Good Bones - Margaret Atwood [2]
I wanted to call you George.
I am not wringing my hands. I’m drying my nails.
Darling, please stop fidgeting with my mirror. That’ll be the third one you’ve broken.
Yes, I’ve seen those pictures, thank you very much.
I know your father was handsomer than Claudius. High brow, aquiline nose and so on, looked great in uniform. But handsome isn’t everything, especially in a man, and far be it from me to speak ill of the dead, but I think it’s about time I pointed out to you that your Dad just wasn’t a whole lot of fun. Noble, sure, I grant you. But Claudius, well, he likes a drink now and then. He appreciates a decent meal. He enjoys a laugh, know what I mean? You don’t always have to be tiptoeing around because of some holier-than-thou principle or something.
By the way, darling, I wish you wouldn’t call your stepdad the bloat king. He does have a slight weight-problem, and it hurts his feelings.
The rank sweat of a what? My bed is certainly not enseamed, whatever that might be! A nasty sty, indeed! Not that it’s any of your business, but I change those sheets twice a week, which is more than you do, judging from that student slum pigpen in Wittenberg. I’ll certainly never visit you there again without prior warning! I see that laundry of yours when you bring it home, and not often enough either, by a long shot! Only when you run out of black socks.
And let me tell you, everyone sweats at a time like that, as you’d find out very soon if you ever gave it a try. A real girlfriend would do you a heap of good. Not like that pasty-faced what’s-her-name, all trussed up like a prize turkey in those touch-me-not corsets of hers. If you ask me, there’s something off about that girl. Borderline. Any little shock could push her right over the edge.
Go get yourself someone more down-to-earth. Have a nice roll in the hay. Then you can talk to me about nasty sties.
No, darling, I am not mad at you. But I must say you’re an awful prig sometimes. Just like your Dad. The Flesh, he’d say. You’d think it was dog dirt. You can excuse that in a young person, they are always so intolerant, but in someone his age it was getting, well, very hard to live with, and that’s the understatement of the year.
Some days I think it would have been better for both of us if you hadn’t been an only child. But you realize who you have to thank for that. You have no idea what I used to put up with. And every time I felt like a little, you know, just to warm up my ageing bones, it was like I’d suggested murder.
Oh! You think what? You think Claudius murdered your Dad? Well, no wonder you’ve been so rude to him at the dinner table!
If I’d known that, I could have put you straight in no time flat.
It wasn’t Claudius, darling.
It was me.
There Was Once
— There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest.
— Forest? Forest is passé, I mean, I’ve had it with all this wilderness stuff. It’s not a right image of our society, today. Let’s have some urban for a change.
— There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the suburbs.
— That’s better. But I have to seriously query this word poor.
— But she was poor!
— Poor is relative. She lived in a house, didn’t she?
—Yes.
— Then socio-economically speaking, she was not poor.
— But none of the money was hers! The whole point of the story is that the wicked stepmother makes her wear old clothes and sleep in the fireplace –
— Aha! They had a fireplace! With poor, let me tell you, there’s no fireplace. Come down to the park, come to the subway stations after dark, come down to where they sleep in cardboard boxes, and I’ll show you poor!
— There was once a middle-class girl, as beautiful as she was good –
— Stop right there. I think we can cut the beautiful, don’t you? Women these days have to deal with too many intimidating physical role models as it is, what with those bimbos in