The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    W ith Madame 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?
    I loop around the first landing of the staircase and see Monsieur Degas at the foot of the next flight, sitting on a little bench. For a moment my breath is gone and I remember Antoinette telling me not to