Good Bones Part 4

I WANT TO get the rose-bushes in first. I like just sitting there. Last night there was a firefly. Can you imagine?

He said I could heal myself. He told me over the phone. He said, I can hear it in your voice. You should meditate on light for three minutes every day, and drink the leaves of cabbages, the leaves right next to the outer ones. Put them in a blender. Some garlic, too. You'll pee green, but you'll heal. You know, it actually worked, for a while.

This is not attractive. I know it isn't, especially the hair. What do I want? I want you to talk about normal things.

I know I look like h.e.l.l. But it's still me in here. What do I want? I want you to talk about normal things. No I don't. I want you to look me in the eye and say, I know you're dying. But for Christ's sake don't make me console you.

I said, get the f.u.c.k out. This has nothing to do with my f.u.c.king att.i.tude. Of course I'm bitter! Get out or I'll throw something at you. Where's the bedpan? You know I don't mean it. Christ I'd like a drink. Well, why not, eh?

No, don't. Don't hug me. It hurts.

I want to see what comes up, in the spring. d.a.m.n squirrels, they eat the bulbs. Mothb.a.l.l.s are supposed to work.

If you want to cry, do it around the corner where she can't see you.

It's time for you to go home.

Something went wrong, we don't know what. We think you should come down at once.

- Can't you do something? It isn't her, it isn't her! She looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy, she's all swollen up, I can't stand it!

- It's not bothering her, she's in a coma.

- I don't believe in comas! She can hear, she can see everything! If you're going to talk about death, let's go down to the coffee-shop.

It's cruel, it's cruel, she's never going to wake up! She can't get back into her body, and if she did she'd hate it! Can't somebody pull the plug?

I knew she'd died when the ashtray broke. It cracked right across. It was the one she gave me. I knew she was right there! It was her way of letting me know.

Glorious scenes. Glorious scenes! n.o.body made scenes like hers. Vulgar as all-get-out. Of course, she would always apologize afterwards. She needn't have done. Not to me.

What I miss is what she'd say. What she would have said. That's the difference: you have to put everything into the past conditional. Bereft, you might call it. Not her word, though too po-faced. That was her word.

I went over there, did a little weeding. It's fading though, what she looked like exactly. I can remember her tone of voice, but not her voice. It's funny the way you keep on talking to people. It's as if they could hear.

Four Small Paragraphs.

For Mr. Flat.

THIS IS THE landscape where he came to rest: the earth, ochre and rust, that has been used and re-used, pa.s.sed through mouth and stomach and gut and bone, and out again into earth and then into stem and bud and ripe fruit, then harvested and bruised and fermented for a moment of warmth; the pruned vines like twisted fists, the unclipped ones with their long yellowish intertwined fingernails, like those of potatoes in the dark; and the light inside everything, oozing up from the furrows like juice from a cut peach, glistening along the leaves like the slippery backs of snails, like licked lips. When it rains, the dust of the Sahara falls from the south wind, spotting the white plastic patio chairs at the tabac with dried blood. Higher up are the limestone mountains, dry and covered with tough and pungent shrubs, the maquis they're called, and gullied by time and spa.r.s.e as aphorism. He liked the harshness of the sun here, or so he said.

In the restaurant he was known as Monsieur Terra.s.se, an alias to deceive the tourists while he ate his dinner. I almost said terrorists. Famous people don't wish to be interrupted while chewing, or watched closely while they do it. Neither does anyone else, but there's less likelihood. In English he was Mr. Patio. Many things are more romantic in French, the word odour for instance. Camus translates as plain flat, but he wouldn't have minded.

The books in the brick-and-board bookshelves, dismantled, reconstructed, dispersed, it must be thirty years ago, are turning yellow and then brown, crumbling at the edges like fallen leaves, consuming themselves from within. There's the same odour, a slow acrid burning. Uncompromising, he wished to be; and clear, like the desert light.

On All Souls' Day the dead are tended. Here it's a duty. The graves are weeded, and huge bubbles of bright paint bloom beside them: chrysanthemums, purple and orange, yellow and red; and china dahlias too, the colour of last year's lipstick, and brittle pansies chipped by hail. What he himself has been given is not ornate. Squareness and greyness, the elegance of plainsong, no mottoes. No gilded mementoes, no picture of him in a gla.s.sy oval, that quizzical face with its simian postwar brush-cut. What do I remember most clearly, from all those acrid pages? The scene in which a man spits on a woman's naked body, because she has been unfaithful. What did he mean to convey, to me? Something about betrayal, or else about women's bodies? He isn't telling. An abrupt bush is what he has, with dark cryptic foliage, one of the mountain shrubs. No hope, no armfuls of petals. This is what there is, he says, or fails to say. You are what you do. Don't expect mercy. Later, when I went back, someone had left six withering real roses in a kitchen jar.

