Lady Oracle

  Why did I never tell him? It was fear, mostly. When I first met him he talked a lot about wanting a woman whose mind he could respect, and I knew that if he found out I'd written The Secret of Morgrave Manor he wouldn't respect mine. I wanted very much to have a respectable mind. Arthur's friends and the books he read, which always had footnotes, and the causes he took up made me feel deficient and somehow absurd, a sort of intellectual village idiot, and revealing my profession would certainly have made it worse. These books, with their covers featuring gloomy, foreboding castles and apprehensive maidens in modified nightgowns, hair streaming in the wind, eyes bulging like those of a goiter victim, toes poised for flight, would be considered trash of the lowest order. Worse than trash, for didn't they exploit the masses, corrupt by distracting, and perpetuate degrading stereotypes of women as helpless and persecuted? They did and I knew it, but I couldn't stop.

  "You're an intelligent woman," Arthur would have said. He always said this before an exposition of some failing of mine, but also he really believed it. His exasperation with me was like that of a father with smart kids who got bad report cards.

  He wouldn't have understood. He wouldn't have been able to understand in the least the desire, the pure quintessential need of my readers for escape, a thing I myself understood only too well. Life had been hard on them and they had not fought back, they'd collapsed like souffles in a high wind. Escape wasn't a luxury for them, it was a necessity. They had to get it somehow. And when they were too tired to invent escapes of their own, mine were available for them at the corner drugstore, neatly packaged like the other painkillers. They could be taken in capsule form, quickly and discreetly, during those moments when the hair-dryer was stiffening the curls around their plastic rollers or the bath oil in the bath was turning their skins to pink velvet, leaving a ring in the tub to be removed later with Ajax Cleanser, which would make their hands smell like a hospital and cause their husbands to remark that they were about as sexy as a dishcloth. Then they would mourn their lack of beauty, their departing youth.... I knew all about escape, I was brought up on it.

  The heroines of my books were mere standins: their features were never clearly defined, their faces were putty which each reader could reshape into her own, adding a little beauty. In hundreds of thousands of houses these hidden selves rose at night from the mundane beds of their owners to go forth on adventures so complicated and enticing that they couldn't be confessed to anyone, least of all to the husbands who lay snoring their enchanted snores and dabbling with nothing more recondite than a Playboy Bunny. I knew my readers well, I went to school with them, I was the good sport, I volunteered for committees, I decorated the high-school gym with signs that read HOWDY HOP and SNOWBALL STOMP and then went home and ate peanut butter sandwiches and read paperback novels while everyone else was dancing. I was Miss Personality, confidante and true friend. They told me all.

  Now I could play fairy godmother to them, despite their obvious defects, their calves which were too skinny, those disfiguring hairs on their upper lips, much deplored in cramped ads at the backs of movie magazines, their elbows knobby as chickens' knees. I had the power to turn them from pumpkins to pure gold. War, politics and explorations up the Amazon, those other great escapes, were by and large denied them, and they weren't much interested in hockey or football, games they couldn't play Why refuse them their castles, their persecutors and their princes, and come to think of it, who the hell was Arthur to talk about social relevance? Sometimes his goddamned theories and ideologies made me puke. The truth was that I dealt in hope, I offered a vision of a better world, however preposterous. Was that so terrible? I couldn't see that it was much different from the visions Arthur and his friends offered, and it was just as realistic. So you're interested in the people, the workers, I would say to him during my solitary midnight justifications. Well, that's what the people and the workers read, the female ones anyway, when they have time to read at all and they can't face the social realism of True Confessions. They read my books. Figure that out.

  But that would have been going too far, that would have been treading on Arthur's most sensitive and sacred toe. It would be better to approach it from a materialist-determinist angle: "Arthur, this happens to be something I'm good at and suited for. I discovered it by accident but then I became hooked, I turned professional and now it's the only way I know of earning a living. As the whores say, why the hell should I be a waitress? You're always telling me women should become whole people through meaningful work and you've been nagging at me to get some. Well, this is my work and I find it meaningful. And I'm hardly an idle drone, I've written fifteen of these things."

