When we lost our heads, p.5
When We Lost Our Heads, page 5
* * *
Sadie went up immediately after Marie. To everyone’s surprise, she announced that she, too, would be reciting Goblin Market. Marie was the most startled that Sadie had chosen the same poem as her. It worked to her disadvantage. The audience would have just heard it. They would be bored of it. The story itself would hold no suspense for them. Their attention would wane.
Sadie did not move her body around the way Marie did. She glared at the audience as she recited the words, curtly and viciously. Her dark seriousness pervaded every word. The audience followed Sadie even if they didn’t want to. They were now in a menacing fairy tale with perverted goblins pulling at their hair and sticking poisonous berries in their stomachs.
Marie began to think of the poem in a different way. It had hidden meanings. Sadie was offering a completely opposite reading of Goblin Market. The audience was silent and troubled, but they were also rapt. They were quiet at the end, pondering the darkness Sadie had revealed to them.
In any case, the two readers had both broken many rules about what it meant to be a young woman and had gotten away with it.
* * *
The judges took a longer time deciding on a winner than they usually did. And when the judges came back, they made an announcement that would have far-reaching consequences and wreak havoc on many lives. They decided that there had been a tie that year. There would be two winners. The judges had decided the girls were both so eloquent, they couldn’t decide who to give the ribbon to. Sadie and Marie were both given first-place ribbons.
If the judges had decided then, once and for all, which of the girls was superior, it would have saved an awful lot of trouble. The girls might have accepted their ranking. One would have been slightly superior and proud of it. And the other might have reconciled themselves to a secondary role. But to posit they were equals put each of them in an impossible situation vis-à-vis the other.
This was absurd to both Sadie and Marie. How could first place be given to two children? They both knew it was a lie.
* * *
After the girls were awarded their ribbons, Marie was surrounded by a swarm of girls and their parents, all of whom wanted to congratulate and compliment her. Sadie stood off to the side, all by herself. Nobody could even look her in the eye.
Sadie didn’t feel as though she had won. She didn’t even feel as though she had tied for first place. She felt she had been robbed of the award. Her interpretation was better; she was sure of it. But the judges refused to let an unlikeable girl like her win the competition.
She felt bitter that night in her bed. She closed her eyes. She imagined inviting Marie to come cycling with her along the river. She imagined the wind blowing Marie over into the water. It would be very hard to swim in the type of fancy dresses Marie wore. She would probably drown.
The only manner in which she could get over her feeling of rejection was to fantasize about Marie dying in strange ways. In these fantasies she always went to great lengths to save Marie but would never succeed.
She had a fantasy wherein Marie fell through a hole while skating on a thin patch of ice on the river. She imagined lying on top of the ice, banging on it. And Marie banged from the other side of it. It was very macabre, but it was wonderful. Marie would be lifeless underneath the ice and Sadie would be staring at her, alive, alive, alive.
* * *
Marie felt like such a phony after obtaining the ribbon. Everything she took pride in was a lie. People had complimented her because she was rich and for no other reason.
She wasn’t especially pretty. She was fat and blond and silly-looking. She still looked like a harmless baby. On the other hand, it was impossible to keep one’s eyes off Sadie. She was going to get prettier and prettier the older she got. Whereas Marie would become fatter and more ridiculous and people would recall how adorable she had been as a child.
Sadie would become more and more brilliant. Marie would always be an idiot.
She had been told she was better than other girls her whole life. It wasn’t true at all. Other girls had been holding themselves back so she could win. She was held up as a standard of success, and because the bar was so low, all the other girls were idiotic.
Marie put her head against her pillow and wept, wishing she had never met Sadie. She wanted to go back to feeling the way she did about the world before meeting her blackhearted friend.
* * *
Nonetheless, the two girls found themselves in Marie’s garden talking about poetry less than a week later. It was a beautiful day. The clouds were like the tutus of ballet dancers dropped all over the floor. The dandelions had sprung up like a group of eggs had hatched the night before. The girls were discussing the duel scene in a play they had seen.
“Why would anyone agree to a duel?” Marie asked. “You’re risking your life to make a point to someone you don’t like.”
“Sometimes two people can’t be alive at the same time. Because they both want the same thing. They hate each other so much that if they both stay alive, it will negate both their existences. So it’s a simple solution if you think about it.”
“But I think they should be able to work it out,” Marie said, her face scrunched up in thought. “I don’t know what killing each other will do. Even if one person is dead, do you really stop hating them? You might go crazy because you will never be able to make peace with that person.”
“No, no, no. Some people can never be friends no matter how much they try. They try again and again and it just makes things worse. There is nothing they can do about it. That’s the thing about mortal enemies, they can never stop trying to destroy each other.”
“Shall we play at being in a duel?” Marie suggested.
“Absolutely,” Sadie said.
