The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [41]
The kitchen of Avilion wasn’t dark, like the sooty Victorian cavern it must once have been, thirty years before. Instead it was white – white walls, white enamelled table, white wood-burning range, black-and-white tiled floor – with daffodil-yellow curtains at the new, enlarged windows. (It had been redone after the war as one of my father’s sheepish, propitiatory gifts to my mother.) Reenie considered this kitchen the latest thing, and as a result of my mother’s having taught her about germs and their nasty ways and their hiding places, she kept it faultlessly clean.
On bread days Reenie would give us scraps of dough for bread men, with raisins for the eyes and buttons. Then she would bake them for us. I would eat mine, but Laura would save hers up. Once Reenie found a whole row of them in Laura’s top drawer, hard as rock, wrapped up in her handkerchiefs like tiny bun-faced mummies. Reenie said they would attract mice and would have to go straight into the garbage, but Laura held out for a mass burial in the kitchen garden, behind the rhubarb bush. She said there had to be prayers. If not, she would never eat her dinner any more. She was always a hard bargainer, once she got down to it.
Reenie dug the hole. It was the gardener’s day off; she used his spade, which was off-limits to anyone else, but this was an emergency. “God pity her husband,” said Reenie, as Laura laid her bread men out in a neat row. “She’s stubborn as a pig.”
“I’m not going to have a husband anyway,” said Laura. “I’m going to live by myself in the garage.”
“I’m not going to have one either,” I said, not to be outdone.
“Fat chance of that,” said Reenie. “You like your nice soft bed. You’d have to sleep on the cement and get all covered in grease and oil.”
“I’m going to live in the conservatory,” I said.
“It’s not heated any more,” said Reenie. “You’d freeze to death in the winters.”
“I’ll sleep in one of the motor cars,” said Laura.
On that horrible Tuesday we’d had breakfast in the kitchen, with Reenie. It was oatmeal porridge and toast with marmalade. Sometimes we had it with Mother, but that day she was too tired. Mother was stricter, and made us sit up straight and eat the crusts. “Remember the starving Armenians,” she would say.
Perhaps the Armenians were no longer starving by then. The war was long over, order had been restored. But their plight must have remained in Mother’s mind as a kind of slogan. A slogan, an invocation, a prayer, a charm. Toast crusts must be eaten in memory of these Armenians, whoever they may have been; not to eat them was a sacrilege. Laura and I must have understood the weight of this charm, because it never failed to work.
Mother didn’t eat her crusts that day. I remember that. Laura went on at her about it – What about the crusts, what about the starving Armenians? – until finally Mother admitted that she didn’t feel well. When she said that, I felt an electric chill run through me, because I knew it. I’d known it all along.
Reenie said God made people the way she herself made bread, and that was why the mothers’ tummies got fat when they were going to have a baby: it was the dough rising. She said her dimples were God’s thumb-prints. She said she had three dimples and some people had none, because God didn’t make everyone the same, otherwise he would just get bored of it all, and so he dished things out unevenly. It didn’t seem fair, but it would come out fair at the end.
Laura was six, by the time I’m remembering. I was nine. I knew that babies weren’t made out of bread dough – that was a story for little kids like Laura. Still, no detailed explanation had been offered.
In the afternoons Mother had been sitting in the gazebo, knitting. She was knitting a tiny sweater,