Lady Oracle (27 page)

“Look,” Arthur said, “this isn’t.…” But there was a flash, and Mrs. Symons whipped off my wreath.

“When the gong sounds, you stand to attention,” Mrs. Symons said. She was very excited. “You look lovely, dear.”

“It sounded all right over the phone,” Arthur said to me in a low voice.

“Who were you talking to?” I asked. “You said it was a man.”

“I thought it was,” Arthur said.

The gong sounded and Leda paced in, wearing a different robe, a purple one, trimmed in red velvet. I recognized the remains of the Jordan Chapel curtains and pulpit: times were evidently hard. With the help of Mr. Stewart, she got up onto the footstool that stood in front of the fireplace.

“Arthur Edward Foster,” she intoned. “Joan Elizabeth Delacourt. Advance.” She broke into a fit of coughing as, hand in hand, we approached her.

“Kneel,” she said, stretching out her arms in front of her as if about to dive off the stool. We did. “No, no,” she said irritably, “on either side. How can I join you together if you’re already joined?”
We got up, kneeled again, and Leda placed a slightly trembling hand on each of our heads.

“For true happiness,” she said, “you must approach life with a feeling of reverence. Reverence for life, for those loved ones who are still with us, and also for those who have gone before. Remember that all we do and all that is in our hearts is watched and recorded, and will someday be brought to light. Avoid deception and falsehood; treat your lives as a diary you are writing and that you know your loved one will someday read, if not here on this side, then on the other side, where all the final reconciliations will take place. Above all, you should love each other for what you are and forgive each other for what you are not. You have a beautiful aura, my children; you must work to preserve it.” Her voice dropped to a mumble; I think she was praying. She swayed dangerously and I hoped she would not fall off the stool.

“Amen,” said Mrs. Symons.

“You may rise,” said Leda. She asked for our rings – I’d insisted on double rings, and we’d got them in a pawn shop – and circled them three times around the statue of the Buddha, though it might have been the stuffed owl; from where I was standing, I couldn’t see. “For wisdom, for charity, for tranquillity,” she said. She gave Arthur’s ring to me and my ring to Arthur.

“Now,” she said, “holding the rings in your
left
hands, place your right hands on each other