The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [174]
In honour of this new cereal I forced myself to sit down properly at the kitchen table, with place setting and paper napkin complete. Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there’s no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.
Yesterday I decided to do the laundry, to thumb my nose at God by working on a Sunday. Not that he gives two hoots what day of the week it is: in Heaven, as in the subconscious – or so we’re told – there is no time. But really it was to thumb my nose at Myra. I shouldn’t be making the bed, says Myra; I shouldn’t be carrying heavy baskets of soiled clothing down the rickety steps to the cellar, where the ancient, frantic washing machine is located.
Who does the laundry? Myra, by default. While I’m here I might as well just pop in a load, she’ll say. Then we both pretend she hasn’t done it. We conspire in the fiction – or what is rapidly becoming the fiction – that I can fend for myself. But the strain of make-believe is beginning to tell on her.
Also she’s getting a bad back. She wants to arrange for a woman, some nosy hired stranger, to come in and do all that. Her excuse is my heart. She has somehow found out about it, about the doctor and his nostrums and his prophecies – I suppose from his nurse, a chemical redhead with a mouth that flaps at both ends. This town is a sieve.
I told Myra that what I do with my dirty linen is my own business: I will stave off the generic woman for as long as possible. How much of this is embarrassment, on my part? Quite a lot. I don’t want anyone else poking into my insufficiencies, my stains and smells. It’s all right for Myra to do it, because I know her and she knows me. I am her cross to bear: I am what makes her so good, in the eyes of others. All she has to do is say my name and roll her eyes, and indulgence is extended to her, if not by the angels, at least by the neighbours, who are a damn sight harder to please.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as complicated. But sometimes it’s hard to put up with.
Having made my decision – and having anticipated Myra’s bleats of distress upon discovering the stack of washed and folded towels, and my own smug grin of triumph – I set about my laundering escapade. I delved about in the hamper, narrowly saving myself from toppling into it head first, and fished out what I thought I could carry, avoiding nostalgia for the undergarments of yesteryear. (How lovely they were! They don’t make things like that any more, not with self-covered buttons, not hand-stitched. Or perhaps they do, but I never see them, and couldn’t afford them anyway, and wouldn’t fit into them. Such things have waists.)
Into the plastic basket went my selections, and off I set, step by step, sideways down the stairs, like Little Red Riding Hood on her way to Granny’s house via the underworld. Except that I myself am Granny, and I contain my own bad wolf. Gnawing away, gnawing away.
The main floor, so far so good. Along the hall into the kitchen, then on with the cellar light and the jittery plunge into the dank. Almost at once, trepidation set in. Places in this house that I could once negotiate with ease have become treacherous: the sash windows are poised like traps, ready to fall on my hands, the stepstool threatens to collapse, the top shelves of the cupboards are booby-trapped with precarious glassware. Halfway down the cellar stairs I knew I shouldn’t have tried it. The angle was too steep, the shadows too dense, the smell too sinister, like freshly poured cement concealing some deftly poisoned spouse. On the floor at the bottom there was a pool of darkness, deep and shimmering and wet as a real pool. Perhaps it was a real pool; perhaps the river was welling up through the floor, as I have seen happen on the weather channel. Any of the four elements may become displaced at any time: fire may break from the earth, earth