Bluebeard's Egg by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online Page B

because I would never have been able to explain what was wrong with taking it. Also I felt that Buddy had something on me: that, now he had accidentally seen something about me that was real, he knew too much about my deviations from the norm. I felt I had to correct that somehow. It occurred to me, years later, that many women probably had become engaged and even married this way.
    It was years later too that I realized Buddy had used the wrong word: it wasn’t an identity bracelet, it was an identification bracelet. The difference escaped me at the time. But maybe it was the right word after all, and what Buddy was handing over to me was his identity, some key part of himself that I was expected to keep for him and watch over.
    Another interpretation has since become possible: that Buddy was putting his name on me, like a Reserved sign or an ownership label, or a tattoo on a cow’s ear, or a brand. But at the time nobody thought that way. Everyone knew that getting a boy’s I.D. bracelet was a privilege, not a degradation, and this is how Trish greeted it when she came back from her walk with Charlie. She spotted the transfer instantly.
    “Let’s see,” she said, as if she hadn’t seen this ornament of Buddy’s many times before, and I had to hold out my wrist for her to admire, while Buddy looked sheepishly on.
    When I was back at the log house, I took off Buddy’s identification bracelet and hid it under the bed. I was embarrassed by it, though the reason I gave myself was that I didn’t want it to get lost. I put it on again in September though, when I went back to the city and back to school. It was the equivalent of a white fur sweater-collar, the kind with pom-poms. Buddy, among other things, was something to wear.
    I was in grade eleven now, and studying Ancient Egypt and The Mill on the Floss . I was on the volleyball team; I sang in the choir. Buddy was still working at the garage, and shortly after school began he got a hernia, from lifting something too heavy. I didn’t know what a hernia was. I thought it might be something sexual, but at the same time it had the sound of something that happened to old men, not to someone as young as Buddy. I looked it up in our medical book. When my brother heard about Buddy’s hernia, he sniggered in an irritating way and said it was the kind of thing you could expect from Buddy.
    Buddy was in a hospital for a couple of days. After that I went to visit him at home, because he wanted me to. I felt I should take him something; not flowers though. So I took him some peanut butter cookies, baked by my mother. I knew, if the subject came up, that I would lie and say I had made them myself.
    This was the first time I had ever been to Buddy’s house. I hadn’t even known where he lived; I hadn’t thought of him as having a house at all or living anywhere in particular. I had to get there by bus and streetcar, since of course Buddy couldn’t drive me.
    It was Indian summer; the air was thick and damp, though there was a breeze that helped some. I walked along the street, which was lined with narrow, two-storey row houses, the kind that would much later be renovated and become fashionable, though at that time they were considered merely old-fashioned and inconvenient. It was a Saturday afternoon, and a couple of the men were mowing their cramped lawns, one of them in his undershirt.
    The front door of Buddy’s house was wide open; only the screen door was closed. I rang the doorbell; when nothing happened, I went in. There was a note, in Buddy’s blotchy blue ball-point writing, lying on the floor: COME ON UP , it said. It must have fallen down from where it had been taped to the inside of the door.
    The hallway had faded pink rose-trellis paper; the house smelled faintly of humid wood, polish, rugs in summer. I peered into the living room as I went towards the stairs: there was too much furniture in it and the curtains were drawn, but it was immaculately clean. I