  Arthur wouldn't have bought this, however. Marlene the paragon had worked as a typesetter for three months ("You can't really understand the workers until you've been on the inside with them"), and for Arthur, the snob, nothing less would do.

  Poor Arthur. I thought about him, all alone in our apartment, surrounded by the rubble of our marriage. What was he doing at that instant? Was he stuffing my red and orange gowns into a Crippled Civilians bag, emptying my makeup drawer into the garbage? Was he leafing through the scrapbook I'd started to keep in those first weeks of childish excitement after Lady Oracle had appeared? How naive to have thought they would all finally respect me.... The scrapbook would go into the trash, along with all the other scraps of me that were left on the other side. What would he keep, a glove, a shoe?

  Perhaps he was regretting. This was a new thought: he was feeling melancholy, bereaved even, as I was. It struck me that I might have misjudged him. Suppose he no longer hated me, suppose he had given up revenge. Perhaps I'd done something terrible to him, something final. Should I send him an anonymous postcard from Rome - Joan is not dead, signed, A Friend - to cheer him up?

  I should have trusted him more. I should have been honest from the beginning, expressed my feelings, told him everything. (But if he'd known what I was really like, would he still have loved me?) The trouble was that I wanted to maintain his illusions for him intact, and it was easy to do, all it needed was a little restraint: I simply never told him anything important.

  But it wasn't more honesty that would have saved me, I thought; it was more dishonesty. In my experience, honesty and expressing your feelings could lead to only one thing. Disaster.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FIVE

  If you let one worm out of a can of worms, all the other worms will follow. Aunt Lou used to say that; she had many useful maxims, some traditional, some invented by her. For instance, I've heard "The tongue is the enemy of the neck" elsewhere, but never "There's more than one cat in any bag" or "Don't count on your rabbits before they're out of the hat." Aunt Lou believed in discretion, though only in important matters.

  That was one reason I never told Arthur much about my mother. If I'd started on her, he would've found out about me soon enough. I invented a mother for his benefit, a kind, placid woman who died of a rare disease - lupus, I think it was - shortly after I met him.

  Luckily he was never very curious about my past: he was too busy telling me about his. I heard all about his own mother: how she'd claimed to have known the very instant Arthur was conceived and had dedicated him to the ministry (Anglican) right then and there in her womb, how she'd threatened to cut his thumbs off when she caught him playing with himself at the age of four. I knew about his contempt for her and for her belief in hard work and achievement, so curiously like his own, and about his fear of her orderliness, symbolized by her flower borders which he was forced to weed. I heard about her dislike of drinking and also about his father's bar in the recreation room in that Fredericton judge's mansion he claimed to have left so far behind, with the miniature gold Scotsmen's heads on the bottletops, perversely like nipples, or so I imagined them. I knew about the various hysterical letters his mother had written, disowning him for this or that, politics, religion, sex. One came when she learned we were living together, and she never did forgive me.


  To all these monstrosities and injustices I listened faithfully, partly out of a hope that I would gradually come to understand him, but mostly from habit. At one stage of my life I was a good listener, I cultivated listening, I figured I'd better be good at it because I wasn't very good at anything else. I would listen to anyone about anything, murmuring at appropriate moments, reassuring, noncommittal, sympathetic as a pillow. I even took up eavesdropping behind doors and in buses and restaurants, but this was hardly the same, since it was unilateral. So it was easy to listen to Arthur, and I ended up knowing a lot more about his mother than he did about mine, not that it did me much good. Knowledge isn't necessarily power.

  I did tell him one thing though, which should've made more of an impression on him than it did: my mother named me after Joan Crawford. This is one of the things that always puzzled me about her. Did she name me after Joan Crawford because she wanted me to be like the screen characters she played - beautiful, ambitious, ruthless, destructive to men - or because she wanted me to be successful? Joan Crawford worked hard, she had willpower, she built herself up from nothing, according to my mother. Did she give me someone else's name because she wanted me never to have a name of my own? Come to think of it, Joan Crawford didn't have a name of her own either. Her real name was Lucille LeSueur, which would have suited me much better. Lucy the Sweat. When I was eight or nine and my mother would look at me and say musingly, "To think that I named you after Joan Crawford," my stomach would contract and plummet and I would be overcome with shame; I knew I was being reproached, but I'm still not sure what for. There's more than one side to Joan Crawford, though. In fact there was something tragic about Joan Crawford, she had big serious eyes, an unhappy mouth and high cheekbones, unfortunate things happened to her. Perhaps that was it. Or, and this is important: Joan Crawford was thin.

