Sadie passed through a giant park on the side of the hill in search of a shortcut. She crossed over the grass field. The autumn ground was like a soft carpet under her shoes. The great big trees that had lost their leaves were stretching their arms as they always did. They let her pass by. They didn’t reach down to grab her. They knew she had to go.
Sadie descended from the Golden Mile onto Sherbrooke Street, a large commercial street at the midpoint of the hill. The bright, large windows of the stores displayed beautifully crafted items. In the window of the millinery, one of the hats on display had cloth pink roses piled on top of it. Sadie paused to consider whether they were real.
Even in her frazzled state of mind, beauty could arrest her. As she stood for that brief moment in front of the display of hats behind the glass, she was aware of the life choice she was making. She was leaving behind this world and all its perfectly arraigned artifice. As she began to descend farther south toward the river, she was aware she was moving behind the scenes of beauty.
She was about to go to the neighborhood where all those cloth roses were crafted. There were apartments crowded with women who made the roses with slender fingers covered in tape from pinpricks. Drops of blood would spring up on their fingers like ladybugs. And their teeth were all ragged from biting threads. They slept in bunk beds, eight to a tiny room that no body heat could save from being cold. There were small clouds of breath that came out of their mouths as they slept and filled the city with fog the next morning.
Yes, she was going backstage. Before, she had had the opportunity to be one of the actors and perform onstage. Now, she was going into the darkness where the stagehands crafted their illusions.
As soon as she reached the Squalid Mile, the factories by the river were shooting up black clouds, which made everything dirty. The buildings and houses were ugly, made out of bricks in squat rows that covered each side of the street. The streets themselves had just been made and were dirt with planks of woods laid down row after row to create a sidewalk. And there were no trees. There were heaps of horse manure all over the road. She had to keep her wits about her.
There was filth everywhere. The stench of human excrement coming from the rows of outhouses in the alleys was unbearable. Sadie pulled a perfumed handkerchief out of her cloak pocket and held it up to her nose.
Sadie passed a young girl who was holding a basket of laundry in her arms and laughing uproariously. It was the exact type of laughter she had been punished for at boarding school. No one had ever told this girl she was supposed to control her laughter. Her laughter would have been interpreted as almost violent in the Golden Mile. What a way to live! How much more intense joy would be if you were allowed to express it. What came first: the feeling or the reaction to the feeling? Sadie wanted to write something that would be as joyous and uncontrollable and uncontained as this girl’s laughter was.
She noticed the ways in which girls on the streets went out of their way to be pretty, even though they weren’t given a penny to spend on their looks and were wearing tattered, out-of-fashion dresses. A girl, noticing young men were present, raised her skirt almost to her knee as she was stepping over a puddle. Her faded stockings, the color of pink roses, were visible for a brief second to anyone who was watching. Her legs and ankles were almost unacceptably pretty. She was suddenly, with her skirt raised, the most attractive girl Sadie had ever seen. Ah! to create beauty without a cent, that was remarkable!
There was a mother who could not have been more than fifteen, bent down in front of a perambulator. She began singing an absurd French ditty to the baby inside: “If you stop crying, tonight I will give you a slice of the moon.” These people had nothing material to promise and offer one another. So they offered one another descriptions of the moon and pirates at sea. They offered one another jokes and snippets of poetry.
In the Golden Mile everyone spoke English. Here the voices mixed in a loud tapestry of languages. Sadie could hear French and English. She also heard what she thought was Gaelic. She heard a group of men arguing in Yiddish and a woman speaking Creole. It made a marvelous, cacophonous symphony.
Suddenly the filth seemed to not matter and Sadie was taken in by everything she was seeing. Everything was a metaphor she wanted to write about. This was a landscape where people acted in an openly poetic manner. They wore their hearts on their sleeves. They were expressing their passions openly. They were expressing rage and longing out on the street. They weren’t hiding anything from one another. They seemed fearless to her. How wonderful, Sadie thought, to have nothing to lose.
She passed a group of men lugging a large barrel up a narrow wooden staircase. The barrel slipped out of their hands and hurled itself back down the stairs. Sadie moved into the alley to get out of their way. She came immediately up against a couple fucking against a wall. The girl didn’t even have her feet on the ground. Her ass was being held up by the man, and her legs in striped stockings were wrapped around him. His pants had been lowered and you could see his buttocks forcing themselves back and forth into the ruffles of her pink skirt and petticoats. Her legs rocked back and forth in her striped stockings. Her black boots might have once looked pretty enough, but the soles were almost worn through.
Sadie had read and thought and wrote and imagined so much about sex. And here it was. She couldn’t believe her eyes. There was something almost supernatural about seeing an act you had previously experienced only in fiction. She could not believe this was how people in the Golden Mile made love. She had never seen anything as intimate as the looks on their faces. It was sex for pleasure. Neither expected anything but pleasure from the encounter. They were having sex for the sake of having sex. They didn’t have expectations. They hoped to God there were no consequences, no babies, no diseases. They were risking their futures to have sex against a wall.