She sat with Marie at the same desk. They pored over all the dealings of the factory together. Marie was not afraid of the secretary knowing her ignorance. The secretary explained everything to Marie from scratch, but Marie was a very fast learner, and the lessons from the American factory owners all came back to her. She also had a passion for the subject. And she began to catch on and excel at the business in a manner that very much impressed the secretary. And, in fact, impressed everyone around her.
They ceased to treat her like a fool they could steal the factory from and began to defer to her decisions and work with her. Many had never believed they would find themselves following the instructions and orders of a woman, but it all happened so smoothly, they soon forgot to consider the unusualness of the situation.
Working from home would mean she didn’t have to deal with the workers directly. They could not manipulate her sympathies to the detriment of the factory. The workers wouldn’t understand why she was about to make a major tightening of the belt at the factory. But everyone had to make sacrifices now. Or they would be eating sugar from another province.
Marie worked on the business from the moment she woke up and was still in her pajamas and drinking her coffee. History was created by violent, narcissistic men who vaunted their dreams at the expense of the working-class masses. History regarded these men as complicated. But there could be no doubt whatsoever that they got things done. They were like the volcanoes and earthquakes that formed the continents. Marie came out of her depression with a callousness she and no one else could have expected.
And so the changes began.
CHAPTER 25
A Brief History of a Girl Named George
The first day they met, Sadie and George talked all night in the brothel’s attic. They sat cross-legged on George’s bed, facing each other, as it felt as though they had known each other a much longer time. Every time they laughed, the mattress wheezed like an older woman. George adored Sadie’s intellect. She’d always wondered if she would seem stupid if she were around upper-class women. Sadie had gotten a first-class education, as much as a woman could have a first-class education, and they got along marvelously.
George began her story at the very beginning. She was born in the brothel. George didn’t know until quite an advanced age that you were supposed to wear all your clothes at once. One prostitute walked by with a crinoline like a cage around her and nothing else. Another woman was wearing a pair of bloomers. Her corset was untied and she was wearing it open like it was a jacket. Another was wearing striped stockings and a see-through chemise. They were mostly in bloomers and petticoats and undershirts. It was an ordeal to get their dresses back on.
George was no great beauty. She must have inherited her father’s looks. All the women in the brothel denied that they were her mother. She accused them all one at a time of being such. She would do it as a way of establishing intimacy. She would know this later. She didn’t quite know what she was doing at that point. She felt as though she were propositioning them somehow.
But it was considered impolite to point out which of the whores was your mother. You belonged to the whorehouse. You didn’t want to lower the sexual allure of your mother, did you? You pretended to be your mother’s sister if you looked too much like her.
But George was indispensable. She did ten times the chores other girls did.
She wasn’t the type of girl men noticed. But growing up in the brothel taught her invisibility. She was able to dart in and out of rooms while people were having sex in order to retrieve items, or check on violent thumping. She would whisk into a room and would take instructions from a prostitute who was on all fours and being thrust into from behind.
“Go move that bowl of water from the table. I’m terrified it’s going to fall over.”
Once a prostitute had her continue to jerk a man off while she ran to the bathroom. She didn’t want him to lose his hard-on. He lay there and closed his eyes, stroking her arm and imagining a more beautiful woman, no doubt.
One of George’s gifts was she wasn’t afraid of the human body. And she wasn’t afraid of other people’s pain. She helped out during all the births. The women found themselves wanting her to be next to them. She would look in their eyes and tell them not to worry, and that they were doing beautifully. And they found themselves hypnotized by her.
She made the same gestures with her face as they did. It made them feel as though they weren’t alone in their pain. When they yelled, she yelled with them.
Once she was called in by a prostitute on a particularly busy night. The prostitute needed a little help getting the man to come, and all the other prostitutes were busy. In situations like this, she ran in and tickled their balls or put her finger in their bottoms. She didn’t mind. It was usually an action that was quite mechanical and would have been a waste of time for another prostitute.
She also went in a room to show out a Chihuahua that was trying to rescue its mistress from a client. After that, it became one of the details of life she automatically attended to whenever she heard a dog barking.
She helped the prostitutes get dolled up again so they could go down and get another client quickly. She helped them douche. She helped reapply makeup and find their shoes. She replaced articles of clothing that had gotten torn. She took the clothes down to the kitchen to work on them right away.
She thanked the Lord for having made her ugly. She didn’t have to work as a prostitute. She helped with every other job there and she learned so much. Also, she didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant.
* * *
There was a skinny man who’d left his pinstriped jacket behind one day. George had begged and begged for it. She wore it with a pair of pants a young boy who had lived in the brothel had outgrown. When you saw her from behind, with her hair up, you could sometimes mistake her for a young man. She felt she was recognizable because of that jacket. It made her different.
She kept her hair in two braids at the side of her head but then cut them off to stop the madam from pulling them.
“Good lord. It’s such a pity that you cut your hair,” Madame exclaimed. “It was your one good feature. Now you’ll be even uglier than you were before.”
George was delighted at her short hair. It made her feel lighter. She liked the way she looked in the mirror. She liked that she looked like a very modern girl. She bought some pomade like the men wore in their hair. She used big gobs of it to style her hair in different ways. Her favorite was to make it into a wild pompadour over her head.
* * *