The Painted Girls

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  Antoinette stayed behind with Émile Abadie, so I am alone when I open the door of our lodging room. The stifling heat comes as a shock after the bitterness of the night outside, after months of shivering, even under the bedclothes, and wrapping myself around one of my sisters to share our warmth. I take in Charlotte sleeping soundly on our mattress, the warmest of our blankets in a kicked-off heap at her feet. Maman is slumped over on the table, her arm serving as pillow to her head. In the corner the fireplace is ablaze, casting the room in a pretty glow, in warmth. Stepping into the room, I see the black hole of a missing drawer, like a gaping mouth in Papa’s sideboard.

  I drop onto a chair. A life, unfolding the only way it can, or so Monsieur Zola said. “Well, never mind about him.” I whisper it to myself twice, the second time a little bit louder than the first. I push myself to standing up. I make my shoulders straight.

  I have Madame Dominique’s class in the morning. I have my chance.

  1880

  Antoinette

  The widow Joubert is dead, bludgeoned to death with a hammer, according to the baker and the pork butcher and Marie, who should know, with that nose of hers always stuck in the newspapers she brings home from the workshop of Monsieur Degas. It is not right to speak badly of the dead, but old widow Joubert, she made a habit of snooty looks. High and mighty, she was, with that newspaper shop of hers, always putting on airs and chatting up the gentlemen buying their evening papers, always scowling when I was close, not even bothering to make a secret of watching me. What would I want with a lifted newspaper? Sure L’Illustration has got pictures, but when you cannot sort out the words underneath, those pictures don’t hardly make sense. Still, I lingered near, if only to make her batty. But smashed ribs and a broken-open skull, teeth shattered to smithereens? No one is deserving of that. And so I stand huddling with the crowd gathered at the place where the rue de Douai, the rue Fontaine and the rue Mansart all meet up, at the spot where the shop of the widow Joubert is still shuttered closed.

  By the time the mortuary carriage heads up the rue Fontaine, the pavements are lined three deep. It is not possible to see the casket, covered up as it is with bouquets and wreaths, one bearing the inscription To Our Mother. It must be her two sons driving the carriage and their two wives, leading the women’s procession trailing behind. At the spot just opposite the shop, one of those women lays a hand upon her heart and, weakness coming to her knees, staggers forward a few steps. As the crowd gasps, the other woman goes to her aid and the procession stops. The widow is to be buried in the cemetery up in Saint-Ouen, and when the staggering woman waves the brothers onward, they have the good sense to know she is not going to make it and escort her to the seat between them on the carriage bench.

  The sun is dull and grey in a sodden sky, and I wrap my shawl a little tighter against the dampness of a spring not yet properly come. With winter lingering and the contribution of Maman little other than the reek of her hot breath, I don’t know just where the wood to heat our lodging room is coming from, unless, of course, she takes it upon herself to burn up more of the sideboard drawers. L’Assommoir shut down the end of last week and Monsieur Leroy at the Opéra says there are not enough roles even for the walkers-on who did not abandon him for more than a year. Marie and Charlotte are getting paid seventy francs by the Opéra each month, and even if Marie is not visiting the workshop of Monsieur Degas so regular anymore, she’s got herself a new job, at the bakery across the street, kneading the dough for eighty baguettes every morning between the hours of half past four and eight o’clock. It was a surprise, the boldness of Marie in looking for work, but the bakery taking her on was not. Forever the baker’s son—Alphonse—went to smoke on the stoop of the shop at the exact time she passed by on her way home from the Opéra. More than once I watched that boy part his lips, working up his nerve, but Marie kept her eyes steadfast on the door of our lodging house instead of giving him a tiny look, the little nudge he needed to call out “good day.” New job or not, that girl is turned stingier than a wolf and, every chance she can, bothers to tell about the slaving. “Tires me out,” she says. “My legs are fine for dancing, though. But, oh, my arms ache.”

  The hardship of it—working alongside a nicely stoked oven, surrounded by the stink of fresh-baked bread. I said as much yesterday, and that girl, she turned her attention from rolling her knuckles over the knotted-up muscle of her calf, and said, “You aren’t home enough to see my weariness. Always off with that boy, out half the night in the brasseries when you haven’t yet found work.”

