Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood
A prick, the photographer said to Rennie. He was an old pro, that's what he called himself, the mournful kind, balding and a little seedy. He wore vests with no jacket and his shirt sleeves rolled up. They used him a lot for indoor shots, but only the black and white ones that were supposed to be the subject's real life. For the colour they used a fashion photographer.
How can you tell? asked Rennie.
I can just tell, the photographer said. Women can't tell.
Oh, come on, said Rennie.
Or maybe they can tell, said the photographer. The thing about women is they prefer guys who treat them like shit. A nice guy like me never gets a chance. There's only two kinds of guys, a prick and not a prick. Not counting fags.
You're jealous, Rennie said. You wish you had teeth like that. He's good at what he does.
Watch out, said the photographer. He's still a prick.
What Jake did was design. He was a designer of labels, not just labels but the total package: the label, the container, the visuals for the advertising. He was a packager. He decided how things would look and what contexts they would be placed in, which meant what people would feel about them. He knew the importance of style, so he didn't sneer at Rennie for doing pieces on the return of the open-toed spike-heel sandal.
Better than that, he liked her body and said so, which Rennie found refreshing. Most of the men she knew used the word person, a little too much, a little too nervously. A fine person. It was a burden, being a fine person. She knew she was not as fine a person as they wanted her to be. It was a relief to have a man say, admit, confess, that he thought she had a terrific ass.
What about my mind? she said. Aren't you going to tell me I have an interesting mind?
Screw your mind, Jake said. Both of them laughed. No, he said, I couldn't screw your mind even if I wanted to. You're a tough lady, you've got your legs crossed pretty tight. You can't rape a woman's mind without her consent, you know that.
You can try, Rennie said.
Not me, Jake said. I'm not a mind man. I'm more interested in your body, if you want the truth.
When they'd moved in together, they'd agreed to keep their options open. That was another phrase she'd had to translate for Daniel; by that time she'd had trouble explaining what it meant.
It took her more time than it should have to realize that she was one of the things Jake was packaging. He began with the apartment, which he painted several shades of off-white and filled with forties furniture, chrome for the kitchen and a deep-pink bulgy chair and sofa for the livingroom, "like thighs," he said, with a real trilight he'd picked up at the Sally Ann. Wicker and indoor plants had been done, he said, and he got rid of the benjamina tree, Rennie suspected, by pouring his leftover coffee into it when she wasn't looking.
Then he started on her. You have great cheekbones, he said. You should exploit them.
Oppressed cheekbones? said Rennie, who was slightly embarrassed by compliments; they'd been rare in Griswold.
Sometimes I feel like a blank sheet of paper, she said. For you to doodle on.
Screw that, said Jake. It's all there underneath. I just want you to bring it out. You should enjoy it, you should make the most of it.
Aren't you afraid packs of ravening, lustful other men will storm in and snatch me away from you? said Rennie. If I make the most of it.
Not a chance, said Jake. Other men are wimps. He believed this, which was one of the things Rennie liked about him. She didn't have to stroke his ego, he did that for himself.
He decided she should wear nothing but white linen jump-suits, with shoulder pads. The Rosie the Riveter look, he said.
They make my ass look big, she said.
That's the point, he said. Small asses have been done.
Rennie drew the line at nothing but - Let's not be absolutist, she said - but she got one, to please him, though she refused to wear it out on the street. In the livingroom he hung blowups of Cartier-Bresson photographs, three Mexican prostitutes looking out of wooden cubicles, their eyebrows plucked thin and drawn into exaggerated bows, their mouths clown-mouths, an old man sitting in a field of deserted chairs.
That was the daytime. When he had that arranged, he started on the night. In the bedroom he hung a Heather Cooper poster, a brown-skinned woman wound up in a piece of material that held her arms to her sides but left her breasts and thighs and buttocks exposed. She had no expression on her face, she was just standing there, if anything a little bored. The picture was called Enigma. The other picture in the bedroom was a stylized print of a woman lying on a 1940's puffy sofa, like the one in their own livingroom. She was feet-first, and her head, up at the other end of the sofa, was tiny, featureless, and rounded like a doorknob. In the foreground there was a bull.
These pictures made Rennie slightly nervous, especially when she was lying on their bed with no clothes on. But that was probably just her background.
Put your arms over your head, Jake said, it lifts the breasts. Move your legs apart, just a little. Raise your left knee. You look fantastic.
A secure woman is not threatened by her partner's fantasies, Rennie told herself. As long as there is trust. She'd even written that, or something like it, in a piece on the comeback of satin lingerie and fancy garter belts. And she was not threatened, not for some time.
You're so closed, Jake said once. I like that. I want to be the one you open up for.
But she could never remember afterwards what he had actually said. Perhaps he'd said, I want to be the one who opens you up.
