Lady Oracle

by Margaret Atwood

It was hard to put into words. "What I was like," I said. What I meant was: What I looked like.

  "What do you mean?" Leda said. "You were a perfectly nice young girl, as far as I could tell."

  "No, I mean ... my shape. I was, you know." I couldn't say "fat"; I used that word about myself only in my head.

  She saw what I meant, but it only amused her. "Is that all?" she said. "To my mind it's a perfectly proper shape. But don't worry, I won't give away your past, though I must say there are worse tragedies in life than being a little overweight. I expect you not to give mine away, either. Leda Sprott owes a little money here and there." She laughed wheezily, then started to cough. I went to get Arthur.

  Five minutes later he came out of the kitchen. As we left, Mrs. Symons teetered along the hall after us, down the steps and along the walk, throwing handfuls of rice and confetti at us and chirping gaily. "Good luck," she called, waving her pink-gloved hand.

  We walked to the bus stop, carrying the packages. Arthur didn't say anything; his jaw was grim.

  "What's the matter?" I asked. Had Leda told him about me after all?

  "The old fraud ripped me off for fifty bucks," he said. "On the phone she told me fifteen."

  When we got back to my rented room we opened the tissuepaper packages. They contained a plastic punch bowl with matching cups, a ninety-eight-cent book on health-food cookery, a framed print of Leda, shaking hands with Mackenzie King, and some government pamphlets about the health-giving properties and correct use of yeast. "She must make quite a profit," Arthur said.

  Surely we would have to go through it all over again at the City Hall, I thought; the ceremony with the footstool and the stuffed owl couldn't possibly be legal. "Do you think we're really married?" I asked.

  "I doubt it," Arthur said. But strangely enough we were.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  We went on our honeymoon four years later, in 1968. It was Arthur's Quebec separatist incarnation, so he insisted on going to Quebec City, where he confused all the waiters by trying to speak joual to them. Most of them found it insulting; the ones who really were separatists sneered at his pronunciation, it was too Parisian for them. We spent the first night watching the funeral of Robert Kennedy on the bunny-eared television set in the cheap motel where we were staying. It wouldn't work unless you held onto the bunny ears with one hand and put your other hand on the wall. I did the wall-touching, Arthur did the watching. By that time I was feeling truly married.

  It took me a while. At first our life was unsettled. We had no money except what I could earn by writing Costume Gothics and pretending to take odd jobs, and we lived in rooming houses instead of the tawdry apartments we later sought out. Sometimes there would be a kitchen alcove concealed by a bamboo curtain or a plastic accordion door, but more often there would be only a single-burner hot plate. I would cook dinners of vegetables in boilable plastic packages, or tins of ravioli, and we would eat them sitting on the edge of the bed and trying not to get any more tomato sauce on the sheets. After the meal I would scrape the plates into the rooming-house toilet and rinse them in the bathtub, as these rooms rarely had sinks. This meant that during baths, which we took together, with me soaping Arthur's back, his ribs sticking out like Death's in a medieval woodcut, we would often be surprised by the odd noodle or pea, floating in the soap scum like an escaped fragment of Sargasso Sea. I felt it added a welcome touch of the tropics to those otherwise polar bathrooms but Arthur didn't like it. Although he denied it, he had a thing about germs.

  I complained a lot about the inconvenience of this improvised suitcase life, and after two years of it, when Arthur was a teaching assistant in Political Science and had a salary of sorts, he broke down and we got a real apartment. It was in a slum - which has since become fashionably white-painted and coach-lamped - but at least it had a full kitchen in addition to the cockroaches. I then discovered to my dismay that Arthur expected me to cook, actually cook, out of raw ingredients such as flour and lard. I'd never cooked in my life. My mother had cooked, I had eaten, those were our roles; she wouldn't even let me in the kitchen when she was cooking, for fear I would break something, stick my germ-laden finger in a sauce, or tread too heavily, causing her cake to fall. I hadn't taken Home Economics in high school; I took Business Practices instead. I wouldn't have minded the cooking, though from the other girls' accounts it was mostly about nutrition; but I shrank from the thought of sewing. How could I possibly sit there, sewing a huge billowing tent for myself, while the others worked away at their trim tailored skirts and ruffled blouses?

