Read Online Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood - Free Book Online Page B

Radical chic, they called it. One day she found herself short of petty cash and did a quick piece on thereturn of hats with veils. It wasn’t even radical, it was only chic, and she tried not to feel too guilty about it.
    Now that she no longer suffers from illusions, Rennie views her kind of honesty less as a virtue than a perversion, one from which she still suffers, true; but, like psoriasis and hemorrhoids, those other diseases typical of Griswold, it can be kept under control. Why make such things public? Her closet honesty is – there’s no doubt about it – a professional liability.
    Other people have no such scruples. Everything is relative, everything is fashion. When a thing or a person has been too widely praised, you merely reverse the adjectives. No one considers this perverse, it’s simply the nature of the business, and the business runs on high turnover. You write about something until people become tired of reading about it or you become tired of writing about it, and if you’re good enough or lucky enough it’s the same thing. Then you write about something else.
    Rennie is still close enough to Griswold to find this attitude irritating at times. Last year she went into the office of the
Toronto Star
when some of the younger staff members were making up a list. It was close to New Year’s and they were drinking gallon white wine out of styrofoam coffee cups and killing themselves laughing. The list was a regular feature. Sometimes it was called “In and Out,” sometimes “Plus and Minus”; such lists reassured people, including those who wrote them. It made them think they could make distinctions, choices that would somehow vindicate them. She had once composed such lists herself.
    This time the list was called “Class: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t.” Ronald Reagan didn’t have class, Pierre Trudeau did. Jogging didn’t have class, contemporary dance did, but only if you did it in jogging pants, which did, for that but not for jogging, but not in stretchy plunge-back leotards, which didn’t for that but did if you went swimming in them, instead of in bathing suits with built-in bra cups,which didn’t. Marilyn’s didn’t, the Lickin’ Chicken on Bloor, which didn’t sell chicken, did.
    “What else for the No list?” they asked her, giggling already, anticipating her answer. “What about Margaret Trudeau?”
    “What about the word
class?”
she said, and they weren’t sure whether that was funny or not.
    Which is a problem she has. The other problem is the reputation she’s getting for being too picky. She’s aware of this, she listens to gossip; people are beginning to think she won’t finish assignments. There’s some truth to this: increasingly there are things she can’t seem to do. Maybe it isn’t
can’t
, maybe it’s
won’t
. What she wants is something legitimate to say. Which is childish. Loss of nerve, she’s decided. It started before the operation but it’s getting worse. Maybe she’s having a mid-life crisis, way too soon. Maybe it’s Griswold squeezing her head:
If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all
. Not that its own maxims ever stopped Griswold.
    Two months ago she was offered a good piece, a profile in
Pandora’s
“Women of Achievement” series. A ballet dancer, a poet, a female executive from a cheese food company, a judge, a designer who specialized in shoes with glitter faces on the toes. Rennie wanted the designer but they gave her the judge, because the judge was supposed to be hard to do and Rennie was supposed to be good.
    Rennie was not prepared for the panic that overtook her the first day out. The judge was nice enough, but what did you say? What does it feel like to be a judge? she asked. What does it feel like to be anything? said the judge, who was only a year older than Rennie. She smiled. It’s a job. I love it.
    The judge had two wonderful children and an adoring husband who didn’t at all mind the time she spent