Lady Oracle

by Margaret Atwood

  The next thing I knew my hair was on fire: I'd leaned imperceptibly towards the candle. At that time I had bangs, and they'd started to sputter and frizzle. I slapped my hand over my forehead and ran to the bathroom; my front hair was badly singed, and I had to cut it off, which caused a scene with my mother the next day, as she'd just contributed five dollars towards a hairdo. I decided I'd better leave the Automatic Writing alone.

  There was something on the notepad, though: a single long red line that twisted and turned back on itself, like a worm or a snarl of wool. I couldn't remember drawing it; but if that was all the Other Side had to tell me, why should I go to the trouble?

  For a while I embroidered Leda Sprott's advice into a classroom daydream (I could do it if I wanted to; humble beginnings in unknown chapel; miraculous revelations; fame spreads; auditoriums packed; thousands helped; whispered comments, awe and admiration - "She may be a large woman, but what powers!"). After several months, however, it gradually faded away, leaving nothing but Mr. Stewart's sermon, indelibly engraved on my brain, to surface at inopportune moments: the pessimistic caterpillar and the optimistic caterpillar, inching their way along the Road of Life, involved in their endless dialogue. Most of the time I was on the side of the optimistic caterpillar; but in my gloomiest moments I would think, So what if you turn into a butterfly? Butterflies die too.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The next job I got, after the Bite-A-Bit Restaurant, was at the Sportsmen's Show. This took place in March every year, down on the grounds of the Exhibition, in the Colosseum Building. It was like an auto show or a fall fair; speedboat, fiberglass canoe, and kayak peddlers all had booths, and fishing-rod and rifle companies did too. The Boy Scouts put on demonstrations of tent-pitching and fire-lighting, teams of them in their green uniforms grinding away at fire drills, with their pink bare knees sticking out of their short pants. Beside their platform the Ministry of Lands and Forests had a poster on forest-fire prevention. At stated times there were Indian dances, given by a group of bitter Indians in costumes that were too new to look real. I knew they were bitter because they ate hot dogs at the same hot-dog stand I did, and I overheard some of the things they said. One of them called me "Fatso."

  There was a grandstand show too, with logrolling contests and fly-casting competitions, and a Miss Outdoors pageant, and a seal named Sharky who could play "God Save the Queen" by tooting on a set of blowpipes.

  I liked it better than any job I'd ever had. It was untidy and a little tawdry, and I could walk through the crowd without feeling too out of place. For all they knew I was an expert fly-caster or a female logroller. I worked after school and all day Saturday and Sunday. On my dinner break I would eat five or six hot dogs and drink a few Honey Dews, then wander around, stopping to watch the ladies' outdoor fashion show, the latest in parkas and kapok life jackets, which Miss Outdoors would head off with a demonstration of her plug-casting technique; or perhaps I would go to one of the grandstand archways and look in while someone shot a balloon with an arrow, balancing on the gunwale of a canoe, or a man pushed another man off a spinning log into a plastic swimming pool.

  My own job was fairly simple. I stood at the back of the archery range, wearing a red leather change apron, and rented out the arrows. When the barrels of arrows were almost used up, I'd go down to the straw targets, leaving the customers standing back of the rope barrier: a few children, some sports-minded younger men and their wives or girl friends, quite a few boys in black leather jackets who otherwise hung out around the shooting gallery. I'd pull the arrows out, drop them into the barrels, and start over again.

  There were two other employees. Rob gave the spiel; he had experience as a huckster and carneyman, he worked the Ex in the summers - rides, cotton-candy stands, win-a-Kewpie-doll games. He stood with a foot on either edge of a barrel and called, "THREE for a dime, nine for a quarter, step right up and show your skill, break the balloon and you get one free, would the little lady like to try?" Bert, a shy first-year university student with glasses and crew-neck sweaters, helped me pass out the arrows and rake in the quarters.

