Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online

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