“I didn’t think you were. I think a murderer would be taller and prettier.”
“She would have knives in her bags,” the other girl added, their voices bouncing back and forth, so it was impossible for Sadie to follow which girl was saying what.
“Do murderers read books?”
“They read scientific books because they have to know how to kill a man with anatomical precision.”
“It’s harder to kill a man than you think. My mother tried to murder my father a few times. But she never succeeded.”
“She’s quiet like a murderer.”
“What makes you think murderers are quiet?”
“They have to be stealthy. So they can sneak up on you.”
“No, I think a murderer would have to be charming. He has to talk you into coming into a dark corner so he can murder you without getting caught.”
Sadie refused to engage with them. The best way to get a girl to expose herself was to make her angry. It was like putting a kettle on an element, waiting for the water to scream. The dinner bell rang. The girls stopped mid-sentence and mid-gesture, and hurried off to the cafeteria.
Sadie felt like weeping. She was a solitary creature. That’s how she thought of herself. But she had wanted at least one of them to take her hand and lead her to the dining hall. This desire caused her to feel profoundly humiliated. She had been someone’s best friend. Now that she had felt the intimacy of having a friend like Marie, loneliness took on an entirely new dimension. It seemed like an emotion she could not get to the bottom of. She sat by herself in the dining hall, the other girls having already all lost interest in her.
* * *
Over the course of the following week, Sadie was introduced to her routine. Every minute of her day was accounted for. The school did not believe girls should be allowed idle hours. They were not at all encouraged to roam freely in their minds. It was as though their minds were dense forests. They were bound to get lost in them, panic, and lose their sanity.
There was a pervasive idea that girls were all on the brink of madness. It took much less than anyone had previously believed to push a girl over the edge. A single novel could do it. A complicated idea could do it. Having ambition and wanting to have an occupation could definitely do it. It was too taxing on the female brain. They had to be monitored carefully to make sure they stuck to exclusively feminine subjects. It was disturbing and unnatural for women to engage in male endeavors. Imagine, if you will, a cat barking, or a songbird opening its mouth to meow. How could anything be more unsettling? Each creature must stick to its natural life path. Otherwise all around us will be images of the grotesque.
The day began at six thirty a.m. when they were awoken by a bell. At this point they had to get out of bed immediately. They were not allowed to have those few moments in the morning when you lie in bed feeling everything is miserable and pointless. They were not permitted the luxury of being suicidal.
They then were to bathe themselves and dress before seven, when they were expected in the dining hall for breakfast. They were all given the same bland breakfast. Except the girls who were overweight and were put on a diet. They then had callisthenic exercises, to make sure their bodies were hale and firm enough to endure the rigors of happiness and childbirth.
They then had elocution lessons in the fine art of small talk. They were given reading and writing courses so they would be able to keep up with their correspondences and run a household. They had history lessons, wherein they were meant to learn the basics of history so they could follow men’s conversation. They were not, however, to form an opinion on anything. It was up to men to do that. Women would simply marvel at their ideas.
They had art classes. The girls all donned white smocks and drew botanical still lives with frighteningly accurate skill. They had music lessons. They were all quite good at the piano. There seemed to be no point during the day when you could not hear someone playing the piano. At the school were girls from the ages of ten to nineteen. So they all played at different levels. There were times where the notes came out so slowly. They sounded like a woman taking off her jewelry and dropping each piece into a porcelain cup. Other times there was a veritable whiz at the piano. It was like a wind chime being blown about furiously in a storm.
Sadie loathed the piano. It never expressed any emotion she had inside her. The notes were too optimistic. She resented it for that. She seemed to never be able to escape it. It was like a young man you disliked who kept asking you to come join him on the dance floor.
How stupid this all is, Sadie thought one night as she looked out the window of her bedroom.
She suddenly thought of what it would have been like if she and Marie had both been denounced as murderers as would only have been right. She imagined the two of them standing next to each other on the gallows in gray prison dresses and nooses around their necks. They would be asked if they had anything to say before the floor was dropped from beneath their pretty naked feet. And that was when they would have spoken their most eloquent recital. They would have said the most emotional and beautiful words two girls could think of. And in that moment, they would have been so alive. They would have been alive in a way no one else in the whole world could ever be.
Sadie sighed and left the bodies of the two imaginary girls hanging in the yard. She climbed into bed and went to sleep. The toes of the hanging girls twitched and shook, and then they were still too.
* * *
The headmistress declared one morning that all the girls had to work on their smiles. She explained that she had never seen such lousy expressions on a group of girls in her life. And that it was a great unkindness to make the teachers have to look on their miserable sardonic smirks and grimaces. They didn’t seem to be aware that when girls didn’t have a pleasant expression on their faces, they were in actuality quite unattractive. Being attractive wasn’t something that came naturally to girls. It took great effort to be pleasant. A smile wasn’t something that should be considered a spontaneous reaction. Instead, it was more like an arrangement of flowers or a memorized poem. Something that had to be labored at.
The headmistress made everybody line up and smile. When she was satisfied with a girl’s smile, she pointed at them and told them to be seated. She critiqued them viciously, as though she had finally had enough and couldn’t stand any more.