Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

by Margaret Atwood

  There’s a lot of sportswear in the room, much beige among the men, many plaid shirts, vests with multiple pockets. She notes the nametags: a Fred, a Dan, a Rick, a Norm, a Bob. Another Bob, then another: there are a lot of Bobs on this trip. Several appear to be flying solo. Bob: a name once of heavy significance to her, though surely she’s rid herself of that load of luggage by now. She selects one of the thinner but still substantial Bobs, glides close to him, raises her eyelids, and lowers them again. He peers down at her chest.

  “Verna,” he says. “That’s a lovely name.”

  “Old-fashioned,” she says. “From the Latin word for ‘spring.’ When everything springs to life again.” That line, so filled with promises of phallic renewal, had been effective in helping to secure her second husband. To her third husband she’d said that her mother had been influenced by the eighteenth-century Scottish poet James Thomson and his vernal breezes, which was a preposterous but enjoyable lie: she had, in fact, been named after a lumpy, bun-faced dead aunt. As for her mother, she’d been a strict Presbyterian with a mouth like a vise grip, who despised poetry and was unlikely to have been influenced by anything softer than a granite wall.

  During the preliminary stages of netting her fourth husband, whom she’d flagged as a kink addict, Verna had gone even further. She’d told him she’d been named for “The Rite of Spring,” a highly sexual ballet that ended with torture and human sacrifice. He’d laughed, but he’d also wriggled: a sure sign of the hook going in.

  Now she says, “And you’re … Bob.” It’s taken her years to perfect the small breathy intake, a certified knee-melter.

  “Yes,” Bob says. “Bob Goreham,” he adds, with a diffidence he surely intends to be charming. Verna smiles widely to disguise her shock. She finds herself flushing with a combination of rage and an almost reckless mirth. She looks him full in the face: yes, underneath the thinning hair and the wrinkles and the obviously whitened and possibly implanted teeth, it’s the same Bob – the Bob of fifty-odd years before. Mr. Heartthrob, Mr. Senior Football Star, Mr. Astounding Catch, from the rich, Cadillac-driving end of town where the mining-company big shots lived. Mr. Shit, with his looming bully’s posture and his lopsided joker’s smile.

  How amazing to everyone, back then – not only everyone in school but everyone, for in that armpit of a town they’d known to a millimetre who drank and who didn’t and who was no better than she should be and how much change you kept in your back pocket – how amazing that golden-boy Bob had singled out insignificant Verna for the Snow Queen’s Palace winter formal. Pretty Verna, three years younger, studious, grade-skipping, innocent Verna, tolerated but not included, clawing her way towards a scholarship, as her ticket out of town. Gullible Verna, who’d believed she was in love.

  Or who was in love. When it came to love, wasn’t believing the same as the real thing? Such beliefs drain your strength and cloud your vision. She’s never allowed herself to be skewered in that tiger trap again.

  What had they danced to that night? “Rock Around the Clock.” “Hearts Made of Stone.” “The Great Pretender.” Bob had steered Verna around the edges of the gym, holding her squashed up against his carnation buttonhole, for the unskilled, awkward Verna of those days had never been to a dance before and was no match for Bob’s strenuous and flamboyant moves. For meek Verna, life was church and studies and household chores and her weekend job clerking in the drugstore, with her grim-faced mother regulating every move. No dates; those wouldn’t have been allowed, not that she’d been asked on any. But her mother had permitted her to go to the well-supervised high-school dance with Bob Goreham, for wasn’t he a shining light from a respectable family? She’d even allowed herself a touch of smug gloating, silent though it had been. Holding her head up after the decampment of Verna’s father had been a full-time job, and had given her a very stiff neck. From this distance Verna could understand it.

  So out the door went Verna, starry-eyed with hero worship, wobbling on her first high heels. She was courteously inserted into Bob’s shiny red convertible with the treacherous mickey of rye already lurking in the glove compartment, where she sat bolt upright, almost catatonic with shyness, smelling of Prell shampoo and Jergens lotion, wrapped in her mother’s mothbally out-of-date rabbit stole and an ice-blue tulle-skirted dress that looked as cheap as it was.

