The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [153]
“I don’t see that I have any position,” said Laura.
“What exactly do you mean by that?” said Richard, less indulgently.
“It’s Iris who has the position,” said Laura. “She’s the Mrs. Griffen. I’m just extra.”
“I realize you are understandably upset,” said Richard stiffly, “considering the unfortunate circumstances, which have been difficult for everyone, but there’s no need to be unpleasant. It isn’t easy for Iris and myself, either. I am only trying to do the best for you that I can.”
“He thinks I’ll be in the way,” Laura said to me that evening, in the kitchen, where we had gone to seek refuge from Richard. It was upsetting for us to watch him making his lists – what was to be discarded, what repaired, what replaced. To watch, and to be silent. He acts like he owns the place, Reenie had said indignantly. But he does, I’d replied.
“In the way of what?” I said. “I’m sure that isn’t what he meant.”
“In the way of him,” said Laura. “In the way of the two of you.”
“It will all work out for the best,” said Reenie. She said this as if by rote. Her voice was exhausted, devoid of conviction, and I saw that there was no further help to be expected from her. In the kitchen that night she looked old, and rather fat, and also defeated. As would presently appear, she was already pregnant with Myra. She’d allowed herself to be swept off her feet. It’s dirt that gets swept, and it’s into the dustbin, she used to say, but she’d violated her own maxims. Her mind must have been on other things, such as whether she would make it to the altar, and if not, what then? Bad times, without a doubt. There were no walls then between sufficiency and disaster: if you slipped you fell, and if you fell you flailed and thrashed and went under. She’d be hard put to make another chance for herself, because even if she went away to have the baby and then gave it up, word would get around and people in town would never forget a thing like that. She might as well hang out a sign: there’d be a lineup around the block. Once a woman was loose, it was seen to that she stayed that way. Why buy a cow when milk’s free, she must have been thinking.
So she’d given up on us, she’d given us over. For years she’d done what she could, and now she had no more power.
Back in Toronto, I waited for Laura to arrive. The heat wave continued. Sultry weather, damp foreheads, a shower before gin and tonics on the back verandah, overlooking the sere garden. The air like wet fire; everything limp or yellow. There was a fan in the bedroom that sounded like an old man with a wooden foot climbing the stairs: a breathless wheezing, a clunk,a wheezing. In the heavy, starless nights I stared up at the ceiling while Richard went on with what he was doing.
He was besotted with me, he said. Besotted – as if he were drunk. As if he would never feel the way he did about me if he were sober and in his right mind.
I looked at myself in the mirror, wondering, What is it about me? What is it that is so besotting? The mirror was full-length: in it I tried to catch the back view of myself, but of course you never can. You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else – to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don’t know – because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around over your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose. You can hold up another mirror to see the back view, but then what you see is what so many painters have loved to paint – Woman Looking In Mirror, said to be an allegory of vanity. Though it is unlikely to be vanity, but the reverse: a search for flaws. What is it about me? can so easily be construed as What is wrong with me?
Richard said women could be divided into apples and pears, according to the shapes of their bottoms. I was a pear, he said, but an unripe one. That was what he liked about me – my greenness, my hardness. In the bottom department, I think he meant, but possibly all the way through.
After my showers, my removal of bristles, my brushings and combings, I was now careful to remove any hairs from the floor. I would lift the little