The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [207]
“But I’m not really sick,” I said.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “Back to normal.” He gave a fond smile, a leer almost. His eyes were getting smaller, or the flesh around them was moving in, which gave him a cunning expression. He was thinking about the time when he could be back where he belonged: on top. I was thinking that he would squeeze the breath out of me. He was putting on weight; he was eating out a lot; he was making speeches, at clubs, at weighty gatherings, substantial gatherings. Ponderous gatherings, at which weighty, substantial men met and pondered, because – everyone suspected it – there was heavy weather ahead.
All that speech-making can bloat a man up. I’ve watched the process, many times now. It’s those kinds of words, the kind they use in speeches. They have a fermenting effect on the brain. You can see it on television, during the political broadcasts – the words coming out of their mouths like bubbles of gas.
I decided to be as sickly as I could for as long as possible.
I fretted and fretted about Laura. I turned Winifred’s story about her this way and that, looking at it from every angle. I couldn’t quite believe it, but I couldn’t disbelieve it either.
Laura had always had one enormous power: the power to break things without meaning to. Nor had she ever been a respecter of territories. What was mine was hers: my fountain pen, my cologne, my summer dress, my hat, my hairbrush. Had this catalogue expanded to include my unborn baby? However, if she was suffering from delusions – if she’d only been inventing things – why was it she’d invented precisely that?
But suppose on the other hand that Winifred was lying. Suppose Laura was as sane as she ever was. In that case, Laura had been telling the truth. And if Laura had been telling the truth, then Laura was pregnant. If there really was going to be a baby, what would become of it? And why hadn’t she told me about it, instead of telling some doctor, some stranger? Why hadn’t she asked me for help? I thought that over for some time. There could have been a good many reasons. My delicate condition would just have been one of them.
As for the father, whether imagined or real, there was only one man who was at all possible. It must be Alex Thomas.
But it couldn’t be. How could it?
I no longer knew how Laura would have answered these questions. She had become unknown to me, as unknown as the inside of your own glove is unknown when your hand is inside it. She was with me all the time, but I couldn’t look at her. I could only feel the shape of her presence: a hollow shape, filled with my own imaginings.
Months went by. It was June, then July, then August. Winifred said I was looking white and drained. I should spend more time outside, she said. If I would not take up tennis or golf, as she’d repeatedly suggested – it might do something about that little tummy of mine, which ought to be seen to before it became chronic – I could at least work on my rock garden. It was an occupation that accorded well with motherhood.
I was not fond of my rock garden, which was mine in name only, like so much else. (Like “my” baby, come to think of it: surely a changeling, surely something left by the gypsies; surely my real baby – one that cried less and smiled more, and was not so pungent – had been spirited away.) The rock garden was similarly resistant to my ministrations; nothing I did to it pleased it at all. Its rocks made a good show – there was a lot of pink granite, along with the limestone – but I couldn’t get anything to grow in it.
I contented myself with books – Perennials for the Rock Garden, Desert Succulents for Northern Climes, and the like. I went through such books, making lists – lists of what I might plant, or else lists of what I had indeed already planted; what ought to have been growing, but was not.