Read Online Surfacing by Margaret Atwood - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Margaret Atwood
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as easily as getting undressed.
I remember the hair on Joe’s back, vestigial, like appendices and little toes: soon we’ll evolve into total baldness. I like the hair though, and the heavy teeth, thick shoulders, unexpectedly slight hips, hands whose texture I can still feel on my skin, roughened and leathery from the clay. Everything I value about him seems to be physical: the rest is either unknown, disagreeable or ridiculous. I don’t care much for his temperament, which alternates between surliness and gloom, or for the overgrown pots he throws so skilfully on the wheel and then mutilates, cutting holes in them, strangling them, slashing them open. That’s unfair, he never uses a knife, only his fingers, and a lot of the time he only bends them, doubles them over; even so they have a disagreeable mutant quality. Nobody else admires them either: the aspiring housewives he teaches two evenings a week, Pottery and Ceramics 432- A , want to make ashtrays and plates with cheerful daisies on them instead, and the things don’t sell at all in the few handicraft shops that will even stock them. So they accumulate in our already cluttered basement apartment like fragmentary memories or murder victims. I can’t even put flowers in them, the water would run out through the rips. Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.
I wanted my third princess to be running lightly through a meadow but the paper’s too wet, she gets out of control, sprouting an enormous rear; I try to salvage it by turning it into a bustle, but it’s not convincing. I give up and doodle, adding fangs and a moustache, surrounding her with moons and fish and a wolf with bristling hackles and a snarl; but that doesn’t work either, it’s more like an overweight collie. What’s the alternative to princesses, what else will parents buy for their children? Humanoid bears and talking pigs, Protestant choo-choo trains who make the grade and become successful.
Perhaps it’s not only his body I like, perhaps it’s his failure; that also has a kind of purity.
I crumple up my third princess, dump the paint water into the slop pail and clean the brushes. I survey from the windows: David and Joe are still out on the lake but they seem to be heading back now. Anna is halfway up the hillside stairs, towel over her arm. I see her for a moment faceted by the screen door and then she’s inside.
“Hi,” she says, “get anything done?”
“Not much,” I say.
She comes over to the table and smooths out my botched princesses. “That’s good,” she says without conviction.
“Those are mistakes,” I say.
“Oh.” She turns the sheets over, face down. “Did you believe that stuff when you were little?” she says. “I did, I thought I was really a princess and I’d end up living in a castle. They shouldn’t let kids have stuff like that.” She goes to the mirror, blots and smooths her face, then stands on tiptoe, checking her back to see if it’s pink. “What was he doing up here?” she asks suddenly.
It takes me a moment to understand what she means. My father, his work. “I don’t know,” I say, “Just, you know.”
She gives me an odd glance, as though I’ve violated a propriety, and I’m puzzled, she told me once you shouldn’t define yourself by your job but by who you are. When they ask her what she does she talks about fluidity and Being rather than Doing; though if she doesn’t like the person she just says “I’m David’s wife.”
“He was living,” I say. This is almost right, it satisfies her, she goes into the bedroom to change her clothes.
All at once I’m furious with him for vanishing like this, unresolved, leaving me with no answers to give them when they ask. If he was going to die he should have done it visibly, out in the open, so they could mark him with a stone and get it over
I remember the hair on Joe’s back, vestigial, like appendices and little toes: soon we’ll evolve into total baldness. I like the hair though, and the heavy teeth, thick shoulders, unexpectedly slight hips, hands whose texture I can still feel on my skin, roughened and leathery from the clay. Everything I value about him seems to be physical: the rest is either unknown, disagreeable or ridiculous. I don’t care much for his temperament, which alternates between surliness and gloom, or for the overgrown pots he throws so skilfully on the wheel and then mutilates, cutting holes in them, strangling them, slashing them open. That’s unfair, he never uses a knife, only his fingers, and a lot of the time he only bends them, doubles them over; even so they have a disagreeable mutant quality. Nobody else admires them either: the aspiring housewives he teaches two evenings a week, Pottery and Ceramics 432- A , want to make ashtrays and plates with cheerful daisies on them instead, and the things don’t sell at all in the few handicraft shops that will even stock them. So they accumulate in our already cluttered basement apartment like fragmentary memories or murder victims. I can’t even put flowers in them, the water would run out through the rips. Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.
I wanted my third princess to be running lightly through a meadow but the paper’s too wet, she gets out of control, sprouting an enormous rear; I try to salvage it by turning it into a bustle, but it’s not convincing. I give up and doodle, adding fangs and a moustache, surrounding her with moons and fish and a wolf with bristling hackles and a snarl; but that doesn’t work either, it’s more like an overweight collie. What’s the alternative to princesses, what else will parents buy for their children? Humanoid bears and talking pigs, Protestant choo-choo trains who make the grade and become successful.
Perhaps it’s not only his body I like, perhaps it’s his failure; that also has a kind of purity.
I crumple up my third princess, dump the paint water into the slop pail and clean the brushes. I survey from the windows: David and Joe are still out on the lake but they seem to be heading back now. Anna is halfway up the hillside stairs, towel over her arm. I see her for a moment faceted by the screen door and then she’s inside.
“Hi,” she says, “get anything done?”
“Not much,” I say.
She comes over to the table and smooths out my botched princesses. “That’s good,” she says without conviction.
“Those are mistakes,” I say.
“Oh.” She turns the sheets over, face down. “Did you believe that stuff when you were little?” she says. “I did, I thought I was really a princess and I’d end up living in a castle. They shouldn’t let kids have stuff like that.” She goes to the mirror, blots and smooths her face, then stands on tiptoe, checking her back to see if it’s pink. “What was he doing up here?” she asks suddenly.
It takes me a moment to understand what she means. My father, his work. “I don’t know,” I say, “Just, you know.”
She gives me an odd glance, as though I’ve violated a propriety, and I’m puzzled, she told me once you shouldn’t define yourself by your job but by who you are. When they ask her what she does she talks about fluidity and Being rather than Doing; though if she doesn’t like the person she just says “I’m David’s wife.”
“He was living,” I say. This is almost right, it satisfies her, she goes into the bedroom to change her clothes.
All at once I’m furious with him for vanishing like this, unresolved, leaving me with no answers to give them when they ask. If he was going to die he should have done it visibly, out in the open, so they could mark him with a stone and get it over
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