Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood

  My father hadn't been staying at the resort; it wasn't the kind of thing he would do. He met my mother by accident, when he'd dropped by to visit a friend. There were a couple of pictures of them before the wedding, in which my father looked embarrassed. My mother held his arm as if it were a leash. Then the wedding portrait. After that some photos of my mother alone, which my father must have taken. Then nothing but me, drooling on rugs, eating stuffed animals or fists; my father had gone off to the war, leaving her pregnant, with nobody to take pictures of her.

  My father didn't come back until I was five, and before that he was only a name, a story which my mother would tell me and which varied considerably. Sometimes he was a nice man who was coming home soon, bringing with him all kinds of improvements and delightful surprises: we would live in a bigger house, eat better, have more clothes, and the landlord would be put in his place once and for all. At other times, when I was getting out of hand, he was retribution personified, the judgment day that would catch up with me at last; or (and I think this was closest to her true feelings) he was a heartless wretch who had abandoned her, leaving her to cope with everything all by herself. The day he finally returned I was almost beside myself, torn between hope and fear: what would he bring me, what would he do to me? Was he a bad man or a nice man? (My mother's two categories: nice men did things for you, bad men did things to you.) But when the time came, a stranger walked through the door, kissed my mother and then me, and sat down at the table. He seemed very tired and said little. He brought nothing and did nothing, and that remained his pattern.

  Most of the time he was simply an absence. Occasionally, though, he would stroll back into reality from wherever he had been, and he even had his moments of modest drama. I was thirteen, it must have been 1955, it was a Sunday. I was sitting in the kitchenette, eating half of an orange layer cake, for which I would later be scolded. But I'd already eaten one piece and I knew the number of words for that one piece would be as great as for half a cake, so I ate on, speedily, trying to get it all down before being discovered.

  By this time I was eating steadily, doggedly, stubbornly, anything I could get. The war between myself and my mother was on in earnest; the disputed territory was my body. I didn't quite know this though I sensed it in a hazy way; but I reacted to the diet booklets she left on my pillow, to the bribes of dresses she would give me if I would reduce to fit them - formal gowns with layers of tulle and wired busts, perky little frocks, skirts with slim waists and frothy crinolines - to her cutting remarks about my size, to her pleas about my health (I would die of a heart attack, I would get high blood pressure), to the specialists she sent me to and the pills they prescribed, to all of these things, with another Mars Bar or a double helping of french fries. I swelled visibly, relentlessly, before her very eyes, I rose like dough, my body advanced inch by inch towards her across the dining-room table, in this at least I was undefeated. I was five feet four and still growing, and I weighed a hundred and eighty-two pounds.

  Anyway: I was sitting in the kitchenette, eating half of an orange layer cake. It was a Sunday in 1955. My father was in the living room, sitting in an easy chair reading a murder mystery, his favorite way of relaxing. My mother was on the chesterfield, pretending to read a book on child psychology - she put in a certain amount of time demonstrating that, God knew, she was doing her best - but actually reading The Fox, an historical novel about the Borgias. I had already finished it, in secret. The chesterfield had a diminutive purple satin cushion at either end, and these two cushions were sacrosanct, ritual objects which were not to be moved. The chesterfield itself was dull pink, a nubby material shot through with silver threads. It had a covering of transparent plastic, which was removed for entertaining. The rug, which picked up the purple of the cushions, was also covered with a sheet of plastic, heavier in texture. The lampshades were protected with cellophane. On each of my father's feet was a slipper of maroon leather. My mother's feet and my own were similarly encased, as by this time my mother had made it a rule that no shoes were to be allowed inside the house. It was a new house and she had just finished getting it into shape; now that it was finally right she didn't want anything touched, she wanted it static and dustless and final, until that moment when she would see what a mistake she had made and the painters or movers would arrive once more, trailing disruption.

  (My mother didn't want her living rooms to be different from everyone else's, or even very much better. She wanted them to be acceptable, the same as everybody else's, although her idea of everybody else changed as my father's salary increased. Perhaps this was why they looked like museum displays or, more accurately, like the show windows of Eaton's and Simpson's, those magic downtown palaces I would approach, with Aunt Lou, every December along a vista of streetcar tracks. We didn't go to see the furniture though, we were heading for the other windows, where animals, fairies and red-cheeked dwarfs twirled mechanically to the sound of tinkle bells. When I was old enough to go Christmas shopping it was Aunt Lou who took me. One year I announced I wasn't going to get my mother a Christmas present. "But, dear," Aunt Lou said, "you'll hurt her feelings." I didn't think she had any, but I gave in and bought her some bubble bath, enclosed in a lovely pink squeezable swan. She never used it, but I knew in advance she wouldn't. I ended up using it myself.)

  I finished the slab of leftover cake and rose to my feet, my stomach bumping the table. My slippers were large and furry; they made my feet look twice as big. I clomped in them sullenly through the dining room, into the living room and past my parents and their books, without saying anything. I had developed the habit of clomping silently but very visibly through rooms in which my mother was sitting; it was a sort of fashion show in reverse, it was a display, I wanted her to see and recognize what little effect her nagging and pleas were having.

