The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [184]
“You screamed and screamed,” I said now. “You didn’t understand he was just pretending.”
“It was worse than that,” said Laura. “I thought he was pretending the rest of the time.”
“What do you mean?”
“That this was what he was really like,” said Laura patiently. “That underneath, he was burning up. All the time.”
The Water Nixie
This morning I slept in, exhausted after a night of dark wanderings. My feet were swollen, as if I’d been walking long distances over hard ground; my head felt porous and damp. It was Myra knocking at the door that woke me up. “Rise and shine,” she trilled through the letter slot. Out of perversity, I didn’t answer. Maybe she’d think I was dead – croaked in my sleep! No doubt she was already fussing over which of my floral prints she’d lay me out in, and was planning the eats for the post-funeral reception. It wouldn’t be called a wake, nothing so barbaric. A wake was to wake you up, because it’s just as well to make sure the dead are really dead before you shovel the mulch over them.
I smiled at that. Then I remembered Myra had a key. I thought of pulling the sheet up over my face to give her at least a minute of pleasurable horror, but decided better not. I levered myself upright and out of the bed, and pulled on my dressing gown.
“Hold your horses,” I called down the stairwell.
But Myra was already inside, and with her was the woman: the cleaning woman. She was a hefty creature with a Portuguese look to her: no way to stave her off. She set to work at once with Myra’s vacuum cleaner – they’d thought of everything – while I followed her around like a banshee, wailing, Don’t touch that! Leave that there! I can do that myself! Now I’ll never find anything! At least I got to the kitchen ahead of them, and had time to shove my pile of scribbled pages into the oven. They’d be unlikely to tackle that on the first day of cleaning. In any case it’s not too dirty, I never bake anything.
“There,” said Myra, when the woman had finished. “All clean and tidy. Doesn’t that make you feel better?”
She’d brought me a fresh do-dad from The Gingerbread House – an emerald-green crocus planter, only a little bit chipped, in the shape of a coyly smiling girl’s head. The crocuses are supposed to grow out through the holes in the top and burst into a halo of bloom, her words exactly. All I have to do is water it, says Myra, and pretty soon it’ll be cute as a button.
God works in his mysterious ways his wonders to perform, as Reenie used to say. Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of Purgatory? And how do you tell the difference?
On our second day at Avilion, Laura and I went off to see Reenie. It wasn’t hard to find out where she was living: everyone in town knew. Or the people in Betty’s Luncheonette did, because that’s where she was working now, three days a week. We didn’t tell Richard and Winifred where we were going, because why add to the unpleasant atmosphere around the breakfast table? We could not be absolutely prohibited, but we would be certain to attract an annoying measure of subdued scorn.
We took the teddy bear I’d bought for Reenie’s baby, at Simpsons, in Toronto. It wasn’t a very cuddly teddy bear – it was stern and tightly stuffed and stiff. It looked like a minor civil servant, or a civil servant of those days. I don’t know what they look like now. Most likely they wear jeans.
Reenie and her husband were living in one of the small limestone row-house cottages originally built for the factory workmen – two floors, pointed roof, privy at the back of the narrow garden – not so very far from where I live now. They had no telephone, so we could not alert Reenie to the fact that we were coming. When she opened the door and saw the two of us standing there, she smiled broadly, and then began to cry. After a moment, so did Laura. I stood holding the teddy bear, feeling left out because I wasn’t crying too.
“Bless you,” said Reenie to both of us. “Come in and see the baby.”
We went along the linoleum-floored corridor into the kitchen. Reenie