The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan
“Stay for soup, vegetable today,” the Superioress says. “We’ll send word, a reminder of your release.” She turns, mouth half-open with instructions for Mole to get a message to the rue de Douai.
“Got to go. Got to see about Marie.” I been waiting and waiting, itching to get out, to find Marie, to pull her tight against my heart.
The Superioress spreads her arms wide, her sleeves falling open like wings, and wraps me in a thicket of black wool. Girls leave bawling, stroking their rosaries, wondering how with their new devoutness, they are to get themselves sent back. For a moment I want to linger, warm, held tight. But I have a plan for nudging Marie back through the door, over to the side where she belongs. I’ve got to go before it is too late. If already it isn’t too late. I send a little wish up to the clouds, which is maybe a prayer, and pull away, soft enough not to insult the Superioress with her beaming, jowly face, her wolf-sharp eyes. She reaches for the great ring of keys hung on a ribbon from her neck and slips the largest into the lock of the gate. Click.
“God bless,” she calls out. “Say your prayers.”
Her voice and Saint-Lazare fade as I run.
Marie
The carving knife has a long ivory handle, cracked in two places, enough so that I have to squeeze it tight to keep the blade from coming loose. The handle of the sharpening steel vanished so long ago that I cannot say if the pair was ever a matching set. I run the blade over the roughness of the steel, one side and then the next, just like Papa taught me when I was a girl. Scissors would work better, but like everything else not broken, they went to the pawnbroker a long time ago.
I grip the high collar of my grey silk, but in the looking glass everything is reversed, and I make a mess of cutting into the silk. I wonder about pulling the dress up over my head and laying it flat to finish up, but I am weary after staying out all through the night—wandering, shivering, glaring hard. So many gawkers staring at my red nose, my swollen eyes, my beastly face.
I finish the cut. Only absinthe takes the clearness away. I will get my absinthe.
Antoinette
Bursting into our lodging room, I call out, “Marie,” and then, “pet, Maman,” but no one remembered and only a yawn of silence answers me back. I stand there panting, gripping the handle of the door, knowing feeling sorry for myself is a waste of time. Still, my shoulders slump.
Stooped before the fireplace, I fish from the cold ash a piece of grey silk. That scrap laid flat on the sooty hearth, I trace around the edge—a shape like an oval sliced in half, the size of my two hands put side by side. A narrow band, properly sewed, runs the length of one edge, but the curved part looks like it was cut by a child just getting familiar with the workings of scissors. I study the scrap spread flat on the hearth, wondering. Then I fling that bit of silk cut from the neckline of the dress Marie wore to Saint-Lazare back into the fireplace and snap to standing straight.
Marie
I stroke the red plush cushion of the bench bounding the café and rest my aching head against the wall. The partition between the room up front and the one where I sit is oak to the height of a man’s shoulder and glass on top of that. It allows the proprietress, knitting on a high stool, to overlook both rooms. Without breaking the click, click of the knitting needles, she glances out from under her brow, eyes lingering on the ragged neckline of my grey silk. I fiddle with the porcelain match holder, shifting it a little to the right, a little to the left on the stained marble slab of the tabletop.
Already I ordered the glass of absinthe that means I cannot change my mind. My pockets empty, I need some boy to pay—maybe him, a table over, in the trousers of a mason, already moved on from drinking bitters to drinking cassis.
I sit a good hour, watching the mason, waiting for him to look up from his cassis. But never once do I get the chance to make the little smile that might get a boy who drank two glasses of bitters and three of cassis to desire a bit of flesh. I order another absinthe, watch the departing tavern maid glance in the direction of the proprietress, see the tiny nod that says I will get a second glass. Two boys play dominoes. Another shuffles Le Temps. The mason stares into his glass. An old man yawns, his eyes weeping rheum, his mouth gaping wide enough to see black teeth.
Antoinette
Alphonse lopes across the rue de Douai from the bakery, calling out, “Antoinette. Antoinette.”
“What?” I say when he is close.
“It’s about Marie.” He opens his mouth, presses it closed, keeping whatever he wants to say locked up inside.
“You seen my sister?” I say, coaxing that bashful boy.