III
My father came home every Christmas, says Rennie. He always spoke of it as coming home, though it became obvious at last, even to me, that his home was elsewhere. He'd gone to Toronto soon after I was born, he'd been in the war and got university free as a veteran. He studied chemical engineering. He stayed there, everyone said, because the jobs were there. We couldn't go because my grandfather got sick and my grandmother needed the help, that's what they said, and after my grandfather died my grandmother could not be left alone. People in Griswold had a great fear of being left alone. It was supposed to be bad for you, it made you go funny, it drove you bats. Then you had to be put in the loony bin.
So my father would turn up every Christmas. He would stay in one of the guest bedrooms, we had a lot of them, bedrooms that had once been for children and now stood empty, dustless and smelling of lavender and dead air. These visits of his, I was told later, were for my sake. My father and I would be bundled up and sent for walks on the icy streets; both of us would be told not to fall down. He would ask me how I was doing at school and tell me that soon I would be able to come and visit him. Neither of us believed this. On the main street people's heads would turn, not too abruptly, as we went past, and I would know that we were being looked at and discussed.
When I was in Grade Six, two girls, the kind from loose families, spread the story that my father was living with another woman in Toronto, and that was the real reason my mother didn't go to join him. I didn't believe this, but I didn't ask my mother about it either, so I probably did believe it after all. Just as well, because it was true, and when my mother finally told me I wasn't surprised. She waited until my thirteenth birthday, two weeks after my first period. She must have felt I was ready for pain.
I think she wanted sympathy, she felt that at last I would understand what a hard life she had led and what sacrifices she had been forced to make. She hoped I would blame my father, see him in his true light. But I was unable to feel what I was supposed to; instead I blamed her. I was angry with him, not for leaving - I could see why he would have wanted to do that - but for leaving me behind.
By that time he'd stopped coming back for Christmas, though he still sent cards, to me but not to her, and I didn't see him again until I moved to Toronto to go to university. For years he'd been married to someone I thought of only as her, because that's what my mother called her. I'd forgotten what he looked like.
I visited them at thei
When I was growing up, says Lora, we lived in cellars. We lived in the cellars of apartment buildings; they were always dark, even in summer, and they smelled like cat piss, partly because of Bob's cats, he never emptied the litter box even though they were his cats, and partly because those kinds of places always smell like cat piss anyway. Bob got the apartments for next to nothing, they were the caretaker's apartments, he was supposed to take out the garbage and mop the floors and fix people's toilets, but he was never much good at that, or maybe he didn't want to, which is why we were always moving.
His war buddy Pat used to say that wasn't how Bob really made his money anyway. He said Bob made his money by catching things that fell off the backs of lorries. I didn't figure out for a while that lorry was the English word for truck, Pat was from England, and then I didn't believe it, because I knew Bob didn't chase after trucks waiting for stuff to fall off them. He was home most of the time, sitting at the kitchen table in his old grey cardigan, and besides he couldn't run because of his limp. This was lucky for me: if I could keep him from grabbing me I could always outrun him, but he was fast with the hands, he'd pretend he was looking the other way and then snatch, and when I was small he could keep hold of me with one hand while he got his belt off with the other. I guess that's partly what made me so quick on my feet.
He said he got the limp in the war and it was typical of the government that they wouldn't give him a pension. He was against the government, whoever was in, he said it didn't matter a tinker's piss, but don't get the wrong idea, he was death on communism too. He couldn't stand the idea of welfare, that was communism as far as he was concerned. Bob's war buddy Pat used to talk about the working class, he used to say that's what they were, the both of them, but that was always a big joke to me. Working class my ass. Bob worked as little as he could. His whole thing was how you could avoid working, he thought anyone with a steady job was the world's number-one dummy. He was dead against the unions too, he had no sympathy for them at all, he said they just made things more expensive for everybody else. When there were strikes on the TV he would cheer on the police, which was something, because the rest of the time he was dead against them too.
Anyway, it took me a long time to figure out why we would suddenly have five television sets, then none, then eight radios, then only one. Sometimes it was toasters, sometimes it was record players, you never knew. Things appeared and disappeared around our place like magic. I got the belt for bragging at school that we had five television sets, I brought one of the kids over to see, which made Bob mad as hell. This'll teach you to keep your fuckin' lip zipped, he said.
A lot of things made him mad as hell. It was like he spent the whole day sitting at that table, smoking Black Cat cigarettes the way he did and waiting for something to come along and make him mad, and my mother spent the whole day trying to guess what it would be so she could stop it from happening.
Go around him, she told me. Why do you have to walk right into him all the time? Pretend he's a closed door. You wouldn't walk right into a door if you could help it, would you? I thought when she said stuff like this she was taking his side, but now I see she was just trying to keep me from getting beat up too much.
I hated him more than anything. I used to lie awake at nights thinking up bad things that could happen to him, like falling down a sewer or getting eaten by rats. There were rats in our apartments too, or anyway mice, and Bob wouldn't let my mother put out poison because the mice might eat it and then his cats might eat the mice, though his cats never ate any mice that I ever saw. When he wasn't there, which wasn't all that often, I used to step on the cats' tails and chase them around with the broom. I couldn't do anything to him but I sure could make life miserable for his bloody cats. I still can't stand to have a cat near me.
