Free The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan

stairwell, stopping to adjust the laces of my boots, when Antoinette tugged my arm and set me tripping and stumbling and working to free myself. “Enough with the dawdling,” she said.
    Charlotte is with us, too, looking miserable at being dragged along. When we get to the heavy doors of Monsieur Degas’s building, Antoinette says, “Such sulking, Marie. Eugénie Fiocre herself wasn’t too high and mighty to pose for Monsieur Degas,” and Charlotte lets out a huff.
    “Such nonsense,” Antoinette says, scowling at the ridiculousness of one sister aching that she is not the girl upon whom Monsieur Degas’s burning gaze fell and the other panic-struck that she is.
    Inside Antoinette claps the knocker on a door with a small plaque: Edgar Degas, Painter. A stout woman with a broad, honest face and the apron of a housekeeper peeks around the door, and taking in the three of us—with our three shawls to take away and fetch and three sets of tracks to sweep up—makes a little tut. “Marie?” she says. “One of you lot is Marie?”
    I poke up my hand, gingerly as a lamb, and she puts out an arm, awaiting the heap of shawls. “Over there,” she says, pointing toward Monsieur Degas, looking off into nothingness with his chin held up by his palm. But the fierceness of his pondering keeps my feet glued to the floor, standing ever so still, and it is no different for Antoinette and Charlotte.
    It is my first time inside a painter’s workshop, and what hits me right away is the strong smell of turpentine and the clutter covering every speck of level surface, every crumb of open wall. The room is vast with sheets of sunlight coming through bare windows and a plain, sturdy table and long bench, both buried under a jumble of brushes and sponges and candlesticks and crockery and saucers of paint and bowls of water and ends of charcoal and boxes of pastels. There are a half dozen rickety chairs—two propping up canvases; another hung with a paint-smeared smock; another holding a rosewood box spilling over with tubes of color; another, with a splintered leg, toppled over on its side; the last, standing empty. The walls are painted with grey distemper and hung floor to ceiling with pictures, so many that if I was called away now I would not be able to describe a single one. There are more, leaning up against the walls, one edge on the floor, turned so the back of the canvas faces into the room.
    “Don’t blame me,” the housekeeper says. “He doesn’t want me touching a thing, and I’m not to sweep up, not with the possibility of dust settling in fresh paint.”
    She goes over to the table, heaps our shawls onto the single empty chair, and stands there, hands on her hips, eyes roving over the mess until they come upon a palette and two brushes. Holding them up, she says, “I’ll clean these, no?” and Monsieur Degas leaves whatever thoughts he was thinking up and nods.
    Eyes settling upon the three of us standing there, he lets out a great sigh, wishing we were not spoiling the tranquility of his afternoon. “Your back,” he says to me. “I’ll start with your back.” He points to a screen in the corner of the room. “You can undress there.”
    Standing light-headed behind the screen, fingers fumbling with the drawstring of my blouse, I hear Monsieur Degas hollering for the housekeeper—Sabine, he calls her—to tidy up a couple of chairs for the sisters I brought along. But the thought of stepping out from behind the screen, hands struggling to hide the two little mounds budding on my chest and the crop of black hair appearing between my legs, with my sisters watching—one wincing and the other with eyes wide—is not something I have the guts to do.
    Holding my gaping blouse shut, my eyes sweep the corner of the room hidden behind the screen. I take in the washstand, the tiny iron bedstead, the rumpled sheets, the spirit lamp on the floor, the scrap of paper tucked beneath it with a drawing of a ballet girl