Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

by Margaret Atwood

  “Don’t do that,” said Jorrie. “I’d feel left out.”

  “If I get prostate cancer,” said Tin, “I pledge to arrange a prostate transplant for you so you can share the experience. I know a lot of guys who wouldn’t mind heaving their prostates out the window about now. They could at least get a good night’s sleep: dispense with the pee parade.”

  Jorrie grinned. “Thanks a bundle,” she said. “I’ve always wanted a prostate. One more thing to whine about in the golden years. Think the donor might like to throw in the whole scrotum?”

  “That remark,” said Tin, “is lacking in fastidiousness. As you intended. More coffee?”

  Because they’re twins they can be who they really are with each other, a thing they haven’t managed very well with anyone else. Even when they’re putting on a front, they fool only outside people: to each other they’re transparent as guppies, they can see each other’s innards. Or that’s their story; though, as Tin is well aware – having once had a lover with an aquarium – even guppies have their opacities.

  He gazes fondly at Jorrie as she frowns at the obituaries through her crimsonframed reading glasses; or frowns as much as she is able to, given the Botox. In recent years – in recent decades – Jorrie has developed the slightly pop-eyed expression of someone who’s had too much work done. There are hair issues as well. As least he’s been able to stop her from dying it jet black: way too Undead with her presentday skin tone, which is lacking in glow despite the tancoloured foundation and the sparkly bronze mineralelements powder she so assiduously applies, the poor deluded wretch.

  “You’re only as old as you feel,” she says too frequently, while trying to talk Tin into some absurdity – rumba classes, watercolour painting holidays, ruinous fads such as spinning. He cannot picture himself on a stationary bicycle, wearing Spandex tights, whirring away like a sawmill and further destroying his wizened crotch. He cannot picture himself on a bicycle of any sort. The painting was a nonstarter: if he were going to do that, why would he want to do it in a group of whinnying amateurs? As for the rumba, you have to be able to swivel your coccyx, a skill he lost around the time he gave up on sex.

  “Exactly,” he replies. “I feel two thousand. I am older than the rocks among which I sit.”

  “What rocks? What are you talking about? You’re sitting on the sofa!”

  “It’s a quotation,” he says. “From Walter Pater.”

  “Oh, you and your quotations! Not everyone lives in quotation marks, you know.”

  Tin sighs. Jorrie is not a wide reader, preferring historical romances about the Tudors and the Borgias to anything more substantial. “Like the vampire, I have been dead many times,” he cites to himself, though he doesn’t wish to alarm her by saying it out loud: an alarmed Jorrie is always a lot of work. She wouldn’t be afraid of vampires as such: being rash and curious, she’d be the first into the forbidden crypt. But she wouldn’t like the thought of Tin turning into one, or turning into anyone other than her idea of him.

  Meanwhile, she’s firmly bent on turning into someone else herself. She does not come up to her own standards. Her only superstitions have to do with the labels on expensive cosmetics. Jorrie actually believes the deceitful comehither labels – the plumpings, the firmings, the unwrinklings, the returning of youthful dews, the hints of immortality – despite having been in advertising herself, a vocation guaranteed to take the bloom off ornamental adjectives. There are so many things in life about which she ought to know better but does not, the art of makeup being one of them. He has to keep reminding her not to halt the sparkly bronze procedure halfway down her neck: otherwise her head will look sewed on.

  The hair compromise he finally agreed to is a white strip on the left side – geriatric punk, he’d whispered to himself – with, recently, the addition of an arresting scarlet patch. The total image is that of an alarmed skunk trapped in the floodlights after an encounter with a ketchup bottle. He crosses his fingers about that bloodcoloured blotch and hopes he will not be accused of elder bashing.

  Gone are the days when Jorrie – once known for her sultry gypsy image and her vivid African prints and clanky ethnic jewellery – could pull off any fashion whim that caught her eye. She’s lost the knack, though she’s kept her flamboyant habits. Mutton dressed as Spam, he’s longed to say to her from time to time, though he hasn’t said it. Instead he’s clamped himself together and held himself back, and said it about other women to make her laugh.

