Lady Oracle

by Margaret Atwood

  I asked her about it the next time I saw her. "I'm head of Public Relations, dear," she said. "Just for Canada. But I didn't really write that booklet, you know. That was written by Advertising."

  "Then what do you do?" I asked.

  "Well," she said, "I go to a lot of meetings, and I advise on the ads. And I answer the letters. My secretary helps me, of course."

  "What kind of letters?" I asked.

  "Oh, you know," she said. "Complaints about the product, requests for advice, that sort of thing. You'd think they'd all be from young girls, and a lot of them are. Girls wanting to know where their vagina is and things like that. We have a form letter for those. But some of them are from people who really need help, and those are the ones I answer personally. When they're afraid to go to the doctor or something, they write me. Half the time I don't know what to say." Aunt Lou finished her martini and went to pour herself another one. "I got one just the other day from a woman who thought she'd been impregnated by an incubus."

  "An incubus?" I asked. It sounded like some sort of medical appliance. "What's that?"

  "I looked it up in the dictionary," said Aunt Lou. "It's a sort of demon."

  "What did you tell her?" I asked, horrified. What if the woman was right?

  "I told her," said Aunt Lou reflectively, "to get a pregnancy test, and if it came out positive it wouldn't be an incubus. If it's negative, then she won't have to worry, will she?"

  "Louisa is beyond the pale," my mother said when she was explaining to my father why she didn't have Aunt Lou to dinner more often. "People are sure to ask her what she does, and she always tells them. I can't have her using those words at the dinner table. I know she's good-hearted but she just doesn't care what kind of an impression she makes."

  "Count your blessings," Aunt Lou said to me with a chuckle. "They pay well and it's a friendly office. I've got nothing to complain about."

  The psychiatrist gave up on me after three sessions of tears and silence. I resented the implication that there were yet more things wrong with me in addition to being fat, and he resented my resentment. He told my mother it was a family problem which couldn't be resolved by treating me alone, and she was indignant. "He has his nerve," she said to my father. "He just wants to get more money out of me. They're all quacks, if you ask me."

  After that she entered her laxative phase. I think by this time she was frantic; certainly she was obsessed with my bulk. Like most people she probably thought in images, and her image of me then must have been a one-holed object, like an inner tube, that took things in at one end but didn't let them out at the other: if she could somehow uncork me I would deflate, all at once, like a dirigible. She started to buy patent medicines, disguising her attempts to get me to take them - "It'll be good for your complexion" - and occasionally slipping them into the food. Once she even iced a chocolate cake with melted Ex-Lax, leaving it on the kitchen counter where I found and devoured it. It made me wretched but it didn't make me thin.

  By this time I was in high school. I resisted my mother's plan to send me to a private girls' school, where the pupils wore kilts and little plaid ties. Ever since Brownies I'd been wary of any group composed entirely of women, especially women in uniforms. So instead I went to the nearest high school, which was second-best in my mother's opinion but not as bad as it might have been, since by now we were living in a respectable neighborhood. The catch was that the children of the families my mother viewed as her peers and models were sent to the kind of private school she wanted to send me to, so the high school got mostly the leftovers, from the smaller houses around the fringes of the area, the brash new apartment building which had been opposed by the established residents, and even worse, the flats above the stores on the commercial streets. Some of my classmates were not at all what she had in mind, though I didn't tell her this as I didn't want to be forced into uniform.

  At this time my mother gave me a clothing allowance, as an incentive to reduce. She thought I should buy clothes that would make me less conspicuous, the dark dresses with tiny polka-dots and vertical stripes favored by designers for the fat. Instead I sought out clothes of a peculiar and offensive hideousness, violently colored, horizontally striped. Some of them I got in maternity shops, others at cut-rate discount stores; I was especially pleased with a red felt skirt, cut in a circle, with a black telephone appliqued onto it. The brighter the colors, the more rotund the effect, the more certain I was to buy. I wasn't going to let myself be diminished, neutralized, by a navy-blue polka-dot sack.

