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  Lady Oracle

  "A striking work."

  - Time

  "Marvelously fanny."

  - Maclean's

  "Hilarious, touching, full of wonderfully skewered insights, and very much faster than a speeding bullet."

  - Cosmopolitan

  "Nervy, mordant, funny and brilliant."

  - Ms.

  "Immensely enjoyable."

  - San Francisco Examiner

  "Funny, poignant and briskly energetic."

  - Newsweek

  "Margaret Atwood's third novel constitutes a showcase for the abundant and rich talents of this Canadian poet-author."

  - Montreal Star

  "A very funny novel, lightly told with wry detachment and considerable art."

  - Washington Post Book World

  "A rich, subtle, deep, delicate, nourishing book. It's all joy, but it stays with you. [Atwood] has things to tell us."

  - Philadelphia Enquirer

  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) 1976 by O.W. Toad Ltd.

  First cloth edition published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 1976

  Trade paperback edition published in 1998

  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 -

  Lady oracle eISBN: 978-1-55199491-8

  I. Title.

  PS8501.T86L3 1998 C813'. 54 C98-930418-3

  PR9199.3.A8L3 1998

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

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street,

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Three

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Part Four

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Part Five

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  About The Author

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  I planned my death carefully; unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it. My life had a tendency to spread, to get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of a baroque mirror, which came from following the line of least resistance. I wanted my death, by contrast, to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a Quaker church or the basic black dress with a single strand of pearls much praised by fashion magazines when I was fifteen. No trumpets, no megaphones, no spangles, no loose ends, this time. The trick was to disappear without a trace, leaving behind me the shadow of a corpse, a shadow everyone would mistake for solid reality. At first I thought I'd managed it.

  The day after I arrived in Terremoto I was sitting outside on the balcony. I'd been intending to sunbathe, I had visions of myself as a Mediterranean splendor, golden-brown, striding with laughing teeth into an aqua sea, carefree at last, the past discarded; but then I remembered I had no suntan lotion (Maximum Protection: without it I'd burn and freckle), so I'd covered my shoulders and thighs with several of the landlord's skimpy bath towels. I hadn't brought a bathing suit; bra and underpants would do, I thought, since the balcony was invisible from the road.

  I'd always been fond of balconies. I felt that if I could only manage to stand on one long enough, the right one, wearing a long white trailing gown, preferably during the first quarter of the moon, something would happen: music would sound, a shape would appear below, sinuous and dark, and climb towards me, while I leaned fearfully, hopefully, gracefully, against the wrought-iron railing and quivered. But this wasn't a very romantic balcony. It had a geometric railing like those on middle-income apartment buildings of the fifties, and the floor was poured concrete, already beginning to erode. It wasn't the kind of balcony a man would stand under playing a lute and yearning or clamber up bearing a rose in his teeth or a stiletto in his sleeve. Besides, it was only five feet off the ground. Any mysterious visitor I might have would be more likely to approach by the rough path leading down to the house from the street above, feet crunching on the cinders, roses or knives in his head only.

  That at any rate would be Arthur's style, I thought; he'd rather crunch than climb. If only we could go back to the way it had once been, before he had changed.... I pictured him coming to retrieve me, winding up the h
ill in a rented Fiat which would have something wrong with it; he would tell me about this defect later, after we'd thrown ourselves into each other's arms. He would park, as close to the wall as possible. Before getting out he would check his face in the rearview mirror, adjusting the expression: he never liked to make a fool of himself, and he wouldn't be sure whether or not he was about to. He would unfold himself from the car, lock it so his scanty luggage could not be stolen, place the keys in an inside jacket pocket, peer left and right, and then with that curious ducking motion of the head, as if he were dodging a thrown stone or a low doorway, he'd sneak past the rusty gate and start cautiously down the path. He was usually stopped at international borders. It was because he looked so furtive; furtive but correct, like a spy.

