The Charmers by Elizabeth Adler

were cracked, the door lintel sloped, the door itself hung off rusted hinges, and a bead curtain always rattling in the wind. Nothing kept out the bitter chill of winter, the rains of spring, the heat of summer. I knew nothing different. I never complained, though I would have liked a ribbon. I thought it would have made me like the other girls, the ones that ignored me, gathering together in a giggling clump, whispering behind their hands as I stood silently across the schoolyard. It was only a small stretch of beaten-down earth, unpaved and weedy and where the few tufts of grass hid bugs so small you never saw them but that bit your ankles, leaving ferocious red welts that lasted for weeks.
    I wore my faded blue smock, my wrinkled once-white stockings, and clumsy black shoes with broken heels. They had belonged first to a neighbor girl, then to her sister, and had finally been passed pityingly on to me, who stuffed them with rags and bits of paper to keep out the wet and keep them on my narrow feet.
    Later, when I was a success and told this story about myself, I claimed I did not care. All I knew was that I loved my mother, and she loved me. My mother told me I was destined for better things than life in this village where those other girls, the ones that had mocked me, would themselves end as beaten-down housewives, with too many children, and probably with a drunk for a husband struggling to provide a roof over their heads, because work was scarce and young love long since lost.
    You, the stranger reading this now, will know, or at least you can find out, who I became. Who Jerusha used to be, that is, because now I am no one. I barely remember myself the extravagant, joyous, carefree life I led, that began with my introduction, still clutching my mother’s hand, a too-young thirteen, innocent in the ways of the world and with no idea that a body could be used for sexual purposes, or that men would want my body, or that later I should find fulfillment, pleasure, even find “myself” in giving that pleasure to my lovers. Never a husband, though. Unlike my school friends who married for a house, I paid to keep my own roof over my head, kept my closets filled with couture dresses, evening gowns that sparkled the way I had imagined them in my dark little house, while now I had crystal chandeliers to light every corner. I had new friends to share this with me, friends that enjoyed my success, who cared about me for who I was, the same girl I had always been, the naive, too-extravagant “beauty” who all her life, when she looked in the mirror never saw that beauty, only the poor child with the broken shoes and her uncombed, too-red hair tied back with a piece of string.
    That is, until the day Maman brushed out the tangles, washed and ironed my blue smock, hitched up the too-long stockings bleached back to whiteness in an ammonia-smelling cauldron, and who purchased new shoes with the little money she’d hidden from the man who was my father. He had never married her and came only at night, usually Friday when he had been paid and gotten drunk and wanted her, and later would not remember where his money had gone. Maman did though. It was in the black leather satchel with my borrowed schoolbooks.
    Choosing a day when my father was gone to work in a faraway area, Maman cleaned me up, tied back my hair with a black ribbon she’d bought specially from the tinker, smoothed me up and down, and tied the newly polished shoes that shone like coal on top. She walked with me to the train station and bought two one-way tickets to Paris, where she told me I was going to be a star on the stage.
    I believed her, of course. Who else could have taken me out of that village, dressed me up, fixed my hair, my shoes, so I could get to go on the stage? Me, who had never so much as seen a real stage, only the traveling circus in its small drafty tent with the dancers in their tatty finery, and the clowns that ran through