Monsieur Zola’s tale is not about getting a washhouse or a chance upon the stage. It is about being born downtrodden and staying that way. Hard work makes no difference, he is saying. My lot, the lots of those around me, were cast the moment we were born into the gutter to parents who never managed to step outside the gutter themselves.
In the fourth balcony, same as the rest of the theater, people get to their feet, stamping and hollering, hands cupping their mouths or beating together overhead. Not me though, I sit, quiet and still, and wonder about the people around me, the woman with the footstool taken from her feet. Did they not see? Did she not see?
I stay out on the bench, the pads of my fingers rubbing my measly brow. Even when the balcony is empty of all but me and the old concierge, holding her back as she stoops to pick up ticket stubs and greasy wrappings from the floor, I have not cleared my head of Gervaise. I see her huddling to keep out the coldness of a winter’s night, also bits of paper fluttering down from behind the proscenium arch, landing like merciless angels upon her back.
****
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.
4
