Good Bones Read online

  In the Dance of the Lepers, the lepers were not real. That is, they did not have leprosy. On the contrary. These lepers were healthy, able-bodied and young. They were dancers. But they were pretending to be lepers, and since I always believe in surfaces, I believed that they were real.

  The pretended, real dance of the lepers took place on a stage. It was Christmas up there. The music was quick, with nasal horns and light-fingered drums. People in mediæval costumes whirled about. Muscular beggars were there, slender maidens in pointed caps with trailing veils, a stately prince, a voluptuous Gypsy, a witty fool. Everything you might require. Daydream ingredients. Take-out romance.

  Then the lights dimmed and the music slowed, and the lepers entered. There were five of them; they held onto one another, to various parts of their various bodies, because they could not see. They were dressed in white strips of cloth wound round and around them, around their bodies and also around their hands and heads. They had no faces, only this blunt cloth.

  They looked like animated mummies from an old horror film. They looked like living bed-sheets. They looked like war casualties. They looked like cocoons. They looked like people you once knew very well, whose names you’ve forgotten. They looked like your own face in the steam-covered mirror after a bath, your own face temporarily nameless. They looked like aphasia. They looked like an ad for bandages. They looked like a bondage photo. They looked erotic. They looked obliterated. They looked like a sad early death.

  The music they danced to was filled with the ringing of bells. In fact they carried little bells, little iron bells, or so I seem to remember. That was to warn people: stay away from the lepers. Or: stay away from the dance. Dancing can be dangerous.

  What about their dance? There is very little I can tell you about that. One thing is certain: it was not a tap-dance. Also: no pirouettes.

  It was a dance of supplication, a numb dance, a dance of hopelessness and resignation. Also: a dance of continuation, a dance of going on despite everything, a stubborn dance. An awkward, hampered dance. A fluid, graceful dance. A clumsy, left-footed, infinitely skilful dance. A cynical and disgusted dance, a dance of worship, naïve and joyful. A dance.

  Ah lepers. If you can dance, even you, why not the rest of us?

  Good Bones

  1.

  YOU HAVE good bones, they used to say, and I paid no attention. What did I care about good bones, then? I was more concerned with what was covering them. I was more concerned with lust, and pimples. The bones were backdrop.

  Now they are growing into their own, those bones. Flesh diminishes, giving way to bedrock. Structural principles. What you need is the right light, to blot out the wrinkles, the incidentals. The right shade, the right amount of sun, and see, out come the bones, the good bones, the bones come out like flowers.

  2.

  Them bones, them bones, them dry bones, them and their good connections; we sang them over once around the campfire, those gleeful strutters to the Word of the Lord, or to our own hands clapping. Behind each face, each lovely body in its plaid shirt, soft bum on hard granite, I could guess the Hallowe’en skeleton, white and one-dimensional, a chalk bonehead drawn on a blackboard; a zombie, a brief memento mori, dragged out for burning, like a heretic, flanked by the torches of the incandescent marshmallows.

  Our voices made short work of them, them bones. Tossed on the bonfire they flared up like butter, and went out and were dismissed. You are my sunshine, we sang, though not to them. We nestled closer, jellifying each other, some of us boneless.

  So much for death. So much for death, at that time, there.

  3.

  This is the cemetery. The good bones are in here, the bad bones are out there, beyond the church wall, beyond the pale, unsanctified.

  The bad bones behaved badly, perhaps because of bad blood, bad luck, bad childhoods. Anyway, they did not treat their bodies well. Walked them over cliff edges, jumped them off bell-towers. Tried to fly. Broke things.

  The good bones lie snug under their tidy monuments. They have been given brooches to wear, signet rings, poems carved on stone, marble urns, citations. Circlets of bright hair. They have been worthy and dutiful, they deserve it. That’s what it says here: the last word.

  The bad bones have been bad, so they are better left unsaid. They are better left unsaying. But they were never happy, they always wanted more, they were always hungry. They can smell the words, the words coming out of your mouth all warm and yeasty. They want some words of their own. They’ll be back.

  4.

  This is my friend, these are her bones, these ashes we pour out under the tulips. When she fell down on the sidewalk her hipbone shattered. It was hollow in there, eaten away, like a tree with ants. Bone meal.

  They put her in the hospital and I went to see her. I’m terrified, she said, but it’s sort of interesting. My turds are white, like bird turds. It’s calcium. I’m dissolving myself, I’m shitting bones. I guess you can do worse than be fertilizer. Other things can grow.