We Want It All.

WHAT WE WANT of course is the same old story. The trees pushing out their leaves, fluttering them, shucking them off, the water thrashing around in the oceans, the tweedling of the birds, the unfurling of the slugs, the worms vacuuming dirt. The zinnias and their pungent slow explosions. We want it all to go on and go on again, the same thing each year, monotonous and amazing, just as if we were still behaving ourselves, living in tents, raising sheep, slitting their throats for G.o.d's benefit, refusing to invent plastics. For unbelief and bathrooms you pay a price. If apples were the Devil's only bait we'd still be able to call our souls our own, but then the p.r.i.c.k threw indoor plumbing into the bargain and we were doomed. Now we use up a lot of paper telling one another how to conserve paper, and the sea fills up with killer coffee cups, and we worry about the sun and its ambivalent rays.

When will it all cave in? The sky, I mean; our networks; our intricate pretensions. We were too good at what we did, at being fruitful, at multiplying, and now there's too much breathing. We eat dangerous foods, our s.h.i.t glows in the dark, the cells of our bodies turn on us like sharks. Every system is self-limiting. Will we solve ourselves as the rats do? With war, with plagues, with ma.s.s starvation? These thoughts come with breakfast, like the juice from murdered fruits. Your depression, my friend, is the revenge of the oranges.

But we still find the world astounding, we can't get enough of it; even as it shrivels, even as its many lights flicker and are extinguished (the tigers, the leopard frogs, the plunging dolphin flukes), flicker and are extinguished, by us, by us, we gaze and gaze. Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.

Better than the mouth, my darling. Better than the mouth.

Dance of the Lepers.

WHO KNOWS whether there could be such a thing? Possibly lepers do not dance, or are unable to. On the other hand, possibly they do. Somebody must know.

In the Dance of the Lepers, the lepers were not real. That is, they did not have leprosy. On the contrary. These lepers were healthy, able-bodied and young. They were dancers. But they were pretending to be lepers, and since I always believe in surfaces, I believed that they were real.

The pretended, real dance of the lepers took place on a stage. It was Christmas up there. The music was quick, with nasal horns and light-fingered drums. People in mediaeval costumes whirled about. Muscular beggars were there, slender maidens in pointed caps with trailing veils, a stately prince, a voluptuous Gypsy, a witty fool. Everything you might require. Daydream ingredients. Take-out romance.

Then the lights dimmed and the music slowed, and the lepers entered. There were five of them; they held onto one another, to various parts of their various bodies, because they could not see. They were dressed in white strips of cloth wound round and around them, around their bodies and also around their hands and heads. They had no faces, only this blunt cloth.

They looked like animated mummies from an old horror film. They looked like living bed-sheets. They looked like war casualties. They looked like coc.o.o.ns. They looked like people you once knew very well, whose names you've forgotten. They looked like your own face in the steam-covered mirror after a bath, your own face temporarily nameless. They looked like aphasia. They looked like an ad for bandages. They looked like a bondage photo. They looked erotic. They looked obliterated. They looked like a sad early death.

The music they danced to was filled with the ringing of bells. In fact they carried little bells, little iron bells, or so I seem to remember. That was to warn people: stay away from the lepers. Or: stay away from the dance. Dancing can be dangerous.

What about their dance? There is very little I can tell you about that. One thing is certain: it was not a tap-dance. Also: no pirouettes.

It was a dance of supplication, a numb dance, a dance of hopelessness and resignation. Also: a dance of continuation, a dance of going on despite everything, a stubborn dance. An awkward, hampered dance. A fluid, graceful dance. A clumsy, left-footed, infinitely skilful dance. A cynical and disgusted dance, a dance of worship, naive and joyful. A dance.

Ah lepers. If you can dance, even you, why not the rest of us?

Good Bones.

YOU HAVE good bones, they used to say, and I paid no attention. What did I care about good bones, then? I was more concerned with what was covering them. I was more concerned with l.u.s.t, and pimples. The bones were backdrop.

Now they are growing into their own, those bones. Flesh diminishes, giving way to bedrock. Structural principles. What you need is the right light, to blot out the wrinkles, the incidentals. The right shade, the right amount of sun, and see, out come the bones, the good bones, the bones come out like flowers.

Them bones, them bones, them dry bones, them and their good connections; we sang them over once around the campfire, those gleeful strutters to the Word of the Lord, or to our own hands clapping. Behind each face, each lovely body in its plaid shirt, soft b.u.m on hard granite, I could guess the Hallowe'en skeleton, white and one-dimensional, a chalk bonehead drawn on a blackboard; a zombie, a brief memento mori, dragged out for burning, like a heretic, flanked by the torches of the incandescent marshmallows.