  At the sight of lanky Arthur descending towards me, uncertain, stony-faced, rescue-minded, in his uncomfortable shoes and well-aged cotton underwear, not knowing whether I would really be there or not, I began to cry. I closed my eyes: there in front of me, across an immense stretch of blue which I recognized as the Atlantic Ocean, was everyone I had left on the other side. On a beach, of course; I'd seen a lot of Fellini movies. The wind rippled their hair, they smiled and waved and called to me, though of course I couldn't hear the words. Arthur was the nearest; behind him was the Royal Porcupine, otherwise known as Chuck Brewer, in his long pretentious cape; then Sam and Marlene and the others. Leda Sprott fluttered like a bedsheet off to one side, and I could see Fraser Buchanan's leather-patched elbow sticking out from where he lurked behind a seaside bush. Further back, my mother, wearing a navy-blue suit and a white hat, my father indistinct by her side; and my Aunt Lou. Aunt Lou was the only one who wasn't looking at me. She was marching along the beach, taking deep breaths and admiring the waves and stopping every now and then to empty the sand out of her shoes. Finally she took them off, and continued, in fox fur, feathered hat and stocking feet, towards a distant hot-dog and orangeade stand that beckoned to her from the horizon like a tacky mirage.

  But I was wrong about the rest of them. They were smiling and waving at each other, not at me. Could it be that the Spiritualists were wrong and the dead weren't interested in the living after all? Though some of them were still alive, and I was the one who was supposed to be dead; they should have been mourning but instead they seemed quite cheerful. It wasn't fair. I tried to will something ominous onto their beach - a colossal stone head, a collapsing horse - but with no result. In fact it was less like a Fellini movie than that Walt Disney film I saw when I was eight, about a whale who wanted to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. He approached a ship and sang arias, but the sailors harpooned him, and each of his voices left his body in a different-colored soul and floated up towards the sun, still singing. The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met, I think it was called. At the time I cried ferociously.

  It was this memory that really set me off. I never learned to cry with style, silently, the pearl-shaped tears rolling down my cheeks from wide luminous eyes, as on the covers of True Love comics, leaving no smears or streaks. I wished I had; then I could have done it in front of people, instead of in bathrooms, darkened movie theaters, shrubberies and empty bedrooms, among the party coats on the bed. If you could cry silently people felt sorry for you. As it was I snorted, my eyes turned the color and shape of cooked tomatoes, my nose ran, I clenched my fists, I moaned, I was embarrassing, finally I was amusing, a figure of fun. The grief was always real but it came out as a burlesque of grief, an overblown imitation like the neon rose on White Rose Gasoline stations, gone forever now.... Decorous weeping was another of those arts I never mastered, like putting on false eyelashes. I should've had a governess, I should have gone to finishing school and had a board strapped to my back and learned water-color painting and self-control.

  You can't change the past, Aunt Lou used to say. Oh, but I wanted to; that was the one thing I really wanted to do. Nostalgia convulsed me. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, to the left a puddle of glass fragments shimmered like water; a small green lizard with iridescent blue eyes warmed its cool blood on the railing; from the valley came a tinkling sound, a soothing moo, the lull of alien voices. I was safe, I could begin again, but instead I sat on my balcony, beside the remains of a kitchen window broken before my time, in a chair made of aluminum tubes and yellow plastic strips, and made choking noises.

  The chair belonged to Mr. Vitroni, the landlord, who was fond of felt-tipped pens with different colors of ink, red, pink, purple, orange, a taste I shared. He used his to show the other people in the town that he could write. I used mine for lists and love letters, sometimes both at once: Have gone to pick up some coffee, XXX. The thought of these abandoned shopping trips intensified my sorrow ... no more grapefruits, cut in half for two, with a red maraschino cherry like a navel boss, which Arthur habitually rolled to the side of the plate; no more oatmeal porridge, loathed by me, extolled by Arthur, lumping and burning because I hadn't taken his advice and done it in a double boiler.... Years of breakfasts, inept, forsaken, never to be recovered.... Years of murdered breakfasts, why had I done it?

  I realized I'd come to the worst place in the entire world. I should have gone somewhere fresh and clean, somewhere I'd never been before. Instead I'd returned to the same town, the same house even, where we'd spent the summer the year before. And nothing had changed: I'd have to cook on the same two-burner stove with the gas cylinder, bombola, that ran out always in the middle of a half-done meal; eat at the same table, which still had the white rings on the varnish from my former carelessness with hot cups; sleep in the same bed, its mattress furrowed with age and the anxieties of many tenants. The wraith of Arthur would pursue me; already I could hear faint gargling noises from the bathroom, the crunch of glass as he scraped back his chair on the balcony, waiting for me to pass his cup of coffee out to him through the kitchen window. If I opened my eyes and turned my head, surely he would be there, newspaper held six inches from his face, pocket dictionary on one knee, left index finger inserted (perhaps) in his ear, an unconscious gesture he denied performing.

