The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan Read Free Book Online

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.
    W hen 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