  “At least I don’t got my own private stash hidden away.” It was true. All of the three francs I was paid each performance at the Ambigu was long ago spent on rent and milk and eggs and the bit of pork put onto the table from time to time.

  “I match what you used to contribute, and there’s the baguette I leave every day.”

  “You keep an entire baguette for yourself.” It shut her up, me knowing about her pay at the bakery including two baguettes, not just the single one put on the table for me and Charlotte to divide into three before Maman gobbled more than her share. Maman told me about being shamed near to death when she went to the baker on behalf of Marie, demanding a second baguette, only to find out Marie was already, every morning, leaving with two.

  Her bottom lip disappeared into her mouth. “I’ll put both on the table for dividing up tomorrow,” she said. “I really will.”

  By nightfall I was feeling remorse and snuggled close to her on our mattress. Maman was God knows where and Charlotte was on the other side of Marie, breathing the slow breaths of sleep, likely dreaming up herself curtseying low upon the stage with a heap of hurled roses at her feet.

  “About L’Assommoir,” Marie said. More than two months come and gone since she was in attendance at the Ambigu, but still, like a half dozen times before, she was fixed on going over the play. “If Coupeau hadn’t fallen and turned to drink, then Gervaise would’ve got her dream.”

  “Don’t know about that. She showed a talent for picking the wrong sort of men. First Lantier, then Coupeau.”

  “So you’re agreeing with Monsieur Zola?” Her back grew rigid against my breast. “About Gervaise’s life turning out the only way it could?”

  “It’s a story.” I said what I should’ve been saying from the start. “Nothing more.” I put my fingers into her thick locks, gave a little rub. “The rue de Douai isn’t quite so grubby as the Goutte-d’Or. You aren’t Gervaise.”

  “I’m not pretty like her.”

  “You got twice the brains. I don’t hear no one else thinking things through the way you do.” I did not say about the colossal waste of time all her fussing amounted to, how it never accomplished a single thing except a thumb picked raw and a mind fully awake in the middle of the night, not to a girl sounding so sorrowful as she.

  “You’re not going to poke fun?”

  “Not tonight.”

  She threaded her fingers between mine, and we lay still a long while, and I knew she was feeling my warmth, same way I was feeling hers. “All that money you’re bringing in,” I said, “where’s the rest of it?”

  “Don’t want to end up like Gervaise,” she said. “I really don’t. I need meat on my bones, or I can forget making the quadrille. I can’t be kneading bread and dancing and modeling and just allowing the troughs between my ribs to grow and grow.”

  “Maman? You’re still giving money to Maman?”

  She sucked in a deep breath, let it out slow. “I bought a practice skirt, at the pawnbroker. Got it for ten francs, and it’s good as new.”

  “It don’t add up, Marie.”

  “Josephine—the one with a different-colored sash for every day—her mother made arrangements for private lessons with Madame Théodore.” She stopped and even in the darkness of the room I knew her to be sucking her lip. “I did the same for myself, twice a week. I’m behind, Antoinette. I got started late. And the examinations for promotion to the quadrille are only three
months away.”

  That will of hers, it knocked me over, especially coming from a girl so inclined to doubting herself. “You’re like Baron Haussmann, flattening half a Paris once he got it in his head to widen the boulevards.” The air was thick with the ambition of Marie, trying to raise herself up from the gutter to the stage. “Keep that second baguette,” I said. “Keep it for yourself.”

  The night was a long one, full of tossing and turning and a dream of Marie growing larger and me shrinking to a speck, and I wondered if what I saw was the view from the heavens, Marie approaching, me falling away. What was it made that girl want so much? She craved the stage. But why? And was there something lacking in me that I was over it in a week when old Pluque kicked me out of the quadrille? Was she truly meant for dancing, while I was not? Yes, that was it. But was I intended for something else? Then my mind went to those fifty francs, tucked into a little drawstring pouch and hung from a nail behind the sideboard of Papa. Émile came with the pouch the morning after I left him at the brasserie. He stood in the doorway of our lodging room and said, “It’s not much. But you put it someplace safe.”

