Free Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood Page B

away the day I found a curious object, like a rubber clamshell, packed away neatly in a box. I was dying to ask her what it was, but I didn’t dare.
    “Sit there quietly, Joan, and watch Mother put on her face,” she’d say on the good days. Then she would tuck a towel around her neck and go to work. Some of the things she did seemed to be painful; for instance, she would cover the space between her eyebrows with what looked like brown glue, which she heated in a little pot, then tear it off, leaving a red patch; and sometimes she’d smear herself with pink mud which would harden and crack. She often frowned at herself, shaking her head as if she was dissatisfied; and occasionally she’d talk to herself as if she’d forgotten I was there. Instead of making her happier, these sessions appeared to make her sadder, as if she saw behind or within the mirror some fleeting image she wasunable to capture or duplicate; and when she was finished she was always a little cross.
    I would stare at the proceedings, fascinated and mute. I thought my mother was very beautiful, even more beautiful when she was colored in. And this was what I did in the dream: I sat and stared. Although her vanity tables became more grandiose as my father got richer, my mother always had a triple mirror, so she could see both sides as well as the front of her head. In the dream, as I watched, I suddenly realized that instead of three reflections she had three actual heads, which rose from her toweled shoulders on three separate necks. This didn’t frighten me, as it seemed merely a confirmation of something I’d always known; but outside the door there was a man, a man who was about to open the door and come in. If he saw, if he found out the truth about my mother, something terrible would happen, not only to my mother but to me. I wanted to jump up, run to the door, and stop him, but I couldn’t move and the door would swing slowly inward.…
    As I grew older, this dream changed. Instead of wanting to stop the mysterious man, I would sit there wishing for him to enter. I wanted him to find out her secret, the secret that I alone knew: my mother was a monster.
    I can never remember calling her anything but Mother, never one of those childish diminutives; I must have, but she must have discouraged it. Our relationship was professionalized early. She was to be the manager, the creator, the agent; I was to be the product. I suppose one of the most important things she wanted from me was gratitude. She wanted me to do well, but she wanted to be responsible for it.
    Her plans for me weren’t specific. They were vague but large, so that whatever I did accomplish was never the right thing. But she didn’t push all the time; for days and even weeks she would seem to forget me altogether. She would become involved in some other project of hers, like redecorating her bedroom or throwing a party.She even took a couple of jobs: she was a travel agent, for instance, and she once worked for an interior decorator, searching out lamps and carpets that would match living-room color designs. But none of these jobs lasted long, she would get discouraged, they weren’t enough for her and she would quit.
    It wasn’t that she was aggressive and ambitious, although she was both these things. Perhaps she wasn’t aggressive or ambitious enough. If she’d ever decided what she really wanted to do and had gone out and done it, she wouldn’t have seen me as a reproach to her, the embodiment of her own failure and depression, a huge edgeless cloud of inchoate matter which refused to be shaped into anything for which she could get a prize.
    In the image of her that I carried for years, hanging from my neck like an iron locket, she was sitting in front of her vanity table, painting her fingernails a murderous red and sighing. Her lips were thin but she made a larger mouth with lipstick over and around them like Bette Davis, which gave her a curious double mouth, the real one