“Do you want a drink?” she asked Sadie.
“Yes, I would. Thank you.”
George handed her a tumbler of whiskey. Sadie drank it. It was as though she had needed a drink for months and had finally got one. Her body felt stiff and frozen and she felt the alcohol unthaw everything. She felt the notes of the piano from the parlor below coming through the floorboards and tickling her feet. She plopped her behind down on the couch, and a cloud of dust rose up around her that was illuminated by the lamplight, as though she were surrounded by fairies.
She noticed the books that were spread all over the room like cats. They lay around, waiting to be picked up again and perused. They liked the feeling of fingers running through their pages. She couldn’t help but go look at them immediately. She held up Jane Eyre. “What did you think of this?”
“Oh, I loved it of course,” George answered. “It’s all about being ugly, isn’t it? A girl who everyone thinks is ugly. But that doesn’t bother her. It’s her ugliness that makes her know she’s alive.”
“What did you think about her falling in love?” Sadie was very curious to hear this uneducated girl’s take on the complexities of this novel.
“Oh, I believe writers think they have to put a love affair in a book. They don’t necessarily make sense. I ignore them.” George laughed. “But I quite liked Frankenstein. I love when the monster rips out the heart of Frankenstein’s wife. I thought that was hilarious and grotesque and much closer to anything I’ve read about love lately.”
Sadie did not tell George, but after she had read that book, she had that fantasy often. She imagined walking up to Marie. She imagined ripping her heart out. Then she imagined holding it up in her hand for Marie to see. It would still be beating. And Marie would know what it was like to have your heart ripped out for no reason at all.
“Frankenstein is divine. I often wonder how Mary Shelley came to be so bold.”
“Have you read her mother’s book? She said raising girls to be silly playthings made for a morally bankrupt society. She said the way people were raising girls could only make them miserable. And they had to value what was on the inside of them, not the outside. It really affected me when I read it.”
“I think all women are beautiful,” Sadie answered. “I saw a woman lying on the sidewalk and she had no teeth and a broken nose. And she was singing a bawdy and melancholic song in the sweetest voice. And I thought this woman is beautiful in the most ferocious of ways. The world is terrified of a certain type of monstrous woman. That’s why they invented these ideas of ugly and beautiful. They say we are beautiful now because we are young and stupid. But the more we accomplish and have to say, the uglier we are described as being.”
“How interesting! Perhaps Mary Shelley is her mother’s monster. Sprung from her ideas into something monstrous. She animated her dead mother’s idea of a free woman and had it walk around in the world, not at all dainty, but grotesque and murderous.”
“Yes! I do like that notion.” Sadie also had to admit it was extremely sophisticated and now wanted to know how George was able to have such ideas. “How did you come to read so many books? Did your mother give them to you as a child?”
“Do I look like I had a mother? No, mothers are hard to come by these days. Half of them decide right after giving birth they aren’t up for it. And they just leave this world. Not that that’s what happened to me. My mother took a look at my ugly face and decided it was best not to let the world know she was responsible for me.”
Sadie was struck by this brazen attitude toward mothers. “How does that make you feel?”
“I must’ve gotten used to it by the time I was one year old because I certainly haven’t thought of it since. But I’ve always been lucky to have women on my side. I had women who were probably way better than my mother could ever be. Jeanne-Pauline at the pharmacy began loaning me books when I was ten or eleven. I never thought I’d get through the first ones, because they were filled with so many new words. You don’t hear any such words growing up in a brothel. But those books changed me. If you read enough books, they are bound to make a peculiar thinker out of you.”
“I always wanted to be a writer. Even when I was a very little girl. I used to write poems to dead animals.”
“I’ve never met a writer before! See, I knew you were special! How do you go about writing?”
“I have a thought, then I put it down on paper. But the thought becomes something quite different on paper. It develops and unfolds. It becomes a wonderful creature of its own. I would feel entirely alone if it weren’t for writing. It’s kept me such marvelous company. But it’s not only that.”
“What are you working on now?”
“A novel.”
“I love novels! The madam used to beat me when she caught me reading them. I don’t blame her. I neglected everything when I had a book in my hand. I didn’t care about the world. I let screaming babies scream. I’d let them walk right out into the road and get run over by a carriage. I went and let her favorite cat get pregnant. I let a whore almost beat a customer to death because I couldn’t put my novel down. She would pull on my braids when she caught me not behaving. Then one day I cut them off. She went to pull them and they weren’t there anymore. We laughed about that for years.”
George picked up three balls and began juggling them over her head. Sadie was intrigued by this elegant, masculine girl who seemed so comfortable in her skin and the neighborhood. She wanted to know what she knew. She liked the way George moved around seamlessly in this violent world. She had a grace that came from having lived in pants her whole life. Both Sadie and Marie had been restrained by wearing corsets and tight-fitting dresses. They were like puppets who attempted to portray grace through limited movements. She felt a sadness about who she and Marie might be right now if they had not always been ordered to have such constrained movements as young ladies.
She had to be sure to free her physical body as well as her mind.
“And you said you are not a whore, but yet you live here?”
“What man would pay money to sleep with me? I’m a midwife.”
Sadie’s eyebrows rose in surprise at this astounding and gruesome profession. “How many babies have you delivered?”
“So many. I have no idea. Sometimes the girls don’t even want to look at the babies. They just want to cry. In those cases, I’m the only one who speaks to the baby. I tell it that it’s going to be okay. Although it really isn’t going to be okay.”
“Wouldn’t it be the most marvelous thing if we didn’t have to be born from women?”
“If we were found in ostrich eggs. You could put the egg on a pillow under a lamp. And when it cracks and the human came out, they wouldn’t belong to anyone.”