“Or else what?” I say. “Or else you won’t eat your egg, your bread? You’ll go to the Opéra, belly howling? Is that it, pet?”
“I remember now,” Marie says.
Quick as lightning, Charlotte is upon her knees. “What time is it?”
“Loads of time,” I say.
“My stockings? You mended them? You said you would.”
By the time I finished with the stockings, the streets were quiet. The fruit peddlers and operagoers, the workmen—staggering and reeking with their arms around each other’s necks—were snoring in their beds. Candle snuffed, I sat there in the blackness, fearing for Marie. Should I grind a bit of soot into the slippers she was to wear, rip the skirt, forget about fetching hard-boiled eggs come the light of day so she went to the Opéra unsteady and weak? Each was something I could undertake and maybe raise the scorn of old Pluque. But then the next minute, my mind flipped back to thinking how a smear of greasepaint might hide her sallow skin. Back and forth I went. How to diminish. How to boost up. All I knew for sure was even if old Pluque saw his way to giving her a chance, even if she clawed her way up from the dance school to the corps de ballet, she was too skinny, too vulgar in her looks, too much like me to ever move up from the second set of the quadrille, the bottom of the scale. She would be stuck, a measly eighty-five francs a month, another two for every evening she danced. It was not enough, not without an abonné paying the rent. And abonnés, those wealthy men ogling every night from the orchestra stalls, where they have it arranged their wives are not allowed to sit, desired girls higher up the pay scale, girls with the dainty chin and rosebud lips of Charlotte, the ones other men dreamt of luring into their beds. Even if half those men could not tell an attitude from an arabesque, they wanted girls it stirred their cockles to watch. The right girl was worth the rent, the meals out, the flowers, the hairdressing bills. And if she was of the highest rank—an étoile—then he’d better be rich. He would have a carriage to pay for and fancy gowns, even a lady’s maid.
Marie and Charlotte eat their eggs: Marie slowly, sucking each crumb of yolk from her fingertips, Charlotte like it is a race, like I will deliver her an egg tomorrow morning and another the morning after that.
I hold out my two old practice skirts, and Charlotte snatches for the not so shabby one, but I flip it high over my head, out of reach. “Such a grabby girl,” I say. “Marie gets this one.” A ratty skirt won’t stop old Pluque from seeing the Taglioni neck of Charlotte, the high arch of her instep, her angel face. He will be drooling, dreaming up all those abonnés one day tossing bouquets to her feet.
I nudge the rattier skirt toward her. She stands still as stone, arms crossed. I let that skirt fall to the grime at our feet, the floor Maman don’t bother to scrub, and Charlotte snatches it up.
“Word of truth, pet, the eyes of old Pluque are going to be glued to your dancer’s feet, your Taglioni neck. He’s going to piss himself, old Pluque, when he sees the swan that just glided into the Opéra.”
I pull two silk roses—pinched from a café up in the place Pigalle—from my pocket, both exactly right for tucking into a chignon. From my other pocket, I take out a tiny lacquer pot, greasepaint filched from the loge assigned to the walkers-on at the Opéra. The pout disappears from the lips of Charlotte, and I knock the brush against the edge of the sideboard, calling over slouching Marie.
I brush out her hair for a full twenty minutes, saying a hundred times, “Such hair. Magnificent hair,” before I set to work, scooping up a mane so thick that when it is done in a single plait my fingers cannot reach around the girth. That hair—dark in color and glossy as a mole in the sun—is the single gift God thought to give to Marie. With its thickness, there is no need for a postiche, those bits of netting ballet girls stuff full of shed hair and tuck into their chignons, making them twice their natural size. I twist the thick rope of Marie’s hair, coil it around and around, shush her gripes about the poking as I pin it into place. When I finish, I step back and see how Marie would be improved with that paltry brow of hers covered up. “Plenty of the ballet girls got bangs,” I say, opening up a drawer of the sideboard, pulling out the scissors that so far have been spared the window of the pawnbroker. Charlotte looks up from bending over the leg she is stretching to loosen, propped atop the back of a chair. “Your head is too full of curls, pet.”
I turn back to Marie. “You’re sure?” she says and grips her bottom lip between her teeth.
