The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [78]
Laura refused to eat the rabbits. They looked like skinned babies, she said. You’d have to be a cannibal to eat them.
Reenie said Father was too good for his own good. She also said he was too prideful. A man should admit when he was beat. She didn’t know what things were coming to, but rack and ruin was the likeliest outcome.
I was now sixteen. My formal education, such as it was, had come to an end. I was hanging around, but for what? What would become of me next?
Reenie had her preferences. She’d taken to reading Mayfair magazine, with its descriptions of society festivities, and the social pages in the newspapers – the weddings, the charity balls, the luxury vacations. She memorized lists of names – names of the prominent, of cruise ships, of good hotels. I ought to be given a début, she said, with all the proper trimmings – teas to meet the important society mothers, receptions and fashionable outings, a formal dance with eligible young men invited. Avilion would be filled with well-dressed people again, as in the old days; there would be string quartets, and torches on the lawn. Our family was at least as good as the families whose daughters were provided for in this way – as good, or better. Father ought to have kept some money in the bank just for that. If only my mother had remained alive, Reenie said, everything would have been done up right.
I doubted that. From what I’d heard about Mother, she might have insisted I be sent to school – the Alma Ladies’ College, or some such worthy, dreary institution – to learn something functional but equally dreary, like shorthand; but as for a début, that would have been vanity. She’d never had one herself.
Grandmother Adelia was different, and far enough removed in time so that I could idealize her. She would have taken pains with me; she’d have spared no scheme or expense. I mooned around in the library, studying the pictures of her that still hung on the walls: the portrait in oils, done in 1900, in which she wore a sphinx-like smile and a dress the colour of dried red roses, with a plunging neckline from which her bare throat emerged abruptly, like an arm from behind a magician’s curtain; the gilt-framed black-and-white photographs, showing her in picture hats, or with ostrich feathers, or in evening gowns with tiaras and white kid gloves, alone or with various now-forgotten dignitaries. She would have sat me down and given me the necessary advice: how to dress, what to say, how to behave on all occasions. How to avoid making myself ridiculous, for which I could already see there was ample scope. Despite her ferretings in the society pages, Reenie didn’t know enough for that.
The button factory picnic
The Labour Day weekend has come and gone, leaving a detritus of plastic cups and floating bottles and gently withering balloons in the backwash of the river’s eddies. Now September is asserting itself. Though at noon the sun is no less hot, morning by morning it rises later, trailing mist, and in the cooler evenings the crickets rasp and creak. Wild asters cluster in the garden, having rooted themselves there some time ago – tiny white ones, others bushier and sky-coloured, others with rusty stems, a deeper purple. Once, in my days of desultory gardening, I would have branded them weeds and pulled them out. Now I no longer make such distinctions.
It’s better weather for walking now, not so much glare and shimmer. The tourists are thinning out, and those remaining are at least decently covered: no more giant shorts and bulging sun-dresses, no more poached red legs.
Today I set out for the Camp Grounds. I set out, but when I was halfway there Myra came by in her car and