400 words answers-“Bluebeard’s Egg” Margaret Atwood

400 words answers-“Bluebeard’s Egg” Margaret Atwood

Sally stands at the kitchen window, waiting for the sauce she’s reducing to come to a simmer, looking out. Past the garage the lot sweeps downwards, into the ravine; it’s a wilderness there, of bushes and branches and what Sally thinks of as vines. It was her idea to have a kind of terrace, built of old railroad ties, with wild flowers growing between them, but Edward says he likes it the way it is. There’s a playhouse down at the bottom, near the fence; from here she can just see the roof. It has nothing to do with Edward’s kids, in their earlier incarnations, before Sally’s time; it’s more ancient than that, and falling apart. Sally would like it cleared away. She thinks drunks sleep in it, the men who live under the bridges down there, who occasionally wander over the fence (which is broken down, from where they step on it) and up the hill, to emerge squinting like moles into the light of Sally’s well-kept back lawn.

Off to the left is Ed, in his windbreaker; it’s officially spring, Sally’s blue scylla is in flower, but it’s chilly for this time of year. Ed’s windbreaker is an old one he won’t throw out; it still says WILDCATS, relic of some team he was on in high school, an era so prehistoric Sally can barely imagine it; though picturing Ed at high school is not all that difficult. Girls would have had crushes on him, he would have been unconscious of it; things like that don’t change. He’s puttering around the rock garden now; some of the rocks stick out too far and are in danger of grazing the side of Sally’s Peugeot, on its way to the garage, and he’s moving them around. He likes doing things like that, puttering, humming to himself. He won’t wear work gloves, though she keeps telling him he could squash his fingers.

Watching his bent back with its frayed, poignant lettering, Sally dissolves; which is not infrequent with her. My darling Edward, she thinks. Edward Bear, of little brain. How I love you. At times like this she feels very protective of him.

Sally knows for a fact that dumb blondes were loved, not because they were blondes, but because they were dumb. It was their helplessness and confusion that were so sexually attractive, once; not their hair. It wasn’t false, the rush of tenderness men must have felt for such women. Sally understands it.

For it must be admitted: Sally is in love with Ed because of his stupidity, his monumental and almost energetic stupidity: energetic, because Ed’s stupidity is not passive. He’s no mere blockhead; you’d have to be working at it to be that stupid. Does it make Sally feel smug, or smarter than he is, or even smarter than she really is herself? No; on the contrary, it makes her humble. It fills her with wonder that the world can contain such marvels as Ed’s colossal and endearing thickness. He is just so stupid. Every time he gives her another piece of evidence, another tile that she can glue into place in the vast mosaic of his stupidity she’s continually piecing together, she wants to hug him, and often does; and he is so stupid he can never figure out what for.

Because Ed is so stupid he doesn’t even know he’s stupid. He’s a child of luck, a third son who, armed with nothing but a certain feeble-minded amiability, manages to make it through the forest with all its witches and traps and pitfalls and end up with the princess, who is Sally, of course. It helps that he’s handsome.

On good days she sees his stupidity as innocence, lamblike, shining with the light of (for instance) green daisied meadows in the sun. (When Sally starts thinking this way about Ed, in terms of the calendar art from the service-station washrooms of her childhood, dredging up images of a boy with curly golden hair, his arm thrown around the neck of an Irish setter–a notorious brainless beast, she reminds herself–she knows she is sliding over the edge, into a ghastly kind of sentimentality, and that she must stop at once, or Ed will vanish, to be replaced by a stuffed facsimile, useful for little else but an umbrella stand. Ed is a real person, with a lot more to him than these simplistic renditions allow for; which sometimes worries her.) On bad days though, she sees his stupidity as wilfulness, a stubborn determination to shut things out. His obtuseness is a wall, within which he can go about his business, humming to himself, while Sally, locked outside, must hack her way through the brambles with hardly so much as a transparent raincoat between them and her skin.

Why did she choose him (or, to be precise, as she tries to be with herself and sometimes is even out loud, hunt him down), when it’s clear to everyone she had other options? To Marylynn, who is her best though most recent friend, she’s explained it by saying she was spoiled when young by reading too many Agatha Christie murder mysteries, of the kind in which the clever and witty heroine passes over the equally clever and witty first-lead male, who’s helped solve the crime, in order to marry the second-lead male, the stupid one, the one who would have been arrested and condemned and executed if it hadn’t been for her cleverness. Maybe this is how she sees Ed: if it weren’t for her, his blundering too-many-thumbs kindness would get him into all sorts of quagmires, all sorts of sink-holes he’d never be able to get himself out of, and then he’d be done for.

“Sink-hole” and “quagmire” are not flattering ways of speaking about other women, but this is what is at the back of Sally’s mind; specifically, Ed’s two previous wives. Sally didn’t exactly extricate him from their clutches. She’s never even met the first one, who moved to the west coast fourteen years ago and sends Christmas cards, and the second one was middle-aged and already in the act of severing herself from Ed before Sally came along. (For Sally, “middle-aged” means anyone five years older than she is. It has always meant this. She applies it only to women, however. She doesn’t think of Ed as middle-aged, although the gap between them is considerably more than five years.)

Ed doesn’t know what happened with these marriages, what went wrong. His protestations of ignorance, his refusal to discuss the finer points, is frustrating to Sally, because she would like to hear the whole story. But it’s also cause for anxiety: if he doesn’t know what happened with the other two, maybe the same thing could be happening with her and he doesn’t know about that, either. Stupidity like Ed’s can be a health hazard, for other people. What if he wakes up one day and decides that she isn’t the true bride after all, but the false one? Then she will be put into a barrel stuck full of nails and rolled downhill, endlessly, while he is sitting in yet another bridal bed, drinking champagne. She remembers the brand name, because she bought it herself. Champagne isn’t the sort of finishing touch that would occur to Ed, though he enjoyed it enough at the time.

But outwardly Sally makes a joke of all this. “He doesn’t know,” she says to Marylynn, laughing a little, and they shake their heads. If it were them, they’d know, all right. Marylynn is in fact divorced, and she can list every single thing that went wrong, item by item. After doing this, she adds that her divorce was one of the best things that ever happened to her. “I was just a nothing before,” she says. “It made me pull myself together.”

