The other girls had sat down and had begun embroidering by the time Sadie arrived late. Sadie sat down at the empty chair in the circle. She took off her hat, and her hair was unkempt and greasy, with pieces of it hanging in knots on her forehead. Everyone else’s hair was immobile. Marie was flattered often for the immobility of her hair. Today, for instance, it was in a perfect mound of circular curls on her head. Their hair was like a group of hound dogs waiting for their meal to be dumped before them who would not budge a muscle before their master signaled for them to begin.
Sadie’s physical appearance caused her to be immediately alienated. She sat sunken in the chair as though she were a male libertine. Her legs were kicked outward and crossed, displaying her filthy boots to everyone. The others knew she had been to a fancy boarding school. They figured she must be deliberately acting in a louche manner because she looked down on them. She was so used to fancier people. She viewed them as servants. They tried to make conversation. But their words were totally lost on Sadie, who continued to stare at Marie.
Sadie’s presence caused Marie’s heart rate to change and her lungs to inhale and exhale in a different way. It changed her inner temperature and her blood began to heat up. She felt circles of sweat begin to form under her armpits. The others observed the change in Marie’s demeanor with displeasure. Sadie was stealing Marie’s heart away, the same way she had when they were little girls.
Sadie took her embroidering out of her bag and began stitching.
“Would you like to see the rose I’ve been working on, Sadie?” Marie asked. “It’s very realistic.”
“A realistic rose. How original. By limiting what we can be realistic about, are we achieving realism at all? I didn’t even know what my cunt looked like. And then one day I took a hand mirror and placed it there. Because I was so curious. I almost dropped the mirror, I was so in shock.”
The girls had all stopped embroidering and were staring at Sadie, dumbfounded with shock themselves. But Sadie continued sewing away. After an hour of sewing, and not saying another word, Sadie handed Marie a kerchief. She had embroidered an anatomically correct heart on it.
“I went to see a surgeon’s museum when I was in England,” Sadie said. “This is what hearts are supposed to look like. When I laid eyes on what a heart actually looked like, much about affection and love made sense to me. Because love is quite grotesque when you think about it. We try to make it very neat and symbolic. But this is what it looks like.”
It wasn’t that Sadie wanted to destroy Marie. She wanted to destroy Marie’s world. She saw that Marie had come to think of it as an acceptable world. She would show Marie how empty and inane it was. She couldn’t help herself.
The other girls all thought Sadie had made something ugly, and they gave one another looks. But Marie felt like a fool. Her chin wobbled like the breast of a songbird.
* * *
Two weeks later, Marie invited Sadie to archery lessons. They stood on the lawn behind Marie’s house, wondering whether the other still had excellent aim. Marie drew and hit the bull’s-eye perfectly. The arrows in the black center of the target looked like a group of quills stuck into an inkpot.
“It’s all very well to hit the center of a bull’s-eye,” Sadie said. “Especially when it is one you have been staring at for years. It is quite another to attempt to hit a target when you are under pressure.”
“What do you propose? You can’t possibly be murdering cats still. Do you want to go hunting? Shall I plunge my arrow into the beating heart of a moving deer?”
“No, nothing so extreme. I’m going to the theater later. So I don’t have time to go hunting on my country estate the way you do.”
Sadie reached into her pocket. She pulled out an apple and balanced it on her head. She stepped in front of the target.
“Shoot the apple off my head.”
Marie raised her bow and arrow, but her whole body began to shake. She knew she could hit the apple were it nothing more than a red dot in the distance. But she could not take that kind of risk with someone’s life, and certainly not with that of someone she adored! She remembered with an alarming clarity Sadie eating an apple after Agatha’s murder. Sadie was trying to incriminate her for the murder she had gotten away with. She would have Marie murder again to prove her point, even if it involved she herself becoming a casualty.
Marie did not know how lowering the bow made her a coward, but it made her feel ashamed. Sadie pointed her finger at Marie’s heart. Marie was too terrified to move, as if the finger had bullets in it. Sadie took the apple off her head and dropped it back into her pocket. As though she would need it again. As though this were something she went around doing regularly.
Sadie promised herself she would confront Marie until she realized it was better to be an outcast and returned to her former self. She walked off, having won the archery competition without having fired an arrow.
* * *
The next week in October was the annual Thanksgiving Ball. It was made clear to Sadie there was no way she might get out of going. Sadie didn’t try. She had known from her childhood everyone in the Golden Mile attended the Thanksgiving Ball. And besides, unlike every other event in the neighborhood, she quite missed going to a ball. She wanted to hear the orchestra and see the dancing. She had liked the excess of a ball and how it always brought peoples’ emotions to a peak. There was always someone acting foolishly.
Sadie finally put on one of the dresses her mother had bought her. She placed her hair up on her head and jabbed it in place with pins. It was hardly much of an improvement on the way she had been wearing it lately. She didn’t like the colors of the dress. It was beige with pink frills. It was made of so much chiffon she was worried the ash of her cigarette might set it on fire. But once she put her cloak on over it she felt more or less herself.
Sadie immediately ventured to the ballroom. Trees planted in large pots lined the dance floor, their branches decorated with candles, creating the effect of a magical forest. Through the makeshift trees, Sadie noticed Marie near the refreshment table. Marie was sweaty and animated and was lost in conversation with a group of men. She had clearly been there a while. Sadie watched as Marie knocked back her drink and then quickly had another, in a manner that was decidedly unladylike. She recalled how gluttonous Marie was. It was one of her absolute favorite things about her. The effects of the alcohol on Marie were immediate. Her cheeks became flushed and she stepped out onto the dance floor as though nothing could hold her back.
Since Marie couldn’t feel Sadie’s gaze, she was acting more naturally. Sadie’s presence made her nervous, but clearly nobody else’s seemed to. And men definitely did not intimidate her in the slightest. Marie toyed with the men, each one looking at her as though they were certain of her adoration. And then she would promptly drop from the man’s arms as though he had never existed, and would pass into the arms of another. Sadie saw Marie could not be dominated by men. And yet she was remarkably attached to her brother. Sadie shrugged off a man who asked her to dance and gave him a contemptuous look so she could continue to focus on Marie.
Suddenly Mrs. Arnett was at her elbow. “You can’t treat men that way,” she whispered harshly.