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MCMAHON CAME HOME early one night. When people come in from the cold, you can feel it all around them like a shawl of some sort. And when people return from doing something wicked, it also surrounds them. You get a shiver in their presence. Rose felt it one day when McMahon walked in, and she knew that the girls weren’t wrong about him. He had done something nefarious very recently. He had a cigar between his teeth, and the smoke coming out of it looked like a skinny girl pulling her undershirt down to her knees.
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MCMAHON WAS ALWAYS looking at her. He was wary of her. It was as if he had a premonition that she would destroy him. It was actually a kind of animal instinct. It was the way a cat felt when a dog walked by. Rose was a predator and he was prey. He was a man. He shouldn’t be afraid of a girl like that. She was so skinny. None of this seemed right. Shouldn’t he be the one to destroy her? It was a new feeling for him, and he needed to understand it. It was attractive.
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SHE WAS MAKING shadow puppets of a bird on the wall. It was a black crow. And somehow the black crow managed to fly from the bedroom wall and down the hall and into his bedroom. It was waiting to pick on his corpse.
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MCMAHON WAS ENORMOUS. She had fallen into his gravitational pull. He was the center of everyone’s universe in the home. That happened in any home. You either fell into someone’s orbit or you had to force everyone to be in yours.
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THAT NIGHT IN HER BED, Rose imagined that she told McMahon to get down on his hands and knees and to kiss her gently, one hundred times, between her legs. She imagined fastening both his wrists to the bedposts with ties and then riding him wildly.
If you can imagine something, then it is possible within the physical laws of this universe. So says some Greek philosopher.
She lay on the tiny bed, spent and happy, knowing that certain things were possible to her that she had not thought possible before. The fantasy had proved revelatory. She fell asleep with the satisfaction of an explorer who had just spotted land through his binoculars. While seagulls circulated over her head crying loudly, “Land ho! Land ho!”
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THE CHILDREN’S MATH TEACHER was quite interested in Rose. He tried to make conversation with her when he came by. He loaned her a book by Victor Hugo. When she opened the pages, she found a pressed flower between them. She held up the tiny flower, whose aging process had been stopped.
They sat together in the backyard. There were white flowers wilting in the yard as if a child had had a tea party and left the pieces all over the carpet. He told her about his little house and how much money he made. “I would like to start a family. And I think that with you I would have very pretty and very happy children.”
She found herself yawning during the conversation. She yawned and yawned and yawned and yawned. She found the idea of life with him so boring.
All the other servants thought it was a good idea to marry him. He was so handsome and so polite, and he wouldn’t beat her. And although Rose was young, they thought it a good idea that she get married before she ended up ruined. She had no desire for him, though. Her desire was a strange calling that she couldn’t ignore.
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MCMAHON LOOKED LIKE A BEAR. He was always lumbering around in the house late at night. He would turn the lights on and knock things over and rattle dishes, unconcerned about whom he might be disturbing. He ate leftover turkey by himself in the dark. She could hear his great snoring from all the way down the hall.
She liked the idea of being ruined. She was curious to see what would happen to her if no man would marry her. It seemed like the most likely way to have an adventure. Even though she was able to make people laugh all day, she sometimes wanted to be tragic.
And then one night Rose ran into McMahon on the way from getting Ernest back to sleep. Their eyes met. There was something new in the darkness of their eyes. They looked and looked, trying to find out what the new thing might be. What it was that they recognized in each other. Then they both realized it all at once. They’d had sexual fantasies about each other the night before. The insight was so shocking to Rose. It was as though there were a noose around her neck, and she heard the floor drop. It was wonderful.
“Don’t touch me or I’ll scream.”
“What are you talking about? Are you crazy? Why would I want to touch you? How dare you talk to me like that!”
“I would never let you touch me just like that, just for nothing. I don’t have any desire for you, so you will have to pay me whatever I ask for, when I ask for it.”
McMahon stared at her. “I don’t want you. How can you speak to me like this? Aren’t you worried that I’ll fire you? Aren’t you worried that I’ll throw you out onto the street?”
“No.”
“You’re not?”
“You won’t throw me out.”
“So you want to be a whore?”