“We’ll prove we of the lower classes are violent animals. The way they always say we are.”
Mary moved the macarons around on the table as though she were playing a game of backgammon. She stared at them as though she were contemplating her next move. She looked up at George.
“We don’t have to prove our humanity to the upper classes. We need to terrorize them. Only then will they set us free. We need to be vicious.”
“Things happen best when they happen slowly,” said George. “You need to educate the woman worker and then she’ll be respected by her employer.”
“You have spent your whole life here. You see what you want to see. You don’t want to realize how the upper classes see you. You are a means to their ends. Even your lover, Sadie, only used you for all your talents and skills. Then she tossed you into the garbage. We are always expendable. We create wonderful things, masterpieces, then they refuse to give us credit for anything. They say we did nothing at all. They say we have no knowledge or appreciation of beauty. Their names go in the history book. Not ours.
“Every great person has an underling they have crushed in order to step on and raise themselves up to be the greatest. Sadie is standing on your shoulders right now. I can see her black boots resting on them. It is a disturbing sight.” George had the inclination to look at her shoulders while Mary continued. “What you are writing now has more relevance than anything she has written. And it is necessary for you to finish your political manifestos. Every piece of writing needs a climax. The climax of a political pamphlet has to occur outside in the real world. The climax of every political pamphlet is murder. That’s what gives it its gravitas. You started this, but you don’t know how to finish it.”
“Together, you will finish it,” said Jeanne-Pauline.
* * *
Mary’s first speech on the subject of unequal pay between men and women was in Jeanne-Pauline’s living room. Many of the women were breastfeeding, as they wanted to make sure the children were silent while Mary was talking. Since Mary was perfectly bilingual, she delivered the speech in French or English, depending on what the majority of her crowd spoke, and sometimes she mixed the two. Despite George’s hesitation, Mary’s speeches were hugely popular with other women.
George handed out her pamphlets and tried to inform women about their bodies. She gave them a list of demands they could make at their workplace and how to go about organizing strikes. Mary, on the other hand, seemed content to drive them insane with her violent rhetoric.
George was nervous of the large crowd that had assembled in the marketplace the next week for her and Mary. She was more vulnerable than Mary was. Mary would be scorned for her ideas, but George would be reviled for existing in the body she did, whether she opened her mouth or not. Every time she left the brothel, she was putting herself in danger. George was adept at being invisible, at not drawing attention to herself, darting about so no one could get a good look at her. But when George stood in front of the crowd, in front of those women looking directly at her, waiting to hear what she had to say, she became unaware of her body. She felt something she had never felt before in public: she was comfortable in her own skin.
George and Mary’s crowds grew larger. They began to have meetings in the park. It was a rare phenomenon to see young girls gathering for the purpose of establishing strength. There were so many of them. The more they had in their group, the more power they had to exert. They could not be fired by their employers or have their necks broken and be tossed into the river. They could not be disposed of, because there were simply too many of them.
Mary found that the size of the crowd did not really affect her enthusiasm for speaking. Whether there were four women in a kitchen or four hundred people at a park, she spoke as though she were warning them of an erupting volcano just outside their door. Once you have felt the public’s gaze on you, it is almost impossible to go back. It is too exhilarating.
Mary began to wear a black ribbon around the stump of her cut-off finger. A young girl carrying a basket of laundry down the street had a black ribbon tied around her finger. It was nobody’s business what the ribbon on their fingers was meant to remind them of. Perhaps it was to pick up a piece of lamb from the butcher shop. Or perhaps it was to go to a gathering of liberated women. One girl cut off a bit of the bright blue ribbon she wore in her hair. And she dyed it black and tied it around her finger. The ribbons were to remind them to be angry. The ribbons were a sign they had joined the revolution. They were ready to fight together.
The crowds were riveted by Mary and kept showing up despite the winter setting in. Their eyelashes stuck together with freezing tears and the tips of their noses were red. The cold made their lips bright red, as though they had been feasting on the carcass of a dead beast. They saw Mary Robespierre as one of their own. She had worked in factories, after all. She knew exactly what they had been through. She had also found a way to get out. She stood before them with her messy blond hair and her missing finger, and they would follow her anywhere. The ruffles down her skirt were like a series of waves about to break against the shore.
* * *
George and Mary were at a chop shop having lunch together one afternoon to plan their next gathering. George was very intuitive about people. Because she had grown up in a brothel, she had a whore’s sense of intuition. She could ferret out ulterior motives. It was uncanny even to her. She did not know how she knew the information she did. It just popped into her head. She could tell a violent man before she even looked at him. There was a chill in the air. She felt the temperature drop slightly. She did not know whether the temperature had dropped in the room or in her body.
She thought there was something not quite right about Mary and her motivations.
George wanted to abolish the upper classes altogether. She thought the huge houses they lived in were too big for anybody. They ought to be turned into libraries and school and hospitals. They could easily be converted into apartment buildings that could each house a dozen factory families. Mary, on the other hand, openly coveted that lifestyle. Once she had Marie out of the way, she seemed to have every intention of walking into her house and taking her place.
“Imagine having Marie Antoine’s wealth. Imagine what her bed is like. It must be enormous. You wouldn’t even be able to fit such a thing into my room. It would be too heavy even. It would crash through the floor. I would sleep the sleep I was meant to sleep. I would dream my whole life all over again. I would always be dressed in the most beautiful clothes. I would drink my tea with sugar.”