She met a society of physicians in another tale. They wanted to study the female orgasm. She lay on a table in the middle of an operating theater. The head doctor lifted up her dress and began to diddle her. The medical students all gathered around to see what the doctor was doing to her that evoked such pleasure.
She had a tale about a plague that killed virgins. The virgins all crowded into a carriage and had to hurry to the nearest town. They burst into an inn and begged men to make love to them quickly.
The stories made the girls feel so immensely. They made them feel disgusted and triumphant. They made them feel as though they no longer belonged to their families. They were somehow members of the criminal class now that they had listened to and digested Sadie’s stories. None of them wanted to reject the experience, whatever it was. They requested new stories from Sadie every evening. Her awaiting audience caused Sadie to write more and more. She became addicted to transcribing her most absurd fantasies. She knew what she was doing was not only transgressive but revolutionary. Sadie began to see herself as a writer.
CHAPTER 14
The Travels of Marie Antoine
Much of Marie’s adolescence, from fourteen to sixteen in fact, was spent on trains with her father traveling the East Coast of North America. Louis and Marie were both eager to explore the new technologies of the continent. During their train travels, as they went from city to city, when Marie felt lonely, she would go to third class to pick out a child to bring back to her cabin. She found the children from third class were better listeners. In fact, they sat there stupefied. One spring afternoon, Marie was wearing a green dress with a green bow at the end of her blond braid. Her dress was tiered and she looked rather like a layered cake. She found a young girl her age with tight black curls seated squashed next to a window and invited her to come and converse with her.
The girl was so surprised to see Marie had her own train car. There was a bed on one side of the car, in the corner. And a table by the window with chairs on either side of it.
“I am traveling the world. I own a factory. It makes sugar. Isn’t that wonderful! It is filled with the most extraordinary machines. One day I will be in charge of it myself. That’s why it’s important for me to see everything that’s happening. If you were to go into the kitchen and look at any sugar bag in Montreal, you would see my face on all of them. The name written on the bags is Marie, and do you want to guess what my name is?”
“I have no idea.”
Marie changed the subject. “Look what we got when we were in Portland, Maine. You have to see them. They are only going to be sold once a year at Easter.”
Marie pulled out a black wooden box that had flowers and a particularly alert-looking rabbit decorating it. The girl looked at the box with incredulity. She clearly had no idea whatsoever what could come out of that box.
Marie held the box in front of her like a proper magician. She lifted the lid. There were six eggs inside it. She held one up and bit into the shell. The girl looked horrified, as though she had just realized she was seated with an ogre. Marie laughed. She showed the egg to the girl. It was filled with chocolate.
“I know! When I saw it for the first time, I thought they had come from a magic sort of chicken.”
“These are for Jesus?”
“No. They are absolutely not for Jesus. Everything is already for Jesus. He doesn’t need any more. The holiday is already so sad. We needed to have some part of the day devoted to pleasure. Don’t you think?”
The girl delicately accepted an egg and took a bite of it.
“When I run my own factory I will give a box of these eggs to all the girls working at my factory at Easter. And they will run home with them and share them with all the members of their family. I want to travel around the city and meet everyone who works for me and shake their hands and tell them I could not do this without them.”
Marie reached into the pocket of her dress. She pulled out a large spider. She pressed a button on its belly. It began to dance a small jig across the table all around the teacups. It raised and lowered its legs.
“I’m going to take it apart to see how it works when I get home,” she said. “There’s so much to see in this world.”
She stepped onto the table. She opened the window and stuck her head out, and her hair blew so wildly, it seemed almost certain the wind would blow her head right off her neck.
The girl had very little to say. She stared at the strange spider hurrying around the table, looking for a way to get free. It didn’t occur to her until later that Marie hadn’t asked her a single question about herself.
* * *
When the third-class girl left, Marie’s loneliness returned. She felt a nagging longing for a companion who truly complemented her like Sadie had. The absence of Sadie left a hole in her wherever she went. Since she was followed by this feeling through America, she realized it was not a feeling she could escape geographically. She began to think about the future. If she couldn’t be happy now, then surely she would be another time. Like all unhappy children, she saw the future as a utopia. Children romanticized the lives of adults, believing they didn’t have any of the problems children did. Adults didn’t sit on their front steps and weep into their hands. Adults didn’t hurl themselves on the ground in a fit of anger, tearing at the grass as though they were angry at the Earth itself. And since adults visibly did not have the problems children had, they therefore had no problems at all.
Marie imagined herself as a grown woman. Her father had told her since she was very little that the factory and all the people in it belonged to her. She visualized running the factory, and it gave her great satisfaction. She imagined tasting different spoonfuls of sugar and then pointing to the one she thought was best.
She had always assumed theirs was the greatest, largest factory in the world. She was surprised when her father referenced a larger one in Pittsburgh. Marie had insisted they go visit it.
* * *
In the year before their trip, Louis and Marie had become isolated in their kingdom of two. Louis’s fear of Marie being taken away had led him to be more wary of society. Louis no longer found any joy in seducing the maids, as he would wake up from his affairs feeling gutted and lonely.