Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online Page B

bulges of fat where breasts would later be and my plump upper arms and floppy waist, I must have looked obscene,senile almost, indecent; it must have been like watching a decaying stripper. I was the kind of child, they would have thought back then in the early months of 1949, who should not be seen in public with so little clothing on. No wonder I fell in love with the nineteenth century: back then, according to the dirty postcards of the time, flesh was a virtue.
    My mother struggled with the costume, lengthening it, adding another layer of gauze to conceal the outlines, padding the bodice; but it was no use. Even I was a little taken aback when she finally allowed me to inspect myself in the three-sided mirror over her vanity table. Although I was too young to be much bothered by my size, it wasn’t quite the effect I wanted. I did not look like a butterfly. But I knew the addition of the wings would make all the difference. I was hoping for magic transformations, even then.
    The dress rehearsal was in the afternoon, the recital the same evening. They were so close together because the recital was to be held, not in the room over the butcher shop, which would have been too cramped, but in a public school auditorium, rented for a single Saturday. My mother went with me, carrying my costumes in a cardboard dress box. The stage was cramped and hollow-sounding but was redeemed by velvet curtains, soft purple ones; I felt them at the first opportunity. The space behind it was vibrating with excitement. A lot of the mothers were there. Some of them had volunteered to do makeup and were painting the faces of theirs and other people’s daughters, the mouths with dark-red lipstick, the eyelashes with black mascara which stiffened them into spikes. The finished and costumed girls were standing against the wall so as not to damage themselves, inert as temple sacrifices. The bigger pupils were strolling about and chatting; it wasn’t as important to them, they had done it before, and their numbers were to be rehearsed later.
    “Tulip Time” and “Anchors Aweigh” went off without a hitch. We changed costumes backstage, in a tangle of arms and legs,giggling nervously and doing up each other’s hooks and zippers. There was a crowd around the single mirror. The Tallers, who were alternating with us, did their number, “Kitty Kat Kapers,” while Miss Flegg stood in the wings, evaluating, waving time with her pointer, and occasionally shouting. She was wrought up. As I was putting on my butterfly costume, I saw my mother standing beside her.
    She was supposed to be out in the front row where I’d left her, sitting on a folding chair, her gloves in her lap, smoking and jiggling one of her feet in its high-heeled open-toed shoe, but now she was talking with Miss Flegg. Miss Flegg looked over at me; then she walked over, followed by my mother. She stood gazing down at me, her lips pressed together.
    “I see what you mean,” she said to my mother. When resenting this scene later on, I always felt that if my mother hadn’t interfered Miss Flegg would have noticed nothing, but this is probably not true. What she was seeing, what they were both seeing, was her gay, her artistic, her
spiritual
“Butterfly Frolic” being reduced to something laughable and unseemly by the presence of a fat little girl who was more like a giant caterpillar than a butterfly, more like a white grub if you were really going to be accurate.
    Miss Flegg could not have stood this. For her, the final effect was everything. She wished to be complimented on it, and wholeheartedly, not with pity or suppressed smiles. I sympathize with her now, although I couldn’t then. Anyway, her inventiveness didn’t desert her. She leaned down, placed her hand on my round bare shoulder, and drew me over to a corner. There she knelt down and gazed with her forceful black eyes into mine. Her blurred eyebrows rose and fell.
    “Joan, dear,” she said, “how would you like