  I was not, and this is one of the many things for which my mother never quite forgave me. At first I was merely plump; in the earliest snapshots in my mother's album I was a healthy baby, not much heftier than most, and the only peculiar thing is that I was never looking at the camera; instead I was trying to get something into my mouth: a toy, a hand, a bottle. The photos went on in an orderly series; though I didn't exactly become rounder, I failed to lose what is usually referred to as baby fat. When I reached the age of six the pictures stopped abruptly. This must have been when my mother gave up on me, for it was she who used to take them; perhaps she no longer wanted my growth recorded. She had decided I would not do.

  I became aware of this fairly soon. My mother had enrolled me in a dancing school, where a woman called Miss Flegg, who was almost as slender and disapproving as my mother, taught tap dancing and ballet. The classes were held in a long room over a butcher shop, and I could always remember the way the smell of sawdust and raw meat gave way to the muggy scent of exhausted feet, mingled with Miss Flegg's Yardley cologne, as I trudged up the dusty stairs. My mother took this step partly because it was fashionable to enroll seven-year-old girls in dancing schools - Hollywood musicals were still popular - and partly because she hoped it would make me less chubby. She didn't say this to me, she said it to Miss Flegg; she was not yet calling me fat.

  I loved dancing school. I was even quite good at the actual dancing, although Miss Flegg sometimes rapped her classroom pointer sharply on the floor and said, "Joan dear, I wish you would stop thumping." Like most little girls of that time I idealized ballet dancers, it was something girls could do, and I used to press my short piggy nose up against jewelry store windows and goggle at the china music-box figurines of shiny ladies in brittle pink skirts, with roses on their hard ceramic heads, and imagine myself leaping through the air, lifted by a thin man in black tights, light as a kite and wearing a modified doily, my hair full of rhinestones and glittering like hope. I worked hard at the classes, I concentrated, and I even used to practice at home, wrapping myself in a discarded lace bathroom curtain I had begged from my mother as she was about to stuff it into the garbage can. She washed it first though; she didn't like dirt. I longed for a pair of satin toe shoes, but we were too young, Miss Flegg explained, the bones in our feet had not hardened. So I had to settle for black slippers with an unromantic elastic over the instep.

  Miss Flegg was an inventive woman; I suppose these days she would be called creative. She didn't have much scope for her inventiveness in the teaching of elementary steps to young children, which was largely a matter of drill, but she let herself go on the annual spring recital. The recital was mostly to impress the parents, but it was also to impress the little girls themselves so they would ask to be allowed to take lessons the next year.

  Miss Flegg choreographed the entire program. She also constructed the sets and props, and she designed the costumes and handed out patterns and instructions to the mothers, who were supposed to sew them. My mother disliked sewing but for this event she buckled down and cut and pinned just like all the other mothers. Maybe she hadn't given up on me after all, maybe she was still making an effort.

  Miss Flegg organized the recital into age groups, which corresponded to her dancing classes. There were five of them: Teenies, Tallers, Tensies, Tweeners and Teeners. Underneath her spiny exterior, the long bony hands, the hair wrenched into a bun, and the spidery eyebrows, done, I realized later, with a pencil, she had a layer of sentimentality, which set the tone for her inventions.

  I was a Teenie, which was in itself a contradiction in terms, for as well as being heavier than everyone else in the class I had begun to be taller. But I didn't mind, I didn't even notice, for I was becoming more wildly excited about the recital every day. I practiced for hours in the basement, the only place I was allowed to do it after I had accidentally knocked over and broken my mother's white-and-gold living-room lamp in the shape of a pineapple, one of a set. I twirled beside the washing machine, humming the dance music in my head, I curtseyed to the furnace (which in those days still burned coal), I swayed in and out between the sheets drying double-folded on the line, and when I was exhausted I climbed the cellar stairs, out of breath and covered with coal dust, to be confronted by my mother with her mouth full of pins. After I'd been scrubbed I would be stood on a chair and told to turn around slowly. I could barely hold still even to have my costumes tried on.