  Cheap. Cheap and disposable. Use and toss. That was what Bob had thought about her, from the very first.

  Now Bob grins a little. He looks pleased with himself: maybe he thinks Verna is blushing with desire. But he doesn’t recognize her! He really doesn’t! How many fucking Vernas can he have met in his life?

  Get a grip, she tells herself. She’s not invulnerable after all, it appears. She’s shaking with anger, or is it mortification? To cover herself she takes a gulp of her wine, and immediately chokes on it. Bob springs into action, giving her a few brisk but caressing thumps on the back.

  “Excuse me,” she manages to gasp. The crisp, cold scent of carnations envelops her. She needs to get away from him; all of a sudden she feels quite sick. She hurries to the ladies’ room, which is fortunately empty, and throws up her white wine and her cream-cheese-and-olive canapé into a cubicle toilet. She wonders if it’s too late to cancel the trip. But why should she run from Bob again?

  Back then she’d had no choice. By the end of that week, the story was all over town. Bob had spread it himself, in a farcical version that was very different from what Verna herself remembered. Slutty, drunken, willing Verna, what a joke. She’d been followed home from school by groups of leering boys, hooting and calling out to her. Easy out! Can I have a ride? Candy’s dandy but liquor’s quicker! Those were some of the milder slogans. She’d been shunned by girls, fearful that the disgrace – the ludicrous, hilarious smuttiness of it all – would rub off on them.

  Then there was her mother. It hadn’t taken long for the scandal to hit church circles. What little her mother had to say through her clamp of a mouth was to the point: Verna had made her own bed, and now she would have to lie in it. No, she could not wallow in self-pity – she would just have to face the music, not that she would ever live it down, because one false step and you fell, that’s how life was. When it was evident that the worst had happened, she bought Verna a bus ticket and shipped her off to a church-run Home for Unwed Mothers on the outskirts of Toronto.

  There Verna spent the days peeling potatoes and scrubbing floors and scouring toilets along with her fellow-delinquents. They wore grey maternity dresses and grey wool stockings and clunky brown shoes, all paid for by generous donations, they were informed. In addition to their scouring and peeling chores, they were treated to bouts of prayer and self-righteous hectoring. What had happened to them was justly deserved, the speeches went, because of their depraved behaviour, but it was never too late to redeem themselves through hard work and self-restraint. They were cautioned against alcohol, tobacco, and gum-chewing, and were told that they should consider it a miracle of God if any decent man ever wanted to marry them.

  Verna’s labour was long and difficult. The baby was taken away from her immediately so that she would not get attached to it. There was an infection, with complications and scarring, but it was all for the best, she overheard one brisk nurse telling another, because those sorts of girls made unfit mothers anyway. Once she could walk, Verna was given five dollars and a bus ticket and instructed to return to the guardianship of her mother, because she was still a minor.

  But she could not face that – that or the town in general – so she headed for downtown Toronto. What was she thinking? No actual thoughts, only feelings: mournfulness, woe, and, finally, a spark of defiant anger. If she was as trashy and worthless as everyone seemed to think, she might as well act that way, and, in between rounds of waitressing and hotel-room cleaning, she did.

  It was only by great good luck that she stumbled upon an older married man who took an interest in her. She traded three years of noontime sex with him for the price of h
er education. A fair exchange, to her mind – she bore him no ill will. She learned a lot from him, how to walk in high heels being the least of it – and pulled herself up and out. Little by little she jettisoned the crushed image of Bob that she still carried like a dried flower – incredibly! – next to her heart.

  She pats her face back into place and repairs her mascara, which has bled down her cheeks despite its waterproof claims. Courage, she tells herself. She will not be chased away, not this time. She’ll tough it out; she’s more than a match for five Bobs now. And she has the advantage, because Bob doesn’t have a clue who she is. Does she really look that different? Yes, she does. She looks better. There’s her silver-blond hair, and the various alterations, of course. But the real difference is in the attitude – the confident way she carries herself. It would be hard for Bob to see through that façade to the shy, mousy-haired, snivelling idiot she’d been at fourteen.

