The Painted Girls

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

But Émile is not bothered. No. He drops the coins at my feet. “For LeBlanc,” he says. “You’re not fit for the streets. Don’t want you on the streets.”

  He leaves me in the alley, pulling up the neckline of my blouse, picking up coins.

  Almost eighty francs, enough to keep the fists of Monsieur LeBlanc from pounding at the door, enough for pork crackling and full bellies, enough to make spinning a tale about vanishing from the Opéra as easy as swallowing soup.

  Marie

  It is an ugly picture, Maman seated on a chair, her head dropped back, her lips gaping, a bit of scum clinging to the corner of her mouth. I lean in close, smell her hot breath. Absinthe. Yes, always absinthe—the bite, the whiff of anise. And why not? Why not wash away the troubles of a widow with three girls to raise? I say it to Antoinette, so full of scorn to find Maman still here when the washhouse opened an hour ago. Antoinette grasps Maman’s shoulder, gives her a rough shake.

  “Leave her. Leave her be.”

  “The washhouse won’t be keeping her, skipping days, soused half the time, sure as sure pulling off buttons and scorching everything in sight.”

  “She’ll go later.”

  “We need water,” she says, picking up the zinc bucket, pausing to look at me, hard. “Don’t give her none of what you got left. She don’t mind asking, and she finished a bottle last night.” Already I put into Antoinette’s hand the wages I collected at the Opéra yesterday, all but the ten francs she told me to put aside for a new practice skirt or sash or a pair of stockings without holes. She has taken over from Maman the paying of the rent owed to Monsieur LeBlanc. She stands, feet apart, arguing over every sou.

  She pulls her shawl down from the peg. Then she is out the door, and I listen to her footsteps, quick on the stairs.

  She could speak properly if she cared to. I know, because sometimes she mocks me, mimicking my correct speech, never once mistaking a “she doesn’t” for a “she don’t,” a “have” for a “got.” And once when we were walking in the boulevard Haussmann, a young man with a silk cravat bowed to Antoinette and handed her a bouquet of flowers, pale pink with tiny bell-shaped heads bobbing in the breeze. She spoke with him a good few minutes, perfect French, before she noticed the pack of boys watching and snickering across the boulevard. She lifted her chin then and threw the flowers in his face. After that she was off, down the pavement, and when I finally caught up, she looked to be fighting tears. “How I wanted those flowers,” she said. “Should’ve kept those hateful flowers.”

  A little gurgling noise rises up from Maman’s throat, and her head flops forward hard enough that the snap of it causes her to wake up. She blinks a couple of times, her chin pulled in tight to her chest, shying away from the daylight creeping into the room. Her wandering gaze comes upon me, putting a wrapped-up wedge of hard cheese into my satchel for my midday meal. “Marie,” she says, her face changing from vague and doughy to rosy and warm. She has correctly remembered yesterday was the last Friday of the month.

  I clutch the ten francs in my pocket. I am soft, and she knows.

  “How about a meat pie for your supper, or a roasted chicken might be nice?” she says, pulling herself up onto unsteady feet.

  “You’re late for the washhouse.”

  “A touch of the colic this morning.”

  “Maybe fried potatoes,” I say, thinking of the half dozen on the larder shelf.

  Swaying, reaching for the table brazenly, like there is no shame in needing it, she says, “Roasted chicken was always your favorite.”

  I would rather a roasted chicken, a bit of mopped-up gravy, but I know where she is headed. “You know the expense of meat, Marie,” she will say. “It’s more than I got to spare.” Or it could be even worse. The last time she went without a bottle too long, she turned weepy and made a claim to have loved Papa with all her heart, a heart he cleaved in two. “Those trollops,” she said. “All those trollops up in the place Pigalle, he preferred them to what he got at home for free.”

  From my pocket I count out enough that she will not have to choose between a roasted chicken and a bottle of absinthe, and hold it out to her. Antoinette will shake her head that yet again I succumbed to Maman’s tricks. But Maman looks at me with bewilderment on her face and then closes my fingers over the coins. “Already you’re giving up most of what you earn,” she says. “I got a few sous stashed away.”

  “Oh.”

