Bluebeard's Egg

  INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR

  Bluebeard's Egg

  "An outstanding correspondent on the war between the sexes writes as wittily as ever on the hopes and shortcomings of women who bake for poets, sleep with their accountants, attribute their preference for awful men to fearlessness, and don't know how much they scare their own mothers."

  - The Observer (U.K.)

  "Atwood displays polished craftsmanship and rare insight in the stories in this collection. They are the work of an author in full control of her considerable talents."

  - Globe and Mail

  "This collection of short stories shows her genius with all its sparkle and humour."

  - Cosmopolitan

  "Atwood is nothing if not clairvoyant."

  -Kingston Whig-Standard

  "Once again Atwood brings her poetic talents, her acute clarity of perception, and her sardonic humour to an examination of the foibles and follies of modern life."

  - David Staines, Canadian Literature

  "In this impressive collection of astute and reverberating stories, she adds to her already considerable stature as a writer."

  -Winnipeg Free Press

  "Atwood's prose in Bluebeard's Egg is powerful, elegant, and mellifluous to an extraordinary degree."

  - Quill & Quire

  "An acute and poetic observer of the eternal, universal, rum relationships between men and women."

  - The Times (U.K.)

  BY MARGARET ATWOOD

  FICTION

  The Edible Woman (1969)

  Surfacing (1972)

  Lady Oracle (1976)

  Dancing Girls (1977)

  Life Before Man (1979)

  Bodily Harm (1981)

  Murder in the Dark (1983)

  Bluebeard's Egg (1983)

  The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

  Cat's Eye (1988)

  Wilderness Tips (1991)

  Good Bones (1992)

  The Robber Bride (1993)

  Alias Grace (1996)

  FOR CHILDREN

  Up in the Tree (1978)

  Anna's Pet [with Joyce Barkhouse] (1980)

  For the Birds (1990)

  Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995)

  NON-FICTION

  Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)

  Days of the Rebels 1815-1840 (1977)

  Second Words (1982)

  Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1996)

  Two Solicitudes: Conversations [with Victor-Levy Beaulieu] (1998)

  POETRY

  Double Persephone (1961)

  The Circle Game (1966)

  The Animals in That Country (1968)

  The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)

  Procedures for Underground (1970)

  Power Politics (1971)

  You Are Happy (1974)

  Selected Poems (1976)

  Two-Headed Poems (1978)

  True Stories (1981)

  Interlunar (1984)

  Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986 (1986)

  Morning in the Burned House (1995)

  Copyright (c) 1983 by O.W. Toad Ltd.

  First cloth edition published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 1983.

  Trade paperback edition published in 1999.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher - or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency - is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Atwood, Margaret, 1939-

  Bluebeard's Egg

  eISBN: 978-1-55199487-1

  I. Tide.

  PS8501.T86B6 C813'.54 C83-099009-7

  PR9199.3.A87B58 1999

  The content and characters in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons or happenings is coincidental.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. Canada We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  For My Parents

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother

  Hurricane Hazel

  Loulou; or, The Domestic Life of the Language

  Uglypuss

  Betty

  Bluebeard's Egg

  Spring Song of the Frogs

  Scarlet Ibis

  The Salt Garden

  The Sin Eater

  The Sunrise

  Unearthing Suite

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother

  When my mother was very small, someone gave her a basket of baby chicks for Easter. They all died.

  "I didn't know you weren't supposed to pick them up," says my mother. "Poor little things. I laid them out in a row on a board, with their little legs sticking out straight as pokers, and wept over them. I'd loved them to death."

  Possibly this story is meant by my mother to illustrate her own stupidity, and also her sentimentality. We are to understand she wouldn't do such a thing now.

  Possibly it's a commentary on the nature of love; though, knowing my mother, this is unlikely.

  My mother's father was a country doctor. In the days before cars he drove a team of horses and a buggy around his territory, and in the days before snow ploughs he drove a team and a sleigh, through blizzards and rainstorms and in the middle of the night, to arrive at houses lit with oil lamps where water would be boiling on the wood range and flannel sheets warming on the plate rack, to deliver babies who would subsequently be named after him. His office was in the house, and as a child my mother would witness people arriving at the office door, which was reached through the front porch, clutching parts of themselves - thumbs, fingers, toes, ears, noses - which had accidentally been cut off, pressing these severed parts to the raw stumps of their bodies as if they could be stuck there like dough, in the mostly vain hope that my grandfather would be able to sew them back on, heal the gashes made in them by axes, saws, knives, and fate.

  My mother and her younger sister would loiter near the closed office door until shooed away. From behind it would come groans, muffled screams, cries for help. For my mother, hospitals have never been glamorous places, and illness offers no respite or holiday. "Never get sick," she says, and means it. She hardly ever does.

