pastoral
what had she done differently? She had modeled herself precisely, on the others: as a very little girl, she stood patiently at the periphery of the ring. As she grew older, she accepted her turn and grabbed hold of M. Joiiy without trepidation: she pocketed his pennies, laughed to see his breeches puddled about his ankles, mimicked his lumbering gait. When they dispersed, screeching like crows, she did too. And when they approached the viliage, suddenly composed and inscrutable, she too fell silent. Were gathering flowers, she announced, when Mother asked. It made a lovely picture: a procession of girls, filing homeward in the dusk, hands stained green from their efforts. Locals who dreamed of migrating to the city now paused and marveled, What was I thinking? I could not live without these simple pleasures.
curdled milk
what had frightened the others? Something in the tightness of her grip, or the way her eyes fed upon the cock. She had betrayed no distaste for the game. The other girls crowed to see his defeat, to see his idiot’s composure dissolve, and then rushed to wipe themselves clean of his ejaculation. But M. Jouy held no fascination for her; she did not feel triumphant when he brayed and snorted; she was occupied only with the soft, stubborn thing clamped in her fists, and grew reluctant to run her fingers through the long grasses. Every Midsummer morning, Mother woke her before dawn and ordered her to kneel down and bathe her face in the dew: it ensures a year’s worth of loveliness, she explained. As a child, Mother had performed the same ritual. When Madeleine wiped M. Jouy off her hands, she left glistening mollusk trails in the underbrush.
bureaucracy
when aroused, even the bucolic village moves with unforgiving swiftness, its machinery oiled and eager. Sophie was eating oatmeal when she decided to tell her mother, and by the time she finished her bowl, her mother had already told her father, who told the priest, who told the mayor. And then it was too late to recant. The mayor puzzled for an afternoon, and by supper had sent his oldest son to fetch the gendarmes. The gendarmes arrived before the sun rose, were directed by a hundred silent fingers towards the barn and apprehended M. Jouywith hay sprouting from his hair, his smile still heavy with dreams. Madeleines hands were thrust into a pot of boiling lye.
host
CAN I HAVE some MORE? Beatrice asks. She has scrambled down from the bed and planted herself in Mother’s way. 1 prefer the burnt part. Doubling over to stoke die fire, Mother grunts before she gjves her permission. Save some for your father, she says. Beatrice sidles up to the sleeping princess and surveys the devastation: one leg lost, from the knee down. The open wound looks tempting and buttery, but she likes the acrid edges best, where the dough has blackened, and breaks off an entire hand. Before biting, she examines it. It looks exactly like the hand of her sleeping sister: shiny and tempered and mitten-like. The fingers are no longer articulated because baking has sutured them all into one. Why did only the hands burn, Maman? she asks through a mouthful of crumbs. Because only her hands were wicked, Mother says. This makes Beatrice pause and consider. Finally, she objects: She will never be able to sew or play the piano! It is no great loss. Mother pats her on top of her head, leaving the floury trace of her five fingertips. And, she adds, they will always remind her of her childhood. As you grow older, it is often easy to forget. Mother hitches her skirts up to her thighs. See. Scars are remembrances. This slender, sickle-shaped one — she runs her finger along her shin — reminds me of my best friend, of stealing eggs, of a shard of glass glinting in the sunshine. And these here — she caresses the white piping that striates the back of her knees — put me in mind of your grandfather. Beatrice nods, but secretly she disagrees. When she deposits the last bits into her mouth, she keeps her back turned to Mother She lowers her eyelids and sticks out her tongue as she has seen the older girls do in church.