Our voices made short work of them, them bones. Tossed on the bonfire they flared up like b.u.t.ter, and went out and were dismissed. You are my sunshine, we sang, though not to them. We nestled closer, jellifying each other, some of us boneless.

So much for death. So much for death, at that time, there.

This is the cemetery. The good bones are in here, the bad bones are out there, beyond the church wall, beyond the pale, unsanctified.

The bad bones behaved badly, perhaps because of bad blood, bad luck, bad childhoods. Anyway, they did not treat their bodies well. Walked them over cliff edges, jumped them off bell-towers. Tried to fly. Broke things.

The good bones lie snug under their tidy monuments. They have been given brooches to wear, signet rings, poems carved on stone, marble urns, citations. Circlets of bright hair. They have been worthy and dutiful, they deserve it. That's what it says here: the last word.

The bad bones have been bad, so they are better left unsaid. They are better left unsaying. But they were never happy, they always wanted more, they were always hungry. They can smell the words, the words coming out of your mouth all warm and yeasty. They want some words of their own. They'll be back.

This is my friend, these are her bones, these ashes we pour out under the tulips. When she fell down on the sidewalk her hipbone shattered. It was hollow in there, eaten away, like a tree with ants. Bone meal.

They put her in the hospital and I went to see her. I'm terrified, she said, but it's sort of interesting. My t.u.r.ds are white, like bird t.u.r.ds. It's calcium. I'm dissolving myself, I'm s.h.i.tting bones. I guess you can do worse than be fertilizer. Other things can grow.

We are both fond of gardens.

Today I speak to my bones as I would speak to a dog. I want to go up the stairs, I tell them. Up, up, up, with one leg dragging. Is the ache deep in the bones, this elusive pain? Does that mean it will rain? Good bones, good bones, I coax, wondering how to reward them; if they will sit up for me, beg, roll over, do one more trick, once more.

There. We're at the top. Good bones! Good bones! Keep on going.

Acknowledgements.

Some of these pieces have appeared in:.

CANADA.

The Malahat Review, This Magazine, Sat.u.r.day Night, Quarry, Le Sabord, Tesseracts 3 (Porcepic). Three also appeared in Selected Poems II (Oxford), which is out of print.

UNITED STATES.

Harper's, Ms., Antaeus, Translation, Critical Fictions (Bay Press). "The Female Body" and "Alien Territory" appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, in its Female Body and Male Body issues, respectively.

UNITED KINGDOM.

Elle, Sunday Times, Soho Square (Bloomsbury).

MEXICO.

Earth Anthology (Grupo de los Cien).

Afterword.

BY ROSEMARY SULLIVAN.

On the front cover of Good Bones, a strange creature, part sibyl, part harpy, perches on a naked female leg. Her tail feathers are composed of human eyes, her wings of lipsticked mouths with smiling teeth, her head feathers of grapes under a ruby hat, and her breastplate of sungla.s.ses. She is the muse of this shrewd, often hilarious collection of stories. Margaret Atwood has designed the cover art for a number of her books. Here the reader has only to look at her collage to be forewarned: this muse packs a scorpion sting.

Atwood was living in France as work on Good Bones was nearing completion. Because of a French postal strike, the cover had to be sent by courier, and was initially lost, with the consequence that this exotic creature was trapped briefly in some French dead letter office. Clearly, someone did not want her wisdom loosed on the world.

In an unexpected way, it helps to think of France in connection with Good Bones, for in describing the form of the stories, the closest I can come is the conte, that curious French form that is midway between parable, fairy tale, and story. The French speak of un vrai conte for an improbable story and un conte vrai for a true story. And there is the conte de bonne femme, or conte bleu, the traditional old wives' tale, which Atwood might be said to have reinvented as the wise woman's tale.

There has always been something of the sibylline touch about Atwood. In Good Bones there are twenty-seven stories, written mostly between 1986 and 1992. As she sent letters across the Atlantic indicating revisions and precise directions for the arrangement of stories, Atwood remarked to her editor that she had "found" "Third Handed," the last story to be added to the collection: "I knew there was a twenty-seventh piece I hate even numbers and much prefer multiples of nine ... it goes in between Homelanding and Death Scenes." And one feels the pungent whiff of the white witch's magic in the brew.

If there is one book that lurks behind these tales, it is The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. As a six-year-old child, Atwood read the 1944 unexpurgated Pantheon edition of Grimm, 210 tales long, with Josef Scharl's gothic ill.u.s.trations of skulls, hangmen, witches, ogres, and other remarkable creatures. In 1983 she recalled those stories with their "barrels of nails, red-hot shoes, removable tongues and eyes, cannibalism and various forms of open-heart surgery," noting that "the book I've re-read most frequently, on a lifetime count, is Grimm's Fairy Tales.... I've been reading this book, cover to cover and here and there, off and on, for 37 years." Her childhood favourites were the wonderfully grotesque "The Juniper Tree" and "Fitcher's Bird" (an archaic version of the more familiar "Blue Beard" recorded by the seventeenth-century French raconteur Charles Perrault).