“I was watching for her yesterday.” He knocks the toe of his boot against a cobblestone. I keep my face blank, still as stone, not so much as a blink to deter shuffling Alphonse. “I thought maybe she was rehearsing, but even very late, she didn’t come home.” He pushes the knuckles of one hand against the heel of the other. “On Wednesdays she goes to the Opéra at noon,” he says. “Always. But not today.” And then he is called away by a tavern maid, standing on the stoop of the bakery with a dozen baguettes tucked up under her arm.
Should I head up to the place Pigalle, stopping in at the Nouvelle Athènes and Rat-Mort? Or should I go first to the rue des Martyrs, the lowliest of the cafés and brasseries there? My face falls to my hands. There are a hundred places to search for a broken girl.
Marie
There is still the clack, clack of dominoes, one game finished, another one begun; the click, click of the knitting needles, a wide band of pea green lengthening to a square; the shuffle, shuffle of newspapers, picked up, read, folded and put back, growing worn with each handling, sticky with cassis, bitters and absinthe.
The old man blows a kiss, lifts his glass, drinks. I lift my own in return. But the old man, he does not come, and so I order myself another glass. I take a long swallow, wipe away the bit of absinthe slopped onto grey silk.
The mason has gone home.
Antoinette
In one tavern a boy smokes, another nods off. In the next a coquette straightens stockings already straight. “You seen a girl,” I say to her, “grey dress, fine, but with the neck cut away?” Hats are on or off, sometimes silk. Shoes are varnished, collars starched. Shoes are scuffed, collars frayed. Always smoke, dominoes, newspapers fixed on sticks, glasses getting drained. Never Marie.
Marie
I grip the marble of the old man’s tabletop with both hands, steadying myself. I lean close enough to breathe in the stink of rotten teeth. “Hello, darling,” I say.
His eyes move down, then up. “You sixteen?”
“Course,” I lie.
“Don’t want no trouble.”
“Marie the First,” I say, sitting down, but he does not give a name back.
He takes a long sip of his bitters, slides the heel of his hand along the top of his thigh. “Your dress?” He juts his chin. “What happened to the neck?”
“Was getting choked to death the way it was before.”
“Another?”
“So kind,” I say, nudging my glass to him.
Antoinette
I open up the door of the practice room partway. Beyond the back of Madame Dominique there is no Marie, only Charlotte, and I remember about her getting put up with the older girls of the quadrille Wednesday afternoons. She draws her one foot up the leg of the other and unfolds that lifted leg in front of her, a développé, high as any other in the room, even if she is a sprite among the girls at the barre. She floats that lifted leg to the side, opening up her arm, turning her face. She catches sight of me, and then she is skittering across the hardwood between us, crushing the breath out of me, and saying, “I knew you would come.”
Madame Dominique thwacks the floor with her cane. “Charlotte!”
“Tonight,” she says, grabbing my hand, making a bridge out of our arms as she steps away. “I debut tonight. Le Tribut de Zamora, act one.” Then her face falls. “I don’t know where Marie is. You have to find Mari
Madame Dominique holds up a finger, telling me to wait. To the violinist she says, “Slow the tempo,” and to the girls, “Left side.”
On the landing outside the practice room, she grips the handle of the door pulled shut behind her back. “Where is that sister of yours?” she says.
“I come looking for her here.”
“A class missed yesterday and now a second.”
“Maybe tonight? She is dancing tonight?”
“Tell her not to bother.” She pushes the door open, says over her shoulder, “Blanche had the good sense to learn the part.”
Marie
The old man says, “You sit so ramrod straight.”
I slide lower in my chair and say, “Ballet girl.” But it is not true, not anymore, not with missing Madame Dominique’s class yesterday and then again this afternoon. Definitely not, when even if tonight I managed to dodge the watchful eyes of the concierge and costume mistress, both on the lookout for girls not able to walk a straight line, there is no chance I could hold the opening arabesque of the slave dance to the slow count of four.
“Don’t think so,” he says, drumming yellow fingernails.
