The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [38]
To all appearances I was my father’s child. I looked more like him; I’d inherited his scowl, his dogged skepticism. (As well as, eventually, his medals. He left them to me.) Reenie would say – when I was being recalcitrant – that I had a hard nature and she knew where I got it from. Laura on the other hand was my mother’s child. She had the piousness, in some ways; she had the high, pure forehead.
But appearances are deceptive. I could never have driven off a bridge. My father could have. My mother couldn’t.
Here we are in the autumn of 1919, the three of us together – my father, my mother, myself– making an effort. It’s November; it’s almost bedtime. We’re sitting in the morning room at Avilion. It has a fireplace in it, with a fire, as the weather has turned cool. My mother is recovering from a recent, mysterious illness, said to have something to do with her nerves. She’s mending clothes. She doesn’t need to do this – she could hire someone – but she wants to do it; she likes to have something to occupy her hands. She’s sewing on a button, torn from one of my dresses: I am said to be hard on my clothes. On the round table at her elbow is her sweetgrass-bordered sewing basket, woven by Indians, with her scissors and her spools of thread and her wooden darning egg; also her new round glasses, keeping watch. She doesn’t need them for close work.
Her dress is sky blue, with a broad white collar and white cuffs edged in piquet. Her hair has begun to go white prematurely. She would no more think of dyeing it than she would of cutting off her hand, and thus she has a young woman’s face in a nest of thistledown. It’s parted in the middle, this hair, and flows back in wide, springy waves to an intricate knot of twists and coils at the back of her head. (By the time of her death five years later, it would be bobbed, more fashionable, less compelling.) Her eyelids are lowered, her cheeks rounded, as is her stomach; her half-smile is tender. The electric lamp with its yellow-pink shade casts a soft glow over her face.
Across from her is my father, on a settee. He leans back against the cushions, but he’s restless. He has his hand on the knee of his bad leg; the leg jiggles up and down. (The good leg, the bad leg – these terms are of interest to me. What has the bad leg done, to be called bad? Is its hidden, mutilated state a punishment?)
I sit beside him, though not too close. His arm lies along the sofa back behind me, but does not touch. I have my alphabet book; I’m reading to him from it, to show that I can read. I can’t though, I’ve only memorized the shapes of the letters, and the words that go with the pictures. On an end table there’s a gramophone, with a speaker rising up out of it like a huge metal flower. My own voice sounds to me like the voice that sometimes comes out of it: small and thin and faraway; something you could turn off with a finger.
A is for Apple Pie,
Baked fresh and hot:
Some have a little,
And others a lot.
I glance up at my father to see if he’s paying any attention. Sometimes when you speak to him he doesn’t hear. He catches me looking, smiles faintly down at me.
B is for Baby,
So pink and so sweet,
With two tiny hands
And two tiny feet.
My father has gone back to gazing out the window. (Did he place himself outside this window, looking in? An orphan, forever excluded – a night wanderer? This is what he was supposed to have been fighting for – this fireside idyll, this comfortable scene out of a Shredded Wheat advertisement: the rounded, rosy-cheeked wife, so kind and good, the obedient, worshipful child. This flatness, this boredom. Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?)
F is for Fire,
Good servant, bad master.
When left to itself
It burns faster and faster.
The picture in the book is of a leaping man covered in flames – wings of fire coming from his heels and shoulders, little fiery horns sprouting