Sadie stared at the rosebush dutifully. The roses gave her a strange feeling of foreboding. She thought it would be impossible for a girl to sneak out a window of this house. If she was to lower her legs into the bushes, the thorns would tear her legs and stockings apart. It was as though there were a moat surrounding the house. But it was meant to keep people in rather than keep them out.
Marie waited for the compliment she usually received about her garden. But when it didn’t come, they walked on. Marie brought Sadie to a promenade that looked over the city. Marie pointed to the edge of the city by the water. “Do you see the smoke coming up from that building? It’s from the sugar factory. And do you want me to tell you something about it that you are going to have trouble believing but is true nonetheless? It belongs to me.”
Sadie was very impressed by Marie’s power. She felt powerless as a young girl. Her parents were always talking about Philip’s future. But they never mentioned hers.
“You are the boss?”
“Not now, of course. I’m too young. But I will be when I’m older. I think about what I am going to do all the time. Whenever there is a baby born to one of my workers, I am going to send over a trousseau of beautiful clothes. And we are going to have an annual parade and the most beautiful girl in the factory can be the sugar queen and ride on a carriage. And there will be a huge, huge cake everyone can take a piece of. We will set it up in a park there. It will be called Sugar Day. It will be the opposite of Lent. The archbishop will come and bless the sugar.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
“Working at a sugar factory is quite wonderful. We have the world’s most splendid machines. And what’s more, you inhale and sugar gets in your lungs and stays there. And when you cough, you cough sugar. You go around life smelling like a cookie.”
“Now that you mention it, you do smell like sugar. After I saw you the last time, when I went home, I kept feeling as though something sweet was baking.”
“It’s my magical power. Would you like a sugary kiss?”
“I would.”
They kissed. And Sadie found her lips tasted like sugar. She was afraid to lick her lips in case the taste would go away.
“I like to write in a notebook every day.”
“I’ve seen you. What do you write about?”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out her notebook. She flipped through the pages, settled on one, and began to read.
“?‘The Swan, a poem. A swan has white feathers, but it does not want to be clean. It only wants others to look at it. Then hates them when they do. The swan hates anyone except its life partner. They spend all their time gossiping about everybody else. And they cannot have anything but contempt for other swans. Or any other creature. But why should they? Nothing. No creature can ever get between two swans. And you cannot tear them apart. Once they fall in love, they become horrible in exactly the same way.’?”
“I love that so much!” said Marie. “You have made me think about swans differently. It is true they are so difficult. But that’s what makes them beautiful. They don’t want to be only what we make of them. They want the right to be ugly too. I think you are my favorite writer, Sadie. One day you will write books and everyone in the whole world will read them. Everyone will know of your ideas.”
Sadie felt her cheeks flush red when Marie complimented her poetry. After the visit, Sadie went home to her room and began to write. She now had a reader. And Marie was open to her idea that there was power and beauty in being original. It made her devotion to her burgeoning craft even more feverish.
She spent all her free time apart from Marie writing. If ever she paused, she thought of Marie enjoying the poem she was working on, and her pen immediately went back to the page. The tip of her pen made the flight pattern of neurotic birds mating. The looping words on the page were like knots in a girl’s hair that have formed after she’s been standing in the wind. They were like the tendrils of a plant if spring happened all in one moment. The page sucked the words out of her pen. It wanted to be marked.
* * *
One afternoon, Marie asked Sadie to show her how to be darker.
“You make everything into a sad story,” Marie said. “And I mean that as a compliment. You always make me want to cry. That’s the most beautiful thing: to cry for no reason at all, only because you are feeling someone else’s sadness.”
“I don’t know how to make you feel it,” Sadie replied. “It is always just there for me. This sadness. It’s just like using the color black. I think sometimes I am too sad, and it taints everything I do. When I read, I always imagine myself as the main character, and then every book becomes a sad book.”
Then Sadie had an idea. They sat at the veranda table in front of two bowls of chocolate pudding. They both tied blindfolds around their eyes. They spoke to each other with their blindfolds on. Sadie thought up a bleak idea and then they took a bite of the pudding. The dark idea would forever be associated with something delicious.
“Imagine you wake up and your house is very quiet. You tiptoe through the rooms and notice your family and all your maids have been murdered,” Sadie said.
“Even Papa?”
“Even Papa.”
There was a pause as they both ate a spoonful of pudding.
“Imagine you are standing on trial in front of a crowd. Everybody begins to yell that you are guilty.”
The girls sucked on their spoons.
“Imagine you are being brought to the guillotine. Your head has been placed on the guillotine and you hear the slice.”
“Yes, yes,” Marie whispered. They heard the sound of each other’s spoons striking the bottom of their bowls.
“Imagine your head is on a stake,” Sadie said. “It’s still conscious and you don’t have a body.”
“You two need to stop this instant!” a voice said in the darkness. The two girls pulled the blindfolds from their eyes to take a look. A maid named Agatha was standing there, having overheard everything they said and looking appalled. Both girls reflected on what their conversation must have sounded like to an impartial listener who had not descended by degrees into their madness. And they began to laugh. In truth they were delighted by their indecency.
* * *
Sadie had a strange side. The best way to describe it was as a perversity. She liked grotesque things. She saw a frog and she stepped on it with the heel of her boot. She wanted to see the maid’s broken ankle. She squealed with delight, put her hands up to her mouth, and declared with admiration that it was absolutely disgusting. Marie was always startled by this but decided never to bring it up.
* * *
After playing one afternoon, Sadie felt overcome by a wave of affection for her friend. The two girls were sitting in the large garden behind Marie’s house. Their parasols were open and lying on either side of them. It was as though they had both hatched out of an egg, like the twins Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra.