The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [141]
One day I tracked her to The Fire Pit. It appeared to be a place where the girls – the girls of that age, from that school – hung out at lunchtime, or when they were skipping classes. The sign outside its door was red, the window edges decorated with scallops of yellow plastic meant to be flames. I was alarmed by the Miltonic audacity of the name: could they possibly have known what they were invoking?
Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’Ethereal Sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down.
... A fiery Deluge, fed
With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d.
No. They didn’t know. The Fire Pit was Hell only for the meat.
The interior had hanging lamps with stained-glass shades, and mottled, fibrous plants in earthen pots – a sixties feel. I took the booth next to the one where Sabrina was sitting with two school friends, all of them wearing the same lumpy boyish uniforms, those blanket-like kilts with matching ties that Winifred always found so prestigious. The three girls had done their best to spoil the effect – drooping socks, shirts partly untucked, ties askew. They were chewing gum as if it were a religious duty, and talking in that bored, too-loud way girls of that age seem always to have mastered.
The three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. It can’t be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; it’s a freshness, a plumpness of the cells, that’s unearned and temporary, and that nothing can replicate. None of them was satisfied with it, however; already they were making attempts to alter themselves, to improve and distort and diminish, to cram themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces. I didn’t blame them, having done the same once myself.
I sat there peering at Sabrina from under the brim of my floppy sun hat and eavesdropping on their trivial chatter, which they threw up in front of themselves like camouflage. None was saying what was on her mind, none trusted the others – quite rightly, as casual treachery is a daily affair at that age. The other two were blondes; Sabrina alone was dark and glossy as a mulberry. She wasn’t really listening to her friends, or looking at them either. Behind the studied blankness of her gaze, revolt must have been simmering. I recognized that surliness, that stubbornness, that captive-princess indignation, which must be kept hidden until enough weapons have been collected. Watch your back,Winifred, I thought with satisfaction.
Sabrina didn’t notice me. Or she did notice me, but she didn’t know who I was. There was some glancing from the three of them, some whispering and giggling; I remember the sort of thing. Shrivelled-up frump , or the modern version of it. I expect my hat was the object of it. It was a long way from being fashionable, that hat. For Sabrina that day I was merely an old woman – an older woman – a nondescript older woman, not yet decrepit enough to be remarkable.
After the three of them had left, I went to the washroom. On the cubicle wall was a poem:
I love Darren yes I do
Meant for me not for you
If you try to take my place
I swear to God I’ll smash your face.
Young girls have become more forthright than they used to be, although no better at punctuation.
When Walter and I finally located The Fire Pit, which wasn’t (he said) where he’d left it, there was plywood nailed across the windows, an official notice of some kind stapled to it. Walter snuffled around the locked-up door like a dog that’s misplaced a bone. “Looks like it’s closed,” he said. He stood for a long moment, hands in his pockets. “They’re always changing things,” he said. “You can’t keep up with it.”
After some casting about and a few false leads, we settled for a greasy spoon of sorts on Davenport, with vinyl seats and jukeboxes at the tables, stocked with country music and a sprinkling