When we lost our heads, p.7
When We Lost Our Heads, page 7
Sadie let the maid lead her toward the gangplank. She felt terrified and as though she were dying. And in some respects, she was. How could she ever expect to be the same after climbing onto the ship? Her face was wretched. It was contorted into extreme expressions.
Sadie’s mother knew her daughter could have been beautiful if she’d had a different personality. Her thoughts were always written on her face. It was not easy to walk into the parlor and see your daughter looking at you with such disdain.
She had never bonded with Sadie as a child. But since she had so much love for her son, she was able to ignore Sadie. He was so obedient and affectionate even if he wasn’t as clever as Sadie. And she wasn’t even sure if Sadie was intelligent. She sometimes thought wickedness seemed to masquerade as intelligence. Certainly cruelty and criticism had a similar edge to intelligence.
When Sadie became friends with Marie, she suddenly had a power in her hands. She, of all people in the house, had held a key to the family fortunes. Her mother hated that. She had to be obsequious to her own daughter. Her mother was frustrated that Sadie was aware of her power but did nothing with it.
She could have finally become part of the household. It was great fun to have a common mission and to work toward a goal together. She could have helped strengthen the family name. She would have benefited enormously. It would have increased her marriage prospects. But whenever she brought up marriage or anything of that nature with her daughter, Sadie looked at her as if she were suggesting she hurry up and look at a unicorn in the backyard.
She watched Sadie moving about on the deck of the ship. She should have known not to take a hope and put it in Sadie’s hand. Sadie could very easily have killed Marie. They would have been finished then. The only thing Louis Antoine had any affection for in this world was his daughter. He would never have allowed Sadie’s family to survive.
Whereas Sadie had seemed surprised by her outpouring of emotion, her mother was surprised she herself didn’t feel anything. She was relieved her daughter was going. It meant nothing to her when Sadie slumped onto her knees. The only satisfaction she had was that she knew she had been right about her daughter this whole time. She had been justified in being suspicious of her.
Sadie’s mother stopped to look at the ship pulling slowly away from the port. She made out Sadie standing on the deck. Sadie was scanning the crowd for her mother in turn, but she did not see her. There were many people on the dock. They held out their handkerchiefs to the people on the ship and waved them. The people on the boat held out their handkerchiefs and waved them back. It was a beautiful thing to see all the handkerchiefs. They were like a group of seabirds congregating around a cresting whale.
Mrs. Arnett didn’t wait for the ship to pull out from the shore before turning around and walking away.
CHAPTER 9
Sadie Sails Across the Sea
Sadie was seasick for the first two days. She was so angry that Marie hadn’t been punished the way she had. She knelt with her arms around a bucket. She stared at the hole that was at the bottom of the bucket. She whispered, “This is Marie’s fault.” And then she vomited into it. If Marie had come with her, then she would not be alone in this predicament. They could hold each other’s hair while they puked and tell each other to be brave.
She walked along the deck, muttering, “This is Marie’s fault.” Children got used to her walking along the deck and talking to herself. They came to accept that she was no fun to play with. And that there was something not quite right with her head. If she had been wearing black, they would have assumed she was in mourning, as she acted like a child who had lost her mother quite recently.
There was a group of girls on the boat who thought it quite the pity that Sadie was too odd to speak to. She was so pretty. And girls were always so attracted to one another. Sadie had such beautiful black hair, they all stared at it enviously. They hoped they would be able to get a lock of it before they landed on shore. But they would never get a lock of her hair.
Sadie’s chant was so repetitive, it seemed somewhat like a skipping-rope chant: An accident. An accident. You can’t punish someone for an accident.
Sadie’s hands were always cold. She held them to her face and blew on them. She exhaled and little puffs of smoke came out of her mouth even though it wasn’t winter yet. It was winter out on the sea apparently. Perhaps the winter didn’t have anything to do with temperatures. Perhaps it had to do with distance and loneliness.
What bothered Sadie most was that she was certain Marie wasn’t feeling tormented at all. She imagined Marie almost as though she were a pastoral painting. She imagined her lying on a large bed, completely naked with a black ribbon around her neck, eating grapes. She imagined her walking in the park. She imagined her sleeping on a canoe with a book on her chest as she moved gently down the river.
Sadie stood at the back of the ship one evening. There were animals underneath the ship. Entire cities of them. There were whales who opened their mouths and swallowed great gulps of the sea. Sadie considered jumping into the water and being swallowed whole by a whale. She imagined sitting in the belly of the whale with all the other suicidal children who had jumped into the sea. She imagined one could sit in the stomach of the whale only for so long before they began to be digested. She imagined trying to pick up a fish’s rib cage to comb her hair, only to discover three of her fingers were gone. She would have to hold things in a delicate, awkward manner. She would sleep on a jellyfish but then wake to discover her legs had disintegrated. Perhaps it was better to go that way. Piece by piece. First you said good-bye to your toes. Then your ankles. Then your heart.
This sort of morbid reflection was very comforting to her.
