Every home in the Capital was filled with books. Almost everyone had a writer in the family. As soon as a child learned to read, they were forced to read their aunt’s or grandfather’s book. And when children met in elementary school, they compared which writers they were related to.
Children often aspired to be the most famous writer in their family. Sofia did not bother. There was no point in trying. Her mother had set the bar too high.
Clara had written the country’s most renowned feminist text, Are Women People?, when she was twenty-nine years old.
Clara was an incredible speaker. Although not everyone in the country had read her book on feminism, they had all certainly heard her speak. She was intoxicating. She was elegant and forceful. She raged against all the ways in which women were held back and underestimated.
In many ways, a person had to be angry in order to speak eloquently. Anger was an ingredient that turned language into something extraordinary and vivid.
She had a very famous speech about how different her life had been from her mother’s. She spoke about how her mother knew nothing about the world, had had no choice other than to be a homemaker, had a child too young, and was at the mercy of her husband. Her mother was uneducated. And she was superstitious and religious. These were aspects of Elysian culture that were keeping women down.
She, unlike her mother, had had an extraordinary life filled with opportunity because she had rejected the antiquated notions of what an Elysian woman should be like. She would not accept this domestication. Then she uttered one of her most famous lines: I am a wolf, and I refuse to be considered a dog.
She was never intimidated by anyone. You could tell she believed she was the most intelligent person in Elysia. And since she believed this, everyone else believed it too. You believed what she said while she said it. It was wildly attractive to see such arrogance in a woman. It was a sort of novelty.
She had a shelf filled with speaking and cultural and humanitarian awards. She had seven honorary degrees. She had one from Paris too. This was the one she was most proud of. It was very difficult for Elysians to be taken seriously beyond their country’s borders. She had impressed the French. This had happened during a quiet news cycle. It became legendary, as some events inexplicably do.
She was invited to participate in government discussions about allocations of funding to grant organizations. She was on the jury for the annual Clara Bottom Prize, established for promising young women thinkers.
There was a way of dressing—particularly wearing a tan coat with the collar popped up—that was referred to as dressing à la Bottom. To complete this look, young girls carried books in their hands and smoked cigarettes. They studied and went to university. Clara Bottom had made it incredibly chic to be an intellectual.
Sofia lived with her mother and father in the enormous penthouse apartment that Sofia’s grandfather had bought in one of the oldest buildings on one of the most glamorous blocks in the Capital.
Everything in the apartment was expensive and noteworthy. The walls were covered in paintings by artists of some renown in their country. And the furniture was carved by the finest Elysian craftsmen from the turn of the last century. Even the plants in the flat were famous. There was a fern Clara had brought back from Paris. She had been having lunch with the president and his wife. She had commented on how lovely a fern hanging from their ceiling was. The president’s wife immediately had it taken down and packaged up for her. Now it took up half the kitchen and shed leaves over everything. Guests always pointed to it and said, “Is this the president of France’s fern?”
“It’s a nuisance, isn’t it?” Clara would reply, indicating perhaps that the French had nothing on the Elysians.
Her mother was very conscious of being a public figure. She always dressed up. No matter how simple the errand she was going on, she spent the time it took to doll herself up. Every moment of her life was important. A trip to the marketplace was a special event. Anyone who ran into her at the marketplace came away feeling that life was very glamorous.
She was short, which she corrected by wearing heels everywhere, and buxom, which she accentuated by wearing form-fitting skirts and jackets. She had jet-black hair she wore in a fashionable bun and to which she pinned the most elaborate hats. Her mother always put herself together so elegantly, it seemed as though she had been born in the outfit she had on.
It wasn’t that her mother was the most beautiful woman in the room, but she commanded the most attention.
She was followed by a trail of cigarette smoke. It was as though the cigarette smoke were a fine fur shawl she wore around herself. In almost every memory Sofia had of her mother, she was standing in a storm cloud of cigarette smoke, picking bits of tobacco off her tongue with her fingernails.
Clara Bottom was called on to speak on all sorts of political matters. She often publicly lamented being the only woman who was called on to speak. But Sofia knew she loved it. And after giving a speech, her mother was always in a such a good mood that she was sweeter with Sofia, for a time.