  Once, though, she almost died. It was when her appendix burst. My grandfather had to do the operation. He said later that he shouldn't have been the person to do it: his hands were shaking too much. This is one of the few admissions of weakness on his part that my mother has ever reported. Mostly he is portrayed as severe and in charge of things. "We all respected him, though," she says. "He was widely respected." (This is a word which has slipped a little in the scale since my mother's youth. It used to outrank love)

  It was someone else who told me the story of my grandfather's muskrat farm: how he and one of my mother's uncles fenced in the swamp at the back of their property and invested my mother's maiden aunt's savings in muskrats. The idea was that these muskrats w
ould multiply and eventually be made into muskrat coats, but an adjoining apple farmer washed his spraying equipment upstream, and the muskrats were all killed by the poison, as dead as doornails. This was during the Depression, and it was no joke.

  When they were young - this can cover almost anything these days, but I put it at seven or eight - my mother and her sister had a tree house, where they spent some of their time playing dolls' tea parties and so forth. One day they found a box of sweet little bottles outside my grandfather's dispensary. The bottles were being thrown out, and my mother (who has always hated waste) appropriated them for use in their dolls' house. The bottles were full of yellow liquid, which they left in because it looked so pretty. It turned out that these were urine samples.

  "We got Hail Columbia for that," says my mother. "But what did we know?"

  My mother's family lived in a large white house near an apple orchard, in Nova Scotia. There was a barn and a carriage-house; in the kitchen there was a pantry. My mother can remember the days before commercial bakeries, when flour came in barrels and all the bread was made at home. She can remember the first radio broadcast she ever heard, which was a singing commercial about socks.

  In this house there were many rooms. Although I have been there, although I have seen the house with my own eyes, I still don't know how many. Parts of it were closed off, or so it seemed; there were back staircases. Passages led elsewhere. Five children lived in it, two parents, a hired man and a hired girl, whose names and faces kept changing. The structure of the house was hierarchical, with my grandfather at the top, but its secret life - the life of pie crusts, clean sheets, the box of rags in the linen closet, the loaves in the oven - was female. The house, and all the objects in it, crackled with static electricity; undertows washed through it, the air was heavy with things that were known but not spoken. Like a hollow log, a drum, a church, it amplified, so that conversations whispered in it sixty years ago can be half-heard even today.

  In this house you had to stay at the table until you had eaten everything on your plate. " 'Think of the starving Armenians,' mother used to say," says my mother. "I didn't see how eating my bread crusts was going to help them out one jot."

  It was in this house that I first saw a stalk of oats in a vase, each oat wrapped in the precious silver paper which had been carefully saved from a chocolate box. I thought it was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen, and began saving silver paper myself. But I never got around to wrapping the oats, and in any case I didn't know how. Like many other art forms of vanished civilizations, the techniques for this one have been lost and cannot quite be duplicated.

  "We had oranges at Christmas," says my mother. "They came all the way from Florida; they were very expensive. That was the big treat: to find an orange in the toe of your stocking. It's funny to remember how good they tasted, now."

  When she was sixteen, my mother had hair so long she could sit on it. Women were bobbing their hair by then; it was getting to be the twenties. My mother's hair was giving her headaches, she says, but my grandfather, who was very strict, forbade her to cut it. She waited until one Saturday when she knew he had an appointment with the dentist.

  "In those days there was no freezing," says my mother. "The drill was worked with a foot pedal, and it went grind, grind, grind. The dentist himself had brown teeth: he chewed tobacco, and he would spit the tobacco juice into a spittoon while he was working on your teeth."

  Here my mother, who is a good mimic, imitates the sounds of the drill and the tobacco juice: "Rrrrr! Rrrrr! Rrrrr! Phtt! Rrrrr! Rrrrr! Rrrrr! Phtt! It was always sheer agony. It was a heaven-sent salvation when gas came in."

  My mother went into the dentist's office, where my grandfather was sitting in the chair, white with pain. She asked him if she could have her hair cut. He said she could do anything in tarnation as long as she would get out of there and stop pestering him.

  "So I went out straight away and had it all chopped off," says my mother jauntily. "He was furious afterwards, but what could he do? He'd given his word."

  My own hair reposes in a cardboard box in a steamer trunk in my mother's cellar, where I picture it becoming duller and more brittle with each passing year, and possibly moth-eaten; by now it will look like the faded wreaths of hair in Victorian funeral jewellery. Or it may have developed a dry mildew; inside its tissue-paper wrappings it glows faintly, in the darkness of the trunk. I suspect my mother has forgotten it's in there. It was cut off, much to my relief, when I was twelve and my sister was born. Before that it was in long curls: "Otherwise," says my mother, "it would have been just one big snarl." My mother combed it by winding it around her index finger every morning, but when she was in the hospital my father couldn't cope. "He couldn't get it around his stubby fingers," says my mother. My father looks down at his fingers. They are indeed broad compared with my mother's long elegant ones, which she calls bony. He smiles a pussy-cat smile.

