Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

All these things—the flags, the pitch pipe songs, the British Empire and the princesses, the war orphans, even the strappings—are superimposed against the ominous navy-blue background of Miss Lumley’s invisible bloomers. I can’t draw the Union Jack or sing “God Save the King” without thinking about them. Do they really exist, or not? Will I ever be in the classroom when she puts them on or—unthinkable—takes them off?

I’m not afraid of snakes or worms but I am afraid of these bloomers. I know it will be the worse for me if I ever actually catch sight of them. They’re sacrosanct, at the same time holy and deeply shameful. Whatever is wrong with them may be wrong with me also, because although Miss Lumley is not what anyone thinks of as a girl, she is also not a boy. When the brass handbell clangs and we line up outside our GIRLS door, whatever category we are in also includes her.

Four – Deadly Nightshade

Chapter 16

I walk along Queen Street, past used comic book stores, windows full of crystal eggs and seashells, a lot of sulky black clothing. I wish I were back in Vancouver, in front of the fireplace with Ben, looking out over the harbor, while the giant slugs munch away at the greenery in the back garden. Fireplaces, back gardens: I wasn’t thinking about them when I used to come down here to visit Jon, over the wholesale luggage store. Around the corner was the Maple Leaf Tavern, where I drank draft beer in the dark, two stoplights away from the art school where I drew naked women and ate my heart out. The streetcars rattled the front windows. There are still streetcars.

“I don’t want to go,” I said to Ben.

“You don’t have to,” he said. “Call it off. Come down to Mexico.”

“They’ve gone to all the trouble,” I said. “Listen, you know how hard it is to get a retrospective anywhere, if you’re female?”

“Why is it important?” he said. “You sell anyway.”

“I have to go,” I said. “It wouldn’t be right.” I was brought up to say please and thank you.

“Okay,” he said. “You know what you’re doing.” He gave me a hug.

I wish it were true.

Here is Sub-Versions, between a restaurant supply store and a tattoo parlor. Both of these will go, in time: once places like Sub-Versions move in, the handwriting’s on the wall. I open the gallery door, walk in with that sinking feeling I always have in galleries. It’s the carpets that do it to me, the hush, the sanctimoniousness of it all: galleries are too much like churches, there’s too much reverence, you feel there should be some genuflecting going on. Also I don’t like it that this is where paintings end up, on these neutral-toned walls with the track lighting, sterilized, rendered safe and acceptable. It’s as if somebody’s been around spraying the paintings with air freshener, to kill the smell. The smell of blood on the wall.

This gallery is not totally sterilized, there are touches of cutting edge: a heating pipe shows, one wall is black. I don’t give a glance to what’s still on the walls, I hate those neo-expressionist dirty greens and putrid oranges, post this, post that. Everything is post these days, as if we’re all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.

Several of my own paintings have been uncrated and are leaning against the wall. They’ve been tracked down, requested, gathered in from whoever owns them. Whoever owns them is not me; worse luck, I’d get a better price now. The owners’ names will be on little white cards beside the paintings, along with mine, as if mere ownership is on a par with creation. Which they think it is. If I cut off my ear, would the market value go up? Better still, stick my head in the oven, blow out my brains. What rich art collectors like to buy, among other things, is a little vicarious craziness. Face out is a piece I painted twenty years ago: Mrs. Smeath, beautifully rendered in egg tempera, with her gray hairpin crown and her potato face and her spectacles, wearing nothing but her flowered one-breast bib apron. She’s reclining on her maroon velvet sofa, rising to Heaven, which is full of rubber plants, while a moon shaped like a doily floats in the sky. Rubber Plant: The Ascension, it’s called. The angels around her are 1940s Christmas stickers, laundered little girls in white, with rag-set curly hair. The word Heaven is stenciled at the top of the painting with a child’s school stencil set. I thought that was a nifty thing to do, at the time.

I caught some shit for that piece, as I recall. But not because of the stencil. I don’t look at this painting for very long, or at any of them. If I do I’ll start finding things wrong with them. I’ll want to take an Exacto knife to them, torch them, clear the walls. Begin again. A woman strides toward me from the back, in a modified blond porcupine haircut, a purple jumpsuit and green leather boots. I know immediately that I should not have worn this powder-blue jogging outfit. Powder-blue is lightweight. I should’ve worn nun black, Dracula black, like all proper female painters. I should have some clotted-neck vampire lipstick, instead of wimping out with Rose Perfection. But that really would make me look like Haggis McBaggis. At this age the complexion can’t stand those grape-jelly reds, I’d look all white and wrinkly.

But I will tough out the jogging suit, I’ll pretend I meant it. It could be iconoclasm, how do they know? A powder-blue jogging suit lacks pretensions. The good thing about being out of fashion is that you’re never in fashion either, so you can never be last year’s model. That’s my excuse for my painting, too; or it was for years.

“Hi,” says the woman. “You must be Elaine! You don’t look much like your picture.” What does that mean, I think: better or worse? “We’ve talked a lot on the phone. My name is Charna.” Toronto didn’t used to have names like Charna. My hand gets crunched, this woman’s got about ten heavy silver rings strung onto her fingers like knuckle dusters. “We were just wondering about the order.” There are two more women; each of them looks five times more artistic than I do. They have abstract art earrings, hair arrangements. I am feeling dowdy.

They’ve got take-out gourmet sprout and avocado sandwiches and coffee with steamed milk, and we eat those and drink that while we discuss the arrangement of the pictures. I say I favor a chronological approach, but Charna has other ideas, she wants things to go together tonally and resonate and make statements that amplify one another. I get more nervous, this kind of talk makes me twitch. I’m putting some energy into silence, resisting the impulse to say I have a headache and want to go home. I should be grateful, these women are on my side, they planned this whole thing for me, they’re doing me an honor, they like what I do. But still I feel outnumbered, as if they are a species of which I am not a member.

Jon comes back tomorrow, from Los Angeles and his chain-saw murder. I can hardly wait. We’ll circumvent his wife, go out for lunch, both of us feeling sneaky. But it’s merely a civilized thing to do, having lunch with an ex-husband in a comradely way: a good coda to all that smashed crockery and mayhem. We’ve known each other since the year zot; at my age, our age, that’s becoming important. And from here he looks like relief.

Someone else comes in, another woman. “Andrea!” says Charna, stalking over to her. “You’re late!”

She gives Andrea a kiss on the cheek and walks her over to me, holding her arm. “Andrea wants to do a piece on you,” she says. “For the opening.”

“I wasn’t told about this,” I say. I’ve been ambushed.

“It came up at the last minute,” says Charna. “Lucky for us! I’ll put you two in the back room, okay? I’ll bring you some coffee. Getting the word out, they call it,” she adds, to me, with a wry smile. I allow myself to be herded down the corridor; I can still be bossed around by women like Charna.