The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [48]
The waitress had a black dress and a white cap and eyebrows plucked to thin curves, and a red mouth shiny as jam. She called my father Captain Chase and he called her Agnes. By this, and by the way he leaned his elbows on the table, I realized he must already be familiar with this place.
Agnes said was this his little girl, and how sweet; she threw me a glance of dislike. She brought him his coffee almost immediately, wobbling a little on her high heels, and when she set it down she touched his hand briefly. (I took note of this touch, though I could not yet interpret it.) Then she brought the soda for me, in a cone-shaped glass like a dunce cap upside down; it came with two straws. The bubbles went up my nose and made my eyes water.
My father put a sugar cube into his coffee and stirred it, and tapped the spoon on the side of the cup. I studied him over the rim of my soda glass. All of a sudden he looked different; he looked like someone I had never seen before – more tenuous, less solid somehow, but more detailed. I rarely saw him this close up. His hair was combed straight back and cut short at the sides, and was receding from his temples; his good eye was a flat blue, like blue paper. His wrecked, still-handsome face had the same abstracted air it often had in the mornings, at the breakfast table, as if he were listening to a song, or a distant explosion. His moustache was greyer than I’d noticed before, and it seemed odd, now that I considered it, that men had such bristles growing on their faces and women did not. Even his ordinary clothes had turned mysterious in the dim vanilla-scented light, as if they belonged to someone else and he had only borrowed them. They were too big for him, that was it. He had shrunk. But at the same time he was taller.
He smiled at me, and asked if I was enjoying my soda. After that he was silent and thoughtful. Then he took a cigarette out of the silver case he always carried, and lit it, and blew out smoke. “If anything happens,” he said finally, “you must promise to look after Laura.”
I nodded solemnly. What was anything? What could happen? I dreaded some piece of bad news, though I couldn’t have put a name to it. Maybe he might be going away – going overseas. Stories of the war had not been lost on me. However he did not explain further.
“Shake hands on it?” he said. We reached our hands across the table; his was hard and dry, like a leather suitcase handle. His one blue eye assessed me, as if speculating about whether I could be depended on. I lifted my chin, straightened my shoulders. I wanted desperately to deserve his good opinion.
“What can you buy for a nickel?” he said then. I was caught offguard by this question, tongue-tied: I didn’t know. Laura and I were not given any money of our own to spend, because Reenie said we needed to learn the value of a dollar.
From the inside pocket of his dark suit he took out his memorandum book in its pigskin cover and tore out a sheet of paper. Then he began talking about buttons. It was never too early, he said, for me to learn the simple principles of economics, which I would need to know in order to act responsibly, when I was older.
“Suppose you begin with two buttons,” he said. He said your expenses would be what it cost you to make the buttons, and your gross revenues would be how much you could sell the buttons for, and your net profit would be that figure minus your expenses, over a given time. You could then keep some of the net profit for yourself and use the rest of it to make four buttons, and then you would sell those and be able to make eight. He drew a little chart with his silver pencil: two buttons, then four buttons, then eight buttons. Buttons multiplied bewilderingly on the page; in the column next to them, the money piled up. It was like shelling peas – peas in this bowl, pods in that. He asked me if I understood.
I scanned his face to see if he was serious. I’d heard him denounce the button factory often enough as a trap, a quicksand, a jinx, an albatross, but that was when he’d been drinking. Right now he