  So it was that my hair was sheared off. I sat in the chair in my first beauty parlour and watched it falling, like handfuls of cobwebs, down over my shoulders. From within it my head began to emerge, smaller, denser, my face more angular. I aged five years in fifteen minutes. I knew I could go home now and try out lipstick.

  "Your father was upset about it," says my mother, with an air of collusion. She doesn't say this when my father is present. We smile, over the odd reactions of men to hair.

  I used to think that my mother, in her earlier days, led a life of sustained hilarity and hair-raising adventure. (That was before I realized that she never put in the long stretches of uneventful time that must have made up much of her life: the stories were just the punctuation.) Horses ran away with her, men offered to, she was continually falling out of trees or off the ridgepoles of barns, or nearly being swept out to sea in rip-tides; or, in a more minor vein, suffering acute embarrassment in trying circumstances.

  Churches were especially dangerous. "There was a guest preacher one Sunday," she says. "Of course we had to go to church every Sunday. There he was, in full career, preaching hellfire and damnation" - she pounds an invisible pulpit - "and his full set of false teeth shot out of his mouth - phoop! - just like that. Well, he didn't miss a stride. He stuck his hand up and caught them and popped them back into his mouth, and he kept right on, condemning us all to eternal torment. The pew was shaking! The tears were rolling down our faces, and the worst of it was, we were in the front pew, he was looking right at us. But of course we couldn't laugh out loud: father would have given us Hail Columbia."

  Other people's parlours were booby-trapped for her; so were any and all formal social occasions. Zippers sprang apart on her clothes in strategic places, hats were unreliable. The shortage of real elastic during the war demanded constant alertness: underpants then had buttons, and were more taboo and therefore more significant than they are now. "There you would be," she says, "right on the street, and before you knew it they'd be down around your galoshes. The way to do was to step out of them with one foot, then kick them up with your other foot and whip them into your purse. I got quite good at it."

  This particular story is told only to a few, but other stories are for general consumption. When she tells them, my mother's face turns to rubber. She takes all the parts, adds the sound effects, waves her hands around in the air. Her eyes gleam, sometimes a little wickedly, for although my mother is sweet and old and a lady, she avoids being a sweet old lady. When people are in danger of mistaking her for one, she flings in something from left field; she refuses to be taken for granted.

  But my mother cannot be duped into telling stories when she doesn't want to. If you prompt her, she becomes self-conscious and clams up. Or she will laugh and go out into the kitchen, and shortly after that you will hear the whir of the Mixmaster. Long ago I gave up attempting to make her do tricks at parties. In gatherings of unknown people, she merely listens intently, her head tilted a little, smiling a smile of glazed politeness. The secret is to wait and see what she will say afterw
ards.

  At the age of seventeen my mother went to the Normal School in Truro. This name - "Normal School" - once held a certain magic for me. I thought it had something to do with learning to be normal, which possibly it did, because really it was where you used to go to learn how to be a schoolteacher. Subsequently my mother taught in a one-room school house not far from her home. She rode her horse to and from the school house every day, and saved up the money she earned and sent herself to university with it. My grandfather wouldn't send her: he said she was too frivolous-minded. She liked ice-skating and dancing too much for his taste.

  At Normal School my mother boarded with a family that contained several sons in more or less the same age group as the girl boarders. They all ate around a huge dining-room table (which I pictured as being of dark wood, with heavy carved legs, but covered always with a white linen tablecloth), with the mother and father presiding, one at each end. I saw them both as large and pink and beaming.

  "The boys were great jokers," says my mother. "They were always up to something." This was desirable in boys: to be great jokers, to be always up to something. My mother adds a key sentence: "We had a lot of fun."

  Having fun has always been high on my mother's agenda. She has as much fun as possible, but what she means by this phrase cannot be understood without making an adjustment, an allowance for the great gulf across which this phrase must travel before it reaches us. It comes from another world, which, like the stars that originally sent out the light we see hesitating in the sky above us these nights, may be or is already gone. It is possible to reconstruct the facts of this world - the furniture, the clothing, the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the jugs and basins and even the chamber pots in the bedrooms, but not the emotions, not with the same exactness. So much that is now known and felt must be excluded.

  This was a world in which guileless flirtation was possible, because there were many things that were simply not done by nice girls, and more girls were nice then. To fall from niceness was to fall not only from grace: sexual acts, by girls at any rate, had financial consequences. Life was more joyful and innocent then, and at the same time permeated with guilt and terror, or at least the occasions for them, on the most daily level. It was like the Japanese haiku: a limited form, rigid in its perimeters, within which an astonishing freedom was possible.