  “You got an angel in your heart, Marie.” She puts her hands on my shoulders and then hauls me into her arms, which are stronger and softer and warmer than Antoinette would guess. “It’s that poor dead sister of yours, my dearest dear.”

  What I know about angels, all clearly put down in Sister Evangeline’s catechism, is that they are numberless and good and happy and endowed with tremendous gifts, that they love us and protect us in body and soul. But some of those angels sin. They are drawn down by infernal ropes to the lower reaches of hell. And those wicked angels, they come back, laying snares, awaiting a moment of hatred or envy or despair, a chance to plunge a girl into the torment of eternal flame.

  I wonder, sometimes, if Maman is right that Marie the First lives in my heart. I was trembling in Monsieur Pluque’s office. He had said to dance, and I could not think and then suddenly, like a clap of thunder, I knew to be a drifting leaf. Was it Marie the First putting such an idea in my head, an idea I never before thought? Was the idea of becoming a leaf one of her tremendous gifts? Other times, though, I switch over to thinking Marie the First clings with blistering fingers to that descending infernal rope. If she is a good angel and in my heart, like Maman says, she watched Papa cough until it kept him from the porcelain factory and Maman grow weary when there was no bread and then Papa take his last breath. Why did she not send one of her tremendous gifts? And where is she now that Monsieur LeBlanc pounds at the door? I am not so sure I want the angel of my tiny, dead sister dwelling in my heart.

  “Tonight, roasted chicken in your belly,” Maman says, loosening her arms, stepping back from me. “And always, an angel in your heart.”

  The practice room is large and square with a barre affixed to the wall. The floor is slanted, they say, to get us ready for the stage, an explanation that curls my fingers into tight fists. There is an earthen stove in the corner; chairs—one for the dance mistress, another for the violinist accompanying us; and benches along one wall for the knitting, reading, snoozing mothers too watchful to set their darlings loose in the Opéra. Maman does not come, but Antoinette climbs the hundred flights of stairs just to stick her head around the door and give a little wave before rushing off to see Monsieur Leroy.

  For a month I have been moved up to Madame Dominique’s class and girls my own age. By a stroke of luck she had come to Madame Théodore’s class to speak to the violinist, but she lingered, her watchfulness causing even the wickedest of the petits rats to keep her toes away from the backside of the girl next in line at the barre. When it was time for limbering—bending forward and arching backward and laying a chest flat on the floor with legs spread out wide to the sides—Madame Dominique’s eyes stayed put on me. Then she walked over and gave me the same exercises Monsieur Pluque had back in the spring, and I felt so full of hope but afraid, too, because hope is something that usually gets snatched away. A week later just as Madame Théodore was about to begin class, Madame Dominique showed up and said I should go to her practice room the next morning, that from then on it would be her calling out the steps and correcting me. I could have split in two with joy at the thought of what I was leaving behind—the squealing and wriggling amid the glissades and entrechats, the hair pulling and scuffles amid the grands jetés and pirouettes, the squabbles over the watering can, just whose turn it was to dampen the floorboards. But that was not all. There would be no more Charlotte whispering corrections to me at the barre and butting ahead of me in line and sniveling that so-and-so called her Madame Fine Airs. And one last sweetener, my first week up with the older girls, Madame Dominique took
us into the theater to watch a dress rehearsal of the ballet divertissement slotted into act four of Monsieur Gounod’s new opera, Polyeucte.

  You could have knocked me over upon seeing the stage—a columned temple; a scarlet, tasseled canopy; statues in marble, bronze and gold; a gilded chariot drawn by four stallions; magistrates, nobles and Roman soldiers, nine hundred costumes all told. Most stunning of all, though, was Rosita Mauri, brought from Barcelona by way of La Scala in Milan, to dance as Venus in the divertissement. Madame Dominique told us she was less refined, less classically correct than the French étoiles, but that no one matched her in strength, in swiftness crossing the stage, in quickness of footwork. I never saw such batterie, Rosita Mauri’s legs beating, her feet quivering midair. I never saw such pirouettes, sharp, brisk, never once dropping from the tips of her toes. The mouths of the corps de ballet hung open. Eyes glinted bitterness. I wanted to dance as Rosita Mauri did—like a man in fierceness and strength, like a woman in lightness and grace. Afterward, she made a low curtsey, and when she looked up, her face was aglow with joy. It was a pleasure I knew, something I had touched once or twice in the practice room, the pleasure of having become music, the pleasure of being filled up head to toe.

