The Turnout Quotes
"Had one of them reached out to the other in those final moments, the reporter wondered to readers, or had they been holding hands all along?"
"It made my stomach wiggle," she said much more quietly to Dara in the backseat.
"Singapore is the cleanest country in the world. The punishment for vandalism is caning."
"Encore, échappé, échappé, watch those knees."
"Our daughters love them both, especially Marie."
"You have to be there," Dara said, standing at the foot of the stairs, Marie’s face hovering above. "Because you nearly burned us all down."
"Like lambs to the slaughter," she said softly, before Dara shushed her.
"Nothing will change," Marie added, slinking up to them, her hair smelling like smoke. "Nothing changes here."
"I don’t think artists should have a limit—a timeline, a dollar figure—on their dreams."
"You show someone your damage and they know all your weak spots. They know everything."
"The worst part is the name, Mrs. Bloom had confided to Dara, blushing and tucking phantom wisps into her chignon. Hot Buttered Blonde, she whispered, blushing again."
"Never cry over pain, their mother told them. Those are wasted tears."
"Every day, I expect him to come home and say, I can’t take the pink anymore."
"Never forget, ma chère, each year is someone’s first Nutcracker. If you can give them that, you have them for life."
"Maybe it’s a mistake, to always play it safe."
"What could be more beautiful than a will like that?"
"We don’t have to like him. No one likes their contractor."
"It won’t last," Charlie said finally. "I promise."
"I’m so happy," she whispered from across the expanse of the bed, "to be home."
"It’s unprofessional. There were students downstairs. Her students."
"You may not see its value on the open market," he continued. "That part of town is no longer the wrong side of the tracks. The tracks moved. You could flip it like a flapjack. Make a pretty penny."
"I don’t have to like you," Dara said, moving past him, a blast of the leather scent in her face. "You’ll be gone soon."
"A man like Derek, he could never understand it was their home. It was their whole childhood. More than that, Dara thought, her eyes blurring."
"I need to hear his voice at night. I can’t sleep without his voice in my ear, talking and talking, all night."
"That was your mistake," Dara said. "You have to hold something back. Now you’re no longer his conquest. Now you’re just his whore."
"I’m not thinking anything," Marie said, rubbing her arms with her hands, a giddy look on her face.
"You and Marie. You two grew up there." "And Charlie." "You know, when I first got here, I couldn’t tell. Is Charlie your husband," he said, tossing his cup in the trash, "or your brother?"
"We made a mistake," Charlie said, leaning back in the chair. His face so pale it looked like stage makeup, his eyes dark blotches. "With him."
"Hey, I get it. Family is everything," he said, leaning against the jamb. "Marie explained."
"What is it, Dara kept asking herself. What is it we’ve let in our studio, our mother’s studio. My sister’s bed. My sister’s body. Our lives."
"You could never prove anything. But every provocation felt like a deeper threat. You couldn’t prove it, so he was going to just keep going. Until he got what he wanted."
"It’s mine," she then said, smiling proudly. "All mine."
"Poor Bailey, who now stood, like Clara, on the dark stage alone."
"The pain is real and abiding. The pain is bracing and makes you feel alive. The pain is your friend. The pain is you."
"For years, she dreamt of objects caught in her throat: a knitting needle, the back-scratcher their father kept in the side pocket of his recliner. For years, she’d wake up gasping for air."
"The Fire Eater, the Sword Swallower. They were both women, dark and fair and fearless, their heads pitched back, their mouths wide open, everything laid bare."
"They could take these things inside them and emerge unscathed. Dangerous things, deadly things. They could take these things inside and remain untouched, immaculate. The same forever. Forever the same."
"It was foolish to amend anything, to redo what worked so well, what made everyone so happy. Everything the same as it always was."
"Every time I see your husband," Madame Sylvie said, "I think of how much your mother adored him. Mon garçon chéri!"
"See! Isn't he something?" Madame Sylvie whispered, feigning to fan herself with a free hand. "But then Drosselmeier's always been my favorite."
"What is Drosselmeier without his Nutcracker?"
"She becomes fixated with her little Nutcracker. So fixated she sneaks back out to find him after the family goes to bed. She falls asleep with it in her arms, lost in fantasy until the doll comes alive as a full-size man. It's a parable, no? Of first sexual experience. The pleasure and danger. Drosselmeier seduced her. And she is glad."
"Little girl, you run so hot, you're gonna burn up."