“I don’t mind dying.”
“You always get to die,” Sadie complained.
“Let’s both die.”
“Perfect!”
“And shall we murder each other with our fingers?” Marie asked.
“I’ll borrow my father’s guns. They are so beautiful.”
* * *
After a brief trip to her house, Sadie returned out of breath, holding a box with her father’s guns inside. She opened the lid for Marie to admire how beautiful they were. Sadie took the box of bullets out of the side and put them on the bench, so no accidents would happen. They went deep into the labyrinth in the backyard together.
CHAPTER 5
Louis Antoine and His Conquests
The maid Agatha was getting dressed very slowly by the window. Louis’s favorite thing was to watch maids get dressed and undressed. He appreciated when they did it slowly. Agatha, however, wasn’t doing it to please Louis but because she didn’t want to go back to work. She considered making love to be part of the job. She considered getting dressed to be her own time. She was lazy about it. She watched a dove tossing about in the sky, looking like a young boy pulling his white shirt over his head.
Louis’s reputation with maids was notorious, even though he tried to keep it within the walls of his large home. Louis Antoine hated the opinions of outsiders. Gossip had plagued him his whole life, even when he was a child and innocent of wrongdoing. Louis Antoine’s father was a moron and lost all the family’s money in bad investments. He did what people normally did when they had a reversal of fortune like that—he blew his head off in his office. His mother had a cup of tea and arsenic and followed suit.
Louis Antoine had wanted to marry someone very pretty. He was very pretty, so he thought he really deserved to marry someone pretty. He believed he had exquisite taste in girls. He could rank who was the most beautiful. He didn’t consider himself shallow because he also took into account women’s personalities. He believed that a woman’s happiness enhanced her looks. He believed a woman looked her most beautiful right after she laughed. Her cheeks were flushed pink and her mouth was partly open. Equally, he admired the way they looked after they had been dancing. They were sweaty, their curls stuck to their forehead, and they looked desperate to take their clothes off.
But the most beautiful and eligible girls were always encouraged to marry rich men, because they could. They courted men who were less charming and beautiful than him because those men had large fortunes. The only woman he could get to marry him was Marie’s mother, Hortense. Her parents had also died when she was young, but they had left her with an enormous fortune and an entire sugar factory. She was so rich that she could afford to marry a handsome, penniless aristocrat. But she was plain and melancholic.
He met Hortense at the Ice Ball when he was nineteen. What had the theme been that year? It had been Cyrano de Bergerac. All the men were wearing large prosthetic noses attached to their faces with elastics. And they had swords on their sides. There was something unexpectedly perverse about the costumes.
Hortense sat on a bench by the wall all evening. She was too self-conscious to skate. She was always about to burst into tears. Every time he saw her, he thought she was crying, even if she didn’t actually have tears in her eyes. She couldn’t bear to embarrass herself. How boring someone that self-conscious would be in bed. No one else wanted to marry her. However, none of the other young men were for sale in the same way that he was. She could afford to buy his love. And so he was purchased.
She understood. And she knew it was her money in large part that he was after. Yet he was kind to her. He plied his seduction with her. She was, of course, insulted when her aunt and uncle insisted he only wanted her money. Because how else could she interpret it other than them implying that she was unlovable. And so that was how it came to be that two very unlovable people came to be wed. One got what he wanted, and the other was deeply depressed and killed herself before her daughter’s first birthday.
There’s no one more brutal than a rich man without money.
After his wife’s death, Louis insisted all the girls working in the house be jolly. He said he didn’t care if they were incompetent as long as they were happy. He had had enough of women’s sadness. He viewed his wife’s sadness as something he had endured. Something he’d had to live through. He acted as though he’d had to cope with his wife’s suicide. It was a selfish act she had perpetrated against him and also against Marie.
The maids in their household changed all the time. They lost their joie de vivre abruptly once Louis seduced them. They inevitably went mad. There was a maid who spoke only French who tried to run off with Marie when she was a baby. She left the father a note that said, You took my heart, now I will take yours. But she had written it in French and Louis had no idea what she meant. She took the train with Marie all the way to a small town outside of Trois-Rivières. They slept together in a bed at an inn. They were too tired to even take the blanket off the bed. They lay on top of it and fell asleep in each other’s arms, and that was how they were found by the detectives.
But of all the strange fates the maids who were Louis’s lovers had in store for them, it was Agatha’s fate that made the most impression.
Marie was always affectionate with the maids. She accepted the runoff of emotions they had for her father and relished it. But she was always wary when Agatha was solicitous of her. She found it alarming, although she couldn’t put her finger on why. And she knew she was being unfair to Agatha. Nonetheless, she couldn’t help but put her defenses up around this maid. It felt as though Agatha was always asking Marie for some sort of reciprocal attachment she had no right to demand.