  My mother's impatience was almost equal to my own, though it was of another sort. She may have started to regret sending me to dancing school. For one thing, I wasn't getting any slimmer; for another, I now made twice as much noise as I had at first, especially when I rehearsed my tap number in my patent leather shoes with metal tips toe and heel, on the hardwood of the hall floor, which I had been ordered not to do; and for another, she was having trouble with the costumes. She'd followed the instructions, but she couldn't get them to look right.

  There were three of them, for the Teenies were doing three numbers: "Tulip Time," a Dutch ballet routine for which we had to line up with partners and move our arms up and down to simulate windmills; "Anchors Aweigh," a tap dance with quick turns and salutes (this was soon after the end of the war and military motifs were still in vogue); and "The Butterfly Frolic," a graceful number whose delicate flittings were more like my idea of what dancing should be. It was my favorite, and it had my favorite costume too. This featured a gauzy skirt, short, like a real ballerina's, a tight bodice with shoulder straps, a headpiece with spangled insect antennae, and a pair of colored cellophane wings with coathanger frames, supplied by Miss Flegg. The wings were what I really longed for but we weren't allowed to put them on until the day itself, for fear of breakage.

  But it was this costume that was bothering my mother. The others were easier: the Dutch outfit was a long full skirt with a black bodice and white sleeves, and I was the rear partner anyway. The "Anchors Aweigh" number had middy dresses with naval braid trim, and this was all right too since they were high-necked, long-sleeved and loose around the waist. I was in the back row because of my height; I hadn't been picked as one of the three stars, all with Shirley
Temple curls, who were doing solos on drums made out of cheese crates. But I didn't mind that much: I had my eye on the chief butterfly spot. There was a duet with the only boy in the class; his name was Roger. I was slightly in love with him. I hoped the girl who was supposed to do it would get sick and they would have to call me in. I'd memorized her part as well as my own, more or less.

  I stood on the chair and my mother stuck pins into me and sighed; then she told me to turn around slowly, and she frowned and stuck in more pins. The problem was fairly simple: in the short pink skirt, with my waist, arms and legs exposed, I was grotesque. I am reconstructing this from the point of view of an adult, an anxious, prudish adult like my mother or Miss Flegg; but with my jiggly thighs and the bulges of fat where breasts would later be and my plump upper arms and floppy waist, I must have looked obscene, senile almost, indecent; it must have been like watching a decaying stripper. I was the kind of child, they would have thought back then in the early months of 1949, who should not be seen in public with so little clothing on. No wonder I fell in love with the nineteenth century: back then, according to the dirty postcards of the time, flesh was a virtue.

  My mother struggled with the costume, lengthening it, adding another layer of gauze to conceal the outlines, padding the bodice; but it was no use. Even I was a little taken aback when she finally allowed me to inspect myself in the three-sided mirror over her vanity table. Although I was too young to be much bothered by my size, it wasn't quite the effect I wanted. I did not look like a butterfly. But I knew the addition of the wings would make all the difference. I was hoping for magic transformations, even then.

  The dress rehearsal was in the afternoon, the recital the same evening. They were so close together because the recital was to be held, not in the room over the butcher shop, which would have been too cramped, but in a public school auditorium, rented for a single Saturday. My mother went with me, carrying my costumes in a cardboard dress box. The stage was cramped and hollow-sounding but was redeemed by velvet curtains, soft purple ones; I felt them at the first opportunity. The space behind it was vibrating with excitement. A lot of the mothers were there. Some of them had volunteered to do makeup and were painting the faces of theirs and other people's daughters, the mouths with dark-red lipstick, the eyelashes with black mascara which stiffened them into spikes. The finished and costumed girls were standing against the wall so as not to damage themselves, inert as temple sacrifices. The bigger pupils were strolling about and chatting; it wasn't as important to them, they had done it before, and their numbers were to be rehearsed later.