Chapter Fifty-Five
Illusion
The next day flies by in a blur. I work alone on cleaning dishes and floors and emptying wastebaskets in the Lily house. Then I walk over to the Violets’ home, because Marie reminds me we have to clean their space as well. I’m not sure what I expect it to be like. I’ve built it up in my head so that nothing can compare.
But when we finally go inside, I’m surprised to find it’s a replica of the Lilies’ home: wood paneling, outdated décor, worn furniture. I suppose there’s no use in pretending these homes are used for anything other than what they are. Still, for some unknown reason, my heart falls. I guess I clung to the idea that if I had stayed, when I finally became a Violet, I would be rewarded.
It’s strange, seeing it for the first time this way—the Violets at breakfast, me walking over red bras and lacy robes and thigh-highs in the unforgiving daylight. I always imagined I’d see it at night, music thumping, Lola dancing on a table with a glass of champagne in her hand. I’d look at her and imagine I could be her, not a care in the world. I could take her place when she left this house of mirages and reign as Top Girl.
But this place is not the dream I created. It’s just a dusty house where girls trade their virtue for bronze coins they’ll never touch. When I complete my chores and leave their home, it feels anticlimactic. That’s it? I keep thinking. The holy grail of Madam Karina’s Home for Burgeoning Entertainers? I watch from the Lily house window as the Violet girls walk back from breakfast.
They stretch in the morning and smooth their tangled hair. Their faces are free of makeup and their clothes mismatched. The oldest can’t be more than twenty-four. One girl reaches down and scratches her crotch while yawning. And Lola walks in the back, mumbling to herself about who knows what.
They don’t look like the glamorous, untouchable girls I’ve seen in fleeting moments at market or outside the main house window. In this light, they aren’t Violets. They’re just girls who were nudged, little by little, to become what someone else wanted.
As I let the curtain fall back into place, and Marie yells for me to get my lazy rear moving, the last of Madam Karina’s illusions is broken.