Sally, looking across the kitchen table at Marylynn, has to agree that she is far from being a nothing now. She started out re-doing people’s closets, and has worked that up into her own interior-design firm. She does the houses of the newly rich, those who lack ancestral furniture and the confidence to be shabby, and who wish their interiors to reflect a personal taste they do not in reality possess.

“What they want are mausoleums,” Marylynn says, “or hotels,” and she cheerfully supplies them. “Right down to the ash-trays. Imagine having someone else pick out your ash-trays for you.”

By saying this, Marylynn lets Sally know that she’s not including her in that category, though Sally did in fact hire her, at the very first, to help with a few details around the house. It was Marylynn who redesigned the wall of closets in the master bedroom and who found Sally’s massive Chinese mahogany table, which cost her another seven hundred dollars to have stripped. But it turned out to be perfect, as Marylynn said it would. Now she’s dug up a nineteenth-century keyhole desk, which both she and Sally know will be exactly right for the bay-windowed alcove off the living room. “Why do you need it?” Ed said in his puzzled way. “I thought you worked in your study.” Sally admitted this, but said they could keep the telephone bills in it, which appeared to satisfy him. She knows exactly what she needs it for: she needs it to sit at, in something flowing, backlit by the morning sunlight, gracefully dashing off notes. She saw a 1940’s advertisement for coffee like this once; and the husband was standing behind the chair, leaning over, with a worshipful expression on his face.

Marylynn is the kind of friend Sally does not have to explain any of this to, because it’s assumed between them. Her intelligence is the kind Sally respects.

Marylynn is tall and elegant, and makes anything she is wearing seem fashionable. Her hair is prematurely grey and she leaves it that way. She goes in for loose blouses in cream-coloured silk, and eccentric scarves gathered from interesting shops and odd comers of the world, thrown carelessly around her neck and over one shoulder. (Sally has tried this toss in the mirror, but it doesn’t work.) Marylynn has a large collection of unusual shoes; she says they’re unusual because her feet are so big, but Sally knows better. Sally, who used to think of herself as pretty enough and now thinks of herself as doing quite well for her age, envies Marylynn her bone structure, which will serve her well when the inevitable happens.

Whenever Marylynn is coming to dinner, as she is today-she’s bringing the desk, too–Sally takes especial care with her clothes and make-up. Marylynn, she knows, is her real audience for such things, since no changes she effects in herself seem to affect Ed one way or the other, or even to register with him. “You look fine to me,” is all he says, no matter how she really looks. (But does she want him to see her more clearly, or not? Most likely not. If he did he would notice the incipient wrinkles, the small pouches of flesh that are not quite there yet, the network forming beneath her eyes. It’s better as it is.)

Sally has repeated this remark of Ed’s to Marylynn, adding that he said it the day the Jacuzzi overflowed because the smoke alarm went off, because an English muffin she was heating to eat in the bathtub got stuck in the toaster, and she had to spend an hour putting down newspaper and mopping up, and only had half an hour to dress for a dinner they were going to. “Really I looked like the wrath of God,” said Sally. These days she finds herself repeating to Marylynn many of the things Ed says: the stupid things. Marylynn is the only one of Sally’s friends she has confided in to this extent.

“Ed is cute as a button,” Marylynn said. “In fact, he’s just like a button: he’s so bright and shiny. If he were mine, I’d get him bronzed and keep him on the mantelpiece.”

Marylynn is even better than Sally at concocting formulations for Ed’s particular brand of stupidity, which can irritate Sally: coming from herself, this sort of comment appears to her indulgent and loving, but from Marylynn it borders on the patronizing. So then she sticks up for Ed, who is by no means stupid about everything. When you narrow it down, there’s only one area of life he’s hopeless about. The rest of the time he’s intelligent enough, some even say brilliant: otherwise, how could he be so successful?

Ed is a heart man, one of the best, and the irony of this is not lost on Sally: who could possibly know less about the workings of hearts, real hearts, the kind symbolized by red satin surrounded by lace and topped by pink bows, than Ed? Hearts with arrows in them. At the same time, the fact that he’s a heart man is a large part of his allure. Women corner him on sofas, trap him in bay-windows at cocktail parties, mutter to him in confidential voices at dinner parties. They behave this way right in front of Sally, under her very nose, as if she’s invisible, and Ed lets them do it. This would never happen if he were in banking or construction.

As it is, everywhere he goes he is beset by sirens. They want him to fix their hearts. Each of them seems to have a little something wrong–a murmur, a whisper. Or they faint a lot and want him to tell them why. This is always what the conversations are about, according to Ed, and Sally believes it. Once she’d wanted it herself, that mirage. What had she invented for him, in the beginning? A heavy heart, that beat too hard after meals. And he’d been so sweet, looking at her with those stunned brown eyes of his, as if her heart were the genuine topic, listening to her gravely as if he’d never heard any of this twaddle before, advising her to drink less coffee. And she’d felt such triumph, to have carried off her imposture, pried out of him that miniscule token of concern.

Thinking back on this incident makes her uneasy, now that she’s seen her own performance repeated so many times, including the hand placed lightly on the heart, to call attention of course to the breasts. Some of these women have been within inches of getting Ed to put his head down on their chests, right there in Sally’s living room. Watching all this out of the corners of her eyes while serving the liqueurs, Sally feels the Aztec rise within her. Trouble with your heart! Get it removed, she thinks. Then you’ll have no more problems.

Sometimes Sally worries that she’s a nothing, the way Marylynn was before she got a divorce and a job. But Sally isn’t a nothing; therefore, she doesn’t need a divorce to stop being one. And she’s always had a job of some sort; in fact she has one now. Luckily Ed has no objection; he doesn’t have much of an objection to anything she does.

Her job is supposed to be full-time, but in effect it’s part-time, because Sally can take a lot of the work away and do it at home, and, as she says, with one arm tied behind her back. When Sally is being ornery, when she’s playing the dull wife of a fascinating heart man-she does this with people she can’t be bothered with–she says she works in a bank, nothing important. Then she watches their eyes dismiss her. When, on the other hand, she’s trying to impress, she says she’s in P.R. In reality she runs the in-house organ for a trust company, a medium-sized one. This is a thin magazine, nicely printed, which is supposed to make the employees feel that some of the boys are doing worthwhile things out there and are human beings as well. It’s still the boys, though the few women in anything resembling key positions are wheeled out regularly, bloused and suited and smiling brightly, with what they hope will come across as confidence rather than aggression.