  Once, when I arrived home in a new lime-green car coat with toggles down the front, flashing like a neon melon, my mother started to cry. She cried hopelessly, passively; she was leaning against the banister, her whole body slack as if she had no bones. My mother had never cried where I could see her and I was dismayed, but elated too at this evidence of my power, my only power. I had defeated her: I wouldn't ever let her make me over in her image, thin and beautiful.

  "Where do you find them?" she sobbed. "You're doing it on purpose. If I looked like you I'd hide in the cellar."

  I'd waited a long time for that. She who cries first is lost. "You've been drinking," I said, which was true. For the first time in my life I experienced, consciously, the joy of self-righteous recrimination.

  "What have I done to make you behave like this?" my mother said. She was wearing a housecoat and slippers, even though it was four-thirty in the afternoon, and her hair could have been cleaner. I stomped past her, up to my room, feeling quite satisfied with myself. But when I thought about it, I had doubts. She was taking all the credit for herself, I was not her puppet; surely I was behaving like this not because of anything she had done but because I wanted to. And what was so bad, anyway, about the way I was behaving?

  "That's just the way I am," Aunt Lou said once. "If other people can't handle it, that's their problem. Remember that, dear. You can't always choose your life, but you can learn to accept it." I was accustomed to thinking of Aunt Lou as wise; she was certainly generous. The only trouble was that the bits of wisdom she dispensed could have several meanings, when you thought hard about them. For instance, was I supposed to accept my mother, or was she supposed to accept me?

  In one of my daydreams I used to pretend Aunt Lou was my real mother, who for some dark but forgivable reason had handed me over to my parents to be brought up. Maybe I was the child of the handsome gambler, who would one day reappear, or Aunt Lou had had me out of wedlock when she was very young. In this case my father was not my real father, and my mother ... but here it broke down, for what could have persuaded my mother to take me in if she hadn't been obliged to? When my father would comment on how fond Aunt Lou was of me, my mother would reply acidly that it was only because she didn't have me on her hands all the time. On her hands, in her hair, these were the metaphors my mother used about me, despite the fact that she seldom touched me. Her hands were delicate and long-fingered, with red nails, her hair carefully arranged; no nests for me among those stiff immaculate curls. I could always recall what my mother looked like but not what she felt like.

  Aunt Lou however was soft, billowy, woolly, befurred; even her face, powdered and rouged, was covered with tiny hairs, like a bee. Wisps escaped from her head, threads from her hems, sweetish odors from the space between her collar and her neck, where I would rest my forehead, listening to the stories of her talking fox. In the summers, when I was small and we wandered the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition, she would hold me by the hand. My mother didn't hold me by the hand, there were her gloves to think of. She held me by the arm or the back of the collar. And she would never take me to the Ex, which she said was not worthwhile. Aunt Lou and I thought it was worthwhile, we loved it, the shouting barkers and the pipe bands and the wads of pink cotton candy and greasy popcorn we would stuff into ourselves while rambling from one pavilion to another. We would head for the Pure Foods first every year to see the cow made of real butter; one year they made the Queen instead.<
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  But there was something I could never quite remember. We went to the midway, of course, and on rides, the slower ones - Aunt Lou liked the Ferris wheel - but there were two tents Aunt Lou wouldn't let me visit. One had women in harem costumes and enormous jutting breasts painted on it, and two or three of these women would pose on a little stage outside the door in their gauzy pants with their midriffs showing, while a man with a megaphone tried to get people to buy tickets. The other was the Freak Show, and this tent had the fire-eater and the sword-swallower in it, as well as the Rubber Man and the Siamese Twins, JOINED HEAD TO HEAD AND STILL ALIVE, the man said, and the fattest woman in the world. Aunt Lou didn't want to go into this tent either. "It's wrong to laugh at other people's misfortunes," she said, sterner than usual. I found this unfair: other people laughed at mine, I should get a chance too. But then, nobody regarded being fat as a misfortune; it was viewed simply as a disgusting failure of will. It wasn't fated and therefore glamorous, like being a Siamese twin or living in an iron lung. Nevertheless, the Fat Lady was in that tent and I wanted to see her; but I never did.

