When we lost our heads, p.20
When We Lost Our Heads, page 20
* * *
A French girl named Marthe’s sin was Lust. “I was caught masturbating. I started touching myself. It was so wonderful. But I didn’t know it was something other people knew about. So I thought I was doing it discreetly. I stuck a cucumber between my legs. I rocked gently back and forth. And I reached the point of ecstasy and I cried out. The reverend happened to be over for dinner that night.”
* * *
Louisa, an Italian girl with curly hair, was guilty of Sloth. “I was so lazy about my physical appearance.” Sadie believed it immediately. The buttons of Louisa’s vest were in the wrong holes. Her hair was lopsided on her head so that her hat was perpendicular to her ear. The madam was always sending her back to her room to straighten her attire up. She seemed incapable of looking immaculate like the other girls. The other day at dinner, she had a milk mustache over her mouth the entire evening.
* * *
A slender, mixed-race woman named Carol was guilty of Wrath. She had been bit by her mother’s toy poodle. She had taken it by the throat with both hands and had strangled it.
* * *
Anne, who was of Scottish descent and had come from a middle-class family, was accused of Envy. Before she got married, her sister shared everything with her. Her sister shared all her toys with her. If Anne admired a pair of stockings she was wearing, her sister let her try them on. If her sister discovered a pretty way of fastening her hair in a bun, she taught Anne the technique at once. But then she got married to a very handsome man and she had no part of it at all.
“How did you seduce him?” Sadie asked.
“I looked at him a few seconds more than was normal. I couldn’t believe how easy it was.”
Anne poured herself a glass of carbonated soda. Sadie stared at the bubbles rising from it. It was as though there were a tiny fairy drowning at the bottom of the glass.
* * *
Ramona, whose mother was Chinese, was so tall she seemed stretched like a shadow in the evening. She had been kicked out of her home for the sin of Greed. She had been gambling with her friends one night. She kept winning. Could she help it if she was lucky? She knew how to count cards. “What’s the point of being good with numbers if you don’t use it to make money? Gambling is what makes fortunes. They sent me here to teach me a lesson, but also because no one wanted to pay their debts to me.”
“And did you learn your lesson?”
“You can’t learn a lesson if it doesn’t make any sense.” She held out her two fists to Sadie. “Would you like to bet your hair ribbon on which hand a stone is in?”
* * *
Siobhan, who swore she wasn’t Irish, was guilty of Pride. She rejected the advances of men too succinctly. She was honest and explained why she could not imagine herself married to them. I’m too intelligent to spend my days with you, she told one. I have to have someone I can converse with. Someone who is my intellectual equal.
“I went to a museum and I looked at the paintings of all the nudes. And all the statues. I realized none of them have breasts as beautiful as mine. Do you want to touch them?”
Siobhan held both breasts in her hands like she was offering two glasses of brandy.
“All right,” said Sadie.
“Hold them,” she whispered hoarsely.
CHAPTER 27
Mary Robespierre Has Balcony Seats
Mary Robespierre was not interested in making obscene amounts of money. She was content. She had so much more than she had ever dreamed of having. She got to do something she loved instead of going to the factory every day. She had come up with a harebrained scheme, and it had actually come to fruition. She had been insulted every day of her life. The freedom that came with not being emotionally abused was exhilarating. It made every day seem like the most perfect day on Earth. She supposed, because of human nature, she would begin to desire something more in life. But she had trouble imagining it. It was like trying to plan what you want to eat the next day after eating an enormous meal.
She worked happily in her bakery. There were piles of dough on the counter. They looked like older women sitting naked on the side of a public bath. Mary picked one up in her hands and threw it on the table. The flour lifted up all around her, and at that moment, a light snowfall descended all over the city.
* * *
When the bakery first opened, because of its proximity to the factory, the factory manager had Mary bring cakes and pastries to their offices at lunchtime. She didn’t have to make the cakes so pretty. They would have ordered from her anyway, since she was right next door. She made them beautiful for her own pleasure. She found it satisfying. She was obsessed with creating works of beauty. She sat with her pastry sleeves and knives, and nothing else in the whole wide world existed.
For many of the factory operators, the arrival of Mary’s cakes was their favorite moment of their workday. They gathered around the cakes deciding which one caught their fancy. Looking at the cakes made odd, hidden parts of themselves come to light. One wondered why, at sixty-five, he was suddenly so drawn to a cake with pink icing and a cherry on top. Why did he feel like a shy little child at a birthday party?
Mary loved when the operators spent time perusing her cakes. When they had to take a very long moment before biting into one because they were about to destroy a work of art, Mary was delighted. It filled her with a pride no other feeling could compete with. Everybody has addictions to different feelings. They end up shaping the course of our lives. Those feelings become our north stars. Mary’s north star was pride.