"I lost a husband and two lovers during Nutcracker season."
"This is ours. It is ours. No one can take it. Never."
"Either that or we're the ones," Charlie said, more softly now, more like himself. "Either that or we've been hypnotized. Been hypnotized our whole lives."
"Family secrets," Derek said, his parting shot, "are the very worst kind, aren't they?"
"It was an accident," Dara repeated. Over and over again. "We found him there. We don't know how it happened. But it did."
"Sometimes what happened just doesn't feel like what really happened."
"Pink satin fantasies we beat into submission so they can be used and then discarded."
"I danced until my feet were on fire. I was on fire."
"There’s no time for that. That’s a luxury we don’t have."
"Accident, yes. Sort of. Not precisely. Not fully."
"Everything was the same as it had been every year for all the years of her life. Nothing had changed. Nothing."
"We don’t usually make house calls. But I knew him a little."
"It all felt right, natural. Pretending nothing had happened. Keeping secrets. Hiding everything."
"Everyone loves a pretty dancer, but strong is better."
"You need to see it," Mrs. Bloom kept murmuring as Dara hurried behind her, up the stairs and down a long hallway, "to understand."
"I never come in here anymore," she whispered. "I can’t."
"For every pleasure," Mrs. Bloom said as if reading her mind, "we pay a price."
"You want to understand," Mrs. Bloom said, her tone harder, steely, an insistent mother doling out a lesson. "You want to know why, how. So take off your shoes."
"...why not dream bigger? I can give you all the things you want."
"The things he made me want to do. I humiliated my husband. I humiliated myself."
"But you could have fired him. You could have ended things. That’s what I don’t get about you women—"
"Just you wait," she said, "until it happens to you."
"Once you turn it on," Mrs. Bloom said, "it’s hard to get it to stop."
"I wish I could burn it down," Mrs. Bloom said. "I wish I could burn the whole place down."
"The money orders I gave him to help his mother, who had to move into a nursing home, the six thousand dollars I gave him for his marina fees for a boat I never saw that was going to launch his new business?"
"You think I’m pathetic," she said, "don’t you? You think we all are. You women."
"No," she said. "But it wouldn’t have mattered."
"Slow, he said, like you mean it. Like you want me to see all of it."
"The very things that first draw you to a person will eventually be the very things that drive you away."
"It wasn’t like you think," he said, his voice first small and tentative and then rushing faster. "It just... happened and then other things happened and suddenly, everything was happening and there was no stopping it."
"Don’t you see?" he said to Dara now, pressing his fists onto the tabletop. "I had to. We all know I had to."
"You need to leave," Dara said. "Leave before I scream fire. Before I start a fire right here."
"It was all so tacky, so déclassé, a voice inside said. It was all so cheap. So unbearably sad."
"Get out," came a voice and it was Marie standing in the doorway. "Get out. Get out. Get out." Over and over again, rising to a scream.
"But," he said, and his face, his voice—suddenly he was thirteen years old again, "where will I go?"
"I don’t care," Dara said, Marie walking over, reaching for her hand, and adding, "We don’t care at all."
"He would have taken it all," Mrs. Bloom said, her voice low, her eyes black rings, like a ballerina taking off her mask. "Even the things I didn’t have to give."
"I know more than he did," Dara said coolly. "I know you used him."
"You’re not talking to my sister," Dara said, stepping forward, a feeling in her chest, a ferocity, something she hadn’t felt in years.
"It only worked if you both cared. If you both had the power to wipe out the board."
"I wouldn’t," Dara said, "believe anything you said at all."
"You’re never free," Dara said, realizing it as she said it.
"When something goes wrong in a family, it takes generations to wipe it out."
"You can’t even breathe in here. How can you breathe."
"It wasn’t healthy here," Marie whispered, shuddering in her nightgown, all her bruises illuminated by the streetlamp shining through the window.
"Sometimes, you think you’d do anything to get out, to be free."
"We’ve always lived here," Dara said. "We’ve lived here our whole lives."
"Our hands pressed against our ears when the screaming started. Remember how she screamed at him? You are nothing to me. You mean nothing to me. You touch me and I feel nothing."
"Save a few," Dara found herself saying, her eyes filling, her face hurting from her smile. She was smiling. "Save them."
"We must keep up traditions. They make us who we are."
"Our almost unbearable awareness that everything we’re seeing is disappearing even as we watch, fluttering past us as the dancers do, slipping away like smoke."