This is the latest in a string of such jobs Sally has held over the years: comfortable enough jobs that engage only half of her cogs and wheels, and that end up leading nowhere. Technically she’s second-in-command: over her is a man who wasn’t working out in management, but who couldn’t be fired because his wife was related to the chairman of the board. He goes out for long alcoholic lunches and plays a lot of golf, and Sally runs the show. This man gets the official credit for everything Sally does right, but the senior executives in the company take Sally aside when no one is looking and tell her what a great gal she is and what a whiz she is at holding up her end.

The real pay-off for Sally, though, is that her boss provides her with an endless supply of anecdotes. She dines out on stories about his dim-wittedness and pomposity, his lobotomized suggestions about what the two of them should cook up for the magazine; the organ, as she says he always calls it. “He says we need some fresh blood to perk up the organ,” Sally says, and the heart men grin at her. “He actually said that?” Talking like this about her boss would be reckless–you never know what might get back to him, with the world as small as it is–if Sally were afraid of losing her job, but she isn’t. There’s an unspoken agreement between her and this man: they both know that if she goes, he goes, because who else would put up with him? Sally might angle for his job, if she were stupid enough to disregard his family connections, if she coveted the trappings of power. But she’s just fine where she is. Jokingly, she says she’s reached her level of incompetence. She says she suffers from fear of success.

Her boss is white-haired, slender, and tanned, and looks like an English gin ad. Despite his vapidity he’s outwardly distinguished, she allows him that. In truth she pampers him outrageously, indulges him, covers up for him at every turn, though she stops short of behaving like a secretary: she doesn’t bring him coffee. They both have a secretary who does that anyway. The one time he made a pass at her, when he came in from lunch visibly reeling, Sally was kind about it.

Occasionally, though not often, Sally has to travel in connection with her job. She’s sent off to places like Edmonton, where they have a branch. She interviews the boys at the middle and senior levels; they have lunch, and the boys talk about ups and downs in oil or the slump in the real-estate market. Then she gets taken on tours of shopping plazas under construction. It’s always windy, and grit blows into her face. She comes back to home base and writes a piece on the youthfulness and vitality of the West.

She teases Ed, while she packs, saying she’s going off for a rendezvous with a dashing financier or two. Ed isn’t threatened; he tells her to enjoy herself, and she hugs him and tells him how much she will miss him. He’s so dumb it doesn’t occur to him she might not be joking. In point of fact, it would have been quite possible for Sally to have had an affair, or at least a one- or two-night stand, on several of these occasions: she knows when those chalk lines are being drawn, when she’s being dared to step over them. But she isn’t interested in having an affair with anyone but Ed.

She doesn’t eat much on the planes; she doesn’t like the food. But on the return trip, she invariably saves the pre-packaged parts of the meal, the cheese in its plastic wrap, the miniature chocolate bar, the bag of pretzels. She ferrets them away in her purse. She thinks of them as supplies, that she may need if she gets stuck in a strange airport, if they have to change course because of snow or fog, for instance. All kinds of things could happen, although they never have. When she gets home she takes the things from her purse and throws them out.

Outside the window Ed straightens up and wipes his earth-smeared hands down the sides of his pants. He begins to turn, and Sally moves back from the window so he won’t see that she’s watching. She doesn’t like it to be too obvious. She shifts her attention to the sauce: it’s in the second stage of a sauce suprême, which will make all the difference to the chicken. When Sally was learning this sauce, her cooking instructor quoted one of the great chefs, to the effect that the chicken was merely a canvas. He meant as in painting, but Sally, in an undertone to the woman next to her, turned it around. “Mine’s canvas anyway, sauce or no sauce,” or words to that effect.

Gourmet cooking was the third night course Sally has taken. At the moment she’s on her fifth, which is called Forms of Narrative Fiction. It’s half reading and half writing assignments–the instructor doesn’t believe you can understand an art form without at least trying it yourself–and Sally purports to be enjoying it. She tells her friends she takes night courses to keep her brain from atrophying, and her friends find this amusing: whatever else may become of Sally’s brain, they say, they don’t see atrophying as an option. Sally knows better, but in any case there’s always room for improvement. She may have begun taking the courses in the belief that this would make her more interesting to Ed, but she soon gave up on that idea: she appears to be neither more nor less interesting to Ed now than she was before.

Most of the food for tonight is already made. Sally tries to be well organized: the overflowing Jacuzzi was an aberration. The cold watercress soup with walnuts is chilling in the refrigerator, the chocolate mousse ditto. Ed, being Ed, prefers meatloaf to sweetbreads with pine nuts, butterscotch pudding made from a package to chestnut puree topped with whipped cream. (Sally burnt her fingers peeling the chestnuts. She couldn’t do it the easy way and buy it tinned.) Sally says Ed’s preference for this type of food comes from being pre-programmed by hospital cafeterias when he was younger: show him a burned sausage and a scoop of instant mashed potatoes and he salivates. So it’s only for company that she can unfurl her boeuf en daube and her salmon en papillote, spread them forth to be savoured and praised.

What she likes best about these dinners though is setting the table, deciding who will sit where and, when she’s feeling mischievous, even what they are likely to say. Then she can sit and listen to them say it. Occasionally she prompts a little.

Tonight will not be very challenging, since it’s only the heart men and their wives, and Marylynn, whom Sally hopes will dilute them. The heart men are forbidden to talk shop at Sally’s dinner table, but they do it anyway. “Not what you really want to listen to while you’re eating,” says Sally. “All those tubes and valves.” Privately she thinks they’re a conceited lot, all except Ed. She can’t resist needling them from time to time.

“I mean,” she said to one of the leading surgeons, “basically it’s just an exalted form of dress-making, don’t you think?”

“Come again?” said the surgeon, smiling. The heart men think Sally is one hell of a tease.

“It’s really just cutting and sewing, isn’t it?” Sally murmured. The surgeon laughed.

“There’s more to it than that,” Ed said, unexpectedly, solemnly.

“What more, Ed?” said the surgeon. “You could say there’s a lot of embroidery, but that’s in the billing.” He chuckled at himself.

Sally held her breath. She could hear Ed’s verbal thought processes lurching into gear. He was delectable.

“Good judgement,” Ed said. His earnestness hit the table like a wet fish. The surgeon hastily downed his wine.

