“It is my first fuck,” Marie said, tripping slightly over the word. “In a way.”
“I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
“I disagree,” Marie said.
They sipped their tiny straws. Dara could feel her thighs inflating, her belly blooming. Sugar, sugar. She couldn’t stop.
“Maybe,” Marie said, lying on her back, her hands on herself. “Maybe I’m in love.”
* * *
*
Does he only take you from behind? Like an animal? It’s not very attractive, you know.
It’s not a good look for you. Bone and rope, that’s all you’ve got back there.
Not all, Dara . . .
* * *
*
They were drunk, they were drunk and Charlie finally called Dara. He was home and making their fenugreek tea. He was home and getting ready for bed. Where was she.
“Marie,” Dara said, finally, rising shakily to her feet, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Her sister looked up, her hair falling from her face, and slowly smiled.
“Dara,” Marie confided, “the things he does to me . . .”
The violet splotches on her neck, they seemed to move and dance and Dara wanted, suddenly, to touch them. She wanted to—
“But what?” Dara said, her head throbbing. “What does he do?”
* * *
*
No one ever really did anything you hadn’t thought of before, Dara kept saying to herself. In the bedroom, wherever, with bodies in the dark. There were only so many ways bodies fit together or didn’t.
Oh, Dara, Marie kept saying, I can only tell you how it feels.
* * *
*
But then Marie started to talk about the things—about the trick with fingers, and the heel of his hand on her throat until—
Stop.
And best of all that thumb. Had she seen his thumb? The curve in it that was just the right shape and size—
Marie, I need you to stop.
Marie, don’t you know you can never let them know.
Let them know what?
How much we . . . how much we . . .
Oh, Dara, she said. Oh, Dara, he knows. That’s what I’m talking about. He looks at you and he knows. . . .
* * *
*
That was when she knew. Right there on the fire escape. It wasn’t going to be a fling. It wasn’t going to be a passing affair, a pickup, a sex thing. Not for Marie at least.
Whatever it was, it was already happening. And there was no stopping it.
* * *
*
That night, Dara dreamt she was walking through the studio and it was ten times its size, the renovation far beyond their budget or the laws of physics, gravity, the ceiling four stories high with stained-glass windows at the top like a cathedral.
Walking through it, wending from empty room to empty room, its mirrors shimmering, she began to hear something, like a few years ago when Marie left the water running in their mother’s old claw-foot tub. The kitchen ceiling puckering above Dara’s head, the smell of rotten wood and rust.
It was like that, a straining. Like the beams holding the ceiling aloft might snap. Like everything had been put together with cardboard and paste, like pointe shoes, the smell of mentholated spirits emanating from them, dead after every use.
She dreamt she finally reached Studio B, where, inexplicably, her classes were now to be held. The plastic curtain still hung across the threshold and she was excited to look.
Blood rushing through her, she watched, pressing her face against the plastic, her nose poking it. She tried to see. She squinted and tried to see.
She felt her heart beating, a dampness between her legs.
But instead of bodies, instead of secrets, something lurched forward, a dark blur and a pair of eyes looking straight back at her. Looking at her as if excited and appalled.
UP THE SPIRAL STEPS
It’ll pass,” Charlie said over soft-boiled eggs the following morning. “It’s a fling.”
Dara didn’t say anything.
She’d come home late after drinking with Marie and crawled into bed, pushing herself against him, her head hot. She tried to wake him, her hands gently roving, but he didn’t move, the thick brume of his meds. So she made herself so small, curling into a ball, feeling—under the crinkly duvet—like a fetus, lima-bean size.
He was sleeping. He was sleeping and didn’t care to talk about it. It’s Marie’s business. She’s a grown woman.
After a fashion, Dara had thought.
And now they were eating soft-boiled eggs in their mother’s chipped porcelain egg cups. The ones their father used to make fun of, holding them with one pinkie perched. Your mother thinks she’s a grand lady, he’d say. Some kind of aristocrat kidnapped by a piggish pauper.