But I hardly hear. I am with Charlotte. I see her brushing rice powder onto her nose, rubbing greasepaint into her cheeks, painting tinted pomade onto her lips, touching the horseshoe on the small table outside the stage-door keeper’s loge. In the wings, she dabs white onto her arms, grinds rosin beneath her slippers. But where is Marie? she wonders. Watching from somewhere, maybe from the wings on the other side. Yes. That’s it. And Antoinette? She is high up in the balconies, leaning close as she can.
It is the only possibility Charlotte knows.
I jerk up from my chair, stumble quick enough to dodge the old man’s reaching hand.
Antoinette
Marie and I were in the visitors’ parlor of Saint-Lazare, a partition of iron bars in between. I said, “On your hands, the blood of an innocent,” and the words glided through the gaps. I wanted her to despair, and I said it. I spat the words into her face.
Marie
Monsieur Degas stands beneath one of the archways out front, watching the operagoers filing past. The crowd is thick. Still, a sight so familiar, I snag his roving gaze. I see him look, take in my weariness, my unsteady step, the cut silk. I watch him know. I stumble and pick myself up. Even with me out of sight, approaching the rear entrance, the labyrinth of corridors leading to the balconies, I expect he is still stroking his beard, contemplating the heart and body, the story of a little dancer, aged fourteen.
Antoinette
In the first row of the fourth balcony I sit, stand, sit back down again. There is nothing I could tell Charlotte that would explain me missing her debut. I search the orchestra pit for a lifted bow, the conductor, some signal the curtains are going to be pulled open soon.
Beside me a woman with a velvet ribbon circling her flabby neck leans close. “Your flowers,” she says, holding out a brooch with two yellow roses attached. “The clasp must’ve come loose.”
I reach for the pretty brooch, thinking it could fetch a few sous, but I pull my hand away in time. “Not mine.”
Only a single lie left.
Marie
Antoinette is there in the first row, wearing mauve silk, strumming her thigh and bouncing her heel, more jittery than a squirrel. But even in such a dress she does not appear a bit cleaned up, the way she used to when she went off to the house of Madame Brossard. She looks like she came from running a race, like she has been running one for the nineteen years of her life.
“Antoinette,” I say in the tiniest voice. She can pretend she does not hear, if she wants. But right away her face snaps to mine, and it is like a breath of air on smoldering embers, the way her eyes light up. And then she plows past the two ladies sitting in the seats between her and me. The one with a patchy bit of fur dangling around her neck says, “Might try excusing yourself,” and Antoinette, she does not say, “Might try getting out of my way.” No, she puts a hand on the shoulder of the lady and gives it a tiny squeeze. And then she puts both her palms on my own two cheeks and looks at me with the fierceness of a lioness guarding her cubs.
Antoinette
When did Marie get so old? When did her cheeks grow hollow, her eyes sunken? She smells of absinthe, tobacco. My mouth wants to twitch. Instead I press my lips into a smile. “I come to my senses,” I say. “It was Abadie who told me to mark the x on the day he and Knobloch bludgeoned the widow Joubert.”
A hundred, a thousand times before Marie heard me lie. A thousand times I gave her reason to doubt my word. But no more. After a thousand truths, the stain of doubt will wash away.
I keep my chin up, my eyes steady on her own. One last lie, the only one that counts.
Marie
Her eyes are so steady. She does not look away or touch her mouth, her nose. Her feet stay still, stuck to the ground. Still, it could be a lie.
“I knew it,” I say, putting the shadow of a sneer into my voice. “I knew it all along.”
Her hands stay tender upon my cheeks. Tilting our faces close, our foreheads touch.
A lie said as a gift?
And then a gift given back.
I cannot say for sure.
Antoinette
A few bars from the orchestra swell, and then those tasseled curtains of rich velvet open onto archways and towers and turrets, a passageway leading off a square and snaking up a hill. From the wings, a petit rat with the face of an angel enters the stage of the grandest opera house in all the world. I lean closer to the stage, Marie clutching my hand. The audience gasps, bursts into applause. Like magic, that rat, she bedazzles, queen of the wooden lawn, graceful as the moon, lighter than air.