It was mean on the cats, but I think I did stuff like that so I wouldn't have to be so scared of him. Remember that story in the papers, six, seven years ago? It was about this woman with a little boy, who married this man, and after a while the two of them killed the little boy, out in the woods. They said they were taking him on a picnic. There was a picture of the little boy that broke my heart. The man just didn't want him around, I guess, and the mother went along with it. I was grown up by the time I read that, I was almost thirty, but it put me in a cold sweat and I dreamed about it off and on for weeks. It was like something that almost happened to me and I didn't even know it at the time, like you're sleepwalking and you wake up and you're standing on the edge of this cliff. I was always more scared of Bob when he was trying to be nice than when he was mad. It's like knowing there's someone in the closet waiting for you but not being able to see in.
My mother married Bob after my father died, that would be when I was around four. I don't know why she married him. My mother wasn't religious or anything, we didn't go to church, but she had this belief that things were ordered, meant to be she would say. When I asked her why she married Bob she would say it was meant to be. I don't know who by, somebody with a pretty poor sense of humour if you ask me. She never did figure out that some things are just accidents. When I was twelve or so I decided that was about the best way to think of Bob: he was an accident that happened to me, like getting run over by a truck, I was just in the way. I had to live with him, but like a broken leg, not like a person. I stopped trying to work out in advance what would make him happy or not or mad or not, because I never would be able to work it out, and I stopped thinking it had a whole lot to do with me. If he hit me it was like the weather, sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn't. He didn't hit me because I was bad, like I used to think. He hit me because he could get away with it and nobody could stop him. That's mostly why people do stuff like that, because they can get away with it.
My mother was full of schemes. She was always reading the back pages of magazines, those ads that tell you how to start your own business in your home and make thousands of dollars. She tried a lot of them too, she addressed envelopes, she sold magazine subscriptions and encyclopedias and stuff like that door to door, she even tried arts and crafts, putting together dried flower arrangements out of the raw materials they'd send to her. Once she even rented a knitting machine. That one died a quick death.
But it was no use, she never did get rich the way they promised, you'd have to work forty-eight hours a day anyway on most of those things just to break even, and she'd lose interest pretty fast. She didn't have the business sense to handle things that really would work, like Tupperware parties. Not that we lived in Tupperware country, no way she could've had one of those parties in any of our apartments, with the cat litter box in the kitchen and the lightbulbs with no shades and the red stains down the backs of the toilets and that smell, and Bob sitting there in his cardigan with the ravelly cuffs and his cigarette cough, like his insides were going to come up any minute. That and chip dip and salads with baby marshmallows in them don't mix, you know?
She was more interested in reading the ads anyway, and sending off the first letter. That always excited her. For her it was like gambling, she wanted to believe in fate, she wanted to believe that some day the wheel would come around and it would be her turn, not for anything she'd done that would make her deserve it, but just because it was her turn. She never said so, she used to say we should make the most of what we had and be thankful for our blessings, but underneath it I think she hated those cellars and the smell of cat piss and maybe even Bob as much as I did. But she didn't know what else to do, she didn't know how to get out.
Where there's life there's hope, that's what my mother would say. She had to believe goo
Rennie's dreaming, she knows it, she wants to wake up.
She's standing in her grandmother's garden, around at the side of the house, she knows this garden disappeared a long time ago, I can't take care of everything, said her mother, but here it is, back in place, everything is so bright, so full of juice, the red zinnias, the hollyhocks, the sunflowers, the poles with scarlet runner beans, the hummingbirds like vivid bees around them. It's winter though, there's snow on the ground, the sun is low in the sky; small icicles hang from the stems and blossoms. Her grandmother is there, in a white cotton dress with small blue flowers on it, it's a summer dress, she doesn't seem to mind the cold, and Rennie knows this is because she is dead. There's an open window, through it Rennie can hear her mother and her aunts singing hymns in the kitchen while they do the dishes, three-part harmony.
Rennie puts out her hands but she can't touch her grandmother, her hands go right in, through, it's like touching water or new snow. Her grandmother smiles at her, the hummingbirds are around her head, lighting on her hands. Life everlasting, she says.
Rennie struggles to wake up, she doesn't want to be in this dream, and finally she makes it. She's lying in her bed, the sheet's twisted around her, she thrashes and untangles herself and pushes herself upright. Outside the window it's grey, the room is dim, perhaps it's not yet morning. There's something she has to find. She stands up, in her bare feet, she's wearing a long white cotton gown, it ties at the back, but this is not a hospital. She gets to the other side of the room and pulls open her bureau drawers, one after another, rummaging through her slips, scarves, sweaters with their arms tucked carefully behind them. It's her hands she's looking for, she knows she left them here somewhere, folded neatly in a drawer, like gloves.