The Classic Fairy Tales (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)

by Edited by Maria Tatar

* * *

  †  Charles F. Lummis, Pueblo Indian Folk-Stories (New York: Century, 1910), pp. 203–05.

    1. Fairy woman.

    2. A stone used for grinding maize.

  MARGARET ATWOOD

  Bluebeard’s Egg†

  Sally stands at the kitchen window, waiting for the sauce she’s reducing to come to a simmer, looking out. Past the garage the lot sweeps downwards, into the ravine; it’s a wilderness there, of bushes and branches and what Sally thinks of as vines. It was her idea to have a kind of terrace, built of old railroad ties, with wild flowers growing between them, but Edward says he likes it the way it is. There’s a playhouse down at the bottom, near the fence; from here she can just see the roof. It has nothing to do with Edward’s kids, in their earlier incarnations, before Sally’s time; it’s more ancient than that, and falling apart. Sally would like it cleared away. She thinks drunks sleep in it, the men who live under the bridges down there, who occasionally wander over the fence (which is broken down, from where they step on it) and up the hill, to emerge squinting like moles into the light of Sally’s well-kept back lawn.

  Off to the left is Ed, in his windbreaker; it’s officially spring, Sally’s blue scylla is in flower, but it’s chilly for this time of year. Ed’s windbreaker is an old one he won’t throw out; it still says WILDCATS, relic of some team he was on in high school, an era so prehistoric Sally can barely imagine it; though picturing Ed at high school is not all that difficult. Girls would have had crushes on him, he would have been unconscious of it; things like that don’t change. He’s puttering around the rock garden now; some of the rocks stick out too far and are in danger of grazing the side of Sally’s Peugeot, on its way to the garage, and he’s moving them around. He likes doing things like that, puttering, humming to himself. He won’t wear work gloves, though she keeps telling him he could squash his fingers.

  Watching his bent back with its frayed, poignant lettering, Sally dissolves; which is not infrequent with her. My darling Edward, she thinks. Edward Bear,1 of little brain. How I love you. At times like this she feels very protective of him.

  Sally knows for a fact that dumb blondes were loved, not because they were blondes, but because they were dumb. It was their helplessness and confusion that were so sexually attractive, once; not their hair. It wasn’t false, the rush of tenderness men must have felt for such women. Sally understands it.

  For it must be admitted: Sally is in love with Ed because of his stupidity, his monumental and almost energetic stupidity: energetic, because Ed’s stupidity is not passive. He’s no mere blockhead;2 you’d have to be working at it to be that stupid. Does it make Sally feel smug, or smarter than he is, or even smarter than she really is herself? No; on the contrary, it makes her humble. It fills her with wonder that the world can contain such marvels as Ed’s colossal and endearing thickness. He is just so stupid. Every time he gives her another piece of evidence, another tile that she can glue into place in the vast mosaic of his stupidity she’s continually piecing together, she wants to hug him, and often does; and he is so stupid he can never figure out what for.

  Because Ed is so stupid he doesn’t even know he’s stupid. He’s a child of luck, a third son who, armed with nothing but a certain feebleminded amiability, manages to make it through the forest with all its witches and traps and pitfalls and ends up with the princess, who is Sally, of course. It helps that he’s handsome.

  On good days she sees his stupidity as innocence, lamblike, shining with the light of (for instance) green daisied meadows in the sun. (When Sally starts thinking this way about Ed, in terms of the calendar art from the service-station washrooms of her childhood, dredging up images of a boy with curly golden hair, his arm thrown around the neck of an Irish setter—a notorious brainless beast, she reminds herself—she knows she is sliding over the edge, into a ghastly kind of sentimentality, and that she must stop at once, or Ed will vanish, to be replaced by a stuffed facsimile, useful for little else but an umbrella stand. Ed is a real person, with a lot more to him than these simplistic renditions allow for; which sometimes worries her.) On bad days though, she sees his stupidity as willfulness, a stubborn determination to shut things out. His obtuseness is a wall, within which he can go about his business, humming to himself, while Sally, locked outside, must hack her way through the brambles3 with hardly so much as a transparent raincoat between them and her skin.