  We are both fond of gardens.

  5.

  Today I speak to my bones as I would speak to a dog. I want to go up the stairs, I tell them. Up, up, up, with one leg dragging. Is the ache deep in the bones, this elusive pain? Does that mean it will rain? Good bones, good bones, I coax, wondering how to reward them; if they will sit up for me, beg, roll over, do one more trick, once more.

  There. We’re at the top. Good bones! Good bones! Keep on going.

  Acknowledgements

  Some of these pieces have appeared in:

  CANADA

  The Malahat Review, This Magazine, Saturday Night, Quarry, Le Sabord, Tesseracts 3 (Porcépic). Three also appeared in Selected Poems II (Oxford), which is out of print.

  UNITED STATES

  Harper’s, Ms., Antaeus, Translation, Critical Fictions (Bay Press). “The Female Body” and “Alien Territory” appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, in its Female Body and Male Body issues, respectively.

  UNITED KINGDOM

  Elle, Sunday Times, Soho Square (Bloomsbury).

  MEXICO

  Earth Anthology (Grupo de los Cien).

  Afterword

  BY ROSEMARY SULLIVAN

  On the front cover of Good Bones, a strange creature, part sibyl, part harpy, perches on a naked female leg. Her tail feathers are composed of human eyes, her wings of lipsticked mouths with smiling teeth, her head feathers of grapes under a ruby hat, and her breastplate of sunglasses. She is the muse of this shrewd, often hilarious collection of stories. Margaret Atwood has designed the cover art for a number of her books. Here the reader has only to look at her collage to be forewarned: this muse packs a scorpion sting.

  Atwood was living in France as work on Good Bones was nearing completion. Because of a French postal strike, the cover had to be sent by courier, and was initially lost, with the consequence that this exotic creature was trapped briefly in some French dead letter office. Clearly, someone did not want her wisdom loosed on the world.

  In an unexpected way, it helps to think of France in connection with Good Bones, for in describing the form of the stories, the closest I can come is the conte, that curious French form that is midway between parable, fairy tale, and story. The French speak of un vrai conte for an improbable story and un conte vrai for a true story. And there is the conte de bonne femme, or conte bleu, the traditional old wives’ tale, which Atwood might be said to have reinvented as the wise woman’s tale.

  There has always been something of the sibylline touch about Atwood. In Good Bones there are twenty-seven stories, written mostly between 1986 and 1992. As she sent letters across the Atlantic indicating revisions and precise directions for the arrangement of stories, Atwood remarked to her editor that she had “found” “Third Handed,” the last story to be added to the collection: “I knew there was a twenty-seventh piece – I hate even numbers and much prefer multiples of nine … it goes in between Homelanding and Death Scenes.” And one feels the pungent whiff of the
white witch’s magic in the brew.

  If there is one book that lurks behind these tales, it is The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales. As a six-year-old child, Atwood read the 1944 unexpurgated Pantheon edition of Grimm, 210 tales long, with Josef Scharl’s gothic illustrations of skulls, hangmen, witches, ogres, and other remarkable creatures. In 1983 she recalled those stories with their “barrels of nails, red-hot shoes, removable tongues and eyes, cannibalism and various forms of open-heart surgery,” noting that “the book I’ve re-read most frequently, on a lifetime count, is Grimm’s Fairy Tales.… I’ve been reading this book, cover to cover and here and there, off and on, for 37 years.” Her childhood favourites were the wonderfully grotesque “The Juniper Tree” and “Fitcher’s Bird” (an archaic version of the more familiar “Blue Beard” recorded by the seventeenth-century French raconteur Charles Perrault).

  In the original Grimm, before the stories were child-proofed and the bloodthirsty bits eliminated, the females had magic powers. “The women in these stories are not the passive zombies we were at one point led to think they were,” Atwood explains. The princesses “do as much rescuing as the princes do, though they use magic, perseverance and cleverness rather than cold steel to do it.” The narrative voice in Good Bones is one of those adventurous heroines, using disguises, ambiguity, and subversion to tell her stories. They entertain but they also instruct, and, like the original Grimm, they do not always have happy endings.

  In Good Bones, Atwood rewrites the traditional Grimm characters: the little hen, the ugly sister, the harpy with her “coiffeur of literate serpents,” giving them contemporary voices. She plays with fairy-tale beginnings: “There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest,” hilariously rewriting the story to meet the prescriptions of political correctness till the story disappears, as does its mystery.

