The Nutcracker began in twenty-six days and her sister was destroying herself.
* * *
*
And everyone was cold. The temperature had dropped overnight, a warning bell from the coming winter, and the radiator pipes were shushing and singing, spitting brown water and smelling of dust and hair, of skin peels and toenails.
And they still had to keep the windows open in Studio B for this stage of the renovation. For the smells, mysterious and clinging.
You never wanted the studios to be too warm. A little chill helped keep the energy up, to offset the natural heat emitted by bundles of young girls. But now it was so frigid that, before class began, the youngest girls shivered in their leotards, skin dimpled, huddling together for warmth. Rows of them, pink and paler pink—like a rabbit’s ear.
“Hey,” Derek said when Dara and Charlie arrived, all their studio layers wrapped around their bodies like mummies, “how’s that furnace holding out on you over on Sycamore?”
Here he was again, talking about their house.
“It’s fine,” Charlie said, walking past Derek, his eyes catching on the state of Studio B, which seemed to have remained in the subfloor stage for days and days now. What work were they doing?
Derek turned to Dara. “Those big Victorians gotta land you a heating bill in four digits,” he said.
Dara didn’t say anything, draping her coat over her arm, navigating the cords, the chaos.
“Or maybe I’m wrong,” he said finally. Men like this, she thought, had to fill the air, fill the space. Any room they were in. “Maybe you never even have to turn on the heat.”
Lifting a power cord from her path, leaning close as she tried to pass. “I bet you don’t.”
He put his hand on her coat, her coat on her arm.
“I bet your house is hot, hot, hot.”
* * *
*
The house again,” Dara said to Charlie later that morning. “See how he keeps talking about it.”
“He’ll be done soon,” Charlie said, staring at a stack of bills, “and out of our lives.”
“We still haven’t received a dime from the insurance company,” Dara said. “I don’t even know how we’re paying for this. Or how he is.”
“I’ll call them again,” Charlie said. “It keeps changing. The estimate keeps changing.”
“The parents . . .” Dara said. “I’m hearing complaints.”
Once word got around that Mrs. Bloom couldn’t be around the construction dust, a coterie of parents—well, at least a few—had begun expressing concern that their daughters were breathing dangerous particulates, possibly mold. I assure you, Dara always said, there’s no risk. But if you’re concerned, we can give your daughter’s part to another girl, which always stopped them cold. Several of the younger girls began showing up with dust masks strapped to their bobbly heads, tearing them off the minute their parents left, shoving them in coat pockets before Dara could see.
“Parents always complain,” Charlie said. “That’s what makes them parents.”
“It’s going to get worse,” Dara said.
Charlie looked at her. “She’ll get tired of him,” he said, turning away.
“You’re wrong,” Dara said.
Every night that week, Dara had walked by the studio late, trying to burn off all the tension, everything. And every night but one, the only lights on were Marie’s on the third floor. A tiny octagon glowing. And Derek’s truck was in the private driveway, parked deeper than during the day.
In the morning, he snaked down those spiral stairs, sometimes with a toothbrush hanging from his mouth, or buttoning his cuffs.
* * *
*
The day hurdled forward, three long hours with her alternating Dewdrops, two earnest, impossibly big-eyed sisters named, also impossibly, Holly and Ivy, a year apart in age but with nearly identical bodies, long, scythe-like feet, and small sleek heads with throats like long scarves, stretching forever.
In the next studio, she heard Marie all day, the low hum of her singsongy voice, plié, tendu, port de bras, all her little ballerinas fluttering around her, dipping up and down, dreaming of one day being as elegant as Mademoiselle Durant, her technicolor bruises, the red of her red, red mouth.
* * *
*
Marie didn’t appear for their usual lunch break, a forty-minute window between classes and rehearsals for a banana, tea, plucking figs or almonds from a shared baggie, Charlie smoking on the windowsill.
“Where is she?” Dara asked Charlie.