The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [210]
“Thank you, Reenie, for all you’ve done,” I said.
“No need to thank me,” said Reenie stiffly. “I only did what was right.”
Meaning I hadn’t. “Can I write to her?” I was fumbling for my handkerchief. I felt like crying. I felt like a criminal.
“She said best not. But she wanted me to say she left you a message.”
“A message?”
“She left it before they took her off to that place. You’d know where to find it, she said.”
“Is that your own hankie? Have you got a cold?” said Myra, noting my snifflings with interest.
“If you ask too many questions your tongue will fall out,” said Reenie.
“No it won’t,” said Myra complacently. She began humming offkey, and kicking her fat legs against my knees, under the table. She had a cheerful confidence, it appeared, and was not easily frightened – qualities in her I’ve often found irritating, but have come to be grateful for. (Which may be news to you, Myra. Accept it as a compliment while you have the chance. They’re thin on the ground.)
“I thought you might like to see a picture of Aimee,” I said to Reenie. I had at least this one achievement I could show, to redeem myself in her eyes.
Reenie took the photo. “My, she’s a dark little thing, isn’t she?” she said. “You never know who a child will favour.”
“I want to see too,” said Myra, grabbing with her sugary paws.
“Quick then, and off we go. We’re late for your Dad.”
“No,” said Myra.
“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” Reenie sang, scrubbing pink icing off Myra’s little snout with a paper napkin.
“I want to stay here,” said Myra, but her coat was pulled on, her knitted wool hat was flumped down over her ears, and she was hauled sideways out of the booth.
“Take care of yourself,” said Reenie. She didn’t kiss me.
I wanted to throw my arms around her, and howl and howl. I wanted to be comforted. I wanted it to be me that was going with her.
“‘There’s no place like home,’” Laura said one day, when she was eleven or twelve. “Reenie sings that. I think it’s stupid.”
“How do you mean?” I said.
“Look.” She wrote it out as an equation. No place = home. Therefore, home = no place. Therefore home does not exist.
Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty’s Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn’t there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow.
I’m heartless, I thought. Therefore I’m homeless.
The message
Yesterday I was too tired to do much more than lie on the sofa. As is becoming my no doubt slovenly habit, I watched a daytime talk show, the kind on which they spill the beans. It’s the fashion now, bean-spilling: people spill their own beans and also those of other people, they spill every bean they have and even some they don’t have. They do this out of guilt and anguish, and for their own pleasure, but mostly because they want to display themselves and other people want to watch them do it. I don’t exempt myself: I relish these grubby little sins, these squalid family tangles, these cherished traumas. I enjoy the expectation with which the top is wrenched off the can of worms as if from some amazing birthday present, and then the sense of anticlimax in the watching faces: the forced tears and skimpy, gloating pity, the cued and dutiful applause. Is that all there is? they must be thinking. Shouldn’t it be less ordinary, more sordid, more epic, more truly harrowing, this flesh wound of yours? Tell us more! Couldn’t we please crank up the pain?
I wonder which is preferable – to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you’re depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin – everything