Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [39]
“I wasn’t told about this,” I say. I’ve been ambushed.
“It came up at the last minute,” says Charna. “Lucky for us! I’ll put you two in the back room, okay? I’ll bring you some coffee. Getting the word out, they call it,” she adds, to me, with a wry smile. I allow myself to be herded down the corridor; I can still be bossed around by women like Charna.
“I thought you would be different,” says Andrea as we settle.
“Different how?” I ask.
“Bigger,” she says.
I smile at her. “I am bigger.”
• • •
Andrea checks out my powder-blue jogging suit. She herself is wearing black, approved, glossy black, not early-sixties holdover as mine would be. She has red hair out of a spray can and no apologies, cut into a cap like an acorn. She’s upsettingly young; to me she doesn’t look more than a teenager, though I know she must be in her twenties. Probably she thinks I’m a weird middle-aged frump, sort of like her high school teacher. Probably she’s out to get me. Probably she’ll succeed.
We sit across from each other at Charna’s desk and Andrea sets down her camera and fiddles with her tape recorder. Andrea writes for a newspaper. “This is for the Living section,” she says. I know what that means, it used to be the Women’s Pages. It’s funny that they now call it Living, as if only women are alive and the other things, such as the Sports, are for the dead.
“Living, eh?” I say. “I’m the mother of two. I bake cookies.” All true. Andrea gives me a dirty look and flicks on her machine.
“How do you handle fame?” she says.
“This isn’t fame,” I say. “Fame is Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage. This stuff is just a media pimple.”
She grins at that. “Well, could you maybe say something about your generation of artists—your generation of woman artists—and their aspirations and goals?”
“Painters, you mean,” I say. “What generation is that?”
“The seventies, I suppose,” she says. “That’s when the women’s—that’s when you started getting attention.”
“The seventies isn’t my generation,” I say.
She smiles. “Well,” she says, “what is?”
“The forties.”
“The forties?” This is archaeology as far as she’s concerned. “But you couldn’t have been …”
“That was when I grew up,” I say.
“Oh right,” she says. “You mean it was formative. Can you talk about the ways, how it reflects in your work?”
“The colors,” I say. “A lot of my colors are forties colors.” I’m softening up. At least she doesn’t say like and you know all the time. “The war. There are people who remember the war and people who don’t. There’s a cut-off point, there’s a difference.”
“You mean the Vietnam War?” she says.
“No,” I say coldly. “The Second World War.” She looks a bit scared, as if I’ve just resurrected from the dead, and incompletely at that. She didn’t know I was that old. “So,” she says. “What is the difference?”
“We have long attention spans,” I say. “We eat everything on our plates. We save string. We make do.”
She looks puzzled. That’s all I want to say about the forties. I’m beginning to sweat. I feel as if I’m at the dentist, mouth gracelessly open while some stranger with a light and mirror gazes down my throat at something I can’t see.
Brightly and neatly she veers away from the war and back toward women, which was where she wanted to be in the first place. Is it harder for a woman, was I discriminated against, undervalued? What about having children? I give unhelpful replies: all painters feel undervalued. You can do it while they’re at school. My husband’s been terrific, he gives me a lot of support, some of which has been financial. I don’t say which husband.
“So you don’t feel it’s sort of demeaning to be propped up by a man?” she says.
“Women prop up men all the time,” I say. “What’s wrong with a little reverse propping?”
What I have to say is not altogether what she wants to hear. She’d prefer stories of outrage, although she’d be unlikely to tell them about herself, she’s too young. Still, people my age are supposed to have stories of outrage; at least insult, at least put-down. Male art teachers pinching your bum, calling you baby, asking