  What I was thinking, lying there, feeling each breath Marie took, was that not a single sou in that pouch of savings was put there by me.

  Today is Saturday, my sixth day as an apprentice laundress, and the overseer, Monsieur Guiot, tells me I can expect to be working late. Everyone wants their best starched and pressed for attending Mass. “How late?”

  I say.

  “Until you ladies finish up.”

  Already Maman was gone, leaving the washhouse after making a little show of putting her hand on my arm and reminding me about the widow Joubert getting bludgeoned just around the corner and being careful on my way home.

  There are four of us left, ironing, one using a headblock and a little iron rounded at both ends for the fussy work of the bonnets, two more working away at a huge pile of shirts and petticoats and camisoles and drawers, and me, doing the lowly work of stockings and pillowcases and handkerchiefs. Ironing is the easiest of the jobs I been rotated through this week, and I was surprised when, this morning, Monsieur Guiot said, “The ironing table for you, Mademoiselle Antoinette.” But now I know it was only that the ironers finish up last on a Saturday night. I look to the pile of damp linens keeping me from Émile, that boy I was planning to meet in a quarter hour, that scrub-brushy head of hair I have not dragged my fingers through all this week of working from seven o’clock in the morning until seven o’clock in the evening. From the stove, I pick up a hot iron and, like I been taught, scrape it across a brick and wipe it clean on the rag tucked into the waistband of my skirt.

  Monday it was twelve dragged-out hours I sat alongside Monsieur Guiot in the overseer’s booth, unpacking bundles of stinking linens, and watching him mark the items in his book, and then me stitching to the inside of each the colored thread indicating just who the linen should go back to once it was clean. I pricked my finger three times, bled onto two shirts and one petticoat, causing a brute of a laundress called Paulette—her sideburns reached around to form a mat of black hair on the underside on her chin—to gripe about the extra bleaching and my sloppiness. Maman gave me a shock by bothering to call out from a nearby zinc tub, “Don’t hear no one grumbling about the extra work of picking that shedding beard of yours off the linens.”

  And then Tuesday through Thursday I was put at the tub beside that of Maman, and she showed the patience of a clock as she explained about starting with the whites and spreading the linens over the washboard and soaping one side before turning them and soaping the next. The linen was then to be pounded with a beater, rinsed, soaped a second time, scrubbed with a brush, rinsed again and hung soaking wet over the trestles where it dripped onto the tile floor, just slanted enough to drain away the slop.

  Friday I was at the trestles, dipping the whites into a small tub of bluing and cranking the handle of a wringing machine, causing the linens to pass between cast-iron cylinders and the skin of my palm to blister and tear away. Maman made a bandage from a worn-out duster and whispered into the ear of an old woman with a scar cutting across her lip. Soon enough, that old woman held up palms yellow with calluses and turned away to crank the wringing machine, and I went to hang the wrung-out clothes over the brass wires of the drying lines. I cannot say for sure what got into Maman, turning her all motherly, but I suppose she was happy enough to have me back earning a steady wage and maybe just a tiny bit prideful about a daughter catching on so quick. Whatever it was brought about the kindnesses all week, it kept me from hurling linens into the face of Monsieur Guiot and trooping out the door.

  I spread a pillow slip, the last of the linens in my basket, over the thick padding of the ironing blanket, and seeing the number of shirts still awaiting an iron, I send up a little wish, asking for the other ironers to see that there is no sense in teaching me about shirts, not tonight. “I suppose it’s about time to see Monsieur Guiot about my wages,” I say to no one in particular but loud enough for all the women around the ironing table to hear. “And just in time for the last Mass, too.”

  The stoutest of the women looks up from her work and licks her fleshy lips. “Monsieur Guiot,” she hollers, and he leans his head from the overseer’s booth. “It isn’t fair, not a bit, you assigning an apprentice to the ironing table on a Saturday. And now she’s got the nerve to suggest leaving first when she is the very reason we are so late tonight.”