Sadie was aware of the growing distance the ocean was creating. She didn’t miss anything about the Golden Mile. She refused to experience homesickness. The only thing that would cause her to miss the Golden Mile was Marie. She decided to put Marie out of her mind.
She and Marie had been separated. There was no chance they would see each other again. She accepted this. Sadie headed back into the ship, turning her back on North America.
* * *
After eight days at sea, the ship docked in England. The noise of the city was brutal and greeted them before they even landed. Sadie took in everything. When she stepped off the ship in London, she couldn’t help but compare the world she saw before her to paintings of hell.
But Sadie wasn’t frightened. Perhaps a pleasant surprise of this entire venture was that she found the chaotic, crowded scene before her curious. Her little heart was beating in her little chest quite rapidly—but it was not out of fear, she realized quickly. It was out of excitement. If she was not afraid of this scene, she would not be afraid of anything.
There was a woman from the boarding school who was there to meet her. Sadie curtsied.
CHAPTER 10
Marie Awakes from a Nap
Marie felt shaken up about the murder. Everything she touched seemed to be vibrating. First the doorknob was vibrating. Then the pen she was holding was vibrating. Until she realized it was actually her who was vibrating. She imagined Sadie would be punished for a time, as her friend was not able to manipulate her parents as well as she was. They would not be able to see each other for perhaps a week or so. Then Sadie would refuse to speak to her for a brief time before forgiving her.
Marie’s father put her in a carriage and brought her out to their country estate. That was where he had brought her mother when she was feeling depressed. He had been told by a doctor that the best cure for nervous anxiety in women was to take them out to the fresh air. They could sit in the sunshine and wiggle their toes and not worry about fashion. Louis also felt there was something more natural about women. He thought they somehow belonged in nature: in fields of flowers, milking goats and holding sheep in their arms.
Her father had filled the bench of the carriage with pillows and the softest blankets. So her trip would be lovely and bouncy, and she could feel like she hadn’t even left her bed. Louis knew that Marie was sensitive. And he had learned from his wife that maladies of the mind could be as devastating as those of the body. He squashed his large body in with hers. He let her rest her beautiful head on his lap.
They left the clamor of the city with all its new buildings that had been recently erected for a growing population. There was scaffolding everywhere, with men pulling up buckets of cement and bricks and yelling. There was never a moment of peace and quiet in the city. It was always in the middle of building itself. You couldn’t even tell what the city looked like. A street would build itself up and then would catch on fire from a single cigarette butt and burn to the ground. It looked for trouble. Sometimes a building climbed up taller and taller and then collapsed in the middle of the street.
When they arrived at the country home, Marie was given lemon and honey tea. It was so strong her nose scrunched up when she drank it. The maid had been instructed to put drops of opium in her tea and to make sure she drank it all day. She placed the drug into Marie’s teacups with a thin dropper, like a hummingbird pollinating a flower.
After she drank the tea, Marie felt so extraordinary. She stared at the sunbeams in the room that were filled with motes. She was sure if she were to put the motes under a microscope they would be tiny, fidgety fairies, lifting up their dresses and scratching their twats, picking their noses and pulling cobwebs off their wings. There had been quite a lot of documentation of fairies lately. Marie yawned, inhaling a hundred fairies up her nose.
Marie was stoned for two weeks. She was eating strawberries dipped in chocolate with her eyes closed. She missed her mouth on several occasions, causing there to be a chocolate mustache above her lip.
The fall came more quickly in the countryside outside Montreal. Marie sat in a lounge chair on the porch, wrapped in a fur blanket, and watched the trees begin to turn colors. The yellow leaves shone like they were made from the gold leaf in illuminated manuscripts. The red made the hills look like a battlefield after a holy war.
She was so impressed by the movements of a leaf, she felt the need to spread her arms and attempt to imitate it. She danced on tiptoe along the edge of an icy pond, pretending to be a leaf.
She had the maid bring in a baby rabbit for her to stroke. She could not get over how incredibly soft it was. She squished it so hard. She fell asleep with the rabbit in her arms, accidentally suffocating it. But she never knew because the maid replaced it with another one.
* * *
Then one day, Marie woke up from a deep nap and realized she had lost all sense of time. Her first thought was that she might have lost an entire week. But her sense of loss was too great for that. She believed she had lost a year.
She was terrified of how much time might have passed. She looked at her body for a moment. Almost as if to check if it was old and that her entire youth had passed her by. Everything about her body was the same. Her toes were the same. Her nose was the same. Her knees were the same. Her peach-colored pubic hair was the same. Her fingers were the same. Her thumb was the same. Her palms were the same.
But she had such an enormous sense of loss, as though something important had slipped through her fingers.
Then it hit her. It wasn’t time she had lost. It was Sadie. Somehow Sadie was gone. The opium had made her oblivious to the effects of the murder. She was being treated for her possible reactions and guilt and horror and anxiety, but she’d also been cured of thinking about Sadie. She suddenly realized something had happened to Sadie. Sadie had disappeared from her reach. She had left Montreal imagining Sadie was confined to her room reading a book, which was something she loved to do. But she knew with a terrible, alarming sense of calamity this was not so.