  What I couldn't remember was this: were there two tents, or was there only one? The man with the megaphone sounded the same for freaks and dancing girls alike. They were both spectacular, something that had to be seen to be believed.

  Aunt Lou's favorite midway place was the one with the giant mouth on the outside, from which canned laughter issued in a never-ending stream. "Laugh in the Dark," it was called. It had phosphorescent skeletons, and distorting mirrors that stretched you and shrank you. I found those mirrors disturbing. I didn't want to be fatter than I already was, and being thinner was impossible.

  I used to imagine the Fat Lady sitting on a chair, knitting, while lines and lines of thin gray faces filed past her, looking, looking. I saw her in gauze pants and a maroon satin brassiere, like the dancing girls, and red slippers. I thought about what she would feel. One day she would rebel, she would do something; meanwhile she made her living from their curiosity. She was knitting a scarf, for one of her relatives who had known her from a child and didn't find her strange at all.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I had one picture of Aunt Lou. I used to cart it around with me and stand it on whatever bureau happened to be there, but when I escaped to Terremoto I left it behind: Arthur might have noticed it was missing. It was taken on a hot August day on the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition, outside the Colosseum Building, by one of those roving photographers who snap your picture and hand you a slip of paper with a number on it.

  "Is that your mother?" Arthur asked once when I was unpacking it.

  "No," I said, "that's my Aunt Lou."

  "Who's the other one? The fat one."

  For a moment I hesitated, on the verge of telling him the truth. "That's my other aunt," I said. "My Aunt Deirdre. Aunt Lou was wonderful, but Aunt Deirdre was a bitch."

  "Looks like she had thyroid problems," Arthur said.

  "She didn't, she just ate too much. She worked as a telephone operator," I said. "She liked that because she could sit down all day and she had a loud voice. She got promoted to one of those people who phone you up to find out why you haven't paid the bill." What lies I told him, and it wasn't just in self-defense: already I'd devised an entire spurious past for this shadow on a piece of paper, this woman of no discernible age who stood squinting at the camera, holding a cone of pink spun sugar, her face puffed and empty as a mongoloid idiot's: my own shucked-off body.

  "She looks a bit like you," he said.

  "A bit," I admitted. "I didn't like her. She was always trying to tell me how to run my life."

  It hurt me a little to betray myself like that. The picture was an opening and I should have taken it, it was still early enough for such risks. Instead I retreated behind the camouflage of myself as Arthur perceived me. I suppose I couldn't trust him with all that discarded misery, I didn't think he would be able to handle it. He wanted me to be inept and vulnerable, it's true, but only superficially. Underneath this was another myth: that I could permit myself to be inept and vulnerable only because I had a core of strength, a reservoir of support and warmth that could be drawn on when needed.

  Every myth is a version of the truth, and the warmth and support were there all right. I learned commiseration early, I gave dollar bills to the Salvation Army at Christmas and to legless men selling pencils on streetcorners, I was the sort children approach with lies about having lost their bus fare and I forked over every time. When I walked down Yonge Street I got hit by the Hare Krishna at each red light, it was like a parade, I don't know how they spotted me. I empathized with anything in pain: cats hit by cars, old women who fell on icy sidewalks and were mortified by their own weakness and displayed underpants, aldermen who wept on television when they lost an election. For this reason, as Arthur pointed out more than once, my politics were sloppy. I didn't like firing squads; I never felt that those toppled from power deserved what got done to them, no matter what they'd done in their turn. "Naive humanism," Arthur called it. He liked it fine when it was applied to him, though.

  What he didn't know was that behind my compassionate smile was a set of tightly clenched teeth, and behind that a legion of voices, crying, What about me? What about my own pain? When is it my turn? But I'd learned to stifle these voices, to be calm and receptive.

