* * *
*
Maybe we should call someone,” Dara said to Charlie that night, finally home from his PT appointment, the Shamrock taxi pulling up just after nine.
“Like who?” he said, a muzzy look in his eye. “The sex police?”
“You don’t get it. You don’t get Marie.”
Charlie looked her.
“I get Marie,” he said. “Believe me.”
* * *
*
You never really knew what went on in other people’s bedrooms, in their heads, Dara thought.
But this thing, this desire to be bossed around, dominated—such a cliché. Such an old, dusty woman thing she’d never understand. She’d never felt it herself.
But with Marie, it made sense, in a way.
She’d always been willful, resistant.
Yet it turned out she couldn’t wait to be bent, broken, split in two.
The stronger they are, the harder they fall.
That’s what their mother used to say about dancers. How you had to break them. Their stubborn bodies, their stubborn wills. The more defiant and resistant they were, the harder you must be. The more violent, the stronger hands on their bodies, bending them, pressing, turning them out.
The stronger they are, the faster to their knees.
But, Dara thought, no one is stronger than me.
TWO
THE TURNOUT
Every ballet dancer must achieve her turnout. The ability to rotate her body one-hundred-eighty degrees, from the hips down to the toes.
Imagine your thigh muscles wrapping around your bones, their mother always told them. Imagine your leg as a spinning barber pole.
She loved to tell them how, when she was ten years old, she was one of four dancers in her province to undertake special training with a Great Diva, a severe Russian beauty famous for having her feet surgically broken, her bones realigned so she might have a more natural line, a more perfect pointe.
Every day for the six weeks of the program the Great Diva scolded and berated their mother for her turnout.
Every day she yanked and dragged their mother’s legs, twisting them, muscles straining, bones nearly twanging until they rotated so far at the hips that the knees, the feet turned outward. But still, it was not enough.
Mademoiselle Durant, entendez! Tailbone down! Over toes, not over heels!
Every night, their mother sobbed into her pillow, sobbed from the pain of cranking her body like an old motor.
Then, one day, when the Great Diva demanded once more that she turn, turn, turn, their mother felt something rise inside her, something powerful.
Suddenly, something snapped inside and her hips and legs felt infinitely pliable, soft taffy, a slinky expanding.
Her hips, hot and newly supple, opened like a book from the center of her body. It felt glorious and so painful she saw stars.
But she did not stop.
Why would she? That feeling, that sensation hot in the center of her.
She kept turning until her feet pushed past one-hundred-eighty degrees, until they turned backward like a doll with its legs put on backward. Like a circus freak.
It was, she told them, the greatest feeling of my life.
It will be, she told them, for you too.
* * *
*
When Dara achieved her turnout at age ten years, six months, she saw the same stars. It was a feeling she recognized from her own furtive confusions, in the claw-foot bathtub, under her bunkbed blankets, her hands tingling, her thighs gaping like a keyhole, and that feeling after, like her whole fist would not be enough.
* * *
*
It’s the dancer’s body opening itself to the audience, their mother always told them.
Giving them everything.
The moment you achieve it, you’ve become a dancer. You’ve become a woman.
BRAZEN
The bruise was very high up Marie’s inner thigh, ringlet-shaped, florid, a cherry bursting.
Dara was trying to lead Corbin Lesterio and Oliver Perez, her Nutcracker Prince and the Mouse King, through their epic swordfight, the climactic clash in the first act.
But there was a visitor lurking in the doorway. And this time it wasn’t Derek. Inexplicably, it was Marie, her bright new hair like a queen’s crown, you could not miss her. Nor could you miss the monstrous bruise on the inside of her thigh. Standing there with one leg turned out, flashing it like a hooker flashing her garter.
“It appears we have a surprise guest,” Dara said tightly. “Or a Peeping Tom.”
Marie took this as an invitation, strolling in, still panting a little from leading her four-year-olds, sweat wreathed beneath her breasts.
The purple neck marks from the week before had grown yellow, a sticky highlighter across her collarbones. But now there was this, fresh. On her thigh. Open. Impossible to miss.