Sally smiled. This was supposed to be a reprimand to her, she knew, for not taking things seriously enough. Oh, come on, Ed, she could say. But she knows also, most of the time, when to keep her trap shut. She should have a light-up JOKE sign on her forehead, so Ed would be able to tell the difference.

The heart men do well. Most of them appear to be doing better than Ed, but that’s only because they have, on the whole, more expensive tastes and fewer wives. Sally can calculate these things and she figures Ed is about par.

These days there’s much talk about advanced technologies, which Sally tries to keep up on, since they interest Ed. A few years ago the heart men got themselves a new facility. Ed was so revved up that he told Sally about it, which was unusual for him. A week later Sally said she would drop by the hospital at the end of the day and pick Ed up and take him out for dinner; she didn’t feel like cooking, she said. Really she wanted to check out the facility; she likes to check out anything that causes the line on Ed’s excitement chart to move above level.

At first Ed said he was tired, that when the day came to an end he didn’t want to prolong it. But Sally wheedled and was respectful, and finally Ed took her to see his new gizmo. It was in a cramped, darkened room with an examining table in it. The thing itself looked like a television screen hooked up to some complicated hardware. Ed said that they could wire a patient up and bounce sound waves off the heart and pick up the echoes, and they would get a picture on the screen, an actual picture, of the heart in motion. It was a thousand times better than an electrocardiogram, he said: they could see the faults, the thickenings and cloggings, much more clearly.

“Colour?” said Sally.

“Black and white,” said Ed.

Then Sally was possessed by a desire to see her own heart, in motion, in black and white, on the screen. At the dentist’s she always wants to see the X-rays of her teeth, too, solid and glittering in her cloudy head. “Do it,” she said, “I want to see how it works,” and though this was the kind of thing Ed would ordinarily evade or tell her she was being silly about, he didn’t need much persuading. He was fascinated by the thing himself, and he wanted to show it off.

He checked to make sure there was nobody real booked for the room. Then he told Sally to slip out of her clothes, the top half, brassiere and all. He gave her a paper gown and turned his back modestly while she slipped it on, as if he didn’t see her body every night of the week. He attached electrodes to her, the ankles and one wrist, and turned a switch and fiddled with the dials. Really a technician was supposed to do this, he told her, but he knew how to run the machine himself. He was good with small appliances.

Sally lay prone on the table, feeling strangely naked. “What do I do?” she said.

“Just lie there,” said Ed. He came over to her and tore a hole in the paper gown, above her left breast. Then he started running a probe over her skin. It was wet and slippery and cold, and felt like the roller on a roll-on deodorant.

“There,” he said, and Sally turned her head. On the screen was a large grey object, like a giant fig, paler in the middle, a dark line running down the centre. The sides moved in and out; two wings fluttered in it, like an uncertain moth’s.

“That’s it?” said Sally dubiously. Her heart looked so insubstantial, like a bag of gelatin, something that would melt, fade, disintegrate, if you squeezed it even a little.

Ed moved the probe, and they looked at the heart from the bottom, then the top. Then he stopped the frame, then changed it from a positive to a negative image. Sally began to shiver.

“That’s wonderful,” she said. He seemed so distant, absorbed in his machine, taking the measure of her heart, which was beating over there all by itself, detached from her, exposed and under his control.

Ed unwired her and she put on her clothes again, neutrally, as if he were actually a doctor. Nevertheless this transaction, this whole room, was sexual in a way she didn’t quite understand; it was clearly a dangerous place. It was like a massage parlour, only for women. Put a batch of women in there with Ed and they would never want to come out. They’d want to stay in there while he ran his probe over their wet skins and pointed out to them the defects of their beating hearts.

“Thank you,” said Sally.

Sally hears the back door open and close. She feels Ed approaching, coming through the passages of the house towards her, like a small wind or a ball of static electricity. The hair stands up on her arms. Sometimes he makes her so happy she thinks she’s about to burst; other times she thinks she’s about to burst anyway.

He comes into the kitchen, and she pretends not to notice. She knows she shouldn’t expect too much of Ed. If Ed were more experimental, more interested in variety, he would be a different kind of man altogether: slyer, more devious, more observant, harder to deal with.

Sally steps away from Ed, smiles at him. “How did you make out with the women today?” she says.

“What women?” says Ed absently, going towards the sink. He knows what women.

“The ones out there, hiding in the forsythia,” says Sally. “I counted at least ten. They were just waiting for a chance.”

She teases him frequently about these troops of women, which follow him around everywhere, which are invisible to Ed but which she can see as plain as day.

“I bet they hang around outside the front door of the hospital,” she will say, “just waiting till you come out. I bet they hide in the linen closets and jump out at you from behind, and then pretend to be lost so you’ll take them by the short cut. It’s the white coat that does it. None of those women can resist the white coats. They’ve been conditioned by Young Doctor Kildare.”

“Don’t be silly,” says Ed today, with equanimity. Is he blushing, is he embarrassed? Sally examines his face closely, like a geologist with an aerial photograph, looking for telltale signs of mineral treasure: markings, bumps, hollows. Everything about Ed means something, though it’s difficult at times to say what.

Now he’s washing his- hands at the sink, to get the earth off. In a minute he’ll wipe them on the dish towel instead of using the hand towel the way he’s supposed to. Is that complacency, in the back turned to her? Maybe there really are these hordes of women, even though she’s made them up. Maybe they really do behave that way. His shoulders are slightly drawn up: is he shutting her out?

“I know what they want,” she goes on. “They want to get into that little dark room of yours and climb up onto your table. They think you’re delicious. They’ll gobble you up. They’ll chew you into tiny pieces. There won’t be anything left of you at all, only a stethoscope and a couple of shoelaces.”

Once Ed would have laughed at this, but today he doesn’t. Maybe she’s said it, or something like it, a few times too often. He smiles though, wipes his hands on the dish towel, peers into the fridge. He likes to snack.

“There’s some cold roast beef,” Sally says, baffled.

Sally takes the sauce off the stove and sets it aside for later: she’ll do the last steps just before serving. It’s only two-thirty. Ed has disappeared into the cellar, where Sally knows he will be safe for a while. She goes into her study, which used to be one of the kids’ bedrooms, and sits down at her desk. The room has never been completely redecorated: there’s still a bed in it, and a dressing table with a blue flowered flounce Sally helped pick out, long before the kids went off to university: “flew the coop,” as Ed puts it.

