She went home wearing her coat over her underwear.
The next day she found a job in a bar with beer-sodden floors. Schoolboys with rouged cheeks and perfumed wrists unbuttoned the pants of middle-aged bankers in the back booths. One day she brought the bill to a fiftyish gentleman, slack-jawed with lust, squeezing a boy.
When Charlotte took the job at Café Rilke, she feared she'd run into Max. Artists met here to argue about Dada and expressionism. Else Lasker-Schüler read her poems aloud.
One morning, Charlotte was standing at the mirror when her mother's reflection appeared behind her.
"Your father and I—"
Charlotte tied the starched apron strings at her back.
"You're a waitress, and—"
"And—? I'm an artist who supports herself by serving coffee."
Her mother's eyes bore down on her.
"You've turned down an education at the Handelsschule. You said no to a respectable career."
Charlotte licked her fingers and formed curls next to her ears.
"Your father has struggled so hard to reach his position in the city government."
"Is filing letters better than cutting a cherry tart into eight slices?"
Her mother's shoulders sagged under her daughter's unconventional attitudes, but Charlotte knew that stapling papers and looking for a husband behind the filing cabinet was not for her.
Balancing a tray and smiling for tips, she was still an artist. In her imagination, the part of her being that grew even under pinched circumstances, she collected impressions, arranged shapes, and mixed colors. Walking to the academy, she held her chin high, a habit from the days when she'd still believed her mother.
Sophie Charlotte, think of yourself as royalty. Your father sits at the right hand of the mayor of Berlin.
Ten years ago, he'd written one dictated letter on City of Berlin stationery. Poor Papa.
The early morning coal smoke ranged from light gray to slate gray with blue at the edges. Burning coal blended its fumes with the smell of baking bread. Bells at the top of the door jangled when Charlotte entered the café. Last night's smoke hung stale on the plum-colored drapes. Lulu, electric curls framing her head, swabbed the ashes off a round marble table.
"Pigs made a mess of the place again," she said, waving a gauze cloth at the tobacco-brown wallpaper.
Charlotte nodded toward a man seated at a table by the window. But Lulu kept on chattering about the customers, picking up beer glasses from the floor of the telephone booth. Her father was a trolley conductor who'd suggested Lulu work as a waitress because of the nice uniform. Her mother sold tickets at the UFA films. On her day off, Lulu liked sitting up front on the trolley, laughing at the passengers.
Now she waved her cloth at a young man with a beard. A serious-looking young woman with spectacles and no make-up sat at his side. They were the kind of people Lulu called degenerates, unlike Lulu's boyfriends, who overflowed with life juices.
Every afternoon, I ached for him. We did it in the coal cellar, standing up. Fast—with all that homework we had.
Beer glasses in the crook of one arm, Lulu joined her at the back counter.
"Did you hear about the blind ones—bunny and the snake?"
Trying to shush her, Charlotte spilled coffee on her apron.
"Bunny says 'let's feel one another and tell what we are.' Snake feels bunny. 'Ears and a little tail. Furry. You're a bunny.' Bunny feels snake. 'Long and cold with no balls. You're an artist.'"
Lulu neighed with laughter. Charlotte eyed the door. Two unshaven young men entered. One held the hand of a woman with helmet-shaped hair.
Lulu rolled her eyes.
"Dead peckers—too many books in the lap," she said, rubbing a lipstick butterfly off one of the glasses.
An arm went up for coffee. He wore a tweed jacket and a soiled shirt. He could have been Max but wasn't. Charlotte carried out a tray with a coffee pot and three cups. She lingered over filling each cup, slowly wiping the spout of the pot with a hand towel before filling the next cup, then leaned in between them to listen.
El Greco's bodies are sickly green—like withered leeks.
The woman looked up when Charlotte laughed.
The door opened. The sun backlit the new customer, a man surrounded by dust and loose threads. Max. Pressing the tray flat against her side, Charlotte glided toward the back. She watched him hang up his jacket. Underneath he wore a fine woolen sweater.
He looked around. Smiling, he walked quickly toward her. He took her arm and whispered in her ear.
"The gallery? Remember?"
Charlotte stepped back, perspiration in her armpits, blood hot in her cheeks. He moved closer. The pot slipped in her hands. Coffee drops smarted her skin. She should say no. He'd only make her feel ignorant. But something stirred in her.
"Four o'clock," she said.
"Gallery steps." He led her to his table.
As his friends looked up, she pictured a million waitresses falling on their faces before gentlemen. Her mother had been right. She should have learned to type.
"Sophie Charlotte, a colleague from the academy," Max announced to his friends.
Nodding like a marionette, she felt their eyes on her, burning her. They introduced themselves, but she couldn't focus on their names. Before they were done, she began walking backwards to the kitchen.
Lulu looked gloomy as a cobweb. "Slumming with the degenerates?"
Charlotte refilled the coffee pot. She wouldn't tell Lulu about the art gallery.
Your Breasts are Your Best Credentials
Charlotte's trouble with her mother began when she was 14. Hormonal and itchy, she'd spent homework time drawing bats' wings and birds' feet. After that, she and her mother drank cocoa before her father returned from the bureaucracy, joyless and exhausted. "I'd like to go to art school," Charlotte said. Her mother reached across the table and took her hand. "Nice long fingers, perfect for—"
"Piano? I don't like music."
"No. Typewriter."
Charlotte jumped to her feet. "I hate you."
"How dare you talk to me like that." Hands on hips, Charlotte said it again. And again. The floor side of her mother's slipper stung her cheek, intensifying her desire to cross her mother and attend art school.
In art class, the other students threw sponges or stabbed their thumbs with protractors and played with the blood that dripped onto the paper while Charlotte strained to catch the teacher's words.
Don't just paint what your eyes see but what your imagination contains.
Addicted to Plato's ideal foot or hand, Charlotte wasn't ready for that lesson yet. Tongue between her teeth, she examined her palm, turning it over then sketching the square little fingers. Next she painted her father's thick red fingers, her mother's thin, blue-veined ones, the flesh-wrapped twigs that passed for hands on the pianist at Bernstein's.
Her art teacher held the paintings at arm's length.
"You want to be a painter?"
She nodded.
"Don't. You'll end up as a teacher."
His nose was red from a cold, and a half moon of dandruff covered the lower part of his glasses' frame. He was like her parents—part of the