The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [149]
Good position, I told her. Angel above, and a carnivorous angel too – high time they came clean on that subject! Oven below, as in all the most reliable accounts. Then there’s the rest of us in between, stuck in Middle Earth, on the level of the frying pan. Poor Myra was baffled, as she always is by theological discourse. She likes her God plain – plain and raw, like a radish.
The winter we’d been waiting for arrived on New Year’s Eve – a hard freeze, followed by an enormous fall of snow the next day. Outside the window it swirled down, bucket after bucket of it, as if God were dumping laundry flakes in the finale of a children’s pageant. I turned on the weather channel to get the full panorama – roads closed, cars buried, power lines down, merchandising brought to a standstill, workmen in bulky suits waddling around like outsized children bundled up for play. Throughout their presentation of what they euphemistically termed “current conditions,” the young anchorfolk kept their perky optimism, as they habitually do through every disaster imaginable. They have the footloose insouciance of troubadours or fun-fair gypsies, or insurance salesmen, or stock-market gurus – making overblown predictions in the full knowledge that none of what they’re telling us may actually come true.
Myra called to ask if I was all right. She said Walter would be over as soon as the snow stopped, to dig me out.
“Don’t be silly, Myra,” I said. “I’m quite capable of digging myself out.” (A lie – I had no intention of lifting a finger. I was well supplied with peanut butter, I could wait it out. But I felt like company, and threats of action on my part usually speeded up the arrival of Walter.)
“Don’t you touch that shovel!” said Myra. “Hundreds of old – of people your age die of heart attacks from snow shovelling every year! And if the electricity goes off, watch where you put the candles!”
“I’m not senile,” I snapped. “If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.”
Walter appeared, Walter shovelled. He’d brought a paper sack of doughnut holes; we ate them at the kitchen table, me cautiously,Walter wholesale, but contemplatively. He’s a man for whom chewing is a form of thinking.
What came back to me then was the sign that used to be in the window of the Downyflake Doughnut stand, at the Sunnyside Amusement Park, in – what was it? – the summer of 1935:
As you ramble on through life, Brother,
Whatever be your goal,
Keep your eye upon the doughnut,
And not upon the hole.
A paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they’ve learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used – metaphorically, of course – to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?
The next day I ventured out, among the cold, splendid dunes. Folly, but I wanted to participate – snow is so attractive, until it gets porous and sooty. My front lawn was a lustrous avalanche, with an Alpine tunnel cut through it. I made it out to the sidewalk, so far so good, but a few houses farther north of me the neighbours had not been so assiduous as Walter about their shovelling, and I got trapped in a drift, and floundered, slipped, and fell. Nothing was broken or sprained – I didn’t think it was – but I couldn’t get up. I lay there in the snow, pawing with my arms and legs, like a turtle on its back. Children do that, but deliberately – flapping like birds, making angels. For them it’s joy.
I was beginning to fret about hypothermia when two strange