Good Bones - Margaret Atwood [4]
Anyway, the way I see it, they were an offering. I used to be given grown-ups, men and women both, stuffed full of seasonal goodies and handed over to me at seed-time and harvest. The symbolism was a little crude perhaps, and the events themselves were – some might say – lacking in taste, but folks’ hearts were in the right place. In return, I made things germinate and grow and swell and ripen.
Then I got hidden away, stuck into the attic, shrunken and parched and covered up in fusty draperies. Hell, I used to have breasts! Not just two of them. Lots. Ever wonder why a third tit was the crucial test, once, for women like me?
Or why I’m so often shown with a garden? A wonderful garden, in which mouth-watering things grow. Mulberries. Magic cabbages. Rapunzel, whatever that is. And all those pregnant women trying to clamber over the wall, by the light of the moon, to munch up my fecundity, without giving anything in return. Theft, you’d call it, if you were at all open-minded.
That was never the rule in the old days. Life was a gift then, not something to be stolen. It was my gift. By earth and sea I bestowed it, and the people gave me thanks.
3.
It’s true, there are never any evil stepfathers. Only a bunch of lily-livered widowers, who let me get away with murder vis-à-vis their daughters. Where are they when I’m making those girls drudge in the kitchen, or sending them out into the blizzard in their paper dresses? Working late at the office. Passing the buck. Men! But if you think they knew nothing about it, you’re crazy.
The thing about those good daughters is, they’re so good. Obedient and passive. Snivelling, I might add. No get-up-and-go. What would become of them if it weren’t for me? Nothing, that’s what. All they’d ever do is the housework, which seems to feature largely in these stories. They’d marry some peasant, have seventeen kids, and get “A dutiful wife” engraved on their tombstones, if any. Big deal.
I stir things up, I get things moving. “Go play in the traffic,” I say to them. “Put on this paper dress and look for strawberries in the snow.” It’s perverse, but it works. All they have to do is smile and say hello and do a little more housework, for some gnomes or nice ladies or whatever, and bingo, they get the king’s son and the palace, and no more dishpan hands.
Whereas all I get is the blame.
God knows all about it. No Devil, no Fall, no Redemption. Grade Two arithmetic.
You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.
Let Us Now Praise Stupid Women
—the airheads, the bubblebrains, the ditzy blondes:
the headstrong teenagers too dumb to listen to their mothers:
all those with mattress stuffing between their ears,
all the lush hostesses who tell us to have a good day, and give us the wrong change, while checking their Big Hair in the mirror,
all those who dry their freshly shampooed poodles in the microwave,
and those whose boyfriends tell them chlorophyll chewing gum is a contraceptive, and who believe it;
all those with nervously bitten fingernails because they don’t know whether to pee or get off the pot,
all those who don’t know how to spell the word pee,
all those who laugh good-naturedly at stupid jokes like this one, even though they don’t get the point.
They don’t live in the real world, we tell ourselves fondly: but what kind of criticism is that?
If they can manage not to live in it, good for them. We would rather not live in it either, ourselves.
And in fact they don’t live in it, because such women are fictions: composed by others, but just as frequently by themselves,
though even stupid women are not so stupid as they