The Books: “Bluebeard’s Egg” – ‘Significant Moments in the Life of my Mother’ (Margaret Atwood)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Here is an excerpt from Bluebeard’s Egg: Stories – by Margaret Atwood. Another story collection – this came out in 1983. I’m trying to do this chronologically but I messed up. This one came out before Handmaid’s Tale. I LOVE this short story collection. Every story is a little Atwood-ian world, perfectly expressed … each one different – all of them (of course) kind of chilling. Atwood has that effect. She’s a “chilly mortal”. She doesn’t seem to be using chilliness as a device (at least not until recently – when her books seem to be imitating herself – my opinion) … it seems to be the truest expression of her artistic sensibility. That’s why it’s good. I can think of other writers who either imitate Atwood – or who try to get that cold clear ruthlessness into their writing … but it doesn’t come naturally. It’s a facsimile, it’s pretentious. Atwood never comes off that way.

The first story in the collection is called “Significant Moments in the Life of my Mother”. The narrator’s mother loves to tell stories – and so, from a perspective of distance (is the mother now dead? It seems like she is) – the narrator relates her mother’s tales. But there’s something upsetting here – something between the lines … The narrator doesn’t know what it is exactly, because her mother wouldn’t divulge it. The mother likes to tell stories about fun she had, funny moments – she casts herself as a clown, a clutz, someone who makes inappropriate scenes … But the narrator wonders what else is there, what did she NOT tell? What did her mother’s smile hide?

Here’s an excerpt. This passage haunts me – I haven’t read this collection in years but I remember vividly the story of the cat. Maybe because I know I’ve had an experience like this in my own life – not exactly, of course – but the feeling is what I’m talking about. Shivers. One of the things Atwood is driving at here in this story (and she gets into it in this excerpt) – is that the generation gap between these two women, mother and daughter, is so huge (as it is quite often) – but here in particular, because the narrator came of age in the 70s – when suddenly women could talk to each other with more openness and honesty. What was it like for you? How did you feel? The ugly stories were just as welcome as the happy ones. It was part of feminist movement – one of the most important parts, I’d say. (Atwood goes way more into this in Cat’s Eye.) Reducing the isolation between women. So although the daughter senses ugliness in her mother’s stories – (an ugliness that she sees as the truth) – it’s left unsaid. This leaves the daughter feeling lonely, isolated … she cannot really know her mother. Anyway – here’s the story with the cat. You’ll see what I mean.

excerpt from Bluebeard’s Egg: Stories – “Significant Moments in the Life of my Mother” – by Margaret Atwood.

At the age of seventeen my mother went to the Normal School in Truro. This name – “Normal School” – once held a certain magic for me. I thought it had something to do with learning to be normal, which possibly it did, because really it was where you used to go to learn how to be a schoolteacher. Subsequently my mother taught in a one-room school house not far from her home. She rode her horse to and from the school house every day, and saved up the money she earned and sent herrself to university with it. My grandfather wouldn’t send her: he said she was too frivolous-minded. She liked ice-skating and dancing too much for his taste.

At Normal School my mother boarded with a family that contained several sons in more or less the same age group as the girl boarders. They all are around a huge dining-room table (which I pictured as being of dark wood, with heavy carved legs, but covered always with a white linen tablecloth), with the mother and father presiding, one at each end. I saw them both as large and pink and beaming.

“The boys were great jokers,” says my mother. “They were always up to something.” This was desirable in boys: to be great jokers, to be always up to something. My mother adds a key sentence: “We had a lot of fun.”

Having fun has always been high on my mother’s agenda. She has as much fun as possible, but what she means by this phrase cannot be understood without making an adjustment, an allowance for the great gulf across which this phrase must travel before it reaches us. It comes from another world, which, like the stars that originally sent out the light we see hesitating in the sky above us these nights, may be or is already gone. It is possible to reconstruct the facts of this world – the furniture, the clothing, the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the jugs and basins and even the chamber pots in the bedrooms, but not the emotions, not with the same exactness. So much that is now known and felt must be excluded.

This was a world in which guileless flirtation was possible, because there were many things that were simply not done by nice girls, and more girls were nice then. To fall from niceness was to fall not only from grace: sexual acts, by girls at any rate, had financial consequences. Life was more joyful and innocent thn, and at the same time permeated with guilt and terror, or at least the occasions for them, on the most daily level. It was like the Japanese haiku: a limited form, rigid in its parameters, within which an astonishing freedom was possible.

There are photographs of my mother at this time, taken with three or four other girls, linked arm in arm or with their arms thrown jestingly around each other’s necks. Behind them, beyond the sea or the hills or whatever is in the background, is a world already hurtling towards ruin, unknown to them: the theory of relativity has been discovered, acid is accumulating at the roots of trees, the bull-frogs are doomed. But they smile with something that from this distance you could almost call gallantry, their right legs thrust forward in parody of a chorus line.

One of the great amusements for the girl boarders and the sons of the family was amateur theatre. Young people – they were called “young people” – frequently performed in plays which were put on in the church basement. My mother was a regular actor. (I have a stack of the scripts somewhere about the house, yellowing little booklets with my mother’s parts checked in pencil. They are all comedies, and all impenetrable.) “There was no television then,” says my mother. “You made your own fun.”

For one of these plays a cat was required, and my mother and one of the sons borrowed the family cat. They put it into a canvas bag and drove to the rehearsal (there were cars by then), with my mother holding the cat on her lap. The cat, which must have been frightened, wet itself copiously, through the canvas bag and all over my mother’s skirt. At the same time it made the most astonishingly bad smell.

“I was ready to sink through the floorboards,” says my mother. “But what could I do? All I could do was sit there. In those days things like that” — she means cat pee, or pee of any sort — “were not mentioned.” She means in mixed company.

I think of my mother driven through the night, skirts dripping, overcome with shame, the young man beside her staring straight ahead, pretending not to notice anything. They both feel that this act of unmentionable urination has been done, not by the cat, but by my mother. And so they continue, in a straight line that takes them over the Atlantic and past the curvature of the earth, out through the moon’s orbit and into the dark reaches beyond.

Meanwhile, back on earth, my mother says: “I had to throw the skirt out. It was a good skirt, too, but nothing could get rid of the smell.”