The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [177]
Did it bother him that I was indifferent to his nighttime activities, even repelled by them? Not at all. He preferred conquest to cooperation, in every area of life.
Sometimes – increasingly, as time went by – there were bruises, purple, then blue, then yellow. It was remarkable how easily I bruised, said Richard, smiling. A mere touch would do it. He had never known a woman to bruise so easily. It came from being so young and delicate.
He favoured thighs, where it wouldn’t show. Anything overt might get in the way of his ambitions.
I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it?
I was sand, I was snow – written on, rewritten, smoothed over.
The ashtray
I’ve been to see the doctor again. Myra drove me there: in view of the black ice caused by a thaw followed by a freeze, it was too slippery for me to walk, she said.
The doctor tapped my ribs and eavesdropped on my heart, and frowned and then cancelled his frown, and then – having already made up his mind about it – asked me how I was feeling. I believe he has done something to his hair; surely he used to be thinner on top. Has he been indulging in the gluing on of strands across his scalp? Or worse, transplantation? Aha, I thought. Despite your jogging and the hairiness of your legs, the shoe of aging is beginning to pinch. Soon you’ll regret all that sun-tanning. Your face will look like a testicle.
Nonetheless he was offensively jocular. At least he doesn’t say, How are we today? He never calls me we, the way some of them do: he does understand the importance of the first person singular.
“I can’t sleep,” I told him. “I dream too much.”
“Then if you’re dreaming, you must be sleeping,” he said, intending a witticism.
“You know what I mean,” I said sharply. “It’s not the same. The dreams wake me up.”
“You’ve been drinking coffee?”
“No,” I lied.
“Must be a bad conscience.” He was writing out a prescription, no doubt for sugar pills. He chuckled to himself: he thought he’d been quite funny. After a certain point, the ravages of experience reverse themselves; we put on innocence with advancing age, at least in the minds of others. What the doctor sees when he looks at me is an ineffectual and therefore blameless old biddy.
Myra sat reading out-of-date magazines in the waiting room while I was in the inner sanctum. She tore out an article on coping with stress, and another one on the beneficial effects of raw cabbage. These were for me, she said, pleased with her helpful trouvailles. She is always diagnosing me. My corporeal health is of almost as much interest to her as my spiritual health: she is especially proprietary about my bowels.
I told her I could hardly be said to suffer from stress, as there was no stress in a vacuum. As for raw cabbage, it bloated me up like a dead cow, so I would skip the beneficial effects. I said I had no wish to go through life, or what remained of it, stinking like a barrel of sauerkraut and sounding like a truck horn.
Crude references to bodily functions usually put a stop to Myra. She drove the rest of the way home in silence, with a smile hardening on her face like plaster of Paris.
Sometimes I am ashamed of myself.
To the task at hand. At hand is appropriate: sometimes it seems to me that it’s only my hand writing, not the rest of me; that my hand has taken on a life of its own, and will keep on going even if severed from the rest of me, like some embalmed,