  After adding a last film of powder, she rejoins the group and lines up at the buffet for roast beef and salmon. She won’t eat much of it, but then she never does, not in public: a piggy, gobbling woman is not a creature of mysterious allure. She refrains from scanning the crowd to pinpoint Bob’s position – he might wave to her, and she needs time to think – and selects a table at the far end of the room. But, presto, Bob is sliding in beside her without so much as a may-I-join-you. He assumes he’s already pissed on this fire hydrant, she thinks. Spray-painted this wall. Cut the head off this trophy and got his picture taken with his foot on the body. As he did once before, not that he realizes it. She smiles.

  He’s solicitous. Is Verna all right? Oh, yes, she replies. It’s just that something went down the wrong way. Bob launches straight into the preliminaries. What does Verna do? Retired, she says, though she had a rewarding career as a physiotherapist, specializing in the rehabilitation of heart and stroke victims. “That must have been interesting,” Bob says. Oh, yes, Verna says. So fulfilling to help people.

  It had been more than interesting. Wealthy men recovering from life-threatening episodes had recognized the worth of an attractive younger woman with deft hands, an encouraging manner, and an intuitive knowledge of when to say nothing. Or, as her third husband put it in his Keatsian mode, heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. There was something about the intimacy of the relationship – so physical – that led to other intimacies, though Verna had always stopped short of sex: it was a religious thing, she’d said. If no marriage proposal was forthcoming, she would extricate herself, citing her duty to patients who needed her more. That had forced the issue twice.

  She’d chosen her acceptances with an eye to the medical condition involved, and once married she’d done her best to provide value for money. Each husband had departed not only happy but grateful, if a little sooner than might have been expected. But each had died of natural causes – a lethal recurrence of the heart attack or stroke that had hit him in the first place. All she’d done was give them tacit permission to satisfy every forbidden desire: to eat artery-clogging foods, to drink as much as they liked, to return to their golf games too soon. She’d refrained from commenting on the fact that, strictly speaking, they were being too zealously medicated. She’d wondered about the dosages, she’d say later, but who was she to set her own opinion up against a doctor’s?

  And if a man happened to forget that he’d already taken his pills for that evening and found them neatly laid out in their usual place and took them again, wasn’t that to be expected? Blood thinners could be so hazardous, in excess. You could bleed into your own brain.

  Then there was sex: the terminator, the coup de grace. Verna herself had no interest in sex as such, but she knew what was likely to work. “You only live once,” she’d been in the habit of saying, lifting a champagne glass during a candlelit supper and then setting out the Viagra, a revolutionary breakthrough but so troubling to the blood pressure. It was essential to call the paramedics in promptly, though not too promptly. “He was like this when I woke up” was an acceptable thing to say. So was “I heard a strange sound in the bathroom, and then when I went to look …”

  She has no regrets. She did those men a favour: surely better a swift exit than a lingering decline.

  With two of the husbands, there’d been difficulties with the grown-up children over the will. Verna had graciously said that she understood how they must feel, then she’d paid them off, more than was strictly fair considering the effort she’d put in. Her sense of justice has remained Presbyterian: she doesn’t want much more than her due, but she doesn’t want much less, either. She likes balanced accounts.

  Bob leans in towards her, sliding his arm along the back of her chair. Is her husband along for the cruise? he asks, closer to her ear than he should be, breathing in. No, she says, she is recently widowed – here she looks down at the table, hoping to convey muted grief – and this is a sort of healing voyage. Bob says he’s very sorry to hear it, but what a coincidence, for his own wife passed away just six months ago. It had been a blow – they’d been really looking forward to the golden years together. She’d been his college sweetheart – it was love at first sight. Does Verna believe in love at first sight? Yes, Verna says, she does.