  He does usually manage to steer her away from the steeper and more lethal precipices. There was the interlude with the nose ring, back in the ’90s: she’d sprung the tacky doodad on him without prior warning, and asked him pointblank what he thought. He’d had to sew his mouth shut, though he’d done some hypocritical nodding and murmuring. She’d jettisoned the tawdry accessory once she’d caught a cold and practically torn her nostril off when her handkerchief got snagged on the ring.

  After that came the threat of a tongue stud, but luckily she’d consulted him first. What had he said? “You want the inside of your mouth to look like a biker’s jacket?” Maybe not: too much risk of the answer being Yes. Certainly he wouldn’t have informed her that some men view such baubles as blowjob advertisements: that might have been an incentive. A health warning: “You could die of septicemia of the tongue?” Health warnings don’t work with her, as she considers them a challenge: her superior immune system will surely crush any microbe the invisible world may toss her way.

  More likely he’d said, “You’d sound like Daffy Duck and you’d spit all over everyone. Not attractive, in my books. Anyway, the stud wave has passed. Only stockbrokers get them any more.” That at least made her giggle.

  It’s best not to overreact to her. Push, and she pushes back. He hasn’t forgotten her childhood tantrums and the fights she used to get into, flailing her long arms ineffectually as the other children laughed and jeered her on. He’d watch, almost in tears himself: he couldn’t extricate her, confined to the boys’ side of the schoolyard as he was.

  So he avoids confrontation. Languor is a more efficient method of control.

  The twins were christened Marjorie and Martin, at a time when parents thought alliterative names for children were snappy, and were costumed alike in miniature overalls. Even their mother – not the sharpest knife in the drawer – realized that it would not do to stick Martin into a dress because he might turn into a pansy, her term. So there they are, aged two, in their matching sailor suits and their tiny sailor hats, holding hands and squinting into the sun with their elvish, lopsided smiles: his skewed up at the left, hers at the right. You can’t tell whether they’re boys or girls, but you have to admit they’re delicious. Behind them is a man’s body in a uniform, it being the war: their father with the top part of his head cut off, which was shortly to happen to him in reality. Their mother used to weep buckets over that photo when she’d been drinking. She viewed it as a premonition: if only she’d held the camera straight, Weston’s head would not have been cropped like that and the fatal explosion would never have happened.

  Gazing at their past selves, Jorrie and Tin feel a tenderness they seldom display to anyone in the present. They’d like to hug those scrumptious little scamps, those yellowing, fading echoes. They’d like to assure the pintsized seafarers that, though their voyage through time is about to take a turn for the worse and will remain worse for a while, it will all work out in the end. Or near the end; which is, let’s face it, where they are now.

  Because, voilà, here they are together again, full circle. A few inner wounds, a few scars, a few abrasions, but still standing. Still Jorrie and Tin, who’d rebelled at being nicknamed Marje and Marv, and who’d taken to using their last syllables as their real, secret names, known to them alone. Jorrie and Tin, in revolt against society’s plans for them: no white weddings, for instance. Jorrie and Tin, who’d refused to knuckle under.

  Again, that’s their story. Privately Tin can recall quite a few mortifying tho
ugh satisfying knucklingsunder he has submitted to, in the wild nighttime shrubberies of Cherry Beach and elsewhere, but no need to sully the ears of Jorrie with those. At least he never ran into any of his students while nervously prowling the midnight pathways. At least he never got mugged. At least he never got caught.

  “So heavenly,” says Tin, smiling at the photograph, which is framed in fumed oak and resides on the dining room wall above the art deco buffet, a steal when Tin acquired it forty years ago. “Too bad our hair went dark.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” says Jorrie. “Blond is overrated.”

  “It’s coming back,” says Tin. “The ’50s are having a moment again, have you noticed? It’s the Marilyn thing.”

  He does not believe in the ’50s moment as portrayed recently on screens large and small. While they were going on, the ’50s seemed like normal life, but now they’ve become the olden days: fodder for television shows in which the colours are wrong – too clean, too pastel – and the crinolines are too numerous. Hardly anyone had a ponytail in real life, nor did the adult men always wear tailored suits, with fedoras tilted at a jaunty angle and white pocket handkerchiefs starched into triangles.