she dreams
IN AN OLD HOUSE in Paris that is covered with vines live twelve little girls in two straight lines. Madeleine is the twelfth gjil. The smallest and the wickedest. Sister Clavel has been instructed to take special care of her. How the sisters wept when they first saw her\ Her hands swaddled in snowy strips of muslin, Mother picking absently at the invisible insects that she feared were infesting the poultices. The sisters gave Madeleine a brand new prayer book and a straw hat strangled by a broad brown ribbon. She went with diem happily. The other litde girls stroke her bandages as if they were touching the hem of Christ. Their eyes grow enormous and glassy and she can hear the prayers escaping beneath their breaths, a slow hiss of perforated air. At night, as they lie in their two rows, the moon rises and she shadows it from her cot, her arms arcing like a ballerina’s, her milky fists rising like two false moons, like two spectral dollops of meringue. She takes pleasure in her helplessness. Everyone must wait on her. She cannot even pee by herself. Bernadette, the eleventh gpl, would like eventually to become a saint, so now she is practicing on Madeleine. She has made it her special duty to clean her when she menstruates, her little holy hands becoming sticky with the blood. Bernadette s fingertips are warm when she parts Madeleine’s knees and passes a damp rag between her legs. From her cot, Madeleine can hear the plash of water against the bowl, the trickling of fluids as Bernadette wrings the cloth She waits for the firm hands that will pat her dry, tuck a clean rag against her wound press together her splayed thighs. She wonders if the abbot at Rievaulx, when ministering to the bloodied Saint Michel, was as unflinching as Bernadette.
delivery
M jouy has not forgotten Madeleine. On Christmas Day, a brown paper package arrives from the hospital at Maifivitte; out of the package spills a fluttering array of drawings and charts. Ho message or holiday wishes enclosed. Mother walks into the village and asks the local chemist to decipher the contents. Xhhhh, he murmurs. They have measured M.]ouys brainpan! And he holds up the diagram for her to see. It looks like the moon on its back, Mother observes. His anatomy is quite regular, no signs of degeneracy, the chemist continues, peering at a new sheaf. Oh, but look! His scapula is protuberant. Shuffling through the papers, the chemist hums to himself, his spectacles propped on the bald crest of his head. Mother furtively examines a bottle of whooping cough remedy that within days, it was rumored, could miraculously resuscitate even the most exhausted breasts. So, she interrupts, are they ungodly or not? vaBB Ungodly? the chemist echoes. He frowns briefly. ‘Why, not at all! Are you sure? He clutches the drawings: These sketches are the work of medical professionals! It seems as if M. Jouy would like her to have them. As a keepsake, perhaps. This picture — he picks out a physiognomic chart — is a very good likeness.
conversion
the drawings accumulate. The small brothers and sister discover that they make buoyant kites. Jean-Luc ties one apiece to the posts that support the pasture fence, and on gusty days, the kites swell into the sky, dodging and nodding to one another as if in conversation. Mother begins to enjoy the delicate swirls of the cranial diagrams, so she cuts them in quarters and decorates her pots of preserves.
custom made
wHeN sister clavel lays out her tidy uniform, Madeleine slips it neatly over her head, and then, with exuberance, her bulky fists burst through the careful seams, like twin whale snouts breaking the surface. So it is decided that she must have special dresses made for her, with long and liquid sleeves like those of an Oriental concubine. The diminutive tailor dangp the convent beU and Sister Clavd ushers him up the back stairwell and into a sunlit room, where Madeleine awaits him, perched on a tiny embroidered stool, wearing nothing but her stocking^. Crouching, the tailor spreads out his tools, and with an irritating air of indifference, goes about measuring Madeleine’s dimensions. She wonders if she can be seen from outside. She pictures the next-door neighbor trodding home, miserable, and then, by chance, he looks up. His smile spreads: from across the square, the schoolboys let out a blissful, unanimous sigh in the middle of their verb conjugations. The nursemaids who perambulate the park peer coyly from beneath their bonnets, squeezing each other’s fingers and giggling naughtily. And the degenerate man, the one who waits by the rhododendron bushes, swivels his eyes up to her window, his neck supple as an owl’s, and his cock rises triumphantly out of his breeches. Meanwhile her bare buttocks warm in a sunbeam and the tailor’s deft fingers slip and alight upon her skin. Madeleine feels, this is divine. But when the dresses arrive, cocooned in crisp tissue paper, they are not the gossamer confections that she has imagined; indeed they make her appear even more uncanny: half-child, half-beast The bodice and skirt are indistinguishable from the convent uniform, austere and shapeless and busy with buttons, but the arms: they droop like two flaccid elephant ears.