  I made it through high school on warmth and supportiveness. In the Braeside Banner, under the group pictures in which girls with dark mouths and penciled brows and pageboys or ponytails were arranged in front of boys with crew cuts or oily duck's asses, eyes front, feet crossed at the ankles, the epigram for me always said, "Our happy-go-lucky gal with the terrific personality!!!" or "A great pal!!!!" or "Joanie's a laugh a minute!!" or "A swell kid who never seems to get excited." For other girls they said things like, "She likes them tall!!" or "Oh, those Don Mills parties!!" or "Her main attraction is a certain Simpson's Rep!" or even, "Good things come in small packages." At home I was sullen or comatose, at the movies I wept with Aunt Lou, but at school I was doggedly friendly and outgoing, I chewed gum, smoked in the washroom, and painted my lips Precious Pink or Sultry Red, my tiny cupid's mouth lost in a sea of face. I was good at volleyball, though not at basketball, in which you had to run around a lot. I was elected to committees, usually as the secretary, and I joined the United Nations Club and was part of a delegation to the Model U.N., representing the Arabs. I made quite a good speech on the plight of the Palestinian refugees, as I recall. I helped with decorations for the dances, stringing endless limp wreaths of Kleenex flowers along the walls of the sweaty gymnasium, though of course I never attended. My marks were reasonable but not so high as to be offensive. More importantly, I played kindly aunt and wisewoman to a number of the pancake-madeup, cashmere-sweatered, pointy-breasted girls in the class. It was for this reason that the yearbook said such cozy things about me.

  There were two other fat girls in the school. One of these, Monica, was a year ahead of me. She had greasy hair, cut short and combed back, like a boy's, and she wore a black leather jacket with silver studs. At noon hour she hung out with some of the tougher, stupider boys in the parking lot, where they drank from mickeys hidden in glove compartments and exchanged dirty jokes. She was accepted by them, more or less, but as another boy. They didn't seem to think of her as a woman at all. Theresa, the other one, was in the same year as I was but a different class. She was pallid and reticent; she never said much and had few friends. She waddled along the halls by herself, shoulders stooped and books clasped to her chest to hide some of her frontal bulk, peering shyly and myopically at her own feet. She wore cream-colored rayon blouses with discreet embroidery on them, like the forty-five-year-old office secretary's. Yet it was she rather than brazen Monica who had the traditional fat-girl reputation, it was Theresa at whom boys would shout from the other side of the street, "Hey Theresa, hey fatty! Wanta go out behind the field house with me?" for the benefit of other, less forthright boys. Theresa
would turn her head away, blushing; no one knew whether or not the rumors were true, that she would "do it" under the right circumstances, but everyone believed them.

  As for me, I had a terrific personality and my friends were nice girls, the kind boys wanted to take out to dances and movies, where they would be seen in public and admired. No one shouted things at me on the street; no one who went to our school, at any rate. These girls liked to walk home with me, asking my advice and confiding in me, for two reasons: if a boy who was not wanted approached them, there I was, a fat duenna, the perfect excuse, it was like having your own private tank; and if a more desirable boy turned up, how could my friends help but look good beside me? In addition, I was very understanding, I always knew the right moment to say, "See you tomorrow," and vanish into the distance like a blimp in a steady wind, leaving the couple gazing at each other on the sidewalk in front of those trim Braeside houses, those clipped lawns. The girls would phone me up later, breathlessly, and say "Guess what happened," and I would say "Oh, what?" as though I were thrilled and delighted and could hardly wait to find out. I could be depended upon not to show envy, not to flirt competitively, and not to wonder why I wasn't invited to the mixed-couples parties of these, my dearest friends. Though immersed in flesh, I was regarded as being above its desires, which of course was not true.

  Everyone trusted me, no one was afraid of me, though they should have been. I knew everything about my friends, their hopes, their preferences, the brand of china and the style of wedding dress they had lined up for themselves already at the age of fifteen, the names of the unsuspecting boys on whom they wished to bestow these treasures, how they really felt about the boys they went out with, those drips and creeps, and about the other ones they would rather have gone out with, those living dolls. I knew what they thought about each other and what they said behind each other's backs. But they guessed nothing about me; I was a sponge, I drank it all in but gave nothing out, despite the temptation to tell everything, all my hatred and jealousy, to reveal myself as the duplicitous monster I knew myself to be. I could just barely stand it.