Sally doesn’t comment on the expression, though she would like to say that it wasn’t the first coop they flew. Her house isn’t even the real coop, since neither of the kids is hers. She’d hoped for a baby of her own when she married Ed, but she didn’t want to force the issue. Ed didn’t object to the idea, exactly, but he was neutral about it, and Sally got the feeling he’d had enough babies already. Anyway, the other two wives had babies, and look what happened to them. Since their actual fates have always been vague to Sally, she’s free to imagine all kinds of things, from drug addiction to madness. Whatever it was resulted in Sally having to bring up their kids, at least from puberty onwards. The way it was presented by the first wife was that it was Ed’s turn now. The second wife was more oblique: she said that the child wanted to spend some time with her father. Sally was left out of both these equations, as if the house wasn’t a place she lived in, not really, so she couldn’t be expected to have any opinion.

Considering everything, she hasn’t done badly. She likes the kids and tries to be a friend to them, since she can hardly pretend to be a mother. She describes the three of them as having an easy relationship. Ed wasn’t around much for the kids, but it’s him they want approval from, not Sally; it’s him they respect. Sally is more like a confederate, helping them get what they want from Ed.

When the kids were younger, Sally used to play Monopoly with them, up at the summer place in Muskoka Ed owned then but has since sold. Ed would play too, on his vacations and on the weekends when he could make it up. These games would all proceed along the same lines. Sally would have an initial run of luck and would buy up everything she had a chance at. She didn’t care whether it was classy real estate, like Boardwalk or Park Place, or those dingy little houses on the other side of the tracks; she would even buy train stations, which the kids would pass over, preferring to save their cash reserves for better investments. Ed, on the other hand, would plod along, getting a little here, a little there. Then, when Sally was feeling flush, she would blow her money on next-to-useless luxuries such as the electric light company; and when the kids started to lose, as they invariably did, Sally would lend them money at cheap rates or trade them things of her own, at a loss. Why not? She could afford it.

Ed meanwhile would be hedging his bets, building up blocks of property, sticking houses and hotels on them. He preferred the middle range, respectable streets but not flashy. Sally would land on his spaces and have to shell out hard cash. Ed never offered deals, and never accepted them. He played a lone game, and won more often than not. Then Sally would feel thwarted. She would say she guessed she lacked the killer instinct; or she would say that for herself she didn’t care, because after all it was only a game, but he ought to allow the kids to win, once in a while. Ed couldn’t grasp the concept of allowing other people to win. He said it would be condescending towards the children, and anyway you couldn’t arrange to have a dice game turn out the way you wanted it to, since it was partly a matter of chance. If it was chance, Sally would think, why were the games so similar to one another? At the end, there would be Ed, counting up his paper cash, sorting it out into piles of bills of varying denominations, and Sally, her vast holdings dwindled to a few shoddy blocks on Baltic Avenue, doomed to foreclosure: extravagant, generous, bankrupt.

On these nights, after the kids were asleep, Sally would have two or three more rye-and-gingers than were good for her. Ed would go to bed early-winning made him satisfied and drowsy–and Sally would ramble about the house or read the endings of murder mysteries she had already read once before, and finally she would slip into bed and wake Ed up, seeking comfort.

* * *

Sally has almost forgotten these games. Right now the kids are receding, fading like old ink; Ed on the contrary looms larger and larger, the outlines around him darkening. He’s constantly developing, like a Polaroid print, new colours emerging, but the result remains the same: Ed is a surface, one she has trouble getting beneath.

“Explore your inner world,” said Sally’s instructor in Forms of Narrative Fiction, a middle-aged woman of scant fame who goes in for astrology and the Tarot pack and writes short stories, which are not published in any of the magazines Sally reads. “Then there’s your outer one,” Sally said afterwards, to her friends. “For instance, she should really get something done about her hair.” She made this trivial and mean remark because she’s fed up with her inner world; she doesn’t need to explore it. In her inner world is Ed, like a doll within a Russian wooden doll, and in Ed is Ed’s inner world, which she can’t get at.

She takes a crack at it anyway: Ed’s inner world is a forest, which looks something like the bottom part of their ravine lot, but without the fence. He wanders around in there, among the trees, not heading in any special direction. Every once in a while he comes upon a strange-looking plant, a sickly plant choked with weeds and briars. Ed kneels, clears a space around it, does some pruning, a little skilful snipping and cutting, props it up. The plant revives, flushes with health, sends out a grateful red blossom. Ed continues on his way. Or it may be a cocked-out squirrel, which he restores with a drop from his flask of magic elixir. At set intervals an angel appears, bringing him food. It’s always meatloaf. That’s fine with Ed, who hardly notices what he eats, but the angel is getting tired of being an angel. Now Sally begins thinking about the angel: why are its wings frayed and dingy grey around the edges, why is it looking so withered and frantic? This is where all Sally’s attempts to explore Ed’s inner world end up.

She knows she thinks about Ed too much. She knows she should stop. She knows she shouldn’t ask, “Do you still love me?” in the plaintive tone that sets even her own teeth on edge. All it achieves is that Ed shakes his head, as if not understanding why she would ask this, and pats her hand. “Sally, Sally, ” he says, and everything proceeds as usual; except for the dread that seeps into things, the most ordinary things, such as rearranging the chairs and changing the burnt-out lightbulbs. But what is it she’s afraid of? She has what they call everything: Ed, their wonderful house on a ravine lot, something she’s always wanted. (But the hill is jungly, and the house is made of ice. It’s held together only by Sally, who sits in the middle of it, working on a puzzle. The puzzle is Ed. If she should ever solve it, if she should ever fit the last cold splinter into place, the house will melt and flow away down the hill, and then…) It’s a bad habit, fooling around with her head this way. It does no good. She knows that if she could quit she’d be happier. She ought to be able to: she’s given up smoking.

She needs to concentrate her attention on other things. This is the real reason for the night courses, which she picks almost at random, to coincide with the evenings Ed isn’t in. He has meetings, he’s on the boards of charities, he has trouble saying no. She runs the courses past herself, mediaeval history, cooking, anthropology, hoping her mind will snag on something; she’s even taken a course in geology, which was fascinating, she told her friends, all that magma. That’s just it: everything is fascinating, but nothing enters her. She’s always a star pupil, she does well on the exams and impresses the teachers, for which she despises them. She is familiar with her brightness, her techniques; she’s surprised other people are still taken in by them.