  But for Arthur's sake I would try anything, though cooking wasn't as simple as I'd thought. I was always running out of staples such as butter or salt and making flying trips to the corner store, and there were never enough clean dishes, since I hated washing them; but Arthur didn't like eating in restaurants. He seemed to prefer my inedible food: the Swiss fondue which would turn to lymph and balls of chewing gum from too high a heat, the poached eggs which disintegrated like mucous membranes and the roast chickens which bled when cut; the bread that refused to rise, lying like quicksand in the bowl; the flaccid pancakes with centers of uncooked ooze; the rubbery pies. I seldom wept over these failures, as to me they were not failures but successes, they were secret triumphs over the notion of food itself. I wanted to prove that I didn't really care about it.

  Occasionally I neglected to produce any food at all because I had forgotten completely about it. I would wander into the kitchen at midnight to find Arthur making himself a peanut-butter sandwich and be overwhelmed with guilt at the implication that I'd been starving him. But though he criticized my cooking, he always ate it, and he resented its absence. The unpredictability kept him diverted; it was like mutations, or gambling. It reassured him, too. His view of the world featured swift disasters set against a background of lurking doom, and my cooking did nothing to contradict it. Whereas for me these mounds of dough, these lumps burning at the edges, this untransformed blood, represented something quite different. Each meal was a crisis, but a crisis out of which a comfortable resolution could be forced to emerge, by the addition of something ... a little pepper, some vanilla.... At heart I was an optimist, with a lust for happy endings.

  It took me a while to realize that Arthur enjoyed my defeats. They cheered him up. He loved hearing the crash as I dropped a red-hot platter on the floor, having forgotten to put on my oven mitt; he liked to hear me swearing in the kitchen; and when I would emerge sweaty-faced and disheveled after one of my battles, he would greet me with a smile and a little joke, or perhaps even a kiss, which was as much for the display, the energy I'd wasted, as for the food. My frustration and anger were real, but I wasn't that bad a cook. My failure was a performance and Arthur was the audience. His applause kept me going.

  That was all right with me. Being a bad cook was much easier than learning to be a good one, and the extra noise and flourishes didn't strain my powers of invention. My mistake was in thinking that these expectations of Arthur's were confined to cooking. It only looked that way at first, because as far as he could tell I attempted nothing else.

  It wasn't that Arthur was dishonest: what he thought and what he said he thought were the same. It was just that both of these things were different from what he felt. For years I wanted to turn into what Arthur thought I was, or what he thought I should be. He was full of plans for me, ambitions, ways in which I could exercise my intelligence constructively, and there I would be, lying lumpishly in bed in the mornings while he was up and making himself black coffee and pursuing one of his goals. That was what was wrong with me, he told me, I didn't have any goals. Unfortunately I was unable to think of this word except in connection with hockey, a game I didn't much enjoy.

  But Arthur wasn't always an early riser. He had his down moments too. After his disillusionment with the atom-bomb people he'd stayed out of politics for a while. But soon he was on the upswing. This time it was civil rights: he went down to the States and almost got shot. Bu
t then that came apart and he was into another period of depression. In quick succession he went through Vietnam and sheltering draft dodgers, student revolt, and an infatuation with Mao. Every one of these involved extensive reading, not just for Arthur but for me. I made a real effort, but somehow I was always out of date, perhaps because I found it so hard to read theories. By the time I'd adjusted my views to Arthur's, his had already changed. Then I would have to be converted anew, improved, made to see the light once more. "Here," he would say, "read this book," and I'd know the cycle had begun again.

  The trouble with Arthur was that he meant well, he meant too well, he wanted everyone to mean as well as he did. When he would find out they didn't, that not all of them burned with his own pure flame but some had pride, others were self-interested and power-hungry, he would become angry. He was a prisoner of conscience.

