If she remembers. Perhaps she's forgotten the bad things, what she said to me, what she did. Or she does remember them, but in a minor way, as if remembering a game, or a single prank, a single trivial secret, of the kind girls tell and then forget.
She will have her own version. I am not the center of her story, because she herself is that. But I could give her something you can never have, except from another person: what you look like from outside. A reflection. This is the part of herself I could give back to her.
We are like the twins in old fables, each of whom has been given half a key.
Cordelia will walk toward me through the opening crowd, a woman of wavering age, dressed in Irish tweed of a muted green, mother-of-pearl earrings circled with gold, beautiful shoes; well-groomed, soignee as they used to say. Taking care of herself, as I am. Her hair will be gently frosted, her smile quizzical. I won't know who she is.
There are a lot of women in this room, several other painters, some rich people. Mostly it's the rich people Charna drags over. I shake their hands, watch their mouths move. Elsewhere I have more stamina for these things, these acts of self-exposure; I could brazen them out. But here I feel scraped naked.
In the gap between rich people, a young girl pushes her way through. She's a painter, it goes without saying, but she says it anyway. She's in a miniskirt and tight leggings and flat clumpy black shoes with laces, her hair is shaved up the back the way my brother's used to be, a late forties squareboy's cut. She is post everything, she is what will come after post. She is what will come after me.
"I loved your early work," she says. "Falling Women, I loved that. I mean, it sort of summed up an era, didn't it?" She doesn't mean to be cruel, she doesn't know she's just relegated me to the dust heap along with crank telephones and whalebone stays. In former days I would have said something annihilating to her, some scabby, scalding remark, but I can't think of anything right off the bat. I'm out of training, I'm losing my nerve. In any case, what purpose would it serve? Her past-tense admiration is sincere. I should be gracious. I stand there, my grin turning to stone, institutionalized. Eminence creeps like gangrene up my legs.
"I'm glad," I manage. When in doubt, lie through your teeth. I'm lucky I still have teeth to lie through.
I'm standing back to the wall, with a new, full glass of wine. I crane my neck, peering through the crowd, over the well-arranged heads: it's time for Cordelia to appear, but she has not appeared. Disappointment is building in me, and impatience; and then anxiety. She must have set out in this direction. Something must have happened to her on the way here.
This goes on while I shake more hands and say more things, and the room gradually clears.
"That went off very well," says Charna, with a sigh, of relief I think. "You were wonderful." She's happy because I haven't bitten anyone or spilled my drink down their legs, or otherwise acted like an artist. "How about dinner, with all of us?"
"No," I say. "No thank you. I'm bone-tired. I think I'll just go back." I look around once more: Cordelia is not here.
Bone-tired, an old phrase, of my mother's. Though bones as such do not get tired. They're strong, they have a lot of stamina; they can go on for years and years, after the rest of the body has quit.
I'm headed for a future in which I sprawl propped in a wheelchair, shedding hair and drooling, while some young stranger spoons mushed food into my mouth and I stand in the snow under the bridge, and stand and stand. While Cordelia vanishes and vanishes.
I go out, into the sidewalk twilight, outside the gallery. I want to take a taxi, but I can barely lift my hand.
I've been prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence.
73
I take a taxi back to the studio, climb the four flights of stairs, dimly lit as they are at night, resting on the landings. I listen to my heart, going dull and fast in there under the layers of cloth. A flawed heart, in decline. I shouldn't have drunk all that wine. It's cold here, they've been skimping on the heat. The sound of my breath comes to me, a disembodied gasping, as if it's someone else breathing.
Cordelia has a tendency to exist.
I fumble the key into the keyhole, grope for the light switch. I could do without all the fake body parts around here. I make my way to the kitchenette, shambling a little, keeping my coat on because of the cold.
Coffee is what I need. I make some, wrap my hands around the warm cup, carry it to the workbench, clearing a space for my elbows among the wire and sharp-edged tools. Tomorrow I'm out of this city, and not a moment too soon. There's too much old time here.
So, Cordelia. Got you back.
Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
I drink my coffee, holding the shaking cup, hot liquid slopping down my chin. It's a good thing I'm not in a restaurant. It isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.
I wipe my arm with the coat sleeve across my face, which is wet because I'm crying. This is the kind of thing I should look out for: crying without reason, making a spectacle of myself. I feel it's a spectacle, even though no one's watching.
You're dead, Cordelia.
No I'm not.
Yes you are. You're dead.
Lie down.
PART
FIFTEEN
BRIDGE
74
I'm light-headed, as if convalescing. I slept rolled up in the duvet, still in my black dress, which I did not have the energy to take off. I woke at noon, with a large, cottony skull, pulsing with hangover, to discover I'd missed my plane. It's a long time since I've drunk that much of anything. As with many things, I should know better.
Now it's late afternoon. The sky is soft and gray, low, damp and blurred like wet blotting paper. The day feels vacant, as if everyone has moved out of it; as if there's nothing more to come.
I pace along the sidewalk, away from the demolished school. My old direction, I could still do it blindfolded. As always on these streets I feel disliked.
Down below me is the bridge. From here it looks neutral. I stand at the top of the hill, take a breath. Then I start down.
It's surprising how little has changed. The houses on either side are the same, although the muddy path is gone: in its place is a neat little hand railing, a trim cement walk. The smell of the fallen leaves is still here, the burning smell of their slow decay, but the nightshade vines with their purple flowers and red blood-drop berries and the weeds and random debris have been cleared away, and everything is pruned and civic.
Nevertheless there's a rustling, a rank undertone of cats and their huntings and furtive scratchings, still going on behind the deceptive tidiness. Another, wilder and more tangled landscape rising up, from beneath the surface of this one.
We remember through smells, as dogs do.
The willow trees overhanging the path are the same. Although they've grown, I've grown also, so the distance between us remains constant. The bridge itself is different, of course; it's made of concrete and lighted up at night, not wooden and falling apart and rotten-smelling. Nevertheless it's the same bridge.
Stephen's jar of light is buried down there somewhere.
At this time of year the day darkens early. It's silent, no voices of children; only the monotonous cawing of a crow, and behind it the sea sound of distant traffic. I rest my arms on the concrete wall and look down through the bare branches that are like dry coral. I used to think that if I jumped over, it would not be like falling, it would be more like diving; that if I died that way it would be soft, like drowning. Though far below, on the ground, there's a pumpkin, tossed over and smashed open, looking unpleasantly like a head.
The ravine is more filled in with bushes and trees than it used to be. In among them is the creek, running with clear water unsafe to drink. They've cleaned up the junk, the rusted car parts and discarded tires; this is no longer an unofficial garbage dump but a joggers' route. The n
eatly graveled runners' path beneath me leads uphill to the distant road and to the cemetery, where the dead people wait, forgetting themselves atom by atom, melting away like icicles, flowing downhill into the river.
That was where I fell into the water, there is the bank where I scrambled up. That's where I stood, with the snow falling on me, unable to summon the will to move. That's where I heard the voice.
There was no voice. No one came walking on air down from the bridge, there was no lady in a dark cloak bending over me. Although she has come back to me now in absolute clarity, acute in every detail, the outline of her hooded shape against the lights from the bridge, the red of her heart from within the cloak, I know this didn't happen. There was only darkness and silence. Nobody and nothing.
There's a sound: a shoe against loose rock.
It's time to go back. I push away from the cement wall, and the sky moves sideways.
I know that if I turn, right now, and look ahead of me along the path, someone will be standing there. At first I think it will be myself, in my old jacket, my blue knitted hat. But then I see that it's Cordelia. She's standing halfway up the hill, gazing back over her shoulder. She's wearing her gray snowsuit jacket but the hood is back, her head is bare. She has the same green wool knee socks, sloppily down around her ankles, the brown school brogues scuffed at the toes, one lace broken and knotted, the yellowish-brown hair with the bangs falling into her eyes, the eyes gray-green.
It's cold, colder. I can hear the rustle of the sleet, the water moving under the ice.