  It was my own stupidity, my own fault. I should have gone to Tunisia or the Canary Islands or even Miami Beach, on the Greyhound Bus, hotel included, but I didn't have the willpower; I needed something more familiar. A place with no handholds, no landmarks, no past at all: that would have been too much like dying.

  By this time I was weeping spasmodically into one of the landlord's bath towels and I'd thrown another one over my head, an old habit: I used to cry under pillows so as not to be found out. But through the towel I could now hear an odd clicking sound. It must've been going on for a while. I listened, and it stopped. I raised the towel. There, at the level of my ankles and only three feet away, floated a head, an old man's head, topped by a raveling straw hat. The whitish eyes stared at me with either alarm or disapproval; the mouth, caved in over the gums, was open at one side. He must've heard me. Perhaps he thought I was having an attack of some kind, in my underwear, towel-covered on a balcony. Perhaps he thought I was drunk.

  I smiled damply, to reassure him, clutched my towels around me and tried to get out of the aluminum chair, remembering too late its trick of folding up if you struggled. I lost several of the towels before I was able to back in through the door.

  I'd recognized the old man. It was the same old man who used to come one or two afternoons a week to tend the artichokes on the arid terrace below the house, cutting the larger weeds with a pair of rusty shears and snipping off the leathery artichoke heads when they were ready. Unlike the other people in the town, he never said anything to me or returned a word of greeting. He gave me the creeps. I put on my dress (out of sight of the picture window, behind the door) and went into the bathroom to swab my face with a dampened washcloth and blow my nose on some of Mr. Vitroni's scratchy toilet paper; then to the kitchen to make a cup of tea.

  For the first time since arriving, I began to feel afraid. It was more than depressing to have returned to this town, it was dangerous
. It's no good thinking you're invisible if you aren't, and the problem was: if I had recognized the old man, perhaps he had recognized me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I sat down at the table to drink my tea. Tea was consoling and it would help me think; though this tea wasn't very good, it came in bags and smelled of Band-Aids. I'd bought it at the main grocery store, along with a package of Peek Frean biscuits, imported from England. The store had laid in a large supply of these, anticipating a wave of English tourists which so far hadn't arrived. By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen, Biscuit Manufacturers, it said on the box, which I found morale-building. The Queen would not snivel: regret is gauche. Pull yourself together, said a stern royal voice. I sat straighter in my chair and considered what I should do.

  I'd taken precautions, of course. I was using my other name, and when I'd gone to see if Mr. Vitroni's flat was available I'd worn my sunglasses and covered my head with the scarf I'd bought at the Toronto airport, printed with pink Mounted Policemen performing a musical ride against a background of purple Rocky Mountains, made in Japan. I shrouded my body in one of the sacklike print dresses, also pink, with baby-blue flowers, that I'd bought off a street rack in Rome. I would've preferred the big red roses or the orange dahlias: this dress made me look like an expanse of wallpaper. But I wanted something inconspicuous. Mr. Vitroni hadn't remembered me, I was sure of that. However, the old man had caught me without my disguise, and, worse still, with my hair showing. Waist-length red hair was very noticeable in that part of the country.

  The biscuits were hard as plaster and tasted of shelf. I ate the last one, dipping it into the tea and chewing it up mechanically before I realized I'd finished the package. That was a bad sign, I'd have to watch that.

  I decided I'd have to do something about my hair. It was evidence, its length and color had been a sort of trademark. Every newspaper clipping, friendly or hostile, had mentioned it, in fact a lot of space had been devoted to it: hair in the female was regarded as more important than either talent or the lack of it. Joan Foster; celebrated author of Lady Oracle, looking like a lush Rossetti portrait, radiating intensity, hypnotized the audience with her unearthly ... (The Toronto Star). Prose-poetess Joan Foster looked impressively junoesque in her flowing red hair and green robe; unfortunately she was largely inaudible ... (The Globe and Mail). They could trace my hair much more easily than they could ever trace me. I would have to cut it off and dye the rest, though I wasn't sure where I'd be able to get the hair dye. Certainly not in this town. I might have to go back to Rome for it. I should've bought a wig, I thought; that was an oversight.