The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [74]
Laura found a splotch of blood on my bedsheets and began to weep. She concluded that I was dying. I would die like Mother, she sobbed, without telling her first. I would have a little grey baby like a kitten and then I would die.
I told her not to be an idiot. I said this blood had nothing to do with babies. (Callista hadn’t gone into that part, having no doubt decided that too much of this kind of information at once might warp my psyche.)
“It’ll happen to you one day too,” I said to Laura. “When you’re my age. It’s a thing that happens to girls.”
Laura was indignant. She refused to believe it. As with so much else, she was convinced that an exception would be made in her case.
There’s a studio portrait of Laura and me, taken at this time. I’m wearing the regulation dark velvet dress, a style too young for me: I have, noticeably, what used to be called bosoms. Laura sits beside me, in an identical dress. We both have white knee socks, patent-leather Mary Janes; our legs are crossed decorously at the ankle, right over left, as instructed. I have my arm around Laura, but tentatively, as if ordered to place it there. Laura on her part has her hands folded in her lap. Each of us has her light hair parted in the middle and pulled back tightly from her face. Both of us are smiling, in that apprehensive way children have when told they must be good and smile, as if the two things are the same: it’s a smile imposed by the threat of disapproval. The threat and the disapproval would have been Father’s. We were afraid of them, but did not know how to avoid them.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Father had decided, correctly enough, that our education had been neglected. He wanted us taught French, but also Mathematics and Latin – brisk mental exercises that would act as a corrective for our excessive dreaminess. Geography too would be bracing. Although he’d barely noticed her during her tenure, he decreed that Miss Violence and her lax, musty, rose-tinted ways must be scrubbed away. He wanted the lacy, frilly, somewhat murky edges trimmed off us as if we were lettuces, leaving a plain, sound core. He didn’t understand why we liked what we liked. He wanted us turned into the semblances of boys, one way or another. Well, what do you expect? He’d never had sisters.
In the place of Miss Violence, he engaged a man called Mr. Erskine, who’d once taught at a boys’ school in England but had been packed off to Canada, suddenly, for his health. He did not seem at all unhealthy to us: he never coughed, for instance. He was stocky, tweed-covered, thirty or thirty-five perhaps, with reddish hair and a plump wet red mouth, and a tiny goatee and a cutting irony and a nasty temper, and a smell like the bottom of a damp laundry hamper.
It was soon clear that inattentiveness and staring at Mr. Erskine’s forehead would not rid us of him. First of all he gave us tests, to determine what we knew. Not much, it appeared, though more than we saw fit to divulge. He then told Father that we had the brains of insects or marmots. We were nothing short of deplorable, and it was a wonder we were not cretins. We had developed slothful mental habits – we had been allowed to develop them, he added reprovingly. Happily, it was not too late. My father said that in that case Mr. Erskine should work us up into shape.
To us, Mr. Erskine said that our laziness, our arrogance, our tendency to lollygag and daydream, and our sloppy sentimentality had all but ruined us for the serious business of life. No one expected us to be geniuses, and it would be conferring no favours if we were, but there was surely a minimum, even for girls: we would be nothing but encumbrances to any man foolish enough to marry us unless we were made to pull up our socks.
He ordered a large stack of school exercise books, the cheap kind with ruled lines and flimsy cardboard covers. He ordered a supply of plain lead pencils, with erasers. These were the magic wands, he said, by means of which we were about to transform ourselves, with his assistance.
He said assistance with a smirk.
He threw