Forms of Narrative Fiction started out the same way. Sally was full of good ideas, brimming with helpful suggestions. The workshop part of it was anyway just like a committee meeting, and Sally knew how to run those, from behind, without seeming to run them: she’d done it lots of times at work. Bertha, the instructor, told Sally she had a vivid imagination and a lot of untapped creative energy. “No wonder she never gets anywhere, with a name like Bertha,” Sally said, while having coffee afterwards with two of the other night-coursers. “It goes with her outfits, though.” (Bertha sports the macrame look, with health-food sandals and bulky-knit sweaters and hand-weave skirts that don’t do a thing for her square figure, and too many Mexican rings on her hands, which she doesn’t wash often enough.) Bertha goes in for assignments, which she calls learning by doing. Sally likes assignments: she likes things that can be completed and then discarded, and for which she gets marks.

The first thing Bertha assigned was The Epic. They read The Odyssey (selected passages, in translation, with a plot summary of the rest); then they poked around in James Joyce’s Ulysses, to see how Joyce had adapted the epic form to the modern-day novel. Bertha had them keep a Toronto notebook, in which they had to pick out various spots around town as the ports of call in The Odyssey, and say why they had chosen them. The notebooks were read out loud in class, and it was a scream to see who had chosen what for Hades. (The Mount Pleasant Cemetery, McDonald’s, where, if you eat the forbidden food, you never get back to the land of the living, the University Club with its dead ancestral souls, and so forth.) Sally’s was the hospital, of course; she had no difficulty with the trench filled with blood, and she put the ghosts in wheelchairs.

After that they did The Ballad, and read gruesome accounts of murders and betrayed love. Bertha played them tapes of wheezy old men singing traditionally, in the Doric mode, and assigned a newspaper scrapbook, in which you had to clip and paste up-to-the-minute equivalents. The Sun was the best newspaper for these. The fiction that turned out to go with this kind of plot was the kind Sally liked anyway, and she had no difficulty concocting a five-page murder mystery, complete with revenge.

But now they are on Folk Tales and the Oral Tradition, and Sally is having trouble. This time, Bertha wouldn’t let them read anything. Instead she read to them, in a voice, Sally said, that was like a gravel truck and was not conducive to reverie. Since it was the Oral Tradition, they weren’t even allowed to take notes; Bertha said the original hearers of these stories couldn’t read, so the stories were memorized. “To recreate the atmosphere,” said Bertha, “I should turn out the lights. These stories were always told at night.” “To make them creepier?” someone offered. “No,” said Bertha. “In the days, they worked.” She didn’t do that, though she did make them sit in a circle.

“You should have seen us,” Sally said afterwards to Ed, “sitting in a circle, listening to fairy stories. It was just like kindergarten. Some of them even had their mouths open. I kept expecting her to say, ‘If you need to go, put up your hand.’ ” She was meaning to be funny, to amuse Ed with this account of Bertha’s eccentricity and the foolish appearance of the students, most of them middle-aged, sitting in a circle as if they had never grown up at all. She was also intending to belittle the course, just slightly. She always did this with her night courses, so Ed wouldn’t get the idea there was anything in her life that was even remotely as important as he was. But Ed didn’t seem to need this amusement or this belittlement. He took her information earnestly, gravely, as if Bertha’s behaviour was, after all, only the procedure of a specialist. No one knew better than he did that the procedures of specialists often looked bizarre or incomprehensible to onlookers. “She probably has her reasons,” was all he would say.

The first stories Bertha read them, for warm-ups (“No memorizing for her,” said Sally), were about princes who got amnesia and forgot about their true loves and married girls their mothers had picked out for them. Then they had to be rescued, with the aid of magic. The stories didn’t say what happened to the women the princes had already married, though Sally wondered about it. Then Bertha read them another story, and this time they were supposed to remember the features that stood out for them and write a five-page transposition, set in the present and cast in the realistic mode. (“In other words,” said Bertha, “no real magic”) They couldn’t use the Universal Narrator, however: they had done that in their Ballad assignment. This time they had to choose a point of view. It could be the point of view of anyone or anything in the story, but they were limited to one only. The story she was about to read, she said, was a variant of the Bluebeard motif, much earlier than Perrault’s sentimental rewriting of it. In Perrault, said Bertha, the girl has to be rescued by her brothers; but in the earlier version things were quite otherwise.

This is what Bertha read, as far as Sally can remember:

There were once three young sisters. One day a beggar with a large basket on his back came to the door and asked for some bread. The eldest sister brought him some, but no sooner had she touched him than she was compelled to jump into his basket, for the beggar was really a wizard in disguise. (“So much for United Appeal,” Sally murmured. “She should have said, ‘I gave at the office.'”) The wizard carried her away to his house in the forest, which was large and richly furnished. “Here you will be happy with me, my darling,” said the wizard, “for you will have everything your heart could desire.”

This lasted for a few days. Then the wizard gave the girl an egg and a bunch of keys. “I must go away on a journey,” he said, “and I am leaving the house in your charge. Preserve this egg for me, and carry it about with you everywhere; for a great misfortune will follow from its loss. The keys open every room in the house. You may go into each of them and enjoy what you find there, but do not go into the small room at the top of the house, on pain of death.” The girl promised, and the wizard disappeared.

At first the girl contented herself with exploring the rooms, which contained many treasures. But finally her curiosity would not let her alone. She sought out the smallest key, and, with beating heart, opened the little door at the top of the house. Inside it was a large basin full of blood, within which were the bodies of many women, which had been cut to pieces;’ nearby were a chopping block and an axe. In her horror, she let go of the egg, which fell into the basin of blood. In vain did she try to wipe away the stain: every time she succeeded in removing it, back it would come.

The wizard returned, and in a stern voice asked for the egg and the keys. When he saw the egg, he knew at once she had disobeyed him and gone into the forbidden room. “Since you have gone into the room against my will,” he said, “you shall go back into it against your own.” Despite her pleas he threw her down, dragged her by the hair into the little room, hacked her into pieces and threw her body into the basin with the others.

Then he went for the second girl, who fared no better than her sister. But the third was clever and wily. As soon as the wizard had gone, she set the egg on a shelf, out of harm’s way, and then went immediately and opened the forbidden door. Imagine her distress when she saw the cut-up bodies of her two beloved sisters; but she set the parts in order, and they joined together and her sisters stood up and moved, and were living and well. They embraced each other, and the third sister hid the other two in a cupboard.