  Atwood creates her own contes. One of my favourites is “In Love With Raymond Chandler.” Somehow she always finds her eccentric way into the heart of the matter. Here she reminds us why we are attached to Chandler. He is not the detective writer of grisly murders and steamy sex, but the detective of furniture, of those antimacassars and mahogany desks, of bedroom suites.

  Two of the contes were commissioned by Michigan Quarterly Review for special issues on the female and the male body. The first editorial inquiry to Atwood came as a request for a submission “entirely devoted to the subject of ‘The Female Body.’ Knowing how well you have written on this topic … this capacious topic.” She is so quick that she immediately picks up the kernel of her tale, telling us of the aging of her capacious topic: “My topic feels like hell.” In the course of the tale, she shows how this topic, the female body, has been exploited and misused, by itself and by society; how it is used to sell and is sold. We know and need to know these things, but it is the wit with which this often overworked topic speaks that makes it fresh and disturbing.

  “Alien Territory” is the male twin to this piece, and here she returns briefly to the tale of Bluebeard. This may be the single most slippery story in the whole repertoire of fairy tales, and it holds endless fascination for Atwood. As an undergraduate at university, she was already listening to Béla Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and drawing water colours of The Robber Bridegroom. Through decades of writing, she has continued to probe the story’s dark entrails. In “Bluebeard’s Egg,” the title story of her 1983 collection, she refers to the traditional version in which the three sisters, in sequence, discovered dismembered bodies of previous wives in Bluebeard’s castle. In the version she invents in Good Bones, the third sister finds a small dead child with its eyes wide open locked in Bluebeard’s secret room. The narrator, whose motive, like that of many modern women, is to heal Bluebeard, obviously has no idea how far down into his psyche she will have to go to do so.

  Atwood insisted that “The Female Body” and “Alien Territory” were to be called not essays, but “pieces.” They are driven by a deeply moral imagination, and fraught with warnings: as a civilization we are destroying ourselves. In the tour de force “My Life as a Bat,” the narrator decides it was better to be a bat than to be human. She hopes to be a bat again. Reincarnation as an animal would be “At least a resting place. An interlude of grace.” And Atwood offers an evocative vision, through a bat’s eyes, of a world in which there are still goddesses in the caves and grottoes. When asked by The British Defense and Aid Fund for South Africa to donate a manuscript for sale at Sotheby’s to assist students in South Africa and Namibia, Atwood donated “My Life as a Bat.” It carries the full weight of her ironic vision of our collective human achievement.

  Good Bones is scrupulously organized and ends with the title story about aging, a subject Atwood confronts with celebratory stoicism. Reading it, I hear W.B. Yeats’s contrapuntal voice speaking of aging in “Sailing to Byzantium”: “An aging man is but a paltry thing / A tattered coat upon a stick … sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal.” I would speculate that Atwood would not entirely approve of Yeats’s egocentric, romantic fantasy of escaping the human through the transcendence of art. Unlike Yeats, she speaks to her aging bones with affection rather than with contempt. There is good in the real, in the minimal, if we could only accept our human limitations. As she urges her bones to the top of the stairs, she speaks to them as to a faithful dog: “There. We’re at the top. Good Bones! Good Bones! Keep on going.”

  In Good Bones, Margaret Atwood may insist that the reader look at hard truths, but she never forgoes her belief in magic and the transformative powers of the imagination. As she once said, we may not be able to change the world, but we can change our way of looking at it. Some of her magic is to be felt in the way she chisels her stories to an adamantine brilliance. Few modern writers are as off-beat and funny; few can orchestrate images of such stunning precision; few can be as wise.

  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)

  The Blind Assassin (2000)

  Good Bones and Simple Murders (2001)

  Oryx and Crake (2003)

  The Penelopiad (2005)

  The Tent (2006)

  Moral Disorder (2006)

  FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS

  Up in the Tree (1978)

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

  For the Birds (1990)

  Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995)

  Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003)

  Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004)

  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 (1995)

  Two Solicitudes: Conversations

  [with Victor Lévy-Beaulieu](1998)

  Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002)

  Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 1982–2004 (2005)

  Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008)

  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)

  Tr
ue Stories (1981)

  Interlunar (1984)

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

  Morning in the Burned House (1995)

  The Door (2007)