  I am figuring out the rules of my new class, how a girl called Blanche always gets the first spot at the barre and the front row once we move to the center of the room for the second part of class, the way Madame Dominique picks her to show the proper positioning of the knee in an attitude, the ankles in a cabriole. I see the other girls whispering and Blanche off by herself, stretching with her leg upon the barre if we are awaiting our turn to show a string of grands jetés, or practicing coupés if it is a chain of piqué pirouettes. At the end of class Blanche packs up her bag and is fast as a rabbit on the stairs. It is better than stalling, hoping that just once one of the laughing, arm-linking girls will say, “You’ll walk home with us today, no?” The girls were nicer to me in the beginning, gathering around and asking where I lived and did I think Marie Sanlaville was furious that Rosita Mauri was picked to dance as Venus in Polyeucte. I said she probably did not mind, at least not so much when the newspapers started calling Gounod’s score unbearable in its monotony. I felt a little proud of my quick thinking, how each of the gathered girls, after the question, knew I could read. Then, after a week, Madame Dominique shifted me to the second spot at the barre, and at first I was sure I was moved only because always I was botching exercises and Madame Dominique wanted me standing behind Blanche, who never did. But the girls turned sour, and soon enough it was not just Blanche off by herself, making her muscles long, her coupés sharp.

  With me up front Madame Dominique is always lifting my drooping elbow, tapping my rising-up shoulders, catching my leg high in a grand battement and further arching my foot. It did not take long to figure out that the days she lavished attention on me were days when I found myself taking the stairs alone after class. I started keeping a tally of her attentions, no different from the rest of the whispering girls, and maybe the tallying was something better not begun because now I cannot stop.

  Today, like every day at the barre, I watch Blanche with the eyes of a hawk, noticing the tiny flourish of her hand as she opens her arm, her neck always long, even when arching back. I copy everything I can, trying to remember exactly when we are turned around, repeating the exercises with the left leg, and she is gone from my view. For battements frappés I hold my arm à la seconde, repeating the exercise already completed on the right, doing my best to recall the snap of Blanche’s foot striking the floor, and nearly jump out of my skin when I hear her whispering to my back, “Arm bas, Marie.” I lower my arm quickly, before Madame Dominique sees my mistake. But why is Blanche coming to my aid? Then, a little later, when I make the mistake of lifting my toes from the floor in ronds de jambe, from behind she whispers, “À terre. Ronds de jambe à terre.” I take a chance and speak low my thanks. As always, she keeps her face forward, her chin level, her neck long, her arms soft, her footwork neat and fast. But afterward, as we turn back to facing the front, she smiles.

  When I came in last night, Antoinette kissed my cheeks and said she was going out to the pork butcher to buy us some chops and then on to the sweet seller for red caramel pipes. Maybe because she was growing warm flitting around the room wrapped up in her shawl, there was a glow upon her cheeks, like the sun was shining in our lodging room.

  Charlotte let go of clutching the sideboard where she was swinging her leg in a stream of battements en balançoire and gave her full attention to Antoinette. “Really?”

  “We’re celebrating,” Antoinette said.

  “Celebrating what?”

  “Got myself steady work.” Her eyes lit up. “I’ll be appearing in a play over at the Ambigu.”

  The play was called L’Assommoir, and she was to be one of several dozen laundresses, appearing in a washhouse tableau. The work sounded not much different from what she already occupied herself with at the Opéra, except at a theater not nearly so grand and in a play anyone who ever opened a newspaper would know was based on a low-minded book. More surprising still, she was acting as a laundress, the very work she would have no part of in her real life. Even so, all evening she brimmed with pleasure, lost in her head—humming, laughing at nothing, even pecking Maman on the cheek when she came in from the washhouse.

  It is what I am pondering at the barre as I make a relevé, an easy step where the heels are drawn up from the floor. But then Madame Dominique thwacks her cane against the barre, a fingerbreadth from my hand. “Second position, Marie,” she says, letting out a great sigh, and the spot that sometimes aches between my shoulder blades glints red.

