Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [177]
I don’t want to be nine years old forever.
The air is soft, autumnal, the sun shines. I am standing still. And yet I walk head down, into the unmoving wind.
PART
FOURTEEN
UNIFIED
FIELD
THEORY
71
I put on my new dress, cutting off the price tag with Jon’s wire cutters. I ended up with black, after all. Then I go into the bathroom to squint at myself in the inadequate, greasy mirror: now that I’ve got the thing on, it looks much the same as all the other black dresses I’ve ever owned. I check it for lint, apply my pink lipstick, and end up looking nice, as far as I can tell. Nice, and negligible.
I could jazz myself up somehow. I ought to have some dangly earrings, some bangles, a silver bow tie on a little chain, an outsized Isadora Duncan strangle-yourself-by-mistake scarf, a rhinestone brooch of the thirties, in sly bad taste. But I don’t have any of these things, and it’s too late to go out and buy any. It will have to do. Come-as-you-are parties, they used to have. I will come as I am.
I’m at the gallery an hour early. Charna is not here, or the others; they may have gone out to eat, or more likely to change. Everything is set up, though, the rented thick-stemmed wineglasses, the bottles of mediocre hooch, the mineral water for teetotalers, because who would serve unadulterated chlorine from the tap? The cheeses hardening at the edges, the sulfur-drenched grapes, luscious and shiny as wax, plumped with blood from the dying field workers of California. It doesn’t pay to know too many of these things; eventually there’s nothing you can put into your mouth without tasting the death in it.
The bartender, a severe-eyed young woman in gelled hair and unstructured black, is polishing glasses behind the long table that serves as the bar. I extract a glass of wine from her. She’s doing the bartending for money, her nonchalance implies: her true ambitions lie elsewhere. She tightens her lips while doling out my drink: she doesn’t approve of me. Possibly she wants to be a painter, and thinks I have compromised my principles, knuckled under to success. How I used to revel in such bitter little snobberies myself; how eay they were, once.
I walk slowly around the gallery, sipping at my glass of wine, permitting myself to look at the show, for the first time really. What is here, and what is not. There’s a catalogue, put together by Charna, a professional-looking computer-and-laser-printer affair. I remember the catalogue from the first show, done on a mimeo machine, smeared and illegible, its poverty a badge of authenticity. I remember the sound of the roller turning, the tang of the ink, the pain in my arm.
Chronology won out after all: the early things are on the east wall, what Charna calls the middle period on the end wall, and on the west wall are five recent pictures which I’ve never shown before. They’re all I’ve been able to do in the past year. I work more slowly, these days.
Here are the still lifes. “Early forays by Risley into the realm of female symbolish and the charismatic naure of domestic objects,” says Charna. In other words, the toaster, the coffee percolator, my mother’s wringer washer. The three sofas. The silver paper.
Farther along are Jon and Josef. I look at them with some fondness, them and their muscles and their cloudy-headed notions about women. Their youngness is terrifying. How could I have put myself into the hands of such inexperience?
Next to them is Mrs. Smeath; many of her. Mrs. Smeath sitting, standing, lying down with her holy rubber plant, flying, with Mr. Smeath stuck to her back, being screwed like a beetle; Mrs. Smeath in the dark-blue bloomers of Miss Lumley, who somehow combines with her in a frightening symbiosis. Mrs. Smeath unwrapped from white tissue paper, layer by layer. Mrs. Smeath bigger than life, bigger than she ever was. Blotting out God.
I put a lot of work into that imagined body, white as a burdock root, flabby as pork fat. Hairy as the inside of an ear. I labored on it, with, I now see, considerable malice.