And here, I freeze. Scantily clad bodies of women are strewn at wild angles on beds, draped over settees, crumpled in chairs. I notice a dangling foot in a torn stocking, a nerveless arm tossed off loosely across a table, an apple of a breast fallen out of a soiled negligee, mangled shoes without mates littering the floor—and immediately I think of Gwendolyn’s story, of death, of murder.
I realize that my mouth is open, and only then hear myself screaming.
One of the bodies stirs, faintly, and a tousled head appears over the back of a sofa.
“Not very polite of you to shout like that,” the head says in a sulky voice, and squints at me through caked, furry eyelashes. “Who are you, anyway?”
The other bodies are now moving, too, shifting, stretching, moaning. I close my mouth with a snap, then open it again to reply. I feel rather shaken.
“Your new maid, miss. I believe you’ve been robbed.”
“Robbed?” Bleary dark eyes blink at me.
“The downstairs.” I gesture, weakly. “It’s all torn apart, pillows, papers—”
“Well, of course it is,” the head interrupts with an irritable yawn. “That’s why you are here, now, isn’t it? I’m going back to sleep. Wake me up when you’ve finished, and do be thorough, make sure the vomit is off the curtains, we have some fresh blood coming tonight.”
And with that, the head vanishes behind the sofa.
Unsettled, I descend the three flights of stairs and set about the slow, laborious, ungrateful business of straightening the living room, the dining room, the parlor, all equally in pieces. As I move scraping and scrubbing and washing well into the afternoon hours, the hush above my head continues complete, and I am just beginning to worry that I merely imagined the stirring limbs, the spoken reassurances, when a barefoot, barelegged young woman plods soundlessly through the door, a short and none-too-fresh yellow kimono thrown over her shoulders.
“Aren’t you an absolute peach,” she declares as she opens her arms wide and twirls about the parlor. I recognize the tousled hair, the once-bleary dark eyes, grown vivid and alert. “I fear we’ve lived in a bit of a pigsty, but young men nowadays, they are just so fast, you know, one needs to keep up, one simply has no time for domestic niceties. I’m Edna. Is there anything for breakfast around here?”
It is nearing four o’clock. Without comment, I go to the kitchen to fry the bananas I retrieved from the piano, make some toast, brew some coffee—the icebox is jammed with haphazardly piled provisions. Just as the smells of morning start to rise through the early-evening air, the kitchen begins to get crowded: more and more barefoot women in slatternly robes and camisoles with the oily shine of tired satin file inside, yawning, running their cocktail-ringed fingers through their messy bobbed hair, rubbing their mascara-smeared eyes.
Edna, who is now sitting on the bar, dangling her strikingly shapely, shockingly exposed legs and biting into her third piece of toast, rattles off introductions in a rapid staccato between zesty mouthfuls: “Greta. Clara. Ginevra. Zelda. Theda. Rita. Barbara, but she prefers Bebe, and rightly so. Anita. Gilda. And, last but not least, the other Barbara, but do call her Bean—we do.”
The names all sound like the same name, sharp and fresh, and the women all seem to be the same woman, short-haired, rosebud-mouthed, pretty, indecently young, scarcely into her twenties. I count, to protect myself from being overwhelmed.
“Eleven,” I say as I distribute more toast. “That’s eleven. But I thought there were twelve of you.”
The barefoot women, who have come alive with the imbibing of coffee and are chattering to one another like an exaltation of larks, fall into an uneasy silence, dart sideways glances at Edna.
“There is also Nora,” Edna admits with visible reluctance. She looks just like the rest of them, but from the oddly mature, hesitant note in her voice, I understand that she must be the oldest. “Nora is not here right now.”
“She might come by later, though,” pipes up one of the others, Ginevra or Zelda. “Hey, you know what, you should stay, too. We’re expecting some divine fellows tonight, aren’t we, girls? We’ll be doing Chinese lanterns, and the music is ever so swell—aren’t you just gone on jazz?”
“Yes, stay, stay!” all the others cry, perking up. “We will lend you a dress, and Bean is marvelous with a pair of scissors, she can get your hair looking like it belongs to this century in no time at all. You will have such fun!”
But something about their abruptly restored jauntiness, the artful geometry of their curls, the terrible youthfulness of their eagerly smiling lips, the restlessness in their naked eyes, frightens me. Mumbling excuses and apologies, I gather my cleaning supplies and slip away, just as the child-women start trooping up the stairs to get ready for the coming night, their shrill, excited voices carrying snippets of fashion advice mixed in with misplaced confidences and heartfelt confessions, their dulcet laughter chasing me out into the twilight. As I trudge down the promenade, I feel every single one of my three dozen years weighing on my shoulders, my back aches, and the trolley stop is so much farther away than it was in the morning.
When I arrive the next day, the house is in shambles once again, chairs lying with legs up in the air like so many expired rats, two or three vases smashed, scratched gramophone records hung in an undulating garland on nails freshly hammered all along the living room walls, something pink and sticky gumming up the piano keys, another silken shoe with a broken-off heel filled with sour champagne, the young women out of sight, clearly asleep, strewn all over the loft in exhausted abandon. Prepared this time, I attack the destruction with grim efficiency and manage to escape just as I hear the first creaking footsteps on the stairs above—a cowardly strategy I will follow without fail in the coming days, in the coming weeks, until one Monday in mid-December, at the uncommonly early hour of three in the afternoon, I am intercepted in the foyer by a droopy creature with spiky hair and vivid shadows under her swollen eyes, whom, after a stretch of impolite gaping, I recognize as Edna.
“Rough night,” she says with a shrug. “Well, you saw what happened to the potted plants. Shame, really. Tonight will be different, though, we will be meeting some absolutely lovely people. Do stay for the party, it’s so much merrier with an even dozen! Did you know they used to call us the Twelve Dancing Princesses? Oh, we were famous, we were! Only now Nora never comes, and it’s just not the same… Please? Pretty please?”