When the wizard returned he at once asked for the egg. This time it was spotless. “You have passed the test,” he said to the third sister. “You shall be my bride.” (“And second prize,” said Sally, to herself this time, “is two weeks in Niagara Falls.”) The wizard no longer had any power over her, and had to do whatever she asked. There was more, about how the wizard met his come-uppance and was burned to death, but Sally already knew which features stood out for her.

At first she thought the most important thing in the story was the forbidden room. What would she put in the forbidden room, in her present-day realistic version? Certainly not chopped-up women. It wasn’t that they were too unrealistic, but they were certainly too sick, as well as being too obvious. She wanted to do something more clever. She thought it might be a good idea to have the curious woman open the door and find nothing there at all, but after mulling it over she set this notion aside. It would leave her with the problem of why the wizard would have a forbidden room in which he kept nothing.

That was the way she was thinking right after she got the assignment, which was a full two weeks ago. So far she’s written nothing. The great temptation is to cast herself in the role of the cunning heroine, but again it’s too predictable. And Ed certainly isn’t the wizard; he’s nowhere near sinister enough. If Ed were the wizard, the room would contain a forest, some ailing plants and feeble squirrels, and Ed himself, fixing them up; but then, if it were Ed the room wouldn’t even be locked, and there would be no story.

Now, as she sits at her desk, fiddling with her felt-tip pen, it comes to Sally that the intriguing thing about the story, the thing she should fasten on, is the egg. Why an egg? From the night course in Comparative Folklore she took four years ago, she remembers that the egg can be a fertility symbol, or a necessary object in African spells, or something the world hatched out of. Maybe in this story it’s a symbol of virginity, and that is why the wizard requires it unbloodied. Women with dirty eggs get murdered, those with clean ones get married.

But this isn’t useful either. The concept is so outmoded. Sally doesn’t see how she can transpose it into real life without making it ridiculous, unless she sets the story in, for instance, an immigrant Portuguese family, and what would she know about that?

Sally opens the drawer of her desk and hunts around in it for her nail file. As she’s doing this, she gets the brilliant idea of writing the story from the point of view of the egg. Other people will do the other things: the clever girl, the wizard, the two blundering sisters, who weren’t smart enough to lie, and who will have problems afterwards, because of the thin red lines running all over their bodies, from where their parts joined together. But no one will think of the egg. How does it feel, to be the innocent and passive cause of so much misfortune?

(Ed isn’t the Bluebeard: Ed is the egg. Ed Egg, blank and pristine and lovely. Stupid, too. Boiled, probably. Sally smiles fondly.)

But how can there be a story from the egg’s point of view, if the egg is so closed and unaware? Sally ponders this, doodling on her pad of lined paper. Then she resumes the search for her nail file. Already it’s time to begin getting ready for her dinner party. She can sleep on the problem of the egg and finish the assignment tomorrow, which is Sunday. It’s due on Monday, but Sally’s mother used to say she was a whiz at getting things done at the last minute.

After painting her nails with Nuit Magique, Sally takes a bath, eating her habitual toasted English muffin while she lies in the tub. She begins to dress, dawdling; she has plenty of time. She hears Ed coming up out of the cellar; then she hears him in the bathroom, which he has entered from the hall door. Sally goes in through the other door, still in her slip. Ed is standing at the sink with his shirt off, shaving. On the weekends he leaves it until necessary, or until Sally tells him he’s too scratchy.

Sally slides her hands around his waist, nuzzling against his naked back. He has very smooth skin, for a man. Sally smiles to herself: she can’t stop thinking of him as an egg-

“Mmm,” says Ed. It could be appreciation, or the answer to a question Sally hasn’t asked and he hasn’t heard, or just an acknowledgement that she’s there.

“Don’t you ever wonder what I think about?” Sally says. She’s said this more than once, in bed or at the dinner table, after dessert. She stands behind him, watching the swaths the razor cuts in the white of his face, looking at her own face reflected in the mirror, just the eyes visible above his naked shoulder. Ed, lathered, is Assyrian, sterner than usual; or a frost-covered Arctic explorer; or demi-human, a white-bearded forest mutant. He scrapes away at himself, methodically destroying the illusion.

“But I already know what you think about,” says Ed.

“How?” Sally says, taken aback.

“You’re always telling me,” Ed says, with what might be resignation or sadness; or maybe this is only a simple statement of fact.

Sally is relieved. If that’s all he’s going on, she’s safe.

* * *

Marylynn arrives half an hour early, her pearl-coloured Porsche leading two men in a delivery truck up the driveway. The men install the keyhole desk, while Marylynn supervises: it looks, in the alcove, exactly as Marylynn has said it would, and Sally is delighted. She sits at it to write the cheque. Then she and Marylynn go into the kitchen, where Sally is finishing up her sauce, and Sally pours them each a Kir. She’s glad Marylynn is here: it will keep her from dithering, as she tends to do just before people arrive. Though it’s only the heart men, she’s still a bit nervous. Ed is more likely to notice when things are wrong than when they’re exactly right.

Marylynn sits at the kitchen table, one arm draped over the chairback, her chin on the other hand; she’s in soft grey, which makes her hair look silver, and Sally feels once again how banal it is to have ordinary dark hair like her own, however well-cut, however shiny. It’s the confidence she envies, the negligence. Marylynn doesn’t seem to be trying at all, ever.

“Guess what Ed said today?” Sally says.

Marylynn leans further forward. “What?” she says, with the eagerness of one joining in a familiar game.

“He said, ‘Some of these femininists go too far,'” Sally reports. “‘Femininists.’ Isn’t that sweet?”

Marylynn holds the pause too long, and Sally has a sudden awful thought: maybe Marylynn thinks she’s showing off, about Ed. Marylynn has always said she’s not ready for another marriage yet; still, Sally should watch herself, not rub her nose in it. But then Marylynn laughs indulgently, and Sally, relieved, joins in.

“Ed is unbelievable,” says Marylynn. “You should pin his mittens to his sleeves when he goes out in the morning.”

“He shouldn’t be let out alone,” says Sally.

“You should get him a seeing-eye dog,” says Marylynn, “to bark at women.”

“Why?” says Sally, still laughing but alert now, the cold beginning at the ends of her fingers. Maybe Marylynn knows something she doesn’t; maybe the house is beginning to crumble, after all.