I put myself between her and the sideboard, snipping strands of hair pulled loose from the coil, daubing greasepaint, rubbing it in, always keeping her cut off from the looking glass hanging beyond my back.
“All this fuss and I haven’t got a chance,” she says.
“You complaining about my hairdressing?” I tuck a flower behind her ear instead of hiding it at the back of her head and step away, giving her a clear view of the looking glass, the butterfly just hatched.
She sees it and her smile opens up. But then it is those teeth of hers, twisting sideways, jostling for a crumb of space. Should I say about keeping her mouth closed up in front of old Pluque? No need, not with her lips snapping shut, her face switching back to grim.
“Pretty as a peach.”
“Such a lying tongue,” she says.
“Christ, Marie.”
“Monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo.”
She reads the newspapers she plucks from the gutters. She goes to the school of those nuns, wanders lost Saturday mornings when the classroom is shut. She knows things, says things, thinks things better left in a closed-up drawer. “What, Marie? What?”
“Monstrous in face, monstrous in spirit.”
“Gibberish for the piss pot,” I say. “Insulting, too, with everyone saying how much we are alike.”
But she goes on about throwbacks and savages and says she’s got the look of an ape, a criminal. Can I see it in her low forehead, her wide cheeks, the jaw pushed forward in her face?
Marie
I stand before Monsieur Pluque, waiting for him to look. My arms are en repos, my feet in first position, not that he can see them with his great desk in the way. Shoulders down, I say inside my head. Neck long. Hands and elbows soft. Be still. No fidgeting and don’t bother about Charlotte, posing front and center in the better practice skirt, snatched from the satchel the minute Antoinette was gone from sight.
The office is vast, twice the size of our lodging room, but plain, except for the desk, which is carved with serpents and creatures with shifty eyes and bared fangs. It gives me the same feeling I had approaching the Opéra’s back gate, looking at the decorations there—mostly garlands and flowers and scrolls—but the fence posts appeared no different from upended swords; and beyond, the Opéra’s façade was full of winged creatures, laughing masks. High up over the rear entrance a blank-eyed head loomed. Already I was trembling when Antoinette said how everyone but the operagoers uses the back gate, entering the Opéra through the doors beyond the courtyard of administration. We would not walk around to the front, to the hundredfold more adornments, the gawking eyes, the gaping mouths. I could have kissed her at the news.
Inside the Opéra I looked around at the plaster walls, the plain wood floors, nothing close to as tatty as our lodging room; but when the Opéra opened three years ago, the newspapers were full of accounts of marble and mosaics and gilt, bronze almost-naked women twisting around each other and holding up the candelabra lighting the stairs. “It’s not so grand,” I said.
“It’s the other side—the public side—that’s magnificent,” Antoinette said. “That side isn’t for you and me.”
A woman with a nose like a sharp beak approached, limping up to us from behind. In a voice flat as slate, she said, “Mademoiselle van Goethem, you know to check in with me.”
“Ah, Madame Gagnon, concierge of all the Opéra.” Antoinette’s face flickered to a smile. “Now, how’s that old knee of yours holding up?”
“Same old slippery tongue as always.”
>
“You prefer being introduced as concierge of the rear entrance?”
“I prefer a girl who says the truth.”
Antoinette smirked, lifted her chin to Charlotte and me. “Old Pluque is waiting for us upstairs.” And for a tiny moment I wondered if he really was.
“Your names don’t appear in the register.” Madame Gagnon put herself between the three of us and the stairs farther down the corridor.
“You know, same as I do, old Pluque never bothers with the register.” Antoinette shifted her weight over to one leg. “Go on up, pet, and get old Pluque. Tell him Madame Gagnon said to get himself downstairs.”
Without the smallest gap, Charlotte ducked around Madame Gagnon and set off in the direction of the stairs, and I felt a tiny pang that Antoinette knew to pick Charlotte instead of me.
“Won’t be a minute,” Charlotte called out.
“Go on up,” Madame Gagnon said through teeth clamped shut, and Antoinette pulled at my arm.
