Good Bones - Margaret Atwood [21]
2.
Cup of coffee, the usual morning drug. He’s off jogging, told her she shouldn’t be so sluggish, but she can’t get organized, it involves too many things: the right shoes, the right outfit, and then worrying about how your bum looks, wobbling along the street. She couldn’t do it alone anyway, she might get mugged. So instead she’s sitting remembering how much she can no longer remember, of who she used to be, who she thought she would turn into when she grew up. We are the dead: that’s about the only line left from In Flanders Fields, which she had to write out twenty times on the blackboard, for talking. When she was ten and thin, and now see. He says she should go vegetarian, like him, healthy as lettuce. She’d rather eat poppies, get the opiates straight from the source. Eat daffodils, the poisonous bulb like an onion. Or better, slice it into his soup. He’ll blow his nose on her once too often, and then. Between the rock and the hard cheese, that’s where she sits, inert as a prisoner, making little crosses on the wall, like knitting, counting the stitches row on row, that old trick to mark off the days. Our place, he calls this dump. He should speak for himself, she’s just the mattress around here, she’s just the cleaning lady, and when he ever lifts a finger there’ll be sweet pie in the sky. She should burn the whole thing down, just for larks; still, however bravely she may talk, to herself, where would she go after that, what would she do? She thinks of the bunch of young men they saw, downtown at night, where they’d gone to dinner, his birthday. High on something, singing out of tune, one guy’s fly half-open. Freedom. Catch a woman doing that, panty alert, she’d be jumped by every creep within a mile. Too late to make yourself scarce, once they get the skirt up. She’s heard of a case like that, in a poolhall or somewhere. That’s what keeps her in here, in this house, that’s what keeps her tethered. It’s not a mid-life crisis, which is what he says. It’s fear, pure and simple. Hard to rise above it. Rise above, like a balloon or the cream on milk, as if all it takes is hot air or fat. Or will-power. But the reason for that fear exists, it can’t be wished away. What she’d need in real life is a few guns. That and the technique, how to use them. And the guts, of course. She pours herself another cup of coffee. That’s her big fault: she might have the gun but she wouldn’t pull the trigger. She’d never be able to hit a man below the belt.
3.
In school, when I first heard the word Flanders I thought it was what nightgowns were made of. And pyjamas. But then I found it was a war, more important to us than others perhaps because our grandfathers were in it, maybe, or at least some sort of ancestor. The trenches, the fields of mud, the barbed wire, became our memories as well. But only for a time. Photographs fade, the rain eats away at statues, the neurons in our brains blink out one by one, and goodbye to vocabulary. We have other things to think about, we have lives to get on with. Today I planted five poppies in the front yard, orangey-pink, a new hybrid. They’ll go well with the marguerites. Terrorists blow up airports, lovers slide blindly in between the sheets, in the soft green drizzle my cat crosses