That day, while getting dressed, Agatha looked out into the magnificent rose garden below. For a moment she considered it to be her own. And then her heart fell into her stomach, her face went pale, and she screamed, “Oh no!” and flew out of the room half-dressed.
She had spotted the two girls engaging in a duel. It was to be the end of her.
CHAPTER 6
Eulogy for a Pair of Pistols
The girls had been practically knocked off their feet by the force of the guns’ blows. They were stunned that there were bullets in the gun. They stood there with tiny clouds of gunpowder over their heads, wondering if they were ghosts, whether they were going to be made aware that bullets had entered them and had stopped their hearts. They knew there were consequences to what they had just done, but they couldn’t ascertain what they were.
The maid lay on the ground with two bullets in her chest. The front of her chemise was soaked in blood. It kept spreading outward. There was no saving her. She didn’t move a muscle. She looked wide-eyed up at the sky. Although neither girl had encountered a dead body in their lives, it was clear they were now looking at one.
Marie seemed to react first. She threw the gun onto the ground, as though it were a live thing, an accomplice that would cause her to murder someone else.
She had a look of such panic on her face that Sadie knew she would have to save her friend. Of course Marie was going to react more strongly. She had seen this woman alive so many times. So naturally the fact of having to look at her dead was overwhelming. But Sadie did not know the maid. She seemed as though she had run out of the house with the express wish to become a corpse.
Their eyes met, and Marie’s whole being begged for Sadie to help her. Ordinarily, Sadie’s face would have the same look of aghast comprehension that Marie’s had. But Marie had beat her to it. They could not both be petrified. Sadie would bestow the privilege of being alarmed and hysterical to Marie. She would take care of this mess and then Marie would know just how much she loved her and would make her sure to always, always keep Sadie at her side.
Sadie stepped around the dead maid. She knew immediately the best course of action would be to deny the whole event. She had read about such things in detective novels. She picked up the guns and hurried off with them in her arms to the woods behind Marie’s house. She stepped carefully over the roots so as not to trip. As she walked, her heart was beating so loudly, it felt as though she were marching in a procession that was signaling to everyone around that war had begun. Sadie buried the guns in the pet cemetery.
She realized it wasn’t the best plan to try to hide the guns in order to conceal the crime. But she had never murdered anyone before. And in the detective novels she had read, there always seemed to be an effort to throw the murder weapon in the river. She wished she could dispose of the body.
She sat between two giant tree roots that held her in their arms as though she were a baby. Her hands were completely covered in mud. She needed to let her little heart stop beating so quickly. The mushrooms at the base of the trees were shaped like ears, as though the forest were listening and waiting for her to explain.
There was a space the noise of the gun had cleared out in her head. All other outside noises were muted. She could not hear the sound of the stream passing by the tips of her boots. She couldn’t hear the branches rustling against one another above her. She looked up in the sky, and there were birds overhead but she couldn’t hear them. She could only hear what was going on inside herself. She sighed, and the sound of her sigh echoed through the whole forest.
She went back down to Marie’s yard, now empty of people, including Agatha’s body, and waited for her friend. She was waiting to find out if they were in trouble. Feeling faint, she reached into her pocket and pulled out an apple. She often carried a piece of fruit around on the off chance she felt hungry. She took a bite from it. Then seeing that she was all alone and not knowing what to do, she headed home.
Marie will take care of this, she thought. She and her father can fix everything. Marie is going to be the owner of a sugar empire. It will be nothing for her to find an answer to this problem. She had no idea how Marie would pull it off, but Marie thought in different, more worldly ways than she did. It was as though the day were a page in a huge book and they would rip it out if they chose. It wasn’t their fault the maid had hurled her body between them. No, this event need never have happened.
She walked home and found it was already dinnertime. She didn’t say a word to anyone at the table, but nobody noticed. They didn’t notice she was deaf and mute. They didn’t notice her thoughts were about a million miles away from them.
She lifted up her fork to take a bite, but it trembled in her hand. She put it down abruptly and looked around. It was as though the fork were asking how dare she hold it after what she got up to today. It was as if the fork were trying to notify everyone at the table what she had done. The fork was not inclined to feed her any dessert. The raspberry remained untouched in the center of the flan. Red juice began to seep out of it, like a bullet wound in the chest of a white chemise.
She asked to be excused, then went to the bathroom to puke.
* * *
The maid had been carried quickly inside by three other maids. Marie ran after them. Agatha’s undergarments were completely red and soaked in blood. They lay the maid on the carpet and unfastened her chemise. The other maids yelled her name and begged her to answer. “Agatha, Agatha, Agatha,” they cried. Marie kept hoping beyond hope that the maid would be resurrected, that she wasn’t actually dead. But she hadn’t shown any signs of movement. Marie realized how obstinate the dead were. They simply refused to take the world seriously.
