their mother always said about parents, or they will dominate you.
Mr. Lesterio didn’t say anything for a moment.
They both looked as Corbin landed, sweeping his hair from his eyes as a pink frill of girls in the back of the room snuck glances, whispering behind their hands.
“It embarrasses him,” Mr. Lesterio said, nearly under his breath. “Being looked at like that.”
“He wouldn’t be dancing if he didn’t want to be looked at,” Dara said.
But of course Corbin—his fine features and frame, the way he moved—would have been noticed anywhere, under any circumstances. Those things, however, fathers were blind to.
“Every day,” Mr. Lesterio said, cradling the thermos now, holding it close to his chest, “I expect him to come home and say, I can’t take the pink anymore.”
Dara looked at him. “Don’t count on it.”
* * *
*
You showed him,” someone said, low and intimate.
Dara, standing at the barre, looked in the mirror and there was Derek the contractor, emerging from Studio B, running his hand through his dark scrubby hair.
“I can’t take the pink anymore,” Derek said, imitating Mr. Lesterio’s gruff tone, his squeamishness. “Get a load of that.”