  Why did she choose him (or, to be precise, as she tries to be with herself and sometimes is even out loud, hunt him down), when it’s clear to everyone she had other options? To Marylynn, who is her best though most recent friend, she’s explained it by saying she was spoiled when young by reading too many Agatha Christie murder mysteries, of the kind in which the clever and witty heroine passes over the equally clever and witty first-lead male, who’s helped solve the crime, in order to marry the second-lead male, the stupid one, the one who would have been arrested and condemned and executed if it hadn’t been for her cleverness. Maybe this is how she sees Ed: if it weren’t for her, his blundering too-many-thumbs kindness would get him into all sorts of quagmires, all sorts of sink-holes he’d never be able to get himself out of, and then he’d be done for.

  “Sink-hole” and “quagmire” are not flattering ways of speaking about other women, but this is what is at the back of Sally’s mind; specifically, Ed’s two previous wives. Sally didn’t exactly extricate him from their clutches. She’s never even met the first one, who moved to the west coast fourteen years ago and sends Christmas cards, and the second one was middle-aged and already in the act of severing herself from Ed before Sally came along. (For Sally, “middle-aged” means anyone five years older than she is. It has always meant this. She applies it only to women, however. She doesn’t think of Ed as middle-aged, although the gap between them is considerably more than five years.)

  Ed doesn’t know what happened with these marriages, what went wrong. His protestations of ignorance, his refusal to discuss the finer points, is frustrating to Sally, because she would like to hear the whole story. But it’s also cause for anxiety: if he doesn’t know what happened with the other two, maybe the same thing could be happening with her and he doesn’t know about that, either. Stupidity like Ed’s can be a health hazard, for other people. What if he wakes up one day and decides that she isn’t the true bride4 after all, but the false one? Then she will be put into a barrel stuck full of nails5 and rolled downhill, endlessly, while he is sitting in yet another bridal bed, drinking champagne. She remembers the brand name, because she bought it herself. Champagne isn’t the sort of finishing touch that would occur to Ed, though he enjoyed it enough at the time.

  But outwardly Sally makes a joke of all this. “He doesn’t know,” she says to Marylynn, laughing a little, and they shake their heads. If it were them, they’d know, all right. Marylynn is in fact divorced, and she can list every single thing that went wrong, item by item. After doing this, she adds that her divorce was one of the best things that ever happened to her. “I was just a nothing before,” she says. “It made me pull myself together.”

  Sally, looking across the kitchen table at Marylynn, has to agree that she is far from being a nothing now. She started out re-doing people’s closets, and has worked that up into her own interior-design firm. She does the houses of the newly rich, those who lack ancestral furniture and the confidence to be shabby, and who wish their interiors to reflect a personal taste they do not in reality possess.

  “What they want are mausoleums,” Marylynn says, “or hotels,” and she cheerfully supplies them. “Right down to the ash-trays. Imagine having someone else pick out your ash-trays for you.”

  By saying this, Marylynn lets Sally know that she’s not including her in that category, though Sally did in fact hire her, at the very first, to help with a few details around the house. It was Marylynn who redesigned the wall of closets in the master bedroom and who found Sally’s massive Chinese mahogany table, which cost her another se
ven hundred dollars to have stripped. But it turned out to be perfect, as Marylynn said it would. Now she’s dug up a nineteenth-century keyhole desk, which both she and Sally know will be exactly right for the bay-windowed alcove off the living room. “Why do you need it?” Ed said in his puzzled way. “I thought you worked in your study.” Sally admitted this, but said they could keep the telephone bills in it, which appeared to satisfy him. She knows exactly what she needs it for: she needs it to sit at, in something flowing, backlit by the morning sunlight, gracefully dashing off notes. She saw a 1940’s advertisement for coffee like this once; and the husband was standing behind the chair, leaning over, with a worshipful expression on his face.

  Marylynn is the kind of friend Sally does not have to explain any of this to, because it’s assumed between them. Her intelligence is the kind Sally respects.

