Surfacing

by Margaret Atwood

I envy people whose parents died when they were young, that’s easier to remember, they stay unchanged.

Anesthesia, that’s one technique: if it hurts invent a different pain.

a roadside crucifix with a wooden Christ, ribs sticking out, the alien god, mysterious to me as ever.

They were once caught in a three-week rainstorm, my father said if you could spend three weeks in a wet tent with a man without killing him or having him kill you then he was a good man.

I believe that an unborn baby has its eyes open and can look out through the walls of the mother’s stomach, like a frog in a jar.

But I couldn’t have brought the child here, I never identified it as mine; I didn’t name it before it was born even, the way you’re supposed to. It was my husband’s, he imposed it on me, all the time it was growing in me I felt like an incubator. He measured everything he would let me eat, he was feeding it on me, he wanted a replica of himself; after it was born I was no more use. I couldn’t prove it though he was clever: he kept saying he loved me.

Inside were pebbles, purple-black and frightening. I knew that if I could get some of them and keep them for myself I would be all-powerful; but later when I was tall enough and could finally reach to pick them it didn’t work. Just as well, I think, as I had no idea what I would do with the power once I got it; if I’d turned out like the others with power I would have been evil.

It was good at first but he changed after I married him, he married me, we committed that paper act. I still don’t see why signing a name should make any difference but he began to expect things, he wanted to be pleased. We should have kept sleeping together and left it at that.

I used to know the species; I listen, my ears are rusty, there’s nothing but a jumble of sound. They sing for the same reason trucks honk, to proclaim their territories: a rudimentary language.

she’s putting on makeup. I realize I’ve never seen her without it before; shorn of the pink cheeks and heightened eyes her face is curiously battered, a worn doll’s, her artificial face is the natural one.

“I’m gonna grow me a little old beard.” “Don’t you dare,” Anna says. “I don’t like him kissing me when he has a beard, it reminds me of a cunt.” Her hand goes over her mouth as though she is shocked. “Isn’t that awful?” “Filthy talk, woman,” David says, “she’s uncultured and vulgar.” “Oh I know. I’ve always been like that.”

The trees will never be allowed to grow that tall again, they’re killed as soon as they’re valuable, big trees are scarce as whales.

Maybe that was why I failed, because I didn’t know what I had to let go of. For me it hadn’t been like skiing, it was more like jumping off a cliff. That was the feeling I had all the time I was married; in the air, going down, waiting for the smash at the bottom.

I’ve finished what I came for and I don’t want to stay here, I want to go back to where there is electricity and distraction. I’m used to it now, filling the time without it is an effort.

We had an argument about that: he said one of my drawings was too frightening and I said children liked being frightened. “It isn’t the children who buy the books,” he said, “it’s their parents.”

It wasn’t Peter Pan’s ability to fly that made him incredible for me, it was the lack of an outhouse near his underground burrow.

He didn’t dislike people, he merely found them irrational; animals, he said, were more consistent, their behavior at least was predictable. To him that’s what Hitler exemplified: not the triumph of evil but the failure of reason.

this must be the only country where a botanist can be classified as crucial to the national defense.

My brother fished by technique, he outguessed them, but I fished by prayer, listening. Our father who art in heaven Please let the fish be caught. Later when I knew that wouldn’t work, just Please be caught, invocation or hypnosis. He got more fish but I could pretend mine were willing, they had chosen to die and forgiven me in advance.

I warned them not to say anything about the fish: if they do, this part of the lake will be swarming with Americans, they have an uncanny way of passing the word, like ants about sugar, or lobsters.

Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform.

My father explained everything but my mother never did, which only convinced me that she had the answers but wouldn’t tell.

We raked the weeds into piles between the rows, where they wilted, dying slowly; later they would be burned, like witches, to keep them from reappearing.

After the first I didn’t ever want to have another child, it was too much to go through for nothing, they shut you into a hospital, they shave the hair off you and tie your hands down and they don’t let you see, they don’t want you to understand, they want you to believe it’s their power, not yours. They stick needles into you so you won’t hear anything, you might as well be a dead pig, your legs are up in a metal frame, they bend over you, technicians, mechanics, butchers, students clumsy or snickering practicing on your body, they take the baby out with a fork like a pickle out of a pickle jar. After that they fill your veins up with red plastic, I saw it running down through the tube. I won’t let them do that to me ever again.

When you can’t tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you’re an addict.

Prove your love, they say. You really want to marry me, let me fuck you instead. You really want to fuck, let me marry you instead.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn’t see why they would want to skin a cat even one way.

The Americans wouldn’t even have to defoliate the trees, the guerrillas would die of starvation and exposure anyway.

They used long words like “demarcation” and “sovereignty,” they wouldn’t say what they meant and you couldn’t ask: in high school the right thing was to stare fixedly at the teacher as though at a movie screen, and it was worse for a girl to ask questions than for a boy. If a boy asked a question the other boys would make derisive sucking noises with their mouths, but if a girl asked one the other girls would say “Think you’re so great” in the washroom afterward.

Why had they strung it up like a lynch victim, why didn’t they just throw it away like the trash? To prove they could do it, they had the power to kill. Otherwise it was valueless; beautiful from a distance but it couldn’t be tamed or cooked or trained to talk, the only relation they could have to a thing like that was to destroy it. Food, slave or corpse, limited choices; horned and fanged heads sawed off and mounted on the billiard room wall, stuffed fish, trophies.

That was their armor, bland ignorance, heads empty as weather balloons: with that they could defend themselves against anything.

If you look like them and talk like them and think like them then you are them, I was saying, you speak their language, a language is everything you do.

The Indians did not own salvation but they had once known where it lived and their signs marked the sacred places, the places where you could learn the truth.

if the Devil was allowed a tail and horns, God needed them also, they were advantages.

The sunset was red, a clear tulip color paling to flesh webs, membrane. Now there are only streaks of it, mauve and purple, sky visible through the window, divided by the window squares and then by the interlacing branches, leaves overlapping leaves.

The mothers of gods, how do they feel, voices and light glaring from the belly, do they feel sick, dizzy?