  The difficulty was that we couldn't make sure all the arrows had actually been shot before we went to clear the targets. Rob would shout, "Bows DOWN please, arrows OFF the string," but occasionally someone would let an arrow go, on purpose or by accident. This was how I got shot. We'd pulled the arrows and the men were carrying the barrels back to the line; I was replacing a target face, and I'd just bent over to stick in the last target pin when I felt something hit me in the left buttock. There was a sound from behind, a sort of screaming laugh, and Rob yelled "Who did that?" before I had time to feel any pain. The fellow said he didn't mean to, which I didn't believe. The sight of my moonlike rump had probably been too much for him.

  I had to go to the first-aid station to have the arrow taken out, and hitch up my skirt while the wound was plugged up and dressed. Luckily it was only a target arrow and it hadn't gone in very far. "Just a flesh wound," the nurse said. Rob wanted me to go home but I insisted on staying till closing time. Afterward he drove me back himself, in his ancient Volkswagen. He was very sweet. Although he was cynical about almost everything else, he was sympathetic to anyone who had been injured due to this kind of occupational hazard. He himself had nearly been killed once by a Mighty Mouse car that went off the track. When we stopped at a red light, he took his right hand off the wheel and patted me on the knee with it. "Too bad you can't piss standing up," he joked. That was my third sexual experience.

  When I came in through the front door, my father's voice called to me from the living room, which was unusual. By that time my parents were letting me come and go as I pleased. They were sitting in their usual places. My father looked careworn and drained, my mother furious.

  "We have some bad news for you, Joan," my father said gently.

  "Your Aunt Lou died," said my mother. "Of a heart attack. I always knew she would." When it came to disasters, my mother's prophecies were discouragingly accurate.

  At first I didn't believe it. My impulse was to sit down, which I did, heavily. I yelped with pain.

  "What on earth," said my mother.

  "Someone shot me with an arrow," I said. "In the behind."

  My mother looked at me as if I was out of my mind. "Isn't that just like you," she said, as if it was my fault. "She left you some money," she continued belligerently. "It's the most idiotic thing I ever heard of. It's a total and complete waste of time, if you ask me."

  My mother, never one to beat around the bush, had gone over to Aunt Lou's apartment as soon as she'd heard the news from the apartment building superintendent, who had found poor Aunt Lou on the bathroom floor in her kimono. She'd slipped on the bath mat, either before or after the attack. The real will was with Aunt Lou's lawyer, but my mother had found a copy among Aunt Lou's papers. "A mess," she said. "The whole apartment's a mess. You'll have to come over and help me with it." For we were Aunt Lou's only relatives.

  Aunt Lou had indeed left me some money. Two thousand dollars, in fact, which was a lot at that time, for someone of my age. But there was a condition: I could have it only if I reduced, and Aunt Lou had even picked the proper weight. I had to lose a hundred pounds.

  This was what had made my mother so angry. She didn't think me capable of it. In her eyes, the money might as well have been thrown away. The only other person who got any was Aunt Lou's husband, the gambler, provided he could be found.

  I spent the night mourning Aunt Lou, fitfully and noisily, though my tears were not yet completely felt, as I didn't yet believe she was dead. The finality of her disappearance didn't get through to me till the following morning, when, light-headed from lack of sleep, I limped after my mother into the now-empty apartment. It was much as I had last seen it, but without Aunt Lou's assurance and vitality it looked unkempt, grubby, shabby even. Aunt Lou always made you feel as though she had intended, even planned the disorder. Now it seemed like mere carelessness; or worse, as though s
omeone had gone through it, searching for something that could not be found and throwing clothes and objects about with no regard for their owner. It was clear Aunt Lou hadn't expected to die or she would have been tidier. And yet she had expected it, or she wouldn't have left her curious will.

  Now in her apartment I felt like an intruder, as though we'd broken into her privacy without asking or were observing an intimate scene through a knothole in the wall. But it got worse. My mother started rifling her closets, pulling the clothes off the hangers, folding them and ramming them into a large brown Crippled Civilians donation bag she had brought, making remarks about them as she did so. "Look at that, will you," she said of Aunt Lou's best gold-sequined evening dress. "Cheap." I saw Aunt Lou disappearing, piece by piece, into the brown paper bag which was swallowing her endlessly, her breezy clothes, her gay scarves and follies, her jokes about herself which my mother took seriously (that magenta blouse, for instance), and I couldn't stand it. I managed to save the fox, stuffing it surreptitiously into my purse while my mother's back was turned. Then I went into the kitchen, to commune with Aunt Lou one last time, via her refrigerator. My mother didn't comment, or complain that I wasn't helping her; I knew in some obscure way that I hadn't been brought along to help in any case, I'd been brought as a devious form of punishment for having loved Aunt Lou while she was alive.