  Marylynn is tall and elegant, and makes anything she is wearing seem fashionable. Her hair is prematurely grey and she leaves it that way. She goes in for loose blouses in cream-coloured silk, and eccentric scarves gathered from interesting shops and odd corners of the world, thrown carelessly around her neck and over one shoulder. (Sally has tried this toss in the mirror, but it doesn’t work.) Marylynn has a large collection of unusual shoes; she says they’re unusual because her feet are so big, but Sally knows better. Sally, who used to think of herself as pretty enough and now thinks of herself as doing quite well for her age, envies Marylynn her bone structure, which will serve her well when the inevitable happens.

  Whenever Marylynn is coming to dinner, as she is today—she’s bringing the desk, too—Sally takes especial care with her clothes and makeup. Marylynn, she knows, is her real audience for such things, since no changes she effects in herself seem to affect Ed one way or the other, or even to register with him. “You look fine to me” is all he says, no matter how she really looks. (But does she want him to see her more clearly, or not? Most likely not. If he did he would notice the incipient wrinkles, the small pouches of flesh that are not quite there yet, the network forming beneath her eyes. It’s better as it is.)

  Sally has repeated this remark of Ed’s to Marylynn, adding that he said it the day the Jacuzzi overflowed because the smoke alarm went off, because an English muffin she was heating to eat in the bathtub got stuck in the toaster, and she had to spend an hour putting down newspaper and mopping up, and only had half an hour to dress for a dinner they were going to. “Really I looked like the wrath of God,” said Sally. These days she finds herself repeating to Marylynn many of the things Ed says: the stupid things. Marylynn is the only one of Sally’s friends she has confided in to this extent.

  “Ed is cute as a button,” Marylynn said. “In fact, he’s just like a button: he’s so bright and shiny. If he were mine, I’d get him bronzed and keep him on the mantelpiece.”

  Marylynn is even better than Sally at concocting formulations for Ed’s particular brand of stupidity, which can irritate Sally: coming from herself, this sort of comment appears to her indulgent and loving, but from Marylynn it borders on the patronizing. So then she sticks up for Ed, who is by no means stupid about everything. When you narrow it down, there’s only one area of life he’s hopeless about. The rest of the time he’s intelligent enough, some even say brilliant: otherwise, how could he be so successful?

  Ed is a heart man, one of the best, and the irony of this is not lost on Sally: who could possibly know less about the workings of hearts, real hearts, the kind symbolized by red satin surrounded by lace and topped by pink bows, than Ed? Hearts with arrows in them. At the same time, the fact that he’s a heart man is a large part of his allure. Women corner him on sofas, trap him in bay-windows at cocktail parties, mutter to him in confidential voices at dinner parties. They behave this way right in front of Sally, under her very nose, as if she’s invisible, and Ed lets them do it. This would never happen if he were in banking or construction.

  As it is, everywhere he goes he is beset by sirens. They want him to fix their hearts. Each of them seems to have a little something wrong—a murmur, a whisper. Or they faint a lot and want him to tell them why. This is always what the conversations are about, according to Ed, and Sally believes it. Once she’d wanted it herself, that mirage. What had she invented for him, in the beginning? A heavy heart, that beat too hard after meals. And he’d been so sweet, looking at her with those stunned brown eyes of his, as if her heart were the genuine topic, listening to her gravely as if he’d never heard any of this twaddle before, advising her to drink less coffee. And she’d felt such triumph, to have carried off her imposture, pried out of him that miniscule token of concern.

  Thinking back on this incident makes her uneasy, now that she’s seen her own performance repeated so many times, including the hand placed lightly on the heart, to call attention of course to the breasts. Some of these women have been within inches of getting Ed to put his head down on their chests, right there in Sally’s living room. Watching all this out of the corners of her eyes while serving the liqueurs, Sally feels the Aztec rise within her. Trouble with your heart? Get it removed, she thinks. Then you’ll have no more problems.