* * *
When Mary heard Louis Antoine had died, she was taken aback. A cake she had been making lay on the kitchen table. It had fallen and resembled the belly of a woman who had recently given birth. Was she sad about Louis’s death? No, how could she be? Louis had ignored her as a child and had spent no more than two hours of his life with her, both of which had made him squeamish and uncomfortable. She’d had to trade one of her fingers to see her father. She really couldn’t afford to meet with him many more times. And yet he had given more to her than anybody else in the world ever had. She knew her protection was now gone. She wondered if Marie would come to the factory often. She knew Marie would notice their physical resemblance. She felt a perverse desire to show her face no matter how dangerous it turned out to be.
When Mary walked into the factory for the first time after Louis’s death, she felt the current of anticipation running through the crowd. Everyone had stopped working and stood on the floor together beneath the balcony, waiting. And then Marie emerged above. Everywhere that Marie went, she glowed and attracted attention. But never nearly as much as she did when she was in the Squalid Mile. The sordid background threw the pink in her cheeks and the rich blond of her ringlets into relief. Her fingertips had a touch of pink at the ends of them. Her breasts were perfect globes that would never fall, as she would never be forced to breastfeed.
It was as though Marie were standing in a sketch for a painting but she was the only part that had been colored in.
They had never seen an outfit like the one she had on. She was in mourning and was dressed in black. But the black material of her dress was so expensive that it seemed to have different colors swarming around inside of it. They could never afford black like that. The black of their clothes was flat. It wasn’t luminous. It wasn’t a color. This black was a color. It was like looking at the river at night. There were beluga whales moving underneath the water. You couldn’t see the sea creatures, but you could sense their shadows. You could feel their presence. There were mermaids twisting in the waves.
Marie was treating the balcony as though it were a stage. An observer might think she was unskilled and that she wasn’t doing anything other than being herself. But Mary, having exactly the same body to work with, knew just how skilled Marie was. Mary was suddenly very envious. That was the thing she loved the most. Admiration. She could never get that kind of sycophantic love from baking. What must it be like to be admired and revered entirely for being yourself?
The nineteenth-century city was a squalid, infectious mess. Everyone was dropping dead all the time. There had been a great wave of people shitting themselves to death the year before. So you might think Louis having a heart attack and dropping dead was not the type of event that would raise any sort of sensation in this crowd. But when Marie described her father’s passing, tears came to their eyes. They were devastated for Marie. They did not like to see her sad at all. At that moment, everyone in the factory felt Marie’s life was more important than theirs. Her problems were grander and more epic. They were living her life vicariously. They gave up their entire identities at that moment to experience hers.
Mary could see it go to Marie’s head almost immediately. Whatever Marie had been looking for in the crowd, she had gotten more than she expected.
Mary Robespierre could feel the electricity from the swell of emotions of the factory workers. It made her want to vomit from the intensity of it. If she were a doctor and placed a stethoscope against their chests, she would find their hearts were beating in rhythm. The power of a mob feeling the same emotion was hard to contain. It was like riding a temperamental stallion who had only recently been broken. You could lose control any minute. And he could crush you under his hooves. She wondered whether Marie understood that it could turn against her.
In any case, the feeling of affection would not turn that day. There was a feeling through the factory that now that Marie was their boss, all their problems were about to go away. They thought they might receive a slight increase in pay. Their minds couldn’t help but wonder happily what that extra pay would allow them to buy. For a poor person, a penny is like a magic bean planted in their heads and from it springs the most incredible, almost preposterous, ideas.
* * *
Nothing at all changed at the factory for six months. And then in the summer and through the next winter, the changes began. Salaries were slashed, jobs made redundant, quotas pushed up. And most alarming, the machines were sped up. When she brought her cakes in, Mary began to notice the changes at the factory. She noticed the effects the extra workload was having on the women employed there. It was as though they were suffering from shock. There was a girl standing outside twitching. She kept raising her shoulders and allowing them to fall. There was a girl walking toward home from the factory who kept wiggling her fingers as though she were sewing.
There was a lot more yelling going on. Girls were getting into trouble because they weren’t moving as fast as they could. Mary saw one of the overseers yelling at a girl. She couldn’t hear the content of the argument because the noise of the machines drowned out their voices. But she could tell from their body language exactly what was transpiring, as though it were an excellent pantomime being performed onstage. The overseer was waving his arms and his lips were opening and closing, while the girl was cringing. His words were affecting her physically. They were like punches.
Mary thought about how language could crush a person. Particularly women. She recalled what it was like to be spoken down to. It hit you on the head like a hammer hitting a nail until you were nothing, only a piece of dirt on the ground. He wasn’t even going to fire her, he was just getting her to be crushed and work in a state of humbled servility. The way women did at home.