In the original Grimm, before the stories were child-proofed and the bloodthirsty bits eliminated, the females had magic powers. "The women in these stories are not the pa.s.sive zombies we were at one point led to think they were," Atwood explains. The princesses "do as much rescuing as the princes do, though they use magic, perseverance and cleverness rather than cold steel to do it." The narrative voice in Good Bones is one of those adventurous heroines, using disguises, ambiguity, and subversion to tell her stories. They entertain but they also instruct, and, like the original Grimm, they do not always have happy endings.

In Good Bones, Atwood rewrites the traditional Grimm characters: the little hen, the ugly sister, the harpy with her "coiffeur of literate serpents," giving them contemporary voices. She plays with fairy-tale beginnings: "There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest," hilariously rewriting the story to meet the prescriptions of political correctness till the story disappears, as does its mystery.

Atwood creates her own contes. One of my favourites is "In Love With Raymond Chandler." Somehow she always finds her eccentric way into the heart of the matter. Here she reminds us why we are attached to Chandler. He is not the detective writer of grisly murders and steamy s.e.x, but the detective of furniture, of those antimaca.s.sars and mahogany desks, of bedroom suites.

Two of the contes were commissioned by Michigan Quarterly Review for special issues on the female and the male body. The first editorial inquiry to Atwood came as a request for a submission "entirely devoted to the subject of 'The Female Body.' Knowing how well you have written on this topic ... this capacious topic." She is so quick that she immediately picks up the kernel of her tale, telling us of the aging of her capacious topic: "My topic feels like h.e.l.l." In the course of the tale, she shows how this topic, the female body, has been exploited and misused, by itself and by society; how it is used to sell and is sold. We know and need to know these things, but it is the wit with which this often overworked topic speaks that makes it fresh and disturbing.

"Alien Territory" is the male twin to this piece, and here she returns briefly to the tale of Bluebeard. This may be the single most slippery story in the whole repertoire of fairy tales, and it holds endless fascination for Atwood. As an undergraduate at university, she was already listening to Bela Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and drawing water colours of The Robber Bridegroom. Through decades of writing, she has continued to probe the story's dark entrails. In "Bluebeard's Egg," the t.i.tle story of her 1983 collection, she refers to the traditional version in which the three sisters, in sequence, discovered dismembered bodies of previous wives in Bluebeard's castle. In the version she invents in Good Bones, the third sister finds a small dead child with its eyes wide open locked in Bluebeard's secret room. The narrator, whose motive, like that of many modern women, is to heal Bluebeard, obviously has no idea how far down into his psyche she will have to go to do so.

Atwood insisted that "The Female Body" and "Alien Territory" were to be called not essays, but "pieces." They are driven by a deeply moral imagination, and fraught with warnings: as a civilization we are destroying ourselves. In the tour de force "My Life as a Bat," the narrator decides it was better to be a bat than to be human. She hopes to be a bat again. Reincarnation as an animal would be "At least a resting place. An interlude of grace." And Atwood offers an evocative vision, through a bat's eyes, of a world in which there are still G.o.ddesses in the caves and grottoes. When asked by The British Defense and Aid Fund for South Africa to donate a ma.n.u.script for sale at Sotheby's to a.s.sist students in South Africa and Namibia, Atwood donated "My Life as a Bat." It carries the full weight of her ironic vision of our collective human achievement.

Good Bones is scrupulously organized and ends with the t.i.tle story about aging, a subject Atwood confronts with celebratory stoicism. Reading it, I hear W.B. Yeats's contrapuntal voice speaking of aging in "Sailing to Byzantium": "An aging man is but a paltry thing / A tattered coat upon a stick ... sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal." I would speculate that Atwood would not entirely approve of Yeats's egocentric, romantic fantasy of escaping the human through the transcendence of art. Unlike Yeats, she speaks to her aging bones with affection rather than with contempt. There is good in the real, in the minimal, if we could only accept our human limitations. As she urges her bones to the top of the stairs, she speaks to them as to a faithful dog: "There. We're at the top. Good Bones! Good Bones! Keep on going."

In Good Bones, Margaret Atwood may insist that the reader look at hard truths, but she never forgoes her belief in magic and the transformative powers of the imagination. As she once said, we may not be able to change the world, but we can change our way of looking at it. Some of her magic is to be felt in the way she chisels her stories to an adamantine brilliance. Few modern writers are as off-beat and funny; few can orchestrate images of such stunning precision; few can be as wise.

BY MARGARET ATWOOD.

FICTION.

The Edible Woman (1969).

Surfacing (1972)

Lady Oracle (1976).

Dancing Girls (1977)

Life Before Man (1979).