Heather O'Neill - Daydreams of Angels

Violet didn’t care what anybody said: nobody sang in the rain. They were each given an umbrella to hold over their heads. What bad luck! she thought. What bad luck!

A girl named Lily got a starring role. They dressed her up like a peacock, literally. She had all these tall peacock feathers sticking out of her ass and a little tuft of black feathers on her forehead. She sang a number about being vain and about how all the boys were wild about her.

Lily had only been doing the act for a week and men were crazy about it. Here was a woman who was telling the truth about her sex, they thought. Finally a woman was admitting that she was vain and stupid and mean. Women got what they had coming. They deserved to be beaten if the beef bouillon wasn’t ready when their husband walked through the door.

Petunia dressed up as a black cat and did a ballet number on pointe shoes. Violet liked her. Petunia always fell asleep as soon as the train started moving. She would fall right to sleep with her head on Violet’s shoulder. And she would wake up with her curls all over the place, looking like she’d come from toppling down a hill. It reminded Violet of her mother.

Petunia told Violet that she liked to be beaten by a man she was seeing. Everyone else thought that Petunia was so pathetic to stay with such a brute. But Violet didn’t find her so at all. Once when Petunia came back from visiting the man, she took off her clothes so that Violet could look at the red welts all over her body. How extraordinary, Violet thought. To have a beau who was so honest about his hatred of you that he would just go ahead and pound you senseless.

There was a girl named Iris who liked to sit and complain about everything. She thought that she had the best singing voice in the whole company.

She said that the director kept her in the chorus because he was terrified of her. Because she would be better equipped to run this company than he was. So he had to keep her down. Iris wore a black velvet jacket and a little black top hat perched at the side of her head. She looked regal, but not in the way that women tended to look noble — all otherworldly and painfully aloof. She was carefree and arrogant and bold — she was noble the way that a man was.

However, Violet preferred the company of the girls who were as terrified as she was. She and Petunia shared a room together in the hotel. It was a tiny room with blue striped wallpaper and a sad little chair in the corner with roses on it. There was a framed drawing of a nightingale over the washstand.

The moonlight lit up Petunia’s body. It made her look like she was made out of smoke. They fell asleep with their arms wrapped around each other: the prettiest girls in the world.

Violet was well liked by the other girls. With her big, dark eyes, she would take in every word they said. The girls had been taught that other girls weren’t important and that real life only happened when you were with a man. What was the point of talking to another make-believe person like themselves? But Violet was sad when the girls fell in love. She thought that each of them was in full bloom, and when a man plucked them, they would start their decline.

There were men in the audience who had come specifically to look for girls. They had wallets that were fat with money. They drove big cars and ordered tremendous meals for themselves. Were you to be chosen by one of these ostentatious fellows, you would have a marvellous life. You would take on their last name. Your new life would begin the moment that they married you. You could forget all about the grungy little childhood that you had come from. That was really the point of all that dancing. When they were up on stage under the spotlight, everyone in the room was able to stare and stare and stare at them.

The girls, on the other hand, because of the glare from the footlights, were not at all able to see anyone in the audience. Everyone in the audience was a complete mystery. Nonetheless, Violet knew the faces of all the men in the dark. Each one of them was Forester looking at her, wanting to own her.

There were some other really very pretty girls who didn’t have a whole lot of talent but who had such big smiles and radiated such happiness that their joy in itself was a spectacle. Violet felt so much disdain for the men in the audience that it reflected in her dancing.

Violet liked to read on the train. And she liked to look out the window at all the trees and the strange houses in the middle of nowhere and the animals in the backyards. The cows and horses looked like little toys that she could reach out for, pluck from the earth and stick in her purse. She had signed up for the chorus line in order to be independent. She had a vague notion of what she wanted, which always seemed to be slightly beyond her reach. She spent all her time with her head in the clouds, trying to figure out just what that might be. She felt lazy and restless because there was something that she was meant to be doing that she just wasn’t doing. The piles of books she always had with her sometimes aided in distracting her and holding her attention.

The other girls taught her to drink gin and that helped too. She thought that she became an alcoholic the very first time she had a drink.

When she drank, her mood was like a firecracker that lit everything up, and when it passed, she knew that the whole world would seem darker than it was before. She would be utterly miserable when that mood passed. She kissed one of the girls on the lips. She threw her arms up in the air. She could tell that girls fell in love with her as much as men did.

She ought to have known about drinking, shouldn’t she? She didn’t blame it for her mother’s poor health. She didn’t believe it could kill you. She thought it was only a fairy tale that you could drink yourself to death.

Violet tried to think of other ways that she could kill herself. A dancer in the company named Daisy told her that chorus girls all thought about killing themselves. She shouldn’t pay any attention to those thoughts when she had them. She shouldn’t go around telling anybody that she was feeling suicidal, because nobody felt sorry for chorus girls. They were pretty — what more could they possibly want?

But the more she drank, the sloppier she was in the chorus line. Her dance steps were off only by seconds some times, but the chorus was so synchronized that any tiny uncoordinated move made the whole production seem shabby. Suddenly, instead of looking like perfect and happy angels, because of Violet’s mistakes they all seemed to be flawed. They seemed mortal. You could see that they had personalities and that they were anxious and desperate and tired.

The director grabbed Violet by the wrist and pulled her out of the line one day and took her aside. He asked her what on earth was wrong with her smile.

“Are you deliberately trying to be the saddest chorus girl in the world?” he asked.

Violet stood there in her see-through minidress and her sequin-covered high-heeled shoes, not knowing what to say. She hated herself for wanting to cry. Sometimes she thought that that was all she was going to amount to: a puddle of tears.

At times there was nothing Violet dreaded so much as the future. Why on earth did she take this job? It was ridiculous. What would she do afterwards, once she retired and her reputation was ruined?

There were two ways to leave the chorus line. If you had dignity, then you would get engaged to a man. You would give your notice. There would be a little farewell party for you backstage. Each of the girls would give you a flower or some other incredibly cheap, incredibly beautiful parting gift. You would all drink some wine and then you would disappear with all your things stuffed into your cardboard suitcase, like a big shot.