The Light of Paris by Eleanor Brown

Author:Eleanor Brown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-25T11:44:17+00:00

fourteen

MARGIE

1924

Like my mother and me, Margie and her mother had never been close. And like my mother and me, Margie had always felt a thin thread of disappointment running through their interactions, a knowledge that Margie was not enough of anything for her mother’s satisfaction. Not pretty enough or ladylike enough or obedient enough. And sometimes outright cruelty isn’t necessary. Sometimes all it takes is a lifetime of disapproving glances, of disappointed sighs, of frustrated hopes.

So when she got her mother’s reply to her announcement that she was staying in Paris, she couldn’t even hope the news would be good.

Reading it, she was only grateful her mother wasn’t able to deliver the scathing message in person. Despite her mother’s perfect penmanship, Margie could see how hard the pen had been held to the paper, the depressions of the letters and tiny rips signs of the fury behind the words. Margie was disobedient and ungrateful. She was a child who didn’t understand the value of security and family. She was unworthy of trust. Margie sat down on the bed in her room, her hands shaking as she read.

Margie didn’t think she was being selfish. And she didn’t understand her mother’s anger. She was supporting herself, wasn’t she? Not asking for anything from them. She threw herself back on the bed, draping her elbow over her eyes. “It’s so unfair,” she said to herself, and she cried a little. She should go home, she thought. Make it all go away. Smooth her mother’s ruffled feathers.

“No,” she said aloud, sitting up again, wiping the tears from her eyes. The evening sun poured into her room through the windows. This was her adventure. This was her city. And she was here, weeping in this room with the beautiful warm light of Paris on her, while outside the city went on, all the people she had said she wanted to know, the writers and artists, at cafés drinking and talking, making the future happen. Outside, only a few steps down the Boulevard du Montparnasse, were three of the city’s most famous cafés—Café du Dôme, Le Select, and La Coupole. Upon hearing Margie was living at the Club, Dorothy had told her those cafés might as well have been the center of the art scene in Paris, that people flitted between them, spreading conversation and ideas, and all of that was happening while Margie sat there, alone in her room, feeling sorry for herself. It seemed she had spent so much time locked away alone in her room, missing out on something.

Well, she wasn’t going to sit there any longer, she decided. She changed out of her work clothes, hanging her skirt and her jacket carefully. She had only a few suitable outfits for the Libe, and no money to buy any more, so she was trying to be as neat with them as she could so as to keep everyone there from thinking she was the Little Match Girl.

Margie reached up to unclip her hair, letting it fall over her back.

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