The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [39]
My mother jabs her needle through the button, cuts the thread. I read on in a voice of increasing anxiety, through suave M and N, through quirky Q and hard R and the sibilant menaces of S. My father stares into the flames, watching the fields and woods and houses and towns and men and brothers go up in smoke, his bad leg moving by itself like a dog’s running in dreams. This is his home, this besieged castle; he is its werewolf. The chilly lemon-coloured sunset outside the window fades to grey. I don’t know it yet, but Laura is about to be born.
Bread day
Not enough rain, say the farmers. The cicadas pierce the air with their searing one-note calls; dust eddies across the roads; from the weedy patches at the verges, grasshoppers whir. The leaves of the maples hang from their branches like limp gloves; on the sidewalk my shadow crackles.
I walk early, before the full blare of the sun. The doctor eggs me on: I’m making progress, he tells me; but towards what? I think of my heart as my companion on an endless forced march, the two of us roped together, unwilling conspirators in some plot or tactic we’ve got no handle on. Where are we going? Towards the next day. It hasn’t escaped me that the object that keeps me alive is the same one that will kill me. In this way it’s like love, or a certain kind of it.
Today I went again to the cemetery. Someone had left a bunch of orange and red zinnias on Laura’s grave; hot-coloured flowers, far from soothing. They were withering by the time I got to them, though they still gave off their peppery smell. I suspect they’d been stolen from the flower beds in front of The Button Factory, by a cheapskate devotee or else a mildly crazy one; but then, it’s the sort of thing Laura herself would have done. She had only the haziest notions of ownership.
On my way back I stopped in at the doughnut shop: it was heating up outside, and I wanted some shade. The place is far from new; indeed it’s almost seedy, despite its jaunty modernity – the pale-yellow tiles, the white plastic tables bolted to the floor, their moulded chairs attached. It reminds me of some institution or other; a kindergarten in a poorer neighbourhood perhaps, or a drop-in centre for the mentally challenged. Not too many things you could throw around or use for stabbing: even the cutlery is plastic. The odour is of deep-fat-frying oil blended with pine-scented disinfectant, with a wash of tepid coffee over all.
I purchased a small iced tea and an Old-fashioned Glazed, which squeaked between my teeth like Styrofoam. After I’d consumed half of it, which was all I could get down, I picked my way across the slippery floor to the women’s washroom. In the course of my walks I’ve been compiling a map in my head of all the easily accessible washrooms in Port Ticonderoga – so useful if you’re caught short – and the one in the doughnut shop is my current favourite. Not that it’s cleaner than the rest, or more likely to have toilet paper, but it offers inscriptions. They all do, but in most locales these are painted over frequently, whereas in the doughnut shop they remain on view much longer. Thus you have not only the text, but the commentary on it as well.
The best sequence at the moment is the one in the middle cubicle. The first sentence is in pencil, in rounded lettering like those on Roman tombs, engraved deeply in the paint: Don’t Eat Anything You Aren’t Prepared to Kill.
Then, in green marker: Don’t Kill Anything You Aren’t Prepared to Eat.
Under that, in ballpoint, Don’t Kill.
Under that, in purple marker: Don’t Eat.
And under that, the last word to date, in bold black lettering: Fuck Vegetarians – “All Gods Are Carnivorous” – Laura Chase.
Thus Laura lives on.
It took Laura a long time to get herself born into this world, said Reenie. It was like she couldn’t decide whether or not it