  I intended to go into the hall, then up the stairs with a sasquatch-like, banister-shaking tread, and along the hall to my room, where I was going to put on an Elvis Presley record and turn the volume up just loud enough so she would repress the desire to complain. She was beginning to worry about her ability to communicate with me. I didn't have any intentional plans, I was merely acting according to a dimly felt, sluggish instinct. I was aware only of a wish to hear "Heartbreak Hotel" at the maximum volume possible without reprisals.

  But when I was halfway across the room there was a sudden pounding at the front door. Someone was hammering on it with balled fists; then there was the thud of a hurled body and a hoarse voice, a man's voice, screaming, "I'll kill you! You bastard, I'll kill you!"

  I froze. My father leapt from his chair and doubled over in a kind of wrestler's crouch. My mother put a bookmark between the pages of her book and closed it; then she removed her reading glasses, which she wore on a silver chain around her neck, and looked at my father with irritation. It was obviously his fault: who would call her a bastard? My father straightened up and went to the door.

  "Oh, it's you, Mr. Currie," he said. "I'm glad to see you're up and about again."

  "I'll sue you," the voice shouted. "I'll sue you within an inch of your life! Why couldn't you just leave me alone? You've ruined everything!" The voice broke into long, raucous sobs.

  "You're a little upset right now," my father's voice said.

  The other voice wept, "You messed it up! I did it right this time and you messed it up! I don't want to live...."

  "Life is a gift," my father said with quiet dignity but a slight edge of reprimand, like the kindly dentist who demonstrated about cavities on the television set we'd acquired two years before. "You should be grateful for it. You should respect it."

  "What do you know?" the voice roared. Then there was a scuffling sound and the voice receded into the distance, trailing muffled words behind it like a string of bubbles underwater. My father shut the door quietly and came back to the living room.

  "I don't know why you do it," my mother said. "They're never grateful."

  "Do what?" I said, bulgy-eyed,
breaking my vow of silence in my eagerness to know. I had never heard a man cry before and the knowledge that they sometimes did was electrifying.

  "When people try to kill themselves," my mother said, "your father brings them to life again."

  "Not always, Frances," my father said sadly.

  "Often enough," my mother said, opening her book. "I'm tired of getting abusive phone calls in the middle of the night. I really wish you would stop."

  My father was an anesthetist at the Toronto General Hospital. He had studied to be one at my mother's urging, as she felt specialization was the coming thing, everyone said that specialists did better than family doctors. She had even been willing to make the necessary financial sacrifices while he was training. But I thought all my father did was put people to sleep before operations. I didn't know about this resurrectionist side of his personality.

  "Why do people try to kill themselves?" I asked. "How do you bring them to life again?"

  My father ignored the first part of this question, it was far too complicated for him. "I'm testing experimental methods," he said. "They don't always work. But they only give me the hopeless cases, when they've tried everything else." Then he said, to my mother rather than to me, "You'd be surprised how many of them are glad. That they've been able to ... come back, have another chance."

  "Well," said my mother, "I only wish the ones who aren't so glad would keep it to themselves. It's a waste of time, if you ask me. They'll simply try all over again. If they were serious they'd just stick a gun in their mouth and pull the trigger. That takes the chance out of it."

  "Not everyone," said my father, "has your determination."

  Two years later, I learned something else about my father. We were in another house, with a bigger dining room, wood-paneled and impressive. My mother was having a dinner party, entertaining two couples whom she claimed privately to dislike. According to her, it was necessary to have them to dinner because they were my father's colleagues, important men at the hospital, and she was trying to help him with his career. She paid no attention when he said that it didn't matter one iota to his career whether she had these people to dinner or not; she went ahead and did it anyway. When she finally realized he'd been telling the truth, she stopped giving dinner parties and began drinking a little more heavily. But she must have already started by this evening, for which I can remember the menu: chicken breasts in cream sauce with wild rice and mushrooms, individual jellied salads with cranberries and celery, topped with mayonnaise, Duchess potatoes, and a complex dessert with mandarin oranges, ginger sauce and some kind of sherbet.

  I was in the kitchen. I was fifteen, and I'd reached my maximum growth: I was five feet eight and I weighed two hundred and forty-five, give or take a few pounds. I no longer attended my mother's dinner parties; she was tired of having a teenaged daughter who looked like a beluga whale and never opened her mouth except to put something into it. I cluttered up her gracious-hostess act. On my side, much as I would have welcomed the chance to embarrass her, strangers were different, they saw my obesity as an unfortunate handicap, like a hump or a club foot, rather than the refutation, the victory it was, and watching myself reflected in their eyes shook my confidence. It was only in relation to my mother that I derived a morose pleasure from my weight; in relation to everyone else, including my father, it made me miserable. But I couldn't stop.

