Watching her, Dara suspected Mrs. Bloom, like so many of the mothers （and, every once in a while, a father）， had once harbored ballet fantasies of her own, her fingers curling around Bailey’s tidy bun, her eyes full of tears.
* * *
*
Just as the day’s last classes had ended, just as Dara was about to wrench loose the cork from the half-full wine bottle stashed in the deep drawer of the office desk, delivery men arrived and she had to sign for yet another box of new pointe shoes ordered especially for The Nutcracker.
Distracted from their changing, jeans half-tugged over their leotards, the eight-and nine-year-olds, a year or two from going on pointe, surrounded the box with ooohs and aaahhhs as if it were the ark of the covenant. Their feet now so round and pristine, eventually to be like the older girls’。 Blood blisters, soles like red onions, feet that peeled fully tip to toe every month or so, calluses thick as canvas, toes curled sidewise, necrotic, ulcerated toes, their nails slipping off, clattering to the floor.
A bold one snuck her hand along the top seam and peered inside, giggling. Wanting in, wanting to touch, to feel this thing that would one day become a part of her, a new organ, tender and virginal, ready to be used, abused, destroyed.
Approaching, Marie took one look at the box, her eyes burning.
“Like lambs to the slaughter,” she said softly, before Dara shushed her.
* * *
*
It was after eight and Dara and Charlie were putting on their coats, or Dara helping Charlie with his, his body stiff and tender.
Watching from the desk, Marie finished the last acidic sludge of wine, turning the bottle over so it balanced on the long spike of their mother’s ancient metal bill holder. （There are few greater pleasures, she used to say, than impaling every bill as it comes in.）
Marie, suddenly so tiny at the big old splintery desk, a cardigan wrapped around herself like a cocoon.
Charlie looked at Dara, who looked back at Charlie.
“Marie,” he said, “come over for dinner? I’m making my famous thirty-second omelet.”
Dara raised her eyebrows at Charlie, surprised.
Smiling faintly, Marie said no, she didn’t think so, propping her dirty feet on the desk, rolling her fingertips over her blood-sick toes.
“She doesn’t want to,” Dara said briskly to Charlie. “She has plans, I guess.”
Marie looked at them and said, “I don’t have anything.”
* * *
*
You’re so prickly with her,” Charlie said in the car. “So prickly with each other.”
“No, we’re not,” Dara said, hiding a flinch. “This is how we always are.”
“Okay,” Charlie said, his hand on hers.
“She left,” Dara reminded him. “It changes things.”
“We almost left once,” he reminded her.
“That doesn’t count,” Dara said, putting on her sunglasses even though it was dark out. “That was years ago.”
“It was,” Charlie conceded, pulling his hand away to turn the steering wheel.
WHEN I WAS A CHILD AND SHE WAS A CHILD
That night, Charlie and Dara spent hours with the big calendar clipped to the old, brass-tarnished easel stand and planned the Nutcracker schedule, from early practices through the final, New Year’s Day performance, just as their mother always had.
They tried to account for everything that might arise—the errant injuries, strep throat epidemics, the death of a grandparent, any and all disruptions.
They spoke their shorthand, standing back and studying the calendar, Dara raising an eyebrow, pointing at a particular date, a particular name, and Charlie replying, “Fixed, fixed,” as he struck his pencil across one date, drew an arrow to another.
They had tea from the Merry Mushroom teakettle, its ’70s orange and brown softened with age. They smoked cigarette after cigarette and didn’t feel bad about it, and then they curled on the bed in their master bedroom and watched an old movie with the sound off until they drifted to sleep.
So many nights like this with Marie and it felt funny she wasn’t there.
So many nights like this, Marie thumping the TV top with the heel of her hand, like their father used to with his TV downstairs （both likely the last antenna TVs in three counties by now）， the images shuddering into focus—an old musical from black-and-white days, pretty girls dressed in feathers, their bodies slicked with jewels.
So many nights like this with Marie, who was now gone, curled instead on her futon at the studio, like some itinerant hobo, grateful for the roof over her head.