Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781551994918
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 1998-04-20T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

How had she found me?

She was standing, very upright, on the clay-colored rug, dressed in her navy-blue suit with the white collar; her white gloves, hat and shoes were immaculate, and she was clutching her purse under her arm. Her face was made up, she’d drawn a bigger mouth around her mouth with lipstick, but the shape of her own mouth showed through. Then I saw that she was crying, soundlessly, horribly; mascara was running from her eyes in black tears.

Through her back I could see the dilapidated sofa; it looked as though the stuffing was coming out of her. The hair on the back of my neck bristled, and I leapt back through the front door, shut it behind me, and leaned against it. It was her astral body, I thought, remembering what Leda Sprott had told me. Why couldn’t she keep the goddamned thing at home where it belonged? I pictured my mother floating over the Atlantic Ocean, her rubber band getting thinner and thinner the farther it was stretched; she’d better be careful or she’d break that thing and then she’d be with me forever, lurking around in the parlor like a diaphanous dustball or a transparent Kodak slide of herself taken in 1949. What did she want from me? Why couldn’t she leave me alone?

I opened the door again, to confront her and have it out finally; but she was gone.

I immediately rearranged all the furniture, which was difficult as it was old and heavy. Then I went through the flat, checking for open windows, but there weren’t any. How had she gotten in?

I didn’t tell the others about this visitation. They were a little put out about the furniture; not that they cared, but they felt I should have consulted them. “I was trying to save you the trouble,” I said. “I just think it looks better this way.” They put it down to housewifely instincts and forgot about the incident. I didn’t, though: if my mother had managed to get her astral body across the Atlantic Ocean once, she’d be able to do it again, and I didn’t welcome the next visit. I wasn’t sure that rearranging the furniture would keep her out. Leda Sprott had used it for unfriendly spirits, but my mother wasn’t a spirit.

I got the telegram five days later. It had been sitting in Canada House for four days; I’d continued to get my mail there and I’d used it as my return address on the infrequent postcards I’d been sending my father, in case my mother should ever have taken it into her head to sleuth me out and hunt me down. I didn’t pick up my mail very often, because all I ever got was the occasional postcard from my father, with a picture of the Toronto skyline as seen at night from Centre Island – he must’ve bought several dozen of them at once – and the message, “Everything all right here,” as if he were sending me a report card.

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