  Once I'd thought of Arthur as single-minded, single-hearted, single-bodied; I, by contrast, was a sorry assemblage of lies and alibis, each complete in itself but rendering the others worthless. But I soon discovered there were as many of Arthur as there were of me. The difference was that I was simultaneous, whereas Arthur was a sequence. At the height of his involvement with any of these causes, Arthur would have the electricity of six, he'd scarcely sleep at all, he'd rush about stapling things and making speeches and carrying signs. But at the low points he'd barely be able to make it out of bed, he'd sit in a chair all day, chain-smoking and looking out the window, watching television, or doing crosswords or jigsaw puzzles of Jackson Pollock paintings and Oriental rugs. It was only on the way up or the way down that I existed for him as any kind of distinct shape; otherwise I was just a kind of nourishing blob. We made love only during the middle periods. When he was way up he had no time, when he was way down he had no energy.

  I admired and envied his purity of conscience, despite its drawbacks: when Arthur was going down, overcome by disillusionment and clouds of doom, he'd write letters to all the people he'd worked with during the up period, denouncing them as traitors and scoundrels, and I was the one who would get the phone calls from them, outraged, puzzled or hurt. "Well, you know how Arthur is," I'd say to them. "He hasn't been feeling very well, he's been discouraged."

  I wished he would do his own explaining, but he specialized in ambushes. He never had fights with people, he never talked things out with them. He would simply decide, by some dark, complicated process of evaluation, that these people were unworthy. Not that they'd done something unworthy, but that unworthiness was innate in them. Once he'd made his judgment, that was it. No trial, no redress. I once told him that I thought he was behaving a little like Calvin's God, but he was offended and I didn't press it. Secretly I was afraid of this same kind of judgment being applied to me.

  I often hoped Arthur would find some group that would be able to sustain the overwhelming burden of his trust. It wasn't just that I wanted Arthur to be happy, though I did. I had two other reasons. One was that his depressions made me miserable, because they made me feel inadequate. The love of a good woman was supposed to preserve a man from this kind of thing, I knew that. But at these times I wasn't able to make him happy, no matter how badly I cooked. Therefore I was not a good woman.

  The other was that I couldn't write Costume Gothics when Arthur was depressed. He hung around the house much of the time, and when he wasn't doing anything he didn't want me to do anything either. If I went into the bedroom and closed the door, he would open it, stand in the doorway looking at me reproachfully, and say he had a headache. Or he would want me to help him with his crossword puzzle. It was very hard to concentrate on my heroine's tumultuous breasts, my hero's thin rapacious mouth, with this kind of thing going on. I would have to pretend I was going out to look for a job, and from time to time I would really get one, in self-defense.

  It was only after I got married that my writing became for me anything more than an easy way of earning a living. I'd always felt sly about it, as if I was getting away with something and nobody had found me out; but now it became important. The really important thing was not the books themselves, which continued to be much the same. It was the fact that I was two people at once, with two sets of identification papers, two bank accounts, two different groups of people who believed I existed. I was Joan Foster, there was no doubt about that; people called me by that name and I had authentic documents to prove it. But I was also Louisa K. Delacourt.

  As long as I could spend a certain amount of time each week as Louisa, I was all right, I was patient and forbearing, warm, a sympathetic listener. But if I was cut off, if I couldn't work at my current Costume Gothic, I would become mean and irritable, drink too much and start to cry.

  Thus we went on from year to year, with Arthur's frenzied cycles alternating with my own, and it was fine really, I loved him. Every once in a while I'd suggest that perhaps it was time for us to settle down somewhere, a little more permanently, and have children. But Arthur wasn't ready, he would say, he had work to do, and I had to admit that I myself had mixed feelings. I wanted children, but what if I had a child who would turn out like me? Even worse, what if I turned out to be like my mother?

  All this time I carried my mother around my neck like a rotting albatross. I dreamed about her often, my three-headed mother, menacing and cold. Sometimes she would be sitting in front of her vanity table, sometimes she would be crying. She never laughed or smiled.