  They did smoke pipes, however, though pipes were fading even then. On the weekends they mooched around in moccasins and jeans – primitive jeans, but jeans. They read their newspapers while sitting in their Naugahyde lounge chairs with matching hassocks, drinking a relaxing Manhattan and smoking fit to kill; they lovingly washed and waxed their sharpfinned and overchromed gasguzzler cars; they mowed their lawns with push mowers. Or that’s what the fathers of the twins’ friends did. Tin has a spot of wistfulness in his heart about the bulbous lounge chairs and the shiny, innocent, lethal cars and the cumbersome push lawn mowers. If their own father had lived, would things have been better for him?

  No. Things would not have been better, they would have been horrific. He would have had to go fishing: hoick fish up out of the water and assassinate them while uttering manly grunts. Crawl under cars with wrenches, saying things like “muffler.” Be slapped on the back and told his dad was proud of him. Fat chance.

  “Though Earnest Hemingway’s mother did it,” said Jorrie.

  “Excuse me? Did what?”

  “Put Ernie in a dress.”

  “Right.”

  The twins often revert to a previous point in their ongoing conversation, though they know better than to do that if anyone else is around. It’s annoying; not to them, they can pick up each other’s dropped stitches, but it can make other people feel excluded. Or else – nowadays – it can make other people feel they are missing a cog or two.

  “And then he blew his head off,” said Tin. “Which I personally have no intention of doing.”

  “Better not,” said Jorrie. “It would make such a mess. Brain salad all over the walls. Leap off a bridge, if the urge comes over you.”

  “Thanks a bundle,” says Tin. “I’ll keep that suggestion in mind.”

  “Any time.”

  That’s how they go on: like a ’30s wisecrackers’ movie. The Marx kids. Hepburn and Tracy. Nick and Nora Charles, minus the chaindrinking of martinis, which Jorrie and Tin can’t handle any more. They skate over the surfaces, chilled and thin and shiny; they avoid the depths. It wears Tin out a bit, their doubles act. Possibly Jorrie feels the same, but they both understand that they have to keep up their ends.

  Tin turned into a pansy anyway, which the twins purport to regard as a hilarious booby trap sprung on their mother, even though she was dead by the time he stopped concealing his pansyhood. The role betrayal should have gone the other way round – Jorrie having been the child gendercrosser as far as the sailor outfits went – but she could never make the jump to lesbianism because she didn’t like other women much.

  Why would she, considering their mother? Not only was Mother Maeve dumb as a sack of hammers, but as time went by and her grief over their exploded father failed to abate, she’d morphed into a binge drinker who’d robbed the twins’ piggy banks for booze money. She also brought home oafs and thugs, for the purpose – said Tin, when describing these episodes at dinner parties, much later – “for the purpose of sexual congress.” Too funny! When the twins would hear the front door opening, they’d skin out the back. Or they’d hide in the cellar, then creep upstairs once things went quiet to spy on the congressional goings-on; or they’d eavesdrop if the bedroom door was closed.

  What had they felt about all that when they were children? They can’t really recall, since they’ve papered over the too-frequently-repeated primal scene with so many layers of hare-brained and possibly mythological narration that the original simple outlines have been obscured. (Did the dog really run outside with a large black brassiere in its mouth and bury it in the backyard? Did they even have a dog? Did Oedipus solve the riddle of the Sphinx? Did Jason make off with the Golden Fleece? It’s the same sort of question.)

  For Tin, the anecdotal family humour has long ceased to be amusing. Their mother died early, and not in a good way. Not that anyone dies in a good way, Tin footnotes to himself, but there are degrees. Being hit by a truck after closing time while jaywalking blinded with mournful tears was not a good way. Though it was quick. And it meant that their life was free of the oafs and thugs by the time they went to university. Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono, Tin noted in the journal he was sporadically keeping then. Every cloud has a silver lining.