I know she's looking at me, the lopsided mouth smiling a little, the face closed and defiant. There is the same shame, the sick feeling in my body, the same knowledge of my own wrongness, awkwardness, weakness; the same wish to be loved; the same loneliness; the same fear. But these are not my own emotions any more. They are Cordelia's; as they always were.
I am the older one now, I'm the stronger. If she stays here any longer she will freeze to death; she will be left behind, in the wrong time. It's almost too late.
I reach out my arms to her, bend down, hands open to show I have no weapon. It's all right, I say to her. You can go home now.
The snow in my eyes withdraws like smoke.
*
When I turn, finally, Cordelia is no longer there. Only a middle-aged woman, pink-cheeked and bareheaded, coming down the hill toward me, in jeans and a heavy white pullover, with a dog on a green leash, a terrier. She passes me smiling, a civil, neutral smile.
There's nothing more for me to see. The bridge is only a bridge, the river a river, the sky is a sky. This landscape is empty now, a place for Sunday runners. Or not empty: filled with whatever it is by itself, when I'm not looking.
75
I'm on the plane, flying or being flown, westward toward the watery coast, the postcard mountains. Ahead of me, out the window, the sun sinks in a murderous, vulgar, unpaintable and glorious display of red and purple and orange; behind me the ordinary night rolls forward. Down on the ground the prairies unscroll, vast and mundane and plausible as hallucinations, dusted already with snow and scrawled with sinuous rivers.
I have the window seat. In the two seats beside me are two old ladies, old women, each with a knitted cardigan, each with yellowy-white hair and thick-lensed glasses with a chain for around the neck, each with a desiccated mouth lipsticked bright red with bravado. They have their trays lowered and are drinking tea and playing Snap, fumbling the slippery cards, laughing like cars on gravel when they cheat or make mistakes. From time to time they get up, unbuckling themselves laboriously, and hobble to the back of the plane, to smoke cigarettes and line up for the washroom. When they return they make bathroom jokes, quips about wetting your pants and running out of toilet paper, eyeing me cunningly while they do so. I wonder how old they think they are, underneath the disguise of their bodies; or how old they think I am. Perhaps, to them, I look like their mother.
They seem to me amazingly carefree. They have saved up for this trip and they are damn well going to enjoy it, despite the arthritis of one, the swollen legs of the other. They're rambunctious, they're full of beans; they're tough as thirteen, they're innocent and dirty, they don't give a hoot. Responsibilities have fallen away from them, obligations, old hates and grievances; now for a short while they can play again like children, but this time without the pain.
This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that's gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.
Now it's full night, clear, moonless and filled with stars, which are not eternal as was once thought, which are not where we think they are. If they were sounds, they would be echoes, of something that happened millions of years ago: a word made of numbers. Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing.
It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it's enough to see by.
About the Author
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
The daughter of a forest entomologist, Atwood spent a large part of her childhood in the Canadian wilderness. At the age of six she began to write "poems, morality plays, comic books, and an unfinished novel about an ant." At sixteen she found that writing was "suddenly the only thing I wanted to do."
Throughout her career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and several honorary degrees, including the Canadian Governor General's Award, Le Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature. She is the author of more than thirty volumes of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, including children's books and short stories. Her most recent works include The Handmaid's Tale (1986), Cat's Eye (1989), Alias Grace (1996), The Blind Assassin (2000), and Oryx and Crake (2003), the story collection Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994), and a volume of poetry, Morning in the Burned House (1995).
Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than twenty-five countries. She has traveled extensively and has lived in Boston, Vancouver, Montreal, London, Provence, Berlin, and Edinburgh.
Margaret Atwood now lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson and their daughter.
The Margaret Atwood Society, whose main goal is to promote scholarly study of Atwood's work, publishes an annual newsletter with annotated bibliography, as well as a midyear issue; and, as an official MLA Allied Organization, it meets annually in conjunction with the Modern Language Association convention. For membership, contact Mary Kirtz, Department of English, University of Akron, Akron, Ohio 44325.
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