On our way to Monsieur Pluque’s office we made a little detour, stopping at the small table in front of the stage-door keeper’s loge. Charlotte and I both put our hands on the horseshoe waiting there, and Antoinette told us it was what every actor and singer and ballet girl and walker-on did. Her hand atop ours, she gave a little squeeze. “Nothing to be afraid of now, Marie.”
While we waited outside Monsieur Pluque’s office, I gripped my hands together to keep from picking at the patch of skin scraped close to raw on my thumb. Eventually a gentleman appeared in the doorway, and I clutched tighter, fearing it was time. He took a moment in the corridor, slipping off strange spectacles—round in shape but with lenses tinted blue. But he was not Monsieur Pluque. No. He tipped his hat to Antoinette and said, “Mademoiselle van Goethem,” and then he went off down the corridor. His frock coat was a good one, but the wool of his waistcoat was more than a little limp and his beard, a mix of chestnut and grey, was not properly trimmed. With Antoinette always saying you can tell by a gentleman’s shoes if he is rich, I leaned out from the wall. His were freshly varnished but the toes bent up, like he had been wearing them a hundred years.
Before he was even out of earshot, Charlotte said, “An abonné?”
“Monsieur Degas, an artist,” Antoinette said. “He’s at the Opéra day and night, all the time sketching away. Ballet girls most of the time. He painted Eugénie Fiocre once.”
“An étoile,” Charlotte said. “She married a marquis.” It was a story all Paris knew, one that kept the charwomen and sewing maids and wool carders sending their daughters to the dance school. The laundresses, too.
“His pictures must be pretty,” I said.
Antoinette shrugged. “Ballet girls fixing their stockings or scratching their backs.”
But who would put such things upon their walls? Antoinette made a habit of saying anything—to keep Maman from scolding, Charlotte from griping, me from knowing what she thought I could not bear or because lying was a habit she did not care to break.
Monsieur Pluque finally looks up from his desk, and then down again quick, and I can tell he wants to laugh—maybe at my skirt; maybe at my arms, still held en repos; maybe at Charlotte, bowing in a curtsey so low her fingertips reach the floor. But he does not. No, he strokes his mustache, covering up his mouth. “All right, Mademoiselles Marie and Charlotte,” he says, getting up and pointing at the floor in front of his desk. “Over here.”
Then he spends a long time just looking, eyes wandering face to feet. He probably knows all about Cesare Lombroso, about murderers and whores and crooks of every sort being born that way, about the signs they carry in their faces that tell the world. Will he ask me to leave now, to wait for Charlotte in the corridor? I pull in my chin, thinking to shrink my jaw, but what if it makes my neck appear short? Just stop, I tell myself. He makes a circle in the air with his finger, and we turn. “On your bellies,” he says after a long while.
I get onto my belly and wonder at the nerve of Charlotte, who says, “Monsieur Pluque, I know all the barre exercises, the center ones, too. I can copy anything Antoinette shows me. I really can. I can do a line of demi-tours that is very straight. I can show you.” She gets herself ready, one foot out in front, arms croisé. Should I do the same?
“On your belly, Mademoiselle Charlotte.”
No, I should not. His voice is like a wintry gust.
“Now, plié,” he says. “No, no, no, Mademoiselle Marie. Keep your rump from popping up.” Then his hand is upon my backside, pushing it down flat, and my bent knees splay out to the sides. “Loose hips.”
I know from Antoinette it is something a dancer needs, hips loose enough to let the fronts of the thighs roll out to the sides when she leaps or stands still, even lifts up a leg. With him unable to glimpse my twisted teeth, I allow myself a smile.
Then he tells us to straighten our knees and raise our shoulders and ribs, arching our backs. Crouching beside me, he pushes my forehead with the heel of his hand. “More,” he says. “More arch.”
It makes me wince, the way he barks.
“Antoinette has you practicing back bends?”
“No, Monsieur.”
“It’s unusual,” he says, “such suppleness in a girl your age.”
He tells us to stand and we do, Charlotte more slowly and making a pretty flourish with her arms.
