Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

“I thought you would be different,” says Andrea as we settle.

“Different how?” I ask.

“Bigger,” she says.

I smile at her. “I am bigger.”

Andrea checks out my powder-blue jogging suit. She herself is wearing black, approved, glossy black, not early-sixties holdover as mine would be. She has red hair out of a spray can and no apologies, cut into a cap like an acorn. She’s upsettingly young; to me she doesn’t look more than a teenager, though I know she must be in her twenties. Probably she thinks I’m a weird middle-aged frump, sort of like her high school teacher. Probably she’s out to get me. Probably she’ll succeed. We sit across from each other at Charna’s desk and Andrea sets down her camera and fiddles with her tape recorder. Andrea writes for a newspaper. “This is for the Living section,” she says. I know what that means, it used to be the Women’s Pages. It’s funny that they now call it Living, as if only women are alive and the other things, such as the Sports, are for the dead.

“Living, eh?” I say. “I’m the mother of two. I bake cookies.” All true. Andrea gives me a dirty look and flicks on her machine.

“How do you handle fame?” she says.

“This isn’t fame,” I say. “Fame is Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage. This stuff is just a media pimple.”

She grins at that. “Well, could you maybe say something about your generation of artists—your generation of woman artists—and their aspirations and goals?”

“Painters, you mean,” I say. “What generation is that?”

“The seventies, I suppose,” she says. “That’s when the women’s—that’s when you started getting attention.”

“The seventies isn’t my generation,” I say.

She smiles. “Well,” she says, “what is?”

“The forties.”

“The forties?” This is archaeology as far as she’s concerned. “But you couldn’t have been…”

“That was when I grew up,” I say.

“Oh right,” she says. “You mean it was formative. Can you talk about the ways, how it reflects in your work?”

“The colors,” I say. “A lot of my colors are forties colors.” I’m softening up. At least she doesn’t say like and you know all the time. “The war. There are people who remember the war and people who don’t. There’s a cut-off point, there’s a difference.”

“You mean the Vietnam War?” she says.

“No,” I say coldly. “The Second World War.” She looks a bit scared, as if I’ve just resurrected from the dead, and incompletely at that. She didn’t know I was that old. “So,” she says. “What is the difference?”

“We have long attention spans,” I say. “We eat everything on our plates. We save string. We make do.”

She looks puzzled. That’s all I want to say about the forties. I’m beginning to sweat. I feel as if I’m at the dentist, mouth gracelessly open while some stranger with a light and mirror gazes down my throat at something I can’t see.

Brightly and neatly she veers away from the war and back toward women, which was where she wanted to be in the first place. Is it harder for a woman, was I discriminated against, undervalued? What about having children? I give unhelpful replies: all painters feel undervalued. You can do it while they’re at school. My husband’s been terrific; he gives me a lot of support, some of which has been financial. I don’t say which husband.

“So you don’t feel it’s sort of demeaning to be propped up by a man?” she says.

“Women prop up men all the time,” I say. “What’s wrong with a little reverse propping?”

What I have to say is not altogether what she wants to hear. She’d prefer stories of outrage, although she’d be unlikely to tell them about herself, she’s too young. Still, people my age are supposed to have stories of outrage; at least insult, at least put-down. Male art teachers pinching your bum, calling you baby, asking you why there are no great female painters, that sort of thing. She would like me to be furious, and quaint.

“Did you have any female mentors?” she asks.

“Female what?”

“Like, teachers, or other woman painters you admired.”

“Shouldn’t that be mentresses?” I say nastily. “There weren’t any. My teacher was a man.”

“Who was that?” she says.

“Josef Hrbik. He was very kind to me,” I add quickly. He’d fit the bill for her, but she won’t hear that from me. “He taught me to draw naked women.”

That startles her. “Well, what about, you know, feminism?” she says. “A lot of people call you a feminist painter.”

“What indeed,” I say. “I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway, I’m too old to have invented it and you’re too young to understand it, so what’s the point of discussing it at all?”

“So it’s not a meaningful classification for you?” she says.

“I like it that women like my work. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Do men like your work?” she asks slyly. She’s been going through the back files, she’s seen some of those witch-and-succubus pieces.

“Which men?” I say. “Not everyone likes my work. It’s not because I’m a woman. If they don’t like a man’s work it’s not because he’s a man. They just don’t like it.” I am on dubious ground, and this enrages me. My voice is calm; the coffee seethes within me.

She frowns, diddles with the tape recorder. “Why do you paint all those women then?”

“What should I paint, men?” I say. “I’m a painter. Painters paint women. Rubens painted women, Renoir painted women, Picasso painted women. Everyone paints women. Is there something wrong with painting women?”

“But not like that,” she says.

“Like what?” I say. “Anyway, why should my women be the same as everyone else’s women?” I catch myself picking at my fingers, and stop. In a minute my teeth will be chattering like those of cornered mice. Her voice is getting farther and farther away, I can hardly hear her. But I see her, very clearly: the ribbing on the neck of her sweater, the fine hairs of her cheek, the shine of a button. What I hear is what she isn’t saying. Your clothes are stupid. Your art is crap. Sit up straight and don’t answer back.

“Why do you paint?” she says, and I can hear her again as clear as anything. I hear her exasperation, with me and my refusals.

“Why does anyone do anything?” I say.

Chapter 17

T he light fades earlier; on the way home from school we walk through the smoke from burning leaves. It rains, and we have to play inside. We sit on the floor of Grace’s room, being quiet because of Mrs. Smeath’s bad heart, and cut out rolling pins and frying pans and paste them around our paper ladies. But Cordelia makes short work of this game. She knows, instantly it seems, why Grace’s house has so many Eaton’s Catalogues in it. It’s because the Smeaths get their clothes that way, the whole family—order them out of the Eaton’s Catalogue. There in the Girls’ Clothing section are the plaid dresses, the skirts with straps, the winter coats worn by Grace and her sisters, three colors of them, in lumpy, serviceable wool, with hoods: Kelly Green, Royal Blue, Maroon. Cordelia manages to convey that she herself would never wear a coat ordered from the Eaton’s Catalogue. She doesn’t say this out loud though. Like the rest of us, she wants to stay on the good side of Grace. She bypasses the cookware, flips through the pages. She turns to the brassieres, to the elaborately laced and gusseted corsets—foundation garments, they’re called—and draws mustaches on the models, whose flesh looks as if it’s been painted over with a thin coat of beige plaster. She pencils hair in, under their arms, and on their chests between the breasts. She reads out the descriptions, snorting with stifled laughter: “”Delightfully trimmed in dainty lace, with extra support for the mature figure.“ That means big bazooms. Look at this— cup sizes! Like teacups!”