“Because he can’t see them coming,” says Marylynn. “That’s what you’re always telling me.”

She sips her Kir; Sally stirs the sauce. “I bet he thinks I’m a femininist,” says Marylynn.

“You?” says Sally. “Never.” She would like to add that Ed has given no indication of thinking anything at all about Marylynn, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t want to take the risk of hurting her feelings.

The wives of the heart men admire Sally’s sauce; the heart men talk shop, all except Walter Morly, who is good at by-passes. He’s sitting beside Marylynn, and paying far too much attention to her for Sally’s comfort. Mrs. Morly is at the other end of the table, not saying much of anything, which Marylynn appears not to notice. She keeps on talking to Walter about St. Lucia, where they’ve both been.

So after dinner, when Sally has herded them all into the living room for coffee and liqueurs, she takes Marylynn by the elbow. “Ed hasn’t seen our desk yet,” she says, “not up close. Take him away and give him your lecture on nineteenth-century antiques. Show him all the pigeon-holes. Ed loves pigeon-holes.” Ed appears not to get this.

Marylynn knows exactly what Sally is up to. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I won’t rape Dr. Morly; the poor creature would never survive the shock,” but she allows herself to be shunted off to the side with Ed.

Sally moves from guest to guest, smiling, making sure everything is in order. Although she never looks directly, she’s always conscious of Ed’s presence in the room, any room; she perceives him as a shadow, a shape seen dimly at the edge of her field of vision, recognizable by the outline. She likes to know where he is, that’s all. Some people are on their second cup of coffee. She walks towards the alcove: they must have finished with the desk by now.

But they haven’t, they’re still in there. Marylynn is bending forward, one hand on the veneer. Ed is standing too close to her, and as Sally comes up behind them she sees his left arm, held close to his side, the back of it pressed against Marylynn, her shimmering upper thigh. Marylynn does not move away.

It’s a split second, and then Ed sees Sally and the hand is gone; there it is, on top of the desk, reaching for a liqueur glass.

“Marylynn needs more Tia Maria,” he says. “I just told her that people who drink a little now and again live longer.” His voice is even, his face is as level as ever, a flat plain with no signposts.

Marylynn laughs. “I once had a dentist who I swear drilled tiny holes in my teeth, so he could fix them later,” she says.

Sally sees Ed’s hand outstretched towards her, holding the empty glass. She takes it, smiling, and turns away. There’s a roaring sound at the back of her head; blackness appears around the edges of the picture she is seeing, like a television screen going dead. She walks into the kitchen and puts her cheek against the refrigerator and her arms around it, as far as they will go. She remains that way, hugging it; it hums steadily, with a sound like comfort. After a while she lets go of it and touches her hair, and walks back into the living room with the filled glass.

Marylynn is over by the french doors, talking with Walter Morly. Ed is standing by himself, in front of the fireplace, one arm on the mantelpiece, his left hand out of sight in his pocket.

Sally goes to Marylynn, hands her the glass. “Is that enough?” she says.

Marylynn is unchanged. “Thanks, Sally,” she says, and goes on listening to Walter, who has dragged out his usual piece of mischief: some day, when they’ve perfected it, he says, all hearts will be plastic, and this will be a vast improvement on the current model. It’s an obscure form of flirtation. Marylynn winks at Sally, to show that she knows he’s tedious. Sally, after a pause, winks back.

She looks over at Ed, who is staring off into space, like a robot which has been parked and switched off. Now she isn’t sure whether she really saw what she thought she saw. Even if she did, what does it mean? Maybe it’s just that Ed, in a wayward intoxicated moment, put his hand on the nearest buttock, and Marylynn refrained from a shriek or a flinch out of good breeding or the desire not to offend him. Things like this have happened to Sally.

Or it could mean something more sinister: a familiarity between them, an understanding. If this is it, Sally has been wrong about Ed, for years, forever. Her version of Ed is not something she’s perceived but something that’s been perpetrated on her, by Ed himself, for reasons of his own. Possibly Ed is not stupid. Possibly he’s enormously clever. She thinks of moment after moment when this cleverness, this cunning, would have shown itself if it were there, but didn’t. She has watched him so carefully. She remembers playing Pick Up Sticks, with the kids, Ed’s kids, years ago: how if you moved one stick in the tangle, even slightly, everything else moved also.

She won’t say anything to him. She can’t say anything: she can’t afford to be wrong, or to be right either. She goes back into the kitchen and begins to scrape the plates. This is unlike her–usually she sticks right with the party until it’s over–and after a while Ed wanders out. He stands silently, watching her. Sally concentrates on the scraping: dollops of sauce suprême slide into the plastic bag, shreds of lettuce, rice, congealed and lumpy. What is left of her afternoon.

“What are you doing out here?” Ed asks at last.

“Scraping the plates,” Sally says, cheerful, neutral. “I just thought I’d get a head start on tidying up.”

“Leave it,” says Ed. “The woman can do that in the morning.” That’s how he refers to Mrs. Rudge, although she’s been with them for three years now: the woman. And Mrs. Bird before her, as though they are interchangeable. This has never bothered Sally before. “Go on out there and have a good time.”

Sally puts down the spatula, wipes her hands on the hand towel, puts her arms around him, holds on tighter than she should. Ed pats her shoulder. “What’s up?” he says; then, “Sally, Sally.” If she looks up, she will see him shaking his head a little, as if he doesn’t know what to do about her. She doesn’t look up.

Ed has gone to bed. Sally roams the house, fidgeting with the debris left by the party. She collects empty glasses, picks up peanuts from the rug. After a while she realizes that she’s down on her knees, looking under a chair, and she’s forgotten what for. She goes upstairs, creams off her make-up, does her teeth, undresses in the darkened bedroom and slides into bed beside Ed, who is breathing deeply as if asleep. As if.

Sally lies in bed with her eyes closed. What she sees is her own heart, in black and white, beating with that insubstantial moth-like flutter, a ghostly heart, torn out of her and floating in space, an animated valentine with no colour. It will go on and on forever; she has no control over it. But now she’s seeing the egg, which is not small and cold and white and inert but larger than a real egg and golden pink, resting in a nest of brambles, glowing softly as though there’s something red and hot inside it. It’s almost pulsing; Sally is afraid of it. As she looks it darkens: rose-red, crimson. This is something the story left out, Sally thinks: the egg is alive, and one day it will hatch. But what will come out of it?

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