The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [81]
I let her go. I was supposed to keep an eye on her: Reenie didn’t waste any sleep on my account, but Laura in her opinion was altogether too confiding, too cozy with strangers. The white slavers were always on the prowl, and Laura was their natural target. She’d get into a strange car, open an unfamiliar door, cross the wrong street, and that would be that, because she didn’t draw lines, or not where other people drew them, and you couldn’t warn her because she didn’t understand such warnings. It wasn’t that she flouted rules: she simply forgot about them.
I was tired of keeping an eye on Laura, who didn’t appreciate it. I was tired of being held accountable for her lapses, her failures to comply. I was tired of being held accountable, period. I wanted to go to Europe, or to New York, or even to Montreal – to nightclubs, to soirées, to all the exciting places mentioned in Reenie’s social magazines – but I was needed at home. Needed at home, needed at home – it sounded like a life sentence. Worse, like a dirge. I was stuck in Port Ticonderoga, proud bastion of the common-and-garden-variety button and of lower-priced long johns for budget-minded shoppers. I would stagnate here, nothing would ever happen to me, I would end up an old maid like Miss Violence, pitied and derided. This at bottom was my fear. I wanted to be elsewhere, but I saw no way to get there. Once in a while I found myself hoping that I would be abducted by white slavers, even though I didn’t believe in them. At least it would be a change.
The bake-sale table had an awning over it, and tea towels or pieces of waxed paper shielding the goods from flies. Reenie had contributed pies, not a form of baking she ever truly mastered. Her pies had gluey, underdone fillings, and crusts that were tough but flexible, like beige kelp or huge leathery mushrooms. In better times they sold well enough – it was understood that they were ceremonial objects, not food as such – but they weren’t moving briskly today. Money was in short supply, and in exchange for it people wanted something they could actually eat.
As I stood behind the table, Reenie in an undertone retailed the latest news. Four men had been thrown into the river already, with the sky still blazing white, and not altogether in fun. There had been arguments, having to do with politics, said Reenie; voices had been raised. Apart from the usual river shenanigans, there had been scuffles. Elwood Murray had been knocked down. He was the editor of the weekly paper, having inherited it from two generations of newspaper Murrays: he wrote most of it, and took the pictures for it as well. Luckily he hadn’t been ducked, as that would have damaged his camera, which had cost a good deal of money even second-hand, as Reenie happened to know. He had a nosebleed, and was sitting under a tree with a glass of lemonade and two women fussing around him with dampened handkerchiefs; I could see him from where I was standing.
Was it political, this knocking-down? Reenie didn’t know, but people didn’t like him listening in on what they were saying. In prosperous times Elwood Murray was considered a fool, and maybe what Reenie called a pansy – well, he wasn’t married, and at his age that had to mean something – but he was tolerated and even appreciated, within decent limits, as long as he put in all the names for social events and got them spelled right. But these were not prosperous times, and Elwood Murray was too nosy for his own good. You don’t want every little thing about you written up, said Reenie. Nobody in their right mind would want that.
I caught sight of Father, walking among the picnicking workers with his lopsided gait. He was nodding in his abrupt way at this man and that, a nod in which his head appeared to move back on his neck rather than forward. His black eye-patch turned from side to side;