  For the rest of the barre I cast gleeful Antoinette out of my head. Twice I see the mix of surprise and pleasure that sometimes comes to Madame Dominique’s eyes; and once, when I stay balanced in an arabesque even as I lift my hand to just hovering over the barre, she nods, the tiniest of nods.

  Monsieur Degas sits in his usual spot, going back and forth between scribbling in his notebook and leaning back in his chair, gawking like his own mother never did tell him it was rude. His eyes are piercing and quizzical, maybe a little lonely, tired, with pouches underneath. I cannot say about his mouth, hidden as it is by his muddle of a beard, but with the way he thinks nothing of staring, it would not surprise me in the least to hear snappish words fall from his lips. It is a little creepy the way he watches, looking underneath my skin, the way he does not have the decency to look away when I happen upon his gaze. Today I have felt it plenty, boring through me, hot on my flesh.

  When Madame Dominique calls us to the center, Monsieur Degas picks up his chair and sets it down again at a spot where he has a clear view of me in the second row just behind Blanche. So blatant, his shifting spots. So bold, like scrutinizing a skinny, bare-armed petit rat is the most natural thing in the world. The other day I worked up the nerve to speak to Lucille, a lazy girl with a tipped-up nose, who does not care enough about dancing to be mean. “He’s harmless,” she said. “Give him a smile. There are sugarplums in those sagging pockets of his.”

  Another girl—Josephine—not so well liked by the others with her different-colored sash for every day of the week and slippers that have not been darned a hundred times and mother always watching, always fussing with her darling’s hair and sitting up taller when it is her turn to cross the floor in a chain of piqué pirouettes, said, “Maman saw a gendarme going into his building in the rue Fontaine. She stopped him. He said people were complaining. Too many comings and goings, too many little girls visiting Monsieur Degas. And now Maman says I’m not to speak to him.”

  Josephine’s arms are soft and round, no jutting elbows, no spiny knobs atop her shoulders, and I thought of how a sugarplum would mean nothing to her, and I remembered Antoinette, too, how she nagged that I was getting too skinny and me snapping back there was nothing in the larder except the skins of an old onion and a pair of empty shelves.

  With Mad
ame Dominique done working us for the day, my legs are close to collapsing. We were made to stay late on account of half the class landing heavy-footed. “More like ogres than sylphs,” she said. She looked sternly at Lucille and Nelly when she announced the extra hour, this after correcting Lucille three times and Nelly four and each of Linette and Josephine and Alice just once. Blame could not be put on Blanche, not with Madame Dominique praising her saut de chat and calling the rest of us to the front of the practice room to marvel at the precision of her footwork, the toe exactly meeting the knee midair, her chin a little lifted, her face proud, bearing the snootiness of a cat, and probably it was not the fault of Chantal or Margot, who both got tiny nods, or Perot or Aimée, who each earned a touch on the shoulder as Madame Dominique walked the length of the barre during ronds de jambe. For me, there was the thwack of her cane and then the tiny nod as I held my arabesque, and afterward in center, there was the smallest smile, so slight it might have been a twitch. Next class I will draw her gaze, hold it still. Next class I will give to Madame Dominique a saut de chat rivaling that of Blanche.

  I take pitiful care undressing, loosening my sash, folding it into quarters, rolling it into a coil, like it is spun from pure gold instead of worn-out silk. Antoinette says it is six francs for a new one, six francs none of us have. I tuck my rotting skirt into my satchel like a doting mother laying down a sleeping child. All the heeding means I am last to leave, last to begin the descent from the practice room, starving and aching tired.

  Six days a week I creep along the staircases and corridors, passing rehearsal halls and the courts of the decorators and the loges of the chorus, the coryphées. My ears fill up, empty, fill again—the whining strains of violins, the jerked quiet trill of a diva, the rampaging shriek of a maestro, the foul mouth of an étoile. Most often I like making the descent, touching the walls, considering that I am part of it all, this Opéra, so thick and sturdy and permanent, this place of trickery, this place of limbering and sweating, leaping and turning, cramming every bit of learning into my bones, getting ready for the examination where any one of us in Madame Dominique’s class can be elevated to the quadrille and the Opéra stage. Today though I suck my bottom lip, wondering. Into which half of the class do I fall? Pitiful, heavy-footed ogre? Lighter-than-air sylph?