Sadie walked into her bedroom. She was flushed and delighted from her spectacle and having quite effectively ruined the meal. Her mood changed quickly when she saw her mother in the center of the room, reading her notebook. The very book she had been so careful to keep out of the hands of authority figures. Why was she worried about them at all? The only authority figure a girl ever had to worry about was her mother.
Sadie knew everything was over. She should have turned and run out the door right then. But she had a perverse desire to hear what her mother had to say to her. Her mother hated her more than anybody else in the world did. There is something that holds us like a magnet to the person who hates us the most.
Sadie knew her mother had imagined horrible things about her personality and what she might be capable of. But this was beyond the scope of her imagination. And so her mother was the perfect audience for the book. If every writer has an ideal reader, that was what her mother was.
Sadie felt in many ways she had walked in on a partner having an affair. The book had had its way. That was what a book wanted most: to have the most corrupt and devastating effect. To change the world of those who read it. It was tired of just having young girls diddling themselves while reading it when it had a more grandiose desire to subvert order. The book wanted to change the world, and it was about to change Sadie’s.
Mrs. Arnett looked up from the book at her. Her mother looked at her with such hatred but also with such superiority. Was hatred always informed by a sense of superiority? She could openly hate her daughter now that she had the upper hand.
“How in the world did you find my book?” Sadie inquired.
“Marie told me where it was.”
“God! Marie!”
“You are reprehensible. You are grotesque. I see it now. You are sick. There is a sickness I could never see in you because you are my daughter. I denied what I knew. You shouldn’t be walking around with people. You can’t be here. I need to protect my family from you. You are wicked. How can you have even imagined these things, let alone write about them? You are poisonous.”
“But did you think it was well written?”
When her mother leaped to the door, Sadie didn’t move. Her mother closed the door behind her, quickly locking it. The lock made quite a clunking noise. The doors in these houses were monumental. They could turn any room into a prison.
Sadie stood there as though trapped in a cage. She would break all her limbs were she to jump from her window. She had never been locked up as a punishment before. At boarding school, the punishments were all public performances. But this was different.
She felt the rage come out of her like a destructive and uncontrollable natural force. Like a tornado whirling forward. She had no power to stop the propulsion. She flung her fists against the door over and over until they were bruised and bloody. She screamed obscenities until her throat was raw and hoarse. If they thought she was rude and inappropriate before, well, she’d let them know about what was really going on in her head. Finally, she flung a chair against the door. The chair broke into pieces.
She collapsed in an armchair. Having weathered her anger, she was exhausted. They had taken her freedom away. But perhaps she had never had any freedom. What choices had she ever been able to make? She had considered herself free in thought. But what did that freedom of thought really mean if you were living at the mercy of other people? If you had no freedom over your body. If someone could send you across the ocean and then bring you back at will, what did freedom mean?
She rose and then flopped onto the bed as though she had been forced to walk off the edge of a plank. Though her mind was roiling, as soon as her body hit the mattress she was swallowed by the sea. She fell deep into the deep, dark sea of sleep. She hadn’t slept so well in ages.
When she woke up, she hazily put her dressing robe on in order to go down to the kitchen. They would probably have some new plan of exile for her, but what did she care? There wasn’t anywhere that was more soul draining than here. They would send her back to England, perhaps.
She would be a teacher. It would be better than posturing like an eligible bride when she was clearly no such thing. She tried the door handle and found it still locked. Her anger rushed up inside her again.
She rang the maid’s bell and then sat on the edge of the bed. She waited and no one came. She rang the bell again and then threw it across the room. Suddenly, there was the sound of a key turning in the lock. The click of it made her body flinch and jump as though she had heard someone cocking the safety on a gun.
The maid had a tray of coffee in one hand and with the other she put her index finger over her mouth and motioned for Sadie to be quiet. She closed the door behind her and set the coffee down next to the bed.
“You can’t stay here, ma’am. It’s dangerous. I see who they sent for. It’s the madhouse.”
Both their cheeks flushed red at once. It was the unmentionable term. The greatest fear of girls everywhere. They weren’t going to make the mistake of exiling her this time. A person from exile might always return. Instead they would have her committed. The most socially approved way of ruining a girl. She would never be heard from again.
“Where do I go?” Sadie asked.
“Take your fancy dresses. No one will have seen anything the likes of them in the Squalid Mile. Someone will be your friend. You’ll get yourself a male companion in no time. He’ll show you about. It’s not so hard. It’s what I’d be doing if I looked like you.”
“Where is the Squalid Mile?”
“Where is the Squalid Mile! I didn’t think it possible not to know of the place! It’s near where you got off the boat. Keep going east of there. It’ll get noisier and noisier until you can’t bear it. Then you’ll be in the right spot.”
“Is it nice there?”
“Of course not. Take your dresses! If you aren’t going to wear them, you’ll sell them for good money at the market.”
Sadie began to quickly put on her old striped dress. The dress had been sleeping and was startled awake. The maid opened a large cloth bag and began to shove Sadie’s other dresses into it.
Sadie hurried out through the maids’ corridors. There were ways to escape through the servants’ quarters, as they had been specifically designed for the master of the house to zip in and out of. Sadie left out the back of her house and hastened down the hill away from the Golden Mile. She was very sorry to have to leave without the notebook. She had had such a wonderful relationship with it. And there were blank pages left in it. But perhaps it was books who determined when they were done and not their authors.
The wind blew under her cloak and flung it around her as though she were a matador. And wasn’t she?
CHAPTER 19
The Squalid Mile