  Two of the oafs had the nerve to come to the funeral, which may explain Jorrie’s fixation on funerals. She still feels she shouldn’t have let those assholes get away with it: turning up at the graveside, pretending to be sad, telling the twins what a fine and kindhearted woman their mother had been, what a good friend. “Friend, like shit! All they wanted was an easy lay!” she’d raged. She ought to have called them on it; she ought to have made a scene. Punched them in the nose.

  Tin’s view is that maybe these men really were sad. Is it so out of the question that they could actually have loved Mother Maeve, in one or two or even three senses of the word? Amor, voluptas, caritas. But he’s kept that view to himself: to express it would be too irritating to Jorrie, especially if he includes the Latin. Jorrie has scant patience with anything Latin. It’s a part of his life she’s never been able to grasp. Why waste your life on a bunch of fusty, forgotten scribblers in a dead language? He was so smart, he was so talented, he could have been … (A long list of things he could have been would follow, none of them in any way possible.)

  So best not to hit that button.

  “Oafs and thugs” was a phrase they’d lifted from their eighth-grade principal, who’d harangued the whole school about the dangers of turning into oafs and thugs, especially if you threw snowballs with rocks in them or wrote swear words on the blackboard. “Oafs vs. Thugs” became, briefly, a schoolyard game invented by Tin in his popular, prepansy period. It was something like Capture the Flag and was played only on the boys’ side of the playground. Girls could not be oafs and thugs, said Tin: only boys, which made Jorrie resentful.

  It was she who came up with the idea of calling Mother Maeve’s onagain, offagain gentleman callers – “or you could say, inagain, outagain,” Tin would quip later – the Oafs and Thugs. That ruined the game for Tin; no doubt it contributed to his pansyhood, he decided later. “Don’t blame me,” said Jorrie. “I didn’t invite them home.”

  “Darling, I’m not blaming you, I’m thanking you,” Tin said. “I’m deeply grateful.” Which, by that time – after he’d sorted out a few things – he really was.

  Their mother wasn’t drunk all the time. Her binges took place only on weekends: she had an underpaid secretarial job that she needed to make ends meet, the military widow’s pension being so miniscule. And she did love the twins in her own way.

  “At least she wasn’t too violent,” Jorrie would say. “Though she got carried away.”

  “Everyone spanked their kids then. Everyone got carried away.” Indeed it was a point of honour t
o compare your slice of corporal punishment with those of other children, and to exaggerate. Slippers, belts, rulers, hairbrushes, ping-pong paddles: those were the parental weapons of choice. It made the young twins sad that they didn’t have a father to administer such beatings, only ineffectual Mother Maeve, whom they could reduce to tears by pretending to be mortally injured, whom they could tease with relative impunity, from whom they could run away. There were two of them and only one of her, so they ganged up.

  “I suppose we were heartless,” Jorrie would say.

  “We were disobedient. We talked back. We were out of control. But adorable, you have to grant that.”

  “We were brats. Heartless little brats. We showed no mercy,” Jorrie sometimes adds. Is it regret, or bragging?

  On the cusp of adolescence, Jorrie had a painful experience with one of the oafs – a sneak attack from which Tin failed to defend her, being asleep at the time. That has weighed on him. It must have messed up her life in regards to men, though most likely her life would have been messed up anyway. She deals with this incident now by making fun of it – “I was ravished by a troll!” – but she hasn’t always managed that. She was downright sullen on the subject of rape in the early 1970s when so many women were going on the rampage, but she seems to have got over that by now.

  Molesting isn’t everything, in Tin’s view. He himself never got molested by the oafs, but his relationships with men were just as scrambled, and if anything more so. Jorrie said he had a problem with love: he conceptualizes it too much. He said Jorrie didn’t conceptualize it enough. That was back when love was still a topic of conversation for them.

  “We should put all of our lovers in a blender,” Jorrie said once. “Mix them up, average them out.” Tin said she had a brutalist way of putting things.

  The truth is, thinks Tin, that the twins never loved anyone except each other. Or they didn’t love anyone unconditionally. Their other loves had many conditions.