The old floor was coming up that day, and Dara still had not told Charlie.
She’d planned to, over breakfast, on the way to the studio. But something kept stopping her, an inexplicable panic about what the look on Charlie’s face might be like. There was something she was afraid of seeing, though she wasn’t sure what it was.
In the past, Marie’s romances were always intense and brief. There’d only been three as far as Dara knew. （But who knew what had happened on her trip around the world? For years after Marie would refer vaguely to her European experiences, her eyes going soft.） There had been Claude, the French Canadian boy who first nestled his head between Marie’s legs, an act they knew about only from a few stolen glimpses of cable TV, peeping into the next-door neighbor’s house. But I had no idea what it would feel like, Marie said after. No one told her it would feel like that. Claude came to rehearsal the next day with a bruise on his cheek like a wet slap, Marie’s thigh snapping against his face like she might never let him free again. Alas, like the two to follow, it was over nearly before it began, Marie too distracted to make sense of the bus schedule to get to his apartment, two transfers, for a quick clinch, wilted deli roses, and then having to listen to Claude recite his poetry while they sat on the floor of his basement apartment. A week later it was over. Marie couldn’t manage most things.
This, too, will be over soon, Dara told herself. Maybe it already was.
One day, she told herself, Marie will learn to control herself.
* * *
*
Besides, there was no time for it. No time at all. As soon as they arrived at the studio, Charlie rushed to the back office to catch up on paperwork and Dara faced the gauntlet. Nutcracker preparations were already dominating their days, the frenzy of auditions past and performance panic already setting in, all alongside the low grumble of a hundred disappointed or resentful girls bemoaning the loss of Clara, the role they were all born to dance, to that little nothing Bailey Bloom.
Immediately when Dara arrived, it emerged that, the day before, Bailey had found a razor blade cunningly hidden in her demi-pointe shoe. Fishing it out with her fingers, she’d shorn off a flap of skin.
“Why did it take you so long to tell?” Dara asked gravely as she inspected the girl’s foot, tender and pulped.
“I was afraid,” Bailey said, “you’d take Clara away.”
“Bailey,” Dara said, “Clara is yours to lose.”
What she wanted to say was, Bailey, steel yourself.
It happened every year. There would have to be a meeting to discuss company loyalty, spirit, healthy competition. Another thing to do.
Marie and the contractor. Maybe it would go away.
* * *
*
Mrs. Cartwright, you knew the schedule before we even began auditions,” Dara was explaining to one of her most frustrating mothers, always swooping in in her camel-hair coat and gold-rimmed sunglasses, striding over to Dara with My life is crazy right now, Ms. Durant, you must understand . . .
“But these rehearsals,” she said, “why, they press right up against Thanksgiving. We always go to Bermuda for Thanksgiving. Iris is counting on it.” Then, lowering her voice, “And, well, she’s just a Candy Cane. Which was, of course, your choice, not mine.”
And there it was. It was never really about the schedule demands, Saturday rehearsals. It wasn’t about the weeknight costume fittings or the shared carpool duties. It was about who was Clara, and who was not.
“Mrs. Cartwright,” Dara said, snapping her fingers at the dawdling Level II students, Marie’s pigeon-breasted seven-year-olds, ushering them into Studio A, “we made it clear that all the parts bring the same demands. Even the Candy Canes.”
Mrs. Cartwright paused, eyebrows lifting.
“You know,” she said, “your sister is more polite.”
* * *
*
Past the gauntlet, Dara finally approached Studio A and Marie. You couldn’t miss her with that garish lipstick she persisted in wearing but also, today, with an improbable scarf flung around her neck. Garish polka dots and fringe, like something she’d dug out of the lost-and-found bin.
“You can’t teach like that,” Dara said. Charlie appeared in the doorway, his posture stiff.
“I can and I have,” Marie said.
“She can’t teach like that,” Dara said to Charlie, making a face.
“I can do anything,” Marie replied, looking at Charlie in a way that irritated Dara. And what was it with that lipstick, like a red gash across her face.