My Evil Mother: A Short Story by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood [Atwood, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories
Published: 2022-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

My father died earlier than many. He’d had cancer—he’d told me about it—so at least I had advance warning. Still, it was a loss: now I would no longer have my own unique secret, a corner of my life my mother hadn’t managed to pry open and judge. I’d kept watch on the death notices, since I knew I wouldn’t be notified by the family. The other family. The family that wasn’t secret.

I went to the funeral, which was well attended by many people I didn’t know, and sat at the back, far away from the official mourners. My mother came as well; she was dressed theatrically in black, which by that time nobody wore to funerals anymore. She even had a veil. I was married by then and had two children of my own, both daughters. My mother and I had had a major breach after the birth of the first one: she’d come to the maternity ward while I was in labor, bearing a gift of something orange in a jar for me to rub on my stretch marks, and announced that she wanted to cook the placenta so I could eat it.

“Are you insane?” I’d never heard of such a disgusting thing. It’s old hat by now, of course.

“It’s a traditional practice. It fends off malevolence. Have you been burning your hair combings, my pet—the way I taught you? That nasty old Miss Scace has been lurking around. She’s always wanted to harm you, just to get back at me. I saw her just now outside the preemie window pretending to be a nurse. She’s addicted to disguises. In the old days she’d dress up like a nun.”

“Miss Scace, my high school gym teacher? That’s not possible, Mother,” I said carefully, as if explaining to a five-year-old. “Miss Scace died years ago.”

“Appearances can be deceptive. She only looks dead.”

You can see why I might have wished to keep my young children at a safe distance from their grandmother. I wanted them to have a normal childhood, unlike mine.

I’ll say a word here about my husband, a lovable individual who has improved with time. I don’t have to tell you that I held him at several arms’ lengths from my mother during what I will quaintly refer to as our courtship period. I imagined him getting one earful of her and hightailing it for the nearest international flight, so alarmed would he have been. But that encounter had needed to take place sometime, since—through some means unknown to me but that may have involved tarot cards—she’d become aware of his existence. The Universe had no objection to him, she’d told me: if anything, he was well aspected, with Jupiter looming large and the Kings of Cups and Diamonds prominent. She was looking forward to meeting him. “No hurry,” she’d say to me, which meant there was.

I softened him up with anecdotes, which I packaged as lighthearted and jokey. The hair burning, the glop in the jars, the pointing, the cards, even my father as a garden gnome—these were harmless eccentricities.

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