  I found a can of lobster in the cupboard and made myself a sandwich. Aunt Lou's purse was there, and I opened it. I felt like a spy, but I knew my mother would open it later and junk the contents. I took out Aunt Lou's wallet, her compact and one of her handkerchiefs with lace edging, which still had her characteristic smell, and put them in my own purse. It was not stealing, it was rescuing. I wanted to keep as much of her in existence as I could, for my mother was determined on obliteration.

  My mother had been in a slump lately, but Aunt Lou's death perked her up again; it gave her something to supervise. She made all the funeral arrangements, efficiently and with a certain grim relish. She sent out notices and replied to cards and telephone calls (from Aunt Lou's office, all of them) and placed an announcement in the paper. My father wasn't up to it. He took several days off from the hospital and wandered about the house in his maroon leather slippers, getting in my mother's way as she bustled about and saying, "Poor Lou," over and over, like some melancholy bird. The only other things he said to me were, "She practically brought me up," and, "She knit me a pair of socks during the war. They didn't fit." He had been fonder of her and closer to her than I had guessed, yet I couldn't help wondering how someone brought up by Aunt Lou could have turned out to be as inexpressive as my father. She used to say, "Still waters run deep," and, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." Perhaps that explained it. She didn't leave him any money, though; he didn't need it and the gambler did, that would have been her reason.

  Aunt Lou was put on display at O'Dacre's Funeral Home, surrounded by baskets of white chrysanthemums (ordered by my mother) and visited by equally middle-aged girls from the sanitary napkin company, who sniffed audibly, squeezed my mother's hand, and said what a wonderful personality she had. I disgraced myself at the funeral by crying too much and too loudly.

  Robert the accountant was there, his eyes red and shrunken. After the service he pressed my hand. "She'll be in touch," he said. "We can count on her." But I couldn't believe it.

  When we got back to the house my mother said, "Well, that's over with." The next thing I remembered was looking up at the ceiling of the living room. I'd fainted, knocking over an end table (scratched), a Swedish Modern lamp (broken), and a copper-enameled ashtray (undamaged).

  It turned out that I had blood poisoning, from the arrow wound. The nurse at the first-aid station hadn't put enough disinfectant on it. The doctor said I must have been running a fever for days. It's true I'd been dizzy, my ears had been singing and objects had been shrinking and swelling around me, but I had attributed this to grief. I was put to bed and injected with penicillin. The doctor said it was a good thing I was so fat ("fleshy," he said); he seemed to hold a kind of blotter theory about fat and germs. My mother brought me chicken bouillon cubes dissolved in hot water.

  I developed a raging fever, with delirium. One of the results of this was the notion that I'd been hit with the arrow at precisely the moment Aunt Lou died and that the shot had been guided by her departing spirit. She'd been letting me know, saying goodbye, in a rather eccentric manner, true - and she wouldn't have wanted me to get blood poisoning - but this was characteristic of her. I never quite got rid of this idea, although I knew it was farfetched. At the time it bothered me a lot; indeed it filled me with remorse, for I hadn't recognized this message from the dead, a cry for help perhaps. I should have dropped everything and rushed off to her apartment, not stopping even to remove the arrow. I might have been in time. I seemed to hear her voice, from a great distance, saying, "Most said soonest mended," and, "For want of a nail the man was lost," though I knew that both of these were wrong.

  In my lucid moments, and when I was convalescing, I thought about her other message to me, the one in her will. How was I to interpret it? Did it mean she hadn't really accepted me for what I was, as I thought she had - that she too found me grotesque, that for her also I would not do? Or was it just pragmatism on her part, her realization that I would have an easier life if I were thinner? She'd offered me the money to get away, to escape from my mother, as she knew I wished to do; but on terms that would force me to capitulate, or so it seemed.