“Now for your feet,” he says, moving to a spot just in front of Charlotte. He claps his hands twice. Somehow she knows he is asking for a foot, and she moves her arms à la seconde and makes a grand battement that ends with her ankle in his waiting palm. She stretches that ankle straight, arches her entire foot, not just her toes, but he says nothing about her dancer’s feet.
I copy the way she got her foot into his hand, but I make a mess of it, and he has to scoot out of the way, that or get himself kicked. I gasp, just a little, and he chuckles, like it does not matter in the least, and then he acts no different about my feet than Charlotte’s. He calls for a violinist and while we wait, he goes back to looking at the papers on his desk and my mind drifts to wondering whether his telling Antoinette she was ugly and skinny is even true.
An old man with a white mustache and a violin comes into the office and makes a little bow. “Something in four-four, a little mournful,” Monsieur Pluque says, coming around to the front of his desk again. The old man lifts up his bow, sets it down on the strings and then there is music filling up the air.
“Dance, when you are ready,” Monsieur Pluque says.
I stand still as death, feet in first position, arms en repos, my mind flitting, crisscrossing to such an extent that I cannot make sense of what we have been asked to do. I feel my skin bristle, nerves aflame.
And then Charlotte whips around, not teetering a bit, in a straight line of demi-tours, and Monsieur Pluque claps his hands together, loud, just once, and the music halts. “No. No. No. Enough,” he says, again a loud bark. “I asked for demi-tours? No. I am not interested in what steps you think you know.” He clears his throat. “Shut your eyes. Listen to the music. Then tell me what the music says.” The music starts up again.
I shut my eyes. I wait, listening hard to the music reaching underneath my skin. But I do not know what to do. I listen more, harder, and I cannot think of anything except that the music sounds like a leaf drifting down from a tree. And then it comes to me, sudden, like a clap of thunder one minute and teeming rain the next: I am supposed to be that drifting leaf. I start slowly, just my head, side to side, and listen for slapped together hands stopping the violin. I add my arms, little sways back and forth. The music grows and so do my swaying arms. And I let myself drift, feel myself lifting up, then floating, then tugged by the spinning wind, then drifting some more. I keep it up, until the music slows down and then stops, and I am a leaf quiet on the ground. I open my eyes. “Exactly,” Monsieur Pluque says, but I do not know if he is talking to me or Charlotte.
With the two us wedged into the single chair in front of his desk, he opens up a ta
ll book of pages thick from handling. He asks for our full names, our street and the number of our lodging house, our mother’s name and occupation and then our father’s, and I should be speaking up, saying Papa is dead, but I do not and eventually Monsieur Pluque remembers what he already knows and says, “Oh, yes. Never mind.”
“That book of yours, it’s where you write out the names of the petits rats?” Charlotte asks.
He leans back, his mouth puckered to a tight ring, and tilts his chair onto two legs. “Mademoiselle Charlotte, you remind me remarkably of Antoinette, with her tendency to say whatever she pleases and never wanting to wait,” he says, and I know we are meant to remember Antoinette losing her spot with the Opéra ballet. He flips his chair forward so it is back on all four legs. “Mademoiselles Marie and Charlotte, tomorrow morning, then. Nine o’clock. Madame Gagnon, downstairs, will have your names in the register. Follow one of the petits rats up to Madame Théodore’s practice room. Come early. You won’t find it on your own.”
With the way I swallow a smile, there has to be the ugliest of grimaces upon my face. And Charlotte, gripping the arm of the chair, looks to be holding herself firm against some force wanting her to leap up. “Dismissed,” he says.
We are quiet in the corridor, quiet while we jump up and down squeezing each other tight, quiet while we change out of the practice skirts. We stay quiet on the stairs, also passing Madame Gagnon’s loge. Even with the rear entrance doors only a step or two away, I whisper when I say, “But where is Antoinette?” She is not on the bench, waiting, like we arranged, and I cannot think of a time when Antoinette said to meet at such and such a spot and was not there.
Charlotte peers into the sunshine of the courtyard beyond the doors. “She’ll be out by the gate.” Same as for me, the possibility of Antoinette forgetting us does not exist.
We pass through the doors and then we gallop and leap and knock shoulders as we run across the courtyard bursting with our news. But out by the gate, still there is no Antoinette. Still she is not there.