1895
Marie
I put my hand on Matilde’s brow, and her eyes blink open. “Maman,” she says, her lashes drifting closed. I blow a tiny puff of air into her face, and then she is awake. “It’s my name day tomorrow,” she says. “You remember about my slippers?” And so she has not forgotten, this child of eight, what I agreed to a month ago, that for her name day I would darn the toes of her ballet slippers, adding the stiffness that aids a girl in rising onto the tips of her toes. Madame Théodore had explained the trick to Matilde’s class, and Matilde said a dozen times afterward how it was the only gift that would do.
Geneviève, her older sister by eleven months, pushes herself up to sitting in their shared bed. Wiping sleep from her eyes, she says, “Don’t do it, Maman. Rats are meant to scuttle flat-footed.” And then those two sisters roll in the linens and pinch and laugh, nightdresses hiked to their thighs. “Up with the both of you,” I say. “Wash your faces and go downstairs for your chocolate.”
In the stairwell I breathe the odor of hot bread wafting up from the bakery and wonder how it is those two girls are not babies anymore. How did it happen so quick? Just the other day Geneviève said her mind was made up, that she would be a milliner. It was Antoinette who put the idea in her head, going on as she does about Geneviève’s talent for putting violet with yellow, this bit of ribbon with that bit of cord. Her comfort with needle and thread was Antoinette’s doing, too. Always when Geneviève goes missing, she can be found amid the frayed buttonholes and split-open seams Antoinette takes in for mending, also the scraps of lace and trim she snips from the heap piled in the ragman’s cart. It is an exchange. He gets a pair of trousers or a waistcoat from his collection stitched up well enough to pawn. Antoinette gets the adornments, and Geneviève, hour upon hour of twisting ribbon into bows, lace into rosettes. Matilde used to follow Geneviève across the rue de Douai and up the stairs to the lodging room where I passed my childhood, where Antoinette and Charlotte still live, now with a larder always stocked and the walls freshly whitewashed and proper beds behind a partition of heavy brocade. But Matilde did not like the finicky work, those bits of cord lost in her fingers, those bits of ribbon nudged and coaxed and slipped from her grip. No, she will dance, she
So many times we have watched from the fourth balcony, Matilde gripped, Geneviève growing restless, me never knowing when that lost life of dancing might sneak up, when I might find myself swallowing hard in the dark. It is not regret, exactly, more a lament for the dancing, those moments when I knew the world in all its joy and sorrow and love. And maybe, too, I miss the dream that once spurred me from bed to bakery to practice room, the dream that filled me to the brim with desire, that has been replaced by the quieter ambition of raising Matilde and Geneviève.
Charlotte has climbed the ranks of the ballet, from second quadrille to first and then on to coryphée and after that sujet. She is a favorite of the abonnés, with two love affairs put behind her, her heart broken twice. But now there is a set decorator, who does not give her a yellow bird in a gilt cage or send a seamstress around to measure her for a silk dress. He has honest, sorrowful eyes, though, and at Eastertime he blew the insides from an egg and painted it up with tiny chicks and Charlotte made a fuss and now there is a collection of painted eggs upon the mantelshelf. When Matilde goes across the street it is to stand at Papa’s sideboard making pliés and stretching her legs, to hear Charlotte say, “That’s it. Hold your neck long, like Taglioni, Matilde,” to appear no different from a child Monsieur Degas would take up his charcoal to sketch.
He moved from the rue Fontaine workshop to I do not know where, and I do not ask. I see him at the Opéra from time to time, and I duck around a pillar or put my attention on the knitting in my lap. Once, though, when Charlotte was appearing in the Faust divertissement and Matilde and Geneviève and I attended the debut, I saw him see me and then watched his eyes shift to the girls. I put them behind my back and waited for his gaze to return to me. “Monsieur Degas,” I said, but he did not say my name, and I wondered if he had forgotten it. “Fine girls,” he said, and I did not loosen the grip that kept them from his sight. Whether it was that rudeness or something he saw in my face, I do not know, but he knew that still I could feel the sting of the words printed in Le Figaro, Le Temps, Le Courrier du soir, and what he said next was, “I keep the statuette in my workshop. It seems I always will. My dealer suggests casting it in bronze. But it’s too much responsibility to leave behind anything in bronze.”