  In the worst dream I couldn't see her at all. I would be hiding behind a door, or standing in front of one, it wasn't clear which. It was a white door, like a bathroom door or perhaps a cupboard. I'd been locked in, or out, but on the other side of the door I could hear voices. Sometimes there were a lot of voices, sometimes only two; they were talking about me, discussing me, and as I listened I would realize that something very bad was going to happen. I felt helpless, there was nothing I could do. In the dream I would back into the farthest corner of the cubicle and wedge myself in, press my arms against the walls, dig my heels against the floor. They wouldn't be able to get me out. Then I would hear the footsteps, coming up the stairs and along the hall.

  Arthur would shake me awake. "What's the matter?" I would say.

  "You were grunting."

  Grunting? Humiliation. Screaming would be one thing, but grunting.... "I was having a nightmare," I'd say. But Arthur couldn't understand why I would have nightmares. Surely nothing that terrible had ever happened to me, I was a normal girl with all kinds of advantages, I was beautiful and intelligent, why didn't I make something of myself? I should try to be more of a leader, he would tell me.

  What he failed to understand was that there were really only two kinds of people: fat ones and thin ones. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn't see what Arthur saw. The outline of my former body still surrounded me, like a mist, like a phantom moon, like the image of Dumbo the Flying Elephant superimposed on my own. I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  When I stopped to think about it, I felt our marriage was happier than most. I even became a little smug about it. In my opinion, most women made one basic mistake: they expected their husbands to understand them. They spent much precious time explaining themselves, serving up their emotions and reactions, their love and anger and sensitivities, their demands and inadequacies, as if the mere relating of these things would get results. Arthur's friends tended to be married to women like this, and these women, I knew, thought of me as placid, sloppy and rather stupid. They themselves made it from crisis to crisis, with running commentaries, on a combination of nerve ends, cigarettes, bludgeoning honesty and what used to be called nagging. Because I didn't do this, Arthur's friends envied him a bit and confided to me in the kitchen. They were beleaguered and exhausted; their wives had a touch of the shrill self-righteousness familiar to me from my mother.

  But I didn't want Arthur to understand me: I went to great lengths to prevent this. Though I was t
empted sometimes, I resisted the impulse to confess. Arthur's tastes were Spartan, and my early life and innermost self would have appalled him. It would be like asking for a steak and getting a slaughtered cow. I think he suspected this; he certainly headed off my few tentative attempts at self-revelation.

  The other wives, too, wanted their husbands to live up to their own fantasy lives, which except for the costumes weren't that different from my own. They didn't put it in quite these terms, but I could tell from their expectations. They wanted their men to be strong, lustful, passionate and exciting, with hard rapacious mouths, but also tender and worshipful. They wanted men in mysterious cloaks who would rescue them from balconies, but they also wanted meaningful in-depth relationships and total openness. (The Scarlet Pimpernel, I would tell them silently, does not have time for meaningful in-depth relationships.) They wanted multiple orgasms, they wanted the earth to move, but they also wanted help with the dishes.

  I felt my own arrangement was more satisfactory. There were two kinds of love, I told myself; Arthur was terrific for one kind, but why demand all things of one man? I'd given up expecting him to be a cloaked, sinuous and faintly menacing stranger. He couldn't be that: I lived with him, and cloaked strangers didn't leave their socks on the floor or stick their fingers in their ears or gargle in the mornings to kill germs. I kept Arthur in our apartment and the strangers in their castles and mansions, where they belonged. I felt this was quite adult of me, and it certainly allowed me to be more outwardly serene than the wives of Arthur's friends. But I had the edge on them: after all, when it came to fantasy lives I was a professional, whereas they were merely amateurs.

  And yet, as time went by, I began to feel something was missing. Perhaps, I thought, I had no soul; I just drifted around, singing vaguely, like the Little Mermaid in the Andersen fairy tale. In order to get a soul you had to suffer, you had to give something up; or was that to get legs and feet? I couldn't remember. She'd become a dancer, though, with no tongue. Then there was Moira Shearer, in The Red Shoes. Neither of them had been able to please the handsome prince; both of them had died. I was doing fairly well by comparison. Their mistake had been to go public, whereas I did my dancing behind closed doors. It was safer, but....