The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [206]
I had an overpowering urge then to snatch Sabrina up in my arms and run away with her. I could imagine Winifred’s quavering wail as I barged my way through the stolid carollers, yelling so comfortably about the bitter weather.
I would have held on to her tightly, I wouldn’t have stumbled, I wouldn’t have let her fall. But also I wouldn’t have got far. They’d have been after me in a shot.
I went out onto the street by myself then, and walked and walked, head down, collar up, along the downtown sidewalks. The wind was coming in off the lake and the snow was whirling down. It was daytime, but because of the low clouds and the snow the light was dim; the cars were churning slowly past along the unploughed streets, their red tail lights receding from me like the eyes of hunchbacked beasts running backwards.
I was clutching a package – I’ve forgotten what I’d bought – and I had no gloves. I must have dropped them in the store, among the feet of the crowd. I hardly missed them. Once I could walk through blizzards with my hands bare and never feel it. It’s love or hate or terror, or just plain rage, that can do that for you.
I used to have a daydream about myself – still have it, come to that. A ridiculous-enough daydream, though it’s often through such images that we shape our destinies. (You’ll notice how easily I slip into inflated language like shape our destinies, once I wander off in this direction. But never mind.)
In this daydream, Winifred and her friends, wreaths of money on their heads, are gathered around Sabrina’s frilly white bed while she sleeps, discussing what they will bestow upon her. She’s already been given the engraved silver cup from Birks, the nursery wallpaper with the frieze of domesticated bears, the starter pearls for her single-strand pearl necklace, and all the other golden gifts, perfectly comme il faut, that will turn to coal when the sun rises. Now they’re planning the orthodontist and the tennis lessons and the piano lessons and the dancing lessons and the exclusive summer camp. What hope has she got?
At this moment, I appear in a flash of sulphurous light and a puff of smoke and a flapping of sooty leather wings, the uninvited black-sheep godmother. I too wish to bestow a gift, I cry. I have the right!
Winifred and her crew laugh and point. You? You were banished long ago! Have you looked in a mirror lately? You’ve let yourself go, you look a hundred and two. Go back to your dingy old cave! What can you possibly have to offer?
I offer the truth, I say. I’m the last one who can. It’s the only thing in this room that will still be here in the morning.
Betty’s Luncheonette
Weeks went by, and Laura did not return. I wanted to write to her, telephone her, but Richard said that would be bad for her. She did not need to be interrupted, he said, by a voice from the past. She needed to concentrate her attention on her immediate situation – on the treatment at hand. That is what he’d been told. As for the nature of this treatment, he wasn’t a doctor, he didn’t pretend to understand such things. Surely they were best left to the experts.
I tortured myself with visions of her, imprisoned, struggling, trapped in a painful fantasy of her own making, or trapped in another fantasy, equally painful, which was not hers at all but those of the people around her. And when did the one become the other? Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar – I say, you say, he and she say, it, on the other hand, does not say – paying for the privilege of sanity with common coin, with meanings we’ve agreed on.
But even as a child, Laura never quite agreed. Was this the problem? That she held firm for no when yes was the thing required? And vice versa, and vice versa.
Laura was doing well, I was told: she was making progress. Then she was not doing so well, she’d had a relapse.