Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [39]
“You can have it,” Joe said. He was levelling the sand mound he had built, he was still angry.
I scraped the ends of crust into the stove and washed the plates, the water turning reddish blue, vein colour. The others ambled in; they didn’t feel like playing bridge, they sat around the table reading detective novels and back issues of magazines, Maclean’s and The National Geographic, some of them were ten years old. I’d read them all so I went into David’s and Anna’s room with a candle to look for more.
I had to climb up on the bed to reach the shelf. There was a high pile of books; I lifted it down to where the candle was. On top was a layer of paperbacks, the average kind, but underneath them were some things that were out of place: the brown leather photo album that ought to have been in a trunk in the city, along with my mother’s unused wedding presents, tarnished silver bowls and lace tablecloths, and the scrapbooks we used to draw in when it rained. I thought she’d thrown them out; I wondered who had brought them here, which one of them.
There were several scrapbooks; I sat down on the bed and opened one at random, feeling as though I was opening someone else’s private diary. It was my brother’s: explosions in red and orange, soldiers dismembering in the air, planes and tanks; he must have been going to school by then, he knew enough to draw little swastikas on the sides. Further on there were flying men with comic-book capes and explorers on another planet, he spent hours explaining these pictures to me. The purple jungles I’d forgotten, the green sun with seven red moons, the animals with scales and spines and tentacles; and a man-eating plant, engulfing a careless victim, a balloon with HELP in it squeezing out of his mouth like bubble gum. The other explorers were rescuing him with their weapons: flame-throwers, trumpet-shaped pistols, ray-guns. In the background was their spaceship, bristling with gadgets.
The next scrapbook was mine. I searched through it carefully, looking for something I could recognize as myself, where I had come from or gone wrong; but there were no drawings at all, just illustrations cut from magazines and pasted in. They were ladies, all kinds: holding up cans of cleanser, knitting, smiling, modelling toeless heels and nylons with dark seams and pillbox hats and veils. A lady was what you dressed up as on Hallowe’en when you couldn’t think of anything else and didn’t want to be a ghost; or it was what you said at school when they asked you what you were going to be when you grew up, you said “A lady” or “A mother,” either one was safe; and it wasn’t a lie, I did want to be those things. On some of the pages were women’s dresses clipped from mail order catalogues, no bodies in them.
I tried another one: mine also, earlier. The drawings were of ornately-decorated Easter eggs, singly and in groups. Some of them had people-shaped rabbits climbing up them on rope ladders; apparently the rabbits lived inside the eggs, there were doors at the tops, they could pull the ladders up after them. Beside the larger eggs were smaller ones connected to them by bridges, the outhouses. Page after page of eggs and rabbits, grass and trees, normal and green, surrounding them, flowers blooming, sun in the upper right-hand corner of each picture, moon symmetrically in the left. All the rabbits were smiling and some were laughing hilariously; several were shown eating ice-cream cones from the safety of their egg-tops. No monsters, no wars, no explosions, no heroism. I couldn’t remember ever having drawn these pictures. I was disappointed in myself: I must have been a hedonistic child, I thought, and quite stodgy also, interested in nothing but social welfare. Or perhaps it was a vision of Heaven.
Behind me someone came into the room, it was David. “Hey lady,” he said, “what’re you doing in my bed? You a customer or something?”
“Sorry,” I said. I put the album back on the shelf but I took the scrapbooks into my