Free The Secrets of Lizzie Borden by Brandy Purdy

get worse, I kept telling myself over and over until the words began to blur and jumble and lose all meaning, yet I was powerless to make myself move, I just sat there staring at the dancers’ tantalizingly veiled crotches and feeling shame flood my face as my nipples hardened. I shouldn’t be feeling this, I told myself. It isn’t right; it isn’t normal! But I could not leave or look away.
    I’m sure my anguish must have shown upon my face; it was all I could do not to burst into tears. I was so ashamed and confused I didn’t know what to do. And someone did notice my distress. One of those mannish women approached me—an older woman, with deep lines etched around her eyes and mouth. Her thick, cropped, curly black hair was liberally peppered with gray and she wore an English tweed suit and a lemon-colored waistcoat and kid gloves and spats of the same vivid shade. She stubbed out her cigarette on Nellie’s dessert plate, narrowly missing the remaining half of the chocolate éclair lying there leaking custard filling, and bent down as if to speak to me, but instead her lips lingeringly grazed mine. I was so stunned I could not react. I just sat there, blinking my eyes, surprised that my tears didn’t start to boil against my flaming face.
    â€œSurely it cannot be as bad as all that, mademoiselle?” she said kindly in heavily accented English. The same words Bridget used to always say to me!
    I heard laughter all around me. Whether they were truly laughing at me, I do not know, but I felt like they were. I could not even turn and meet my companions’ eyes; I did not want to see the expressions upon their faces. Oh, the horror! The shame!
    Life surged back into my limbs and I bolted up and ran, plowing through the crowd as if I were running for my life, certain that everyone was staring at the big red stain blossoming on the back of my skirt.
    I don’t know how I got back to the hotel; somehow I found a cab. I filled the bathtub and scrubbed my skirts as best I could, then gave up and left them for the laundress. Then I tried to scrub the shame from my skin. I lay on the bathroom floor, huddled in my flower-sprigged nightgown upon the chilly tiles, with a towel pinned to the homemade blue calico waistband clutched tight between my thighs, curled up and bent double with cramps, and cried and cried as if my world were about to end and the sun would never rise and shine for me again. I don’t know how long I lay there before I finally dragged myself to bed.
    All that night I was troubled by dreams of beautiful Can-Can dancers, taunting me with their raised skirts and veiled crotches and breasts, their diaphanous blouses and drawers suddenly dissolving before my astonished eyes like sugar crystals in the rain, and mannish ladies who were not afraid to put their lips, and hands, on me even though we both knew it was the dancing beauties with their feminine frills and hourglass figures, delicious and decadent as French pastries, that I truly hungered for. But I had to make do. What else could I do when the beauties only tormented and teased? Reminding me with every shake of their pink skirts and glimpse of what lay beneath that they, these glorious creatures, were not for me. Beauty wants beauty and only suffers plain or ugly to touch it if the dazzle of dollar signs and diamonds, the promise of opulent rewards, blinds its eyes. Suddenly their ranks parted to reveal one who was all in gold with yellow feathers and diamond-tipped pins in her raven hair. She was wearing black silk stockings and golden slippers with high diamond-encrusted French heels that flashed with every movement of her dainty dancing feet. She teasingly shook her skirts right in my face, the white ruffles and yellow silk ribbons on her petticoats tickling my nose, and I looked up, startled, to see that it was Bridget Sullivan, rouged and painted as I had never seen her before. The gold paint on her eyelids