Free The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood Page A

themselves.
    ‘Never mind,’ I said to them. ‘You must pretend to be in love with these men. If they think you have taken their side, they’ll confide in you and we’ll know their plans. It’s one way of serving your master, and he’ll be very pleased with you when he comes home.’ That made them feel better.
    I even instructed them to say rude and disrespectful things about me and Telemachus, and about Odysseus as well, in order to further the illusion. They threw themselves into this project with a will: Melantho of the Pretty Cheeks was particularly adept at it, and had lots of fun thinking up snide remarks. There is indeed something delightful about being able to combine obedience and disobedience in the same act.
    Not that the whole charade was entirely an illusion. Several of them did fall in love with the men who had used them so badly. I suppose it was inevitable. They thought I couldn’t see what was going on, but I knew it perfectly well. I forgavethem, however. They were young and inexperienced, and it wasn’t every slave-girl in Ithaca who could boast of being the mistress of a young nobleman.
    But, love or no love, midnight excursions or none, they continued to report to me any useful information they’d found out.
    So I foolishly thought myself quite wise. In retrospect I can see that my actions were ill-considered, and caused harm. But I was running out of time, and becoming desperate, and I had to use every ruse and stratagem at my command.
    When they found out about the trick I’d played on them with the shroud, the Suitors broke into my quarters at night and caught me at my work. They were very angry, not least because they’d been fooled by a woman, and they made a terrible scene, and I was put on the defensive. I had to promise to finish the shroud as quickly as possible, after which I would without fail choose one of them as a husband.
    The shroud itself became a story almost instantly. ‘Penelope’s web,’ it was called; people used to say that of any task that remained mysteriously unfinished. I did not appreciate the term web . If the shroud was a web, then I was the spider. But I had not been attempting to catch men like flies: on the contrary, I’d merely been trying to avoid entanglement myself.

xvi
Bad Dreams
    Now began the worst period of my ordeal. I cried so much I thought I would turn into a river or a fountain, as in the old tales. No matter how much I prayed and offered up sacrifices and watched for omens, my husband still didn’t return. To add to my misery, Telemachus was now of an age to start ordering me around. I’d run the palace affairs almost single-handedly for twenty years, but now he wanted to assert his authority as the son of Odysseus and take over the reins. He started making scenes in the hall, standing up to the Suitors in a rash way that I was certain was going to get him killed. He was bound to embark on some foolhardy adventure or other, as young men will.
    Sure enough, he snuck off in a ship to go chasing around looking for news of his father, without even so much as consulting me. It was a terribleinsult, but I couldn’t dwell on that part of it, because my favourite maids brought me the news that the Suitors, having learned of my son’s daring escapade, were sending a ship of their own to lie in wait for him and ambush him and kill him on his return voyage.
    It’s true that the herald Medon revealed this plot to me as well, just as the songs relate. But I already knew about it from the maids. I had to appear to be surprised, however, because otherwise Medon – who was neither on one side nor the other – would have known I had my own sources of information.
    Well, naturally, I staggered around and fell onto the threshold and cried and wailed, and all of my maids – my twelve favourites, and the rest of them – joined in my lamentations. I reproached them all for not having told me of my son’s departure, and for not stopping him, until that