Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

I myself wear miniskirts in primary colors, with tights underneath and boots, and an ankle-length coat over top. I am not entirely satisfied with this clothing. It’s hard to sit down in. Also I’ve put on some weight, since having Sarah. These skimpy skirts and tiny bodices were designed for women a lot skinnier than I am, of which there now seem to be dozens, hundreds: weasel-faced girls with long hair hanging to the place where their bums ought to be, their chests flat as plywood, making me feel bulbous by comparison.

A new vocabulary has come with them. Far out, they say. Cosmic. Blew my mind. Uptight. Let it all bang out. I consider myself too old for such words: they are for young people, and I am no longer young. I have found a gray hair behind my left ear. In a couple of years I will be thirty. Over the hill. I wheel Sarah up the walk, unbuckle her, set her at the foot of the porch steps, unhook and lift out the grocery bags, fold up the stroller. I walk Sarah up the steps to the front door: these steps can be slippery. I go back for the bags and the stroller, lug them up the steps, fumble in my purse for the key, open the door, lift Sarah inside, then the bags and stroller, close and lock the door. I walk Sarah up the inside stairs, open the inside door, put her inside, close the baby gate, go back down for the bags, carry them up, open the gate, go in, close the gate, go into the kitchen, set the bags on the table, and begin to unpack: eggs, toilet paper, cheese, apples, bananas, carrots, hot dogs, and buns. I worry about serving too many hot dogs: when I was young they were carnival food, and supposed to be bad for you. You might get polio from them.

Sarah is hungry, so I stop unpacking the groceries to get her a glass of milk. I love her ferociously, and am frequently irritated by her.

For the first year I was tired all the time, and fogged by hormones. But I’m coming out of it now. I’m looking around me.

Jon comes in, scoops Sarah up, gives her a kiss, tickles her face with his beard, carries her squealing off into the living room. “Let’s hide on Mummy,” he says. He has a way of putting the two of them into the same camp, in pretended league against me, that annoys me more than it should. Also I don’t like it when he calls me Mummy. I am not his mummy, but hers. But he too loves her. This was a surprise, and I’m not finished being grateful for it. I don’t yet see Sarah as a gift I have given him, but one he has allowed me. It’s because of her that we got married, at City Hall, for the oldest of reasons. One that was nearly obsolete. But we didn’t know that.

Jon, who is a lapsed Lutheran from Niagara Falls, thought we should go there for our honeymoon. He broke up over the word honeymoon. He thought it would be a sort of joke: self-conscious corniness, like a painting of a giant Coke bottle. “Amazing visuals,” he said. He wanted to take me to the waxworks, the flower clock, the Maid of the Mist. He wanted us to get satin shirts with our names embroidered on the pockets and NIAGARA FALLS across the back. But I was silently offended by this approach to our marriage. Whatever else we were getting into as the weeks passed one another and my body swelled like a slow flesh balloon, it was not a joke. So we ended by not going. Right after we were married, I lapsed into a voluptuous sloth. My body was like a feather bed, warm, boneless, deeply comforting, in which I lay cocooned. It may have been the pregnancy, sponging up my adrenaline. Or it may have been relief. Jon glowed for me then like a plum in sunlight, richly colored, perfect in form. I would lie in bed beside him or sit at the kitchen table, running my eyes over him like hands. My adoration was physical, and wordless. I would think Ah, nothing more. Like a breath breathed out. Or I would think, like a child, Mine. Knowing it wasn’t true. Stay that way, I would think. But he could not.

Jon and I have begun to have fights. Our fights are secret fights, conducted at night, when Sarah is asleep: a squabbling in undertones. We keep them from her, because if they are frightening to us—as they are—how much more frightening will they be to her?

We thought we were running away from the grown-ups, and now we are the grown-ups: this is the crux of it. Neither of us wants to take it on, not the whole thing. We compete, for instance, over which of us is in worse shape. If I get a headache, he gets a migraine. If his back hurts, my neck is killing me. Neither one of us wants to be in charge of the Band-Aids. We fight over our right to remain children. At first I do not win these fights, because of love. Or so I say to myself. If I were to win them, the order of the world would be changed, and I am not ready for that. So instead I lose the fights, and master different arts. I shrug, tighten my mouth in silent rebuke, turn my back in bed, leave questions unanswered. I say, “Do it however you like,” provoking sullen fury from Jon. He does not want just capitulation, but admiration, enthusiasm, for himself and his ideas, and when he doesn’t get it he feels cheated.

Jon has a job now, supervising part-time at a co-op graphics studio. I am part-time as well. Between the two of us, we can manage to cover the rent.

Jon is no longer painting on canvas, or on anything flat. In fact he is no longer painting. Flat surfaces with paint on them he calls “art-on-the-wall.” There is no reason for art to be on the wall, there’s no reason for it to have a frame around it or paint on it. Instead he is making constructions, out of things he gathers from junk heaps or finds here and there. He makes wooden boxes with compartments, each containing a different item: three pairs of outsize ladies’ panties in fluorescent colors, a plaster hand with long false nails glued onto it, an enema bag, a toupee. He makes a motorized furry bedroom slipper that runs around on the floor by itself, and a family of diaphragms fitted up with monster movie eyes and mouths and jumping legs underneath that hop around on the table like radiation-damaged oysters. He’s decorated our bathroom in red and orange, with purple mermaids swimming on the walls, and hooked up the toilet seat so that it plays “Jingle Bells” when it’s raised. This is for Sarah’s benefit. He makes toys for her as well, and lets her play with ends of wood and leftover pieces of cloth and some of his less dangerous tools, while he’s working.

That’s when he’s here. Which is by no means most of the time.

For the first year after Sarah was born I didn’t paint at all. I was freelancing then, working at home, and just keeping up with the few book cover assignments I’d taken on was a major effort. I felt clogged, as if swimming with my clothes on. Now that I’m half a day at work, it’s better. I’ve done some of what I call my own work as well, although hesitantly: my hands are out of practice, my eyes disused. Most of what I do is drawing, because the preparation of the surface, the laborious underpainting and detailed concentration of egg tempera are too much for me. I have lost confidence: perhaps all I will ever be is what I am now.

I’m sitting on a wooden folding chair, on a stage. The curtains are open and I can see the auditorium, which is small, battered, and empty. Also on the stage is a stage set, not yet dismantled, for a play which has just closed. The set consists of the future, which will be sparsely furnished, but will contain a good many cylindrical black columns and several austere flights of stairs. Arranged around the columns on other wooden chairs, and sitting here and there on the stairs, are seventeen women. Every one of them is an artist, or something like it. There are several actresses, two dancers, three painters besides me. There’s one magazine writer, and an editor from my own publishing company. One woman is a radio announcer (daytime classical music), one does puppet shows for children, one is a professional clown. One is a set designer, which is why we’re here: she got us the space for this meeting. The reason I know all of this is that we had to say our names, going around the circle, and what we do. Not for a living: for a living is different, especially for the actresses. Also for me. This is a meeting. It’s not the first such meeting I’ve been to, but I still find it startling. For one thing, it’s all women. That in itself is unusual, and has an air of secrecy about it, and an unfocused, attractive dirtiness: the last all-women gathering I was at was Health Class in high school, where the girls were separated off from the boys so they could be told about the curse. Not that the word was used. “Those days” was the accepted, official phrase. It was explained that tampons, although not recommended for young girls, which we knew meant virgins, could not get lost inside you and end up in your lung. There was considerable giggling, and when the teacher spelled blood —“B-L-O-O-D”—one girl fainted. Today there is no giggling or fainting. This meeting is about anger.