The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [84]
“What’s wrong with him?” I said to Reenie. I hadn’t liked him, but surely he was now being judged without a hearing.
“What’s right with him, is more like it,” said Reenie. “Rolling around on the lawn in full view of everyone.” She was talking more to me than to Laura. “At least you had your skirt tucked in.” Reenie said a girl alone with a man should be able to hold a dime between her knees. She was always afraid that people – men – would see our legs, the part above the knee. Of women who allowed this to happen, she would say: Curtain’s up, where’s the show? Or, Might as well hang out a sign. Or, more balefully, She’s asking for it, she’ll get what’s coming to her, or, in the worst cases, She’s an accident waiting to happen.
“We weren’t rolling,” Laura said. “There was no hill.”
“Rolling or not, you know what I mean,” said Reenie.
“We weren’t doing anything,” I said. “We were talking.”
“That’s beside the point,” said Reenie. “People could see you.”
“Next time we’re not doing anything we’ll hide in the bushes,” I said.
“Who is he anyway?” said Reenie, who usually ignored my head-on challenges, since by now there was nothing she could do about them. Who is he meant Who are his parents.
“He’s an orphan,” said Laura. “He was adopted, from an orphanage. A Presbyterian minister and his wife adopted him.” She seemed to have winkled this information out of Alex Thomas in a very short time, but this was one of her skills, if it can be called that – she’d just keep on asking questions, of the personal kind we’d been taught were rude, until the other person, in shame or outrage, would be forced to stop answering.
“An orphan!” said Reenie. “He could be anybody!”
“What’s wrong with orphans?” I said.I knew what was wrong with them in Reenie’s books: they didn’t know who their fathers were, and that made them unreliable, if not downright degenerate. Born in a ditch was how Reenie would put it. Born in a ditch, left on a doorstep.
“They can’t be trusted,” said Reenie. “They worm their way in. They don’t know where to draw the line.”
“Well anyway,” said Laura, “I’ve invited him to dinner.”
“Now that takes the gold-plated gingerbread,” said Reenie.
Loaf givers
There’s a wild plum tree at the back of the garden, on the other side of the fence. It’s ancient, gnarled, the branches knuckled with black knot. Walter says it should come down, but I’ve pointed out that, technically speaking, it isn’t mine. In any case, I have a fondness for it. It blossoms every spring, unasked, untended; in the late summer it drops plums into my garden, small blue oval ones with a bloom on them like dust. Such generosity. I picked up the last windfalls this morning – those few the squirrels and raccoons and drunken yellow-jackets had left me – and ate them greedily, the juice of their bruised flesh bloodying my chin. I didn’t notice it until Myra dropped by with another of her tuna casseroles. My goodness, she said, with her breathless avian laugh. Who’ve you been fighting?
I remember that Labour Day dinner in every detail, because it was the only time all of us were ever in the same room together.
The revels were still going on out at the Camp Grounds, but not in any form you’d want to witness close up, as the surreptitious consumption of cheap liquor was now in full swing. Laura and I had left early, to help Reenie with the dinner preparations.
These had been going on for some days. As soon as Reenie had been informed about the party, she’d dug out her one cookbook, The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, by Fannie Merritt Farmer. It wasn’t hers really: it had belonged to Grandmother Adelia, who’d consulted it – along with her various cooks, of course – when planning her twelve-course dinners. Reenie had inherited it, although she didn’t use it for her daily cooking – all of that was in her head, according to her. But this was a question of the fancy stuff.
I had read this