  Bob confides further: they’d waited until after his law degree to get married and then they’d had three kids, and now there are five grandkids – he’s so proud of them all. If he shows me any baby pictures, Verna thinks, I’ll hit him.

  “It does leave an empty space, doesn’t it?” Bob says. “A sort of blank.” Verna admits that it does. Would Verna care to join Bob in a bottle of wine?

  You crap artist, Verna thinks. So you went on to get married and have children and a normal life, just as if nothing ever happened. Whereas for me … She feels queasy.

  “I’d love to,” she says. “But let’s wait until we’re on the ship. That would be more leisurely.” She gives him the eyelids again. “Now I’m off to my beauty sleep.” She smiles, wafts upward.

  “Oh, surely you don’t need that,” Bob says gallantly. The asshole actually pulls out her chair for her. He hadn’t shown such fine manners back then. Nasty, brutish, and short, as her third husband had said, quoting Hobbes on the subject of natural man. Nowadays a girl would know to call the police. Nowadays Bob would go to jail no matter what lies he might tell, because Verna was underage. But there had been no true words for the act then: rape was what occurred when some maniac jumped on you out of a bush, not when your formal-dance date drove you to a side road in the mangy twice-cut forest surrounding a tin-pot mining town and told you to drink up like a good girl and then took you apart, layer by torn layer. To make it worse, Bob’s best friend, Ken, had turned up in his own car to help out. The two of them had been laughing. They’d kept her panty girdle as a souvenir.

  Afterwards, Bob had pushed her out of the car halfway back, surly because she was crying. “Shut up or walk home,” he’d said. She has a picture of herself limping along the icy roadside with her bare feet stuck in her dyed-to-match ice-blue heels, dizzy and raw and shivering and – a further ridiculous humiliation – hiccupping. What had concerned her most at that moment was her nylons – where were her nylons? She’d bought them with her own drugstore money. She must have been in shock.

  Did she remember correctly? Had Bob stuck her panty girdle upside down on his head and danced about in the snow with the garter tabs flopping around like jester’s bells?

  Panty girdle, she thinks. How prehistoric. It, and all the long-gone archeology that went with it. Now a girl would be on the pill or have an abortion without a backward glance. How Paleolithic to still feel wounded by any of it.

  It was Ken – not Bob – who’d come back for her, told her brusquely to get in, driven her home. He, at least, had had the grace to be shamefaced. “Don’t say anything,” he’d muttered. And she hadn’t, but her silence had done her no good.

  Why should she be the only one to have suffered for that night? She’d been stupid, granted, but Bob
had been vicious. And he’d gone scot-free, without consequences or remorse, whereas her entire life had been distorted. The Verna of the day before had died, and a different Verna had solidified in her place: stunted, twisted, mangled. It was Bob who’d taught her that only the strong can win, that weakness should be mercilessly exploited. It was Bob who’d turned her into – why not say the word? – a murderer.

  The next morning, during the chartered flight north to where the ship is floating on the Beaufort Sea, she considers her choices. She could play Bob like a fish right up to the final moment, then leave him cold with his pants around his ankles: a satisfaction, but a minor one. She could avoid him throughout the trip and leave the equation where it’s been for the past fifty-some years: unresolved. Or she could kill him. She contemplates this third option with theoretical calm. Just say, for instance, if she were to murder Bob, how might she do it during the cruise without getting caught? Her meds-and-sex formula would be far too slow and might not work anyway, since Bob did not appear to suffer from any ailments. Pushing him off the ship is not a viable option. Bob is too big, the railings are too high, and she knows from her previous trip that there will always be people on deck, enjoying the breathtaking views and taking pictures. A corpse in a cabin would attract police and set off a search for DNA and fabric hairs and so forth, as on television. No, she would have to arrange the death during one of the onshore visits. But how? Where? She consults the itinerary and the map of the proposed route. An Inuit settlement will not do: dogs will bark, children will follow. As for the other stops, the land they’ll be visiting is bare of concealing features. Staff with guns will accompany them to protect against polar bears. Maybe an accident with one of the guns? For that she’d need split-second timing.