The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [15]
I should have married someone like Walter. Good with his hands.
No: I shouldn’t have married anyone. That would have saved a lot of trouble.
Walter stopped the car in front of the high school. It’s postwar modern, fifty years old but still new to me: I can’t get used to the flatness, the blandness. It looks like a packing crate. Young people and their parents were rippling over the sidewalk and the lawn and in through the front doors, their clothes in every summer colour. Myra was waiting for us, yoo-hooing from the steps, in a white dress covered with huge red roses. Women with such big bums should not wear large floral prints. There’s something to be said for girdles, not that I’d wish them back. She’d had her hair done, all tight grey cooked-looking curls like an English barrister’s wig.
“You’re late,” she said to Walter.
“Nope, I’m not,” said Walter. “If I am, everyone else is early, is all. No reason she should have to sit around cooling her heels.” They’re in the habit of speaking of me in the third person, as if I’m a child or pet.
Walter handed my arm over into Myra’s custody and we went up the front steps together like a three-legged race. I felt what Myra’s hand must have felt: a brittle radius covered slackly with porridge and string. I should have brought my cane, but I couldn’t see carting it out onto the stage with me. Someone would be bound to trip over it.
Myra took me backstage and asked me if I’d like to use the Ladies’ – she’s good about remembering that – then sat me down in the dressing room. “You just stay put now,” she said. Then she hurried off, bum lolloping, to make sure all was in order.
The lights around the dressing-room mirror were small round bulbs, as in theatres; they cast a flattering light, but I was not flattered: I looked sick, my skin leached of blood, like meat soaked in water. Was it fear, or true illness? Certainly I did not feel a hundred percent.
I found my comb, made a perfunctory stab at the top of my head. Myra keeps threatening to take me to “her girl,” at what she still refers to as the Beauty Parlour – The Hair Port is its official name, with Unisex as an added incentive – but I keep resisting. At least I can still call my hair my own, though it frizzes upwards as if I’ve been electrocuted. Beneath it there are glimpses of scalp, the greyish pink of mice feet. If I ever get caught in a high wind my hair will all blow off like dandelion fluff, leaving only a tiny pockmarked nubbin of bald head.
Myra had left me one of her special brownies, whipped up for the Alumni Tea – a slab of putty, covered in chocolate sludge – and a plastic screw-top jug of her very own battery-acid coffee. I could neither drink nor eat, but why did God make toilets? I left a few brown crumbs, for authenticity.
Then Myra bustled in and scooped me up and led me forth, and I was having my hand shaken by the principal, and told how good it was of me to have come; then I was passed on to the vice-principal, the president of the Alumni Association, the head of the English department – a woman in a trouser suit – the representative from the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and finally the local member of Parliament, loath as such are to miss a trick. I hadn’t seen so many polished teeth on display since Richard’s political days.
Myra accompanied me as far as my chair, then whispered, “I’ll be right in the wings.” The school orchestra struck up with squeaks and flats, and we sang “O Canada!,”the words to which I can never remember because they keep changing them. Nowadays they do some of it in French, which once would have been unheard of. We sat down, having affirmed our collective pride in something we can’t pronounce.
Then the school chaplain offered a prayer,