  Sometimes Sally worries that she’s a nothing, the way Marylynn was before she got a divorce and a job. But Sally isn’t a nothing; therefore, she doesn’t need a divorce to stop being one. And she’s always had a job of some sort; in fact she has one now. Luckily Ed has no objection; he doesn’t have much of an objection to anything she does.

  Her job is supposed to be full-time, but in effect it’s part-time, because Sally can take a lot of the work away and do it at home, and, as she says, with one arm tied behind her back. When Sally is being ornery, when she’s playing the dull wife of a fascinating heart man—she does this with people she can’t be bothered with—she says she works in a bank, nothing important. Then she watches their eyes dismiss her. When, on the other hand, she’s trying to impress, she says she’s in P.R. In reality she runs the in-house organ for a trust company, a medium-sized one. This is a thin magazine, nicely printed, which is supposed to make the employees feel that some of the boys are doing worthwhile things out there and are human beings as well. It’s still the boys, though the few women in anything resembling key positions are wheeled out regularly, bloused and suited and smiling brightly, with what they hope will come across as confidence rather than aggression.

  This is the latest in a string of such jobs Sally has held over the years: comfortable enough jobs that engage only half of her cogs and wheels, and that end up leading nowhere. Technically she’s second-in-command: over her is a man who wasn’t working out in management, but who couldn’t be fired because his wife was related to the chairman of the board. He goes out for long alcoholic lunches and plays a lot of golf, and Sally runs the show. This man gets the official credit for everything Sally does right, but the senior executives in the company take Sally aside when no one is looking and tell her what a great gal she is and what a whiz she is at holding up her end.

  The real pay-off for Sally, though, is that her boss provides her with an endless supply of anecdotes. She dines out on stories about his dimwittedness and pomposity, his lobotomized suggestions about what the two of them should cook up for the magazine; the organ, as she says he always calls it. “He says we need some fresh blood to perk up the organ,” Sally says, and the heart men grin at her. “He actually said that?” Talking like this about her boss would be reckless—you never know what might get back to him, with the world as small as it is—if Sally were afraid of losing her job, but she isn’t. There’s an unspoken agreement between her and this man: they both know that if she goes, he goes, because who else would put up with him? Sally might angle for his job, if she were stupid enough to disregard his family connections, if she coveted the trappings of power. But she’s just fine where she is. Jokingly, she says she’s reached her level of incompetence. She says she suffers from fear of success.

  Her boss is white-haired, slender, and tanned, and looks like an English gin ad. De
spite his vapidity he’s outwardly distinguished, she allows him that. In truth she pampers him outrageously, indulges him, covers up for him at every turn, though she stops short of behaving like a secretary: she doesn’t bring him coffee. They both have a secretary who does that anyway. The one time he made a pass at her, when he came in from lunch visibly reeling, Sally was kind about it.

  Occasionally, though not often, Sally has to travel in connection with her job. She’s sent off to places like Edmonton, where they have a branch. She interviews the boys at the middle and senior levels; they have lunch, and the boys talk about ups and downs in oil or the slump in the real-estate market. Then she gets taken on tours of shopping plazas under construction. It’s always windy, and grit blows into her face. She comes back to home base and writes a piece on the youthfulness and vitality of the West.

  She teases Ed, while she packs, saying she’s going off for a rendezvous with a dashing financier or two. Ed isn’t threatened; he tells her to enjoy herself, and she hugs him and tells him how much she will miss him. He’s so dumb it doesn’t occur to him she might not be joking. In point of fact, it would have been quite possible for Sally to have had an affair, or at least a one- or two-night stand, on several of these occasions: she knows when those chalk lines are being drawn, when she’s being dared to step over them. But she isn’t interested in having an affair with anyone but Ed.

  She doesn’t eat much on the planes; she doesn’t like the food. But on the return trip, she invariably saves the pre-packaged parts of the meal, the cheese in its plastic wrap, the miniature chocolate bar, the bag of pretzels. She ferrets them away in her purse. She thinks of them as supplies, that she may need if she gets stuck in a strange airport, if they have to change course because of snow or fog, for instance. All kinds of things could happen, although they never have. When she gets home she takes the things from her purse and throws them out.