The Light of Paris(52)

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. Her hair had always been a source of contention between her and her mother. It was like her father’s—wavy and heavy—and had to be pressed into submission with hair tonic and a comb at regular intervals throughout the day. Her mother’s hair was fine and silky and straight, and it fell cooperatively into any style her mother asked it to, though she rarely asked for anything other than the tidy Victorian knot she had been wearing for as long as Margie could remember. Margie’s hair was too thick for regular combs, and the waves had their own ideas about how they wanted to curl and refused the assistance of curling tongs, and it was too heavy to dress up without dozens of hairpins and the liberal application of hair wax. Margie herself had never mastered the talent of wrestling her own hair into submission, and Nellie only tried under duress. When Margie’s mother attempted it herself, she would triumph through sheer force of will, at least for a while. And then halfway through dinner, the coif would begin to fail: wisps of curls popping out of the smooth waves her mother had designed, the weight of it slipping backward, as though it were sliding off her head, collapsing into a luxurious pool at the base of her neck.

And now, the weight of it seemed wrong, too much. That hair belonged to the old Margie Pearce, the one Evelyn had called “deadweight” and an “old maid,” the one whose only marriage prospects were men as old as her father, the one who lived in her parents’ house while outside the world changed and other women had jobs and lives and fell in love. And suddenly Margie wished, wanted, fervently, to be rid of the hair as much as she wanted to be rid of that destiny.

The hotel had delivered her trunk, and Margie rummaged through it until she found a pair of scissors. They were on the small side and designed more for everyday sewing repairs than for cutting off six inches of heavy hair, but they would have to do. Facing herself in the mirror, she pulled her hair back into a ponytail with one hand and began to cut with the other. It was laborious, slow work, and she had to take a break a few times just to put her arms down, her shoulders aching from the awkward position, the scissors doing more gnawing than cutting. When she finished, she shook her head and it was done. She looked dumbly down at the switch of hair in her hand, the strands catching the light as she turned it back and forth, marveling at its size, and then up at herself in the mirror.

It wasn’t the neatest of haircuts, she would have been the first to admit, but neither was it the worst. Freed from its own weight, her hair lifted up, curling loosely around her face. Her eyes looked wider and shinier, the curve of her cheeks more cherubic and less chubby. Shaking her head again, letting a few loose, abandoned strands float down onto her shoulders, Margie wondered at the lightness of it, at the way it changed her face. She was going to have to get someone else to even out the back—a hairdresser, or one of the girls in the sun room, but it wasn’t half bad. She looked, she thought, still staring at herself in the mirror, almost pretty.

The area immediately around the Club was full of houses and apartments and families, with shops scattered here and there on the ground floor, so when she left that evening, the sidewalks were relatively quiet. People had gone home already, were eating their evening meals with their families, centered around the fresh loaves of bread she saw so many people buying on her walk home from the Libe. Margie strode confidently up to the Boulevard du Montparnasse until she saw the fluttering awning of Café du D?me. There, she hesitated. She had chatted with a few of the girls at the Club, but hadn’t gotten to know any of them, really. Some of them might be here, at one of these cafés, but she wouldn’t know them well enough to pull up a chair at a table. And while it was common for people to dine or drink or sit and write at cafés, sometimes for hours during the day, at night the place was much more convivial.

As if reading her mind, a group of young men brushed past her, shouting in conversation as they did. One of them bumped squarely into her from behind, and she took a long step forward to keep from falling. “Pardon, pardon,” he said, stopping and turning to check on her, and then, “Marguerite?”

Margie, who had been looking at the sidewalk she had been fairly certain she was going to be pushed into, looked up into the startlingly green eyes of Sebastien. “Oh!” she said, and she blushed a little. Other girls, prettier girls, were used to good-looking men talking to them, she supposed, didn’t go silly and red the way she did, weren’t flustered and tongue-tied at the tiniest of attentions paid. “Bonsoir.”

“Bonsoir,” he replied. His friends had paused up ahead, and one of them called out to him in French, which, to her surprise, Margie understood.

“What are you doing there, eh? Leave the pretty girl alone.”

“Go on,” Sebastien called back. “I’ll catch up with you.” And Margie felt as though a light had gone on above her, holding her in a comforting glow. She had understood everything they had said, through their accents, through the casual, informal words. It was a miracle.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him.