  I was in the kitchen then, eavesdropping through the passageway and devouring spare parts and leftovers. They had reached the dessert, so I was making away with the extra chicken and cranberry salads and Duchess potatoes, and listening to the conversation in the other room halfheartedly, as if to a tepid radio drama. One of the visiting doctors had been in the war, mostly in Italy as it turned out; the other one had enlisted but had never made it farther than England. Then of course there was my father, who apart from acknowledging that he had been over there too, never said much about it. I'd listened in on conversations like this before and they didn't interest me. From the war movies I'd seen, there was nothing much for women to do in wars except the things they did anyway.

  The man who had served in Italy finished recounting one of his exploits, and after a chorus of ruminative murmurs, asked, "Where were you stationed, Phil?"

  "Oh, um," said my father.

  "In France," my mother said.

  "Oh, you mean after the invasion," said the other man.

  "No," said my mother, and giggled; a danger sign. She had taken to giggling during dinner parties lately. The giggle, which had a bleary, uncontrolled quality, had replaced the high, gay company laugh she used to wield as purposefully as a baseball bat.

  "Oh," said the Italy man politely, "what were you doing?"

  "Killing people," said my mother promptly and with relish, as if she were enjoying a private joke.

  "Fran," said my father. It was a warning, but the tone was also imploring; something new and rare. I was gnawing the last shreds off the carcass of a breast, but I stopped in order to listen more closely.

  "Well, everyone kills a few people in a war, I guess," said the second man.

  "Up close?" said my mother. "I bet you didn't kill them up close."

  There was a silence, of the kind that comes into a room when everyone knows that something exciting and probably unpleasant is going to happen. I could picture my mother looking around at the attentive faces, avoiding my father's eyes.

  "He was in Intelligence," she said importantly. "You wouldn't think it to look at him, would you? They dropped him in behind the lines and he worked with the French underground. You wouldn't ever hear it from him, but he can speak French like a native; he gets it from his last name."

  "My," said one of the women, "I've always wanted to go to Paris. Is it as beautiful as they say?"

  "His job was to kill the people they thought were fakes," my mother continued. "He had to just take them out and shoot them. In cold blood. Sometimes he wouldn't even know if he'd shot the right one. Isn't that something?" Her voice was thrilled and admiring. "The funny thing is, he doesn't like me to mention it ... the funny thing is, he told me once that the frightening thing about it was, he started to enjoy it."

  One of the men laughed nervously. I got up and retreated on my furry slippered feet to the stairs (I could walk quietly enough when I wanted to) and lowered myself down halfway up. Sure enough, a moment later my father marched through the swinging door into the kitchen, followed by my mother. She must have realized she had pushed it too far.

  "There's nothing wrong with it," she said. "It was in a good cause. You never make the most of yourself."

  "I asked you not to talk about it," my father said. He sounded very angry, enraged. It was the first time I realized he could feel rage; he was usually very calm. "You have no idea what it was like."

  "I think it's great," said my mother, earnestly. "It took real courage, I don't see what's wrong with...."

  "Shut up," said my father.

  Those are stories from later; earlier he wasn't there, which is probably why I remember him as nicer than my mother. And after that he was busy studying, he was someone who was not to be disturbed, and then he was at the hospital a lot. He didn't know quite what to make of me, ever; though I never felt he was hostile, only bemused.

  The few things we did together were wordless things. Such as: he took to growing house plants - vines and spider plants and ferns and begonias. He liked to tinker with them, snipping off cuttings and repotting and planting, on Saturday afternoons if he had the free time, listening to the Texaco Company Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on the radio, and he would let me help him with the plants. As he never said much of anything, I would pretend his voice was the voice of Milton Cross, kindly and informed, describing the singers' costumes and the passionate, tragic and preposterous events in which they were involved. There he would be, puffing away on the pipe he took up after he quit cigarettes, poking at his house plants and conversing to me about lovers being stabbed or abandoned or betrayed, about jealo
usy and madness, about unending love triumphing over the grave; and then those chilling voices would drift into the room, raising the hair on the back of my neck, as if he had evoked them. He was a conjuror of spirits, a shaman with the voice of a dry, detached old opera commentator in a tuxedo. Or that's how I imagined him sounding, when I thought up the conversations I would have liked to have had with him but never did. I wanted him to tell me the truth about life, which my mother would not tell me and which he must have known something about, as he was a doctor and had been in the war, he'd killed people and raised the dead. I kept waiting for him to give me some advice, warn me, instruct me, but he never did any of these things. Perhaps he felt as if I weren't really his daughter; he'd seen me for the first time five years after I was born, and he treated me more like a colleague than a daughter, more like an accomplice. But what was our conspiracy? Why hadn't he come back on leave during those five years? A question my mother asked also. Why did they both act as though he owed my mother something?

  Then there were those other conversations I overheard. I used to go into the upstairs bathroom, lock the door, and turn on the tap so they would think I was brushing my teeth. Then I would arrange the bath mat on the floor so my knees wouldn't get cold, put my head into the toilet, and listen to them through the pipes. It was almost a direct line to the kitchen, where they had most of their fights, or rather my mother had them. She was a lot easier to hear than my father.