  One day, while I was sitting up in bed, leafing through one of my father's detective novels, I happened to glance down at my body. I'd thrown the bedcovers off, as it was warm, and my nightgown had ridden up. I didn't usually look at my body, in a mirror or in any other way; I snuck glances at parts of it now and then, but the whole thing was too overwhelming. There, staring me in the face, was my thigh. It was enormous, it was gross, it was like a diseased limb, the kind you see in pictures of jungle natives; it spread on forever, like a prairie photographed from a plane, the flesh not green but bluish-white, with veins meandering across it like rivers. It was the size of three ordinary thighs. I thought, That is really my thigh. It really is, and then I thought, This can't possibly go on.

  When I was up and around again I told my mother I was going to reduce. She didn't believe me, but I went downtown to Richmond Street and weighed in, as the will stipulated, with Aunt Lou's lawyer, a Mr. Morrisey, who kept saying, "She was a character, your aunt." I'd already lost some weight during my illness, and I had only seventy pounds to go.

  I had somehow expected that once I'd made my decision I would simply deflate, like an air mattress. I wanted it to happen suddenly and with little effort on my part, and I was annoyed when it didn't. I started taking my mother's miraculous remedies, all at once: a couple of fat pills in the morning, a dose of laxatives, half a box of Ayds, a little RyKrisp and black coffee, a waddle around the block for exercise. Of course I developed some spectacular side effects: blinding headaches, stomach cramps, accelerated heartbeat from the fat pills, and an alarming clarity of vision. The world, which I'd seen for so long as a blur, with the huge but ill-defined figure of my mother blocking the foreground, came sharply into focus. Sunshine and brilliant colors hurt my eyes. I suffered from fits of weakness and from alarming, compulsive relapses during which I would eat steadily, in a kind of trance, anything and everything in sight - I recall with horror consuming nine orders of fried chicken in a row - until my shrunken and abused stomach would protest and I would throw up.

  I'd lost some time at school through sickness, and I couldn't catch up; it was too difficult to concentrate. I spent the mornings resisting the thought of lunch hour and the afternoons regretting it. I became listless and crabby; I snapped at my friends, I told them I didn't want to hear any more about their stupid boyfriends, I turned down requests to help with the decorations for the Senior Formal, which was to be called "April Antics." I was fed up with Kleenex flowers. My marks
plummeted; my skin sagged into the loose folds of the chronically ill or aged, it flopped around me like a baggy sweat suit. Around May I was put through a surreal interview with the Guidance Counselor, during which I, bug-headed on diet speed, my mind zapping around like a mechanical mouse, stared walleyed at this non-credible bright-gray man while he said, "We know you have the ability, Joan. Is there something bothering you at home?" "My Aunt died," I said, and then began to giggle so hard I choked. The rest of the interview consisted of him whacking me on the back. I think he called my mother on the telephone.

  At home I spent hours in front of the mirror, watching as my eyebrows, then my mouth, began to spread across my face. I was dwindling. The sight of a fat person on the street, which used to inspire fellow feeling, I now found revolting. The wide expanse of flesh that had extended like a sand dune from my chin to my ankles began to recede, my breasts and hips rising from it like islands. Strange men, whose gaze had previously slid over and around me as though I wasn't there, began to look at me from truck-cab windows and construction sites; a speculative look, like a dog eyeing a fire hydrant.

  As for my mother, at first she was gratified, though she phrased it in her own way: "Well, it's about time, but it's probably too late." As I persevered, she said things like, "You're ruining your health," and, "Why do you have to go to extremes with everything?" and even, "You should eat something more than that, you'll starve to death." She went on baking sprees and left pies and cookies around the kitchen where they would tempt me, and it struck me that in a lesser way she had always done this. While I grew thinner, she herself became distraught and uncertain. She was drinking quite heavily now and she began to forget where she had put things, whether or not her dresses had been sent to the cleaners, what she had said or not said. At times she would almost plead with me to stop taking the pills, to take better care of myself; then she would have spasms of rage, a disheveled piecemeal rage unlike her former purposeful fury. "You are the limit," she would say with contempt. "Get out of here, the sight of you makes me sick."