Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [155]
In practice this means that she appropriates the MEAT LIKE YOU LIKE IT sign and incorporates it into one of her constructions, an especially violent dismemberment in which the mannequin, dressed only in ropes and leather straps, has ended up with her head tucked upside-down under her arm.
“If you were a man you’d get stomped for that,” Carolyn tells her.
Jody smiles sweetly. “But I’m not one.”
We work for three days, arranging and rearranging. After we have the stuff in place, there are the rented trestle tables to be assembled for the bar, the hooch and eats to be bought. Hooch and eats are Jody’s words. We get Canadian wine in gallon jugs, Styrofoam cups to serve it in, pretzels and potato chips, hunks of cheddar cheese wrapped in plastic film, Ritz crackers. This is what we can afford; but also there’s an unspoken rule that the food has to be unwaveringly plebeian.
Our catalogue is a couple of mimeographed sheets stapled together at the top corner. This catalogue is supposed to be a collective effort, but in fact Jody has written most of it, because she has the knack. Carolyn makes a banner, out of bedsheets dyed to look as if someone’s bled on them, to hang above the outside door:
F(OUR) FOR ALL.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” says Jon, who has dropped by, supposedly to pick me up, really to see. He is suspicious of my doings with women, although he will not demean himself by saying so. He does however refer to them as “the girls.”
“It’s a pun on free for all,” I tell him, although I know he knows this. “Plus it encapsulates the word our.” Encapsulate is also one of Jody’s words.
He does not comment.
It’s the banner that attracts the newspapers: this kind of thing is new, it’s an event, and it promises disruption. One newspaper sends a photographer, in advance, who says, jokingly, “Come on, girls, burn a few bras for me,” while he’s taking our pictures.
“Tig,” says Carolyn in a low voice.
“Cool it,” says Jody. “They love it when you freak.”
Before the opening, I come to the gallery early. I pace around the show, up and down the former aisles, around the checkout counters where Jody’s sculptures pose like models on a runway, past the wall where Carolyn’s quilts yell defiance. This is strong work, I think. Stronger than mine. Even Zillah’s gauzy constructions appear to me to have a confidence and subtlety, an assurance, that my own paintings lack: in this context my pictures are too highly finished, too decorative, too merely pretty.
I have strayed off course, I have failed to make a statement. I am peripheral.
I drink some of the awful wine and then some more, and feel better; although I know that later I will feel worse. The stuff tastes like something you’d use to tenderize pot roast.
I stand against the wall, beside the door, hanging onto my Styrofoam cup. I’m standing here because it’s the exit. Also the entrance: people arrive, and then more people.
Many, most of these people are women. There are all kinds of them. They have long hair, long skirts, jeans and overalls, earrings, caps like construction workers’, lavender shawls. Some of them are other painters, some just look like it. Carolyn and Jody and Zillah are here by now, and there are greetings called, squeezes of the arm, kisses on cheeks, shrieks of delight. They all seem to have more friends than I do, more close women friends. I’ve never really considered it before, this absence; I’ve assumed that other women were like me. They were, once. And now they are not.
There is Cordelia, of course. But I haven’t seen her for years.
Jon is not here yet, although he said he would come. We even got a baby-sitter so he could. I think maybe I will flirt with someone, someone inappropriate, just to see what could happen; but there aren’t many possibilities, because there aren’t many men. I make my way through the crowd with another Styrofoam cup of the dreadful red marinade, trying not to feel left out.
• • •
Right behind me a woman’s voice says, “Well, they certainly are different.” It’s the quintessential Toronto middle-class-matron