She would feel that bullet hit her again and again throughout her life. It struck her. The bullet that was meant for her. It continued through space. It entered her heart. She put her hands to her chest. The hole was so palpable. It was the empty spot where Sadie belonged.
She went to see her father in his room. There was a maid in the bedroom who was wearing only a pair of white stockings while dashing about looking for the pieces of her maid’s uniform. Marie was used to maids in her father’s bedroom. She looked at the maid impatiently, waiting for her to hurry up. The maid gathered her clothes and slipped out.
Louis was sitting up in his bed reading the newspaper. Although this seemed like an intelligent activity, in truth he enjoyed looking at comic strips and illustrations of attractive starlets. He also relished reading about the scandals. As long as they concerned other people and not himself, he found it cathartic.
“Where is Sadie?” Marie exclaimed.
Louis looked up. He thought they had established an implicit agreement not to talk about it.
“Darling, Sadie has been sent to England to attend a boarding school there.”
“I didn’t want that to happen! Oh, Papa, Papa. I beg of you. Make her come back. This isn’t fair. I’m as much to blame as she is.”
“Something had to be done.”
“Then send me away too. Send me to her. I want to be with her. I want to share the punishment. I can’t live without Sadie. She is my best friend. Everything will be boring without her. I don’t want to be in Montreal without her.”
“You would choose her over me, Marie? That disappoints me in a way I can’t begin to express. You are my whole life.”
“Then why are you making me choose?”
“Marie!” he yelled. He stood up. He threw a vase against the wall. She stopped. She rarely saw her father get angry that way. He was always so indulgent with her. When you were that rich, you didn’t have to be angry with your child. You hired a governess to do it.
She knew her father had been aware all along that she was lying and had betrayed her friend. Having betrayed Sadie was morally much worse than shooting the maid. The maid’s death had been an accident. She could have stood on a chair in any room and yelled, “Accident!” at the top of her lungs, and felt good about herself. Whether people accepted this or not, she would feel justified yelling it. She would be an idiot, but she would also have the moral high ground.
She felt thoroughly chastised and ashamed for having pinned the murder on her friend. She had done this herself. That was always the hardest pill to swallow. If only we could have the luxury of blaming other people for the situations we find ourselves in. She had to swallow her pride. And she experienced the effect of digesting it. Her shame was absorbed in every part of her body. She felt it in her toes. The female body was particularly absorbent when it came to shame. If you wrung out any woman’s body, you would discover it was soaked in shame.
She could not bear to have her father bring it up again. She would have to act as though it had not happened. Then her father would forget about it.
Louis observed Marie as she fell deflated on the couch. He was happy to see she was dropping the subject. He had no interest in being angry with Marie. Louis was able to be callous to everyone else because he had Marie. He had no fear of being alone. Because Marie would always, always be there for him. She was the only person who loved him unconditionally.
She had been sitting on his lap one day when she was five years old. Her hair was a bundle of gorgeous curls, with a bow stuck on top of them like a butterfly on a plant. He had looked at her and said, “Do you think Papa is a bad man?” And she had looked at him shocked and hurt. Her eyes welled up with tears and she’d exclaimed, “No, Papa! I will never leave you! I will never marry!” And he had believed her. And he would always hold her to it.
The maid hurriedly got dressed in the kitchen and went back to making soup. She wiped a tear from her cheek. But neither of the Antoines remembered she existed.
CHAPTER 11
A School for Girls Who Refuse to Smile
The girls gathered around to see the new student. Sadie stood before them in her one dress, with her heavy, stained cloak around her shoulders. She could feel them assessing her appearance. She straightened her back and raised up her chin. She could not let them see she was frightened by them.
She felt self-conscious about her status. She knew she wasn’t only comparatively less wealthy than they were. She was poor now. She was poor because of her lack of money and also a lack of love. She knew from the way they were looking at her they knew she had been accused of murder.
Walking down the large hallway behind the headmistress, she couldn’t remember ever feeling so tiny. The heels of her boots made an echo on the floors. She wanted them to be quiet and not draw attention to her. But they were curious and nervous and so would not.
The headmistress’s heels, on the other hand, made the sound of a gavel striking the block with every step she made. Guilty, guilty, guilty, they kept saying.
The headmistress showed her the classrooms briefly on the first floor and then the cafeteria with its large tables. She then led her up to the second floor, where all the bedrooms were. Each room had three beds in it. There was a small table next to each of the beds on which each girl had displayed her collection of most impressive items. There were vases with flowers painted on them, small bottles of perfume, bell jars with stuffed birds in them, rows of combs lined up neatly like utensils, dolls wearing dresses that looked fancier than anything Sadie had ever worn herself, jewelry boxes with ballerinas stretching their arms up to the sky. Sadie didn’t have any of these pretty things in her suitcase.
The two girls she was sharing a room with stared at Sadie when she walked in. Sadie decided it was best not to say anything and began to unpack. She reached into her bag and took out her notebook and put it into the drawer. She took out her few books and placed them on the desk, hoping they’d take up more space than they did.