It was usual for women to suffer abuse at home. There were no laws against it. It wasn’t exactly socially acceptable, but everybody did it. But now here were girls who were being made to feel the way they did at home, at work. There was no difference between public and private worlds as far as girls were concerned. They were treated by everybody as though they were their daughters; you could say or do anything you wanted to them. They lived in a permanent state of humiliation.
Mary arrived at the factory very early one day to provide hot buns for a breakfast meeting. There were five girls all sitting outside the office of one of the foremen. They had been sent there to be reprimanded. They were hysterical about it. One got on her knees the moment the foreman walked out, begging his forgiveness for taking too long on a smoke break. She grabbed the foreman’s ankles and he was visibly disconcerted. One took her boots off and hit herself on the head with them. It was rather extraordinary. Their mood was affecting everyone in the office. Mary considered perhaps on some level the girls knew what they were doing. They were performing their victimhood in a manner that upset the workings of the factory. If they didn’t settle down, who knew what they were capable of?
Afterward, Mary felt the need to discuss the disturbing sights with someone. So she went off to see Jeanne-Pauline at the pharmacy. She found Jeanne-Pauline counting pills and putting them in containers.
“How are things?” Jeanne-Pauline asked without looking up.
“It’s a mess over at the factory,” Mary answered. “The women are in a particular fit. They are going mad. But they don’t know they are going mad. They are acting in peculiar ways. They don’t understand what they are doing. But I think this madness means that they are resisting.” Mary warmed to her own idea. “Yes, they think they are getting sick. But they are resisting. They think all of their limbs are refusing to move. But that is their body resisting. They are throwing up their food. But that is their stomach resisting. They think they are suffocating their babies in their sleep. But they are just resisting. They are having sex in alleys, but they are just resisting. When they have nothing left, when they are all alone and broken down, then they might realize: Ah, I was resisting.”
“Bravo, Mary. You have felt the revolutionary pulse in the skinny arms of women workers. And you will never be able to ignore it now.”
After Mary left the store, Jeanne-Pauline reflected on how Mary had a wonderful way of thinking and a wonderful way of speaking. It was more revolutionary and violent than the girl herself was probably aware. She wondered what use she would make of it. She had the sort of violence needed for change. She had sacrificed a finger for her own personal cause. And it hadn’t seemed to faze her whatsoever.
She made a note to herself that she would perhaps have reason to call on Mary’s speaking skills sometime in the future.
CHAPTER 28
A Collaboration
Sadie settled in with George. She handed over a dress to the madam for rent, who promptly gave it to a beautiful fourteen-year-old prostitute.
The cold was so much more violent and temperamental in the Squalid Mile than it was in the Golden one. The inhabitants of the Squalid Mile brought out the worst of the winter’s personality. It bullied the poor because it could. It cracked windows and blew open doors. It forced its way into homes and gave people chills and pneumonia. It twisted old people into pretzels, it aged young people by making them cranky and sore, and it murdered sweet children in their sleep. It pushed against residents as they tried to walk down the street. Drunks slipped on the ice and broke their necks. The frost bit and ruined many a nose. And factory girls coughed as though they smoked cigars. People were so covered in layers, they looked like they were books that had been soaked and bloated by the rain. When you saw the homeless sleeping on the church steps under all their coats and thin blankets, they looked like piles of newspapers.
But inside the brothel, the stove was pumped full of coal and the building was warm, as though you were naked and curled up in the belly of your mother, unaware that you would be shoved out one day. Sadie liked the feeling of hibernating, as she could concentrate on the dreamlike realm of her book undistracted. Sadie wrote for hours and hours. Her fingertips were always covered in ink. Sadie filled pages in a wonderful, unstoppable way. Watching her handwriting was like watching a cat playing with a string. She was a girl who had been born inspired.
George was fascinated with books. They were magical things. She had somehow never really considered the obvious fact that they had been written by actual human beings. And human beings who had all the same flaws and needs as any other. They sat at desks with their underwear on and their cats on windowsills and their pots of coffee getting cold. And they wrote down their ideas. They paused to eat soup, take a dump in the bathroom, look out the window, and masturbate, and then they sat down and continued to write.
“I notice you’ve been writing in a notebook. What are you writing about?” George asked.
“It’s my novel that I mentioned. Would you like to read it?”
“Yes!”
George had believed from the instant she read the book that it was something of genius. She very much liked that the two main characters were passionate women. Neither were married to men. They seemed like pioneers in fiction to her. They were going off on an adventure. They were like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. It was picaresque and funny. But George also knew that humorous books were often the most subversive ones. People became free in literature first. It was through books that new ideas entered the general population.
“The book is brilliant! Truly.”
“I’m at a loss though,” said Sadie. “I don’t know how to finish it at all.”
Sadie had looked up from her writing desk to discover she was in a deep forest. There was nowhere to grow. There was no pathway out. Every time she picked up the pen, new trees grew like beanstalks, wrapping around one another, growing so dense they would block out the sky. George sat down with her and they discussed the book.