  “Mademoiselle Antoinette,” he says, with a sternness that don’t match the rest of his face, “all the ironers stay until the ironing is done.” Then he steps down from his booth, out the front door, and starts unfolding the shutters, closing us and the steamy windows of the washhouse off from the rue de Douai.

  The griping ironer sends a little huff my way and drops a dozen shirts into my basket. Even with the zinc tubs empty and the boiler simmering instead of bellowing out hot steam now that the stoker is gone home, the washhouse is sweltering, steamier than the thick soup of Paris in July. I feel the heat of the iron-warming stove on my back, the sweat trickling down, the clamminess mounting under my arms, my breasts, between my legs. I smell the dank odor of my sweat rising up. A week ago the warmth of the place was a relief after the chill of our lodging room. But just now, with soggy underclothes clinging to wet flesh and time parading forward, trampling to nothing those minutes I need to cross the street to our lodging house, fly up the stairs and put on a fresh blouse before going to Émile, the boiling air is a curse.

  Before Monsieur Guiot is through with the shutters, the laundresses are freeing themselves of neckerchiefs, loosening their blouses, hitching up their skirts. He comes in, rubbing his hands together against the cold outside, and don’t appear in the least baffled by the naked arms, the bare necks. No, he goes back to his overseer’s booth without a single word, and I loosen the drawstring of my own blouse.

  I spread a shirt over the ironing table, and when no one bothers with a word of instruction, I dip my fingers into the cornstarch and water and sprinkle it onto the linen like I saw the others do. I run the iron over the collar, make a fold across each of the tips, and press till the creases are sharp, till the little triangles of fabric stick out like wings. My collar looks no different from those of the others, and I move on, running the iron over the front of the shirt, up the placket, across the buttonholes, which is not any more difficult than breathing air. But then the tip of the iron nudges a bone button and that button lurches away from the shirt to the thick padding of the table, all without making a sound. I hold myself back from snatching, from calling attention to that sheared-off button, the hole the size of a pea left behind. I pass a hand over the shirt, float it across the table, gathering up the button along the way. Then, with that bit of bone safe inside the pocket of my skirt, I run my iron over the sleeves and back and fold the shirt into a perfect square, tucking the section of placket with the hole up underneath, out of sight.

  I move on to a second shirt, starching and
pressing and folding, setting it atop the one with the hole where the button used to be. By the time I add a third square of crisp, folded linen to my stack, I feel smug about matching the pace of the others, each a full-fledged laundress. Grabbing another shirt from the pile, I let out a haughty huff. I take my iron from the warming stove, scrape it across the brick, sprinkle starch and wonder about swapping the ruffled shirt now spread before me for a plainer one. But it is not possible, not without raising the ire of those sneering laundresses. I lower the iron atop the ruffles, know there is no chance for them to come out anything but a creased mess, which turns out to be exactly true. I sprinkle more starch, wonder about arranging the shirt so that only the ruffle is caught underneath the nose of my iron. It works, more or less, except for those stubborn creases set in the ruffle by my own hot iron. More starch, more heat. Put the weight of my body onto that iron. Hold still, giving those creases a chance to flatten out.

  “Antoinette!” It is the bearded laundress hollering my name and then knocking into me and grabbing at my iron. She holds it over her head, wanting to clobber, and my arms fly up. “Monsieur Guiot. Monsieur Guiot,” she calls out. “Such a stupid, stupid girl. She burned a fine shirt right through.”

  Then he is beside the ironing table, staring down at the burned ruffle, touching the charred edge. His fingers jump to the colored thread stitched into the collar. “Monsieur Berthier,” he says. “His missus won’t accept a mended shirt.”

  I look at my tatty boots, the leather soggy and marked from a week of standing in slop.

  The bearded laundress snatches at my stack of shirts. “Let’s just see,” she says.

  She snaps open the one on the top of the pile and then the next, and I see her face twitching anger. No creases. No scorch marks. Collar wings pressed to exactly the same size. But then she is lifting my first shirt, her stubby finger tapping the hole. “Where’s the button?” she says.