The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [96]
Or I would walk along the main street, giving serious attention to what was in the shop windows – the pairs of socks and shoes, the hats and gloves, the screwdrivers and wrenches. I would study the posters of movie stars in the glass cases outside the Bijou Theatre and compare them with how I myself looked, or might look if I combed my hair down over one eye and had the proper clothes. I wasn’t allowed to go inside; I didn’t enter a movie theatre until after I was married, because Reenie said the Bijou was cheapening, for young girls by themselves at any rate. Men went there on the prowl, dirty-minded men. They would take the seat next to you and stick their hands onto you like flypaper, and before you knew it they’d be climbing all over you.
In Reenie’s descriptions the girl or woman would always be inert, but with many handholds on her, like a jungle gym. She would be magically deprived of the ability to scream or move. She would be transfixed, she would be paralyzed – with shock, or outrage, or shame. She would have no recourse.
The cold cellar
A nip in the air; the clouds high and windblown. Sheaves of dried Indian corn have appeared on the choicer front doors; on the porches the jack-o’-lanterns have taken up their grinning vigils. A week from now the candy-minded children will take to the streets, dressed as ballerinas and zombies and space aliens and skeletons and gypsy fortune-tellers and dead rock stars, and as usual I will turn out the lights and pretend not to be home. It’s not dislike of them as such, but self-defence – should any of the wee ones disappear, I don’t want to be accused of having lured them in and eaten them.
I told this to Myra, who is doing a brisk trade in squat orange candles and black ceramic cats and sateen bats, and in decorative stuffed-cloth witches, their heads made of dried-out apples. She laughed. She thought I was making a joke.
I had a sluggish day yesterday – my heart was pinching me, I could barely move off the sofa – but this morning, after taking my pill, I felt oddly energetic. I walked quite briskly as far as the doughnut shop. There I inspected the washroom wall, on which the latest entry is: If you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all, followed by: If you can’t suck anything nice don’t suck anything at all . It’s good to know that freedom of speech is still in full swing in this country.
Then I bought a coffee and a chocolate-glazed doughnut, and took them outside to one of the benches provided by the management, placed handily right beside the garbage bin. There I sat, in the still-warm sunlight, basking like a turtle. People strolled by – two overfed women with a baby carriage, a younger, thinner woman in a black leather coat with silver studs in it like nail-heads and another one in her nose, three old geezers in windbreakers. I got the feeling they were staring at me. Am I still that notorious, or that paranoid? Or perhaps I’d merely been talking to myself out loud. It’s hard to know. Does my voice simply flow out of me like air when I’m not paying attention? A shrivelled whispering, winter vines rustling, the sibilance of autumn wind in dry grass.
Who cares what people think, I told myself. If they want to listen in, they’re welcome.
Who cares, who cares. The perennial adolescent riposte. I cared, of course. I cared what people thought. I always did care. Unlike Laura, I have never had the courage of my convictions.
A dog came over; I gave it half of the doughnut. “Be my guest,” I said to it. That’s what Reenie would say when she caught you eavesdropping.
All through October – the October of 1934 – there had been talk of what was going on at the button factory. Outside agitators were hanging around, it was said; they were stirring things up, especially among the young hotheads. There was talk of collective bargaining, of workers’ rights, of unions. Unions were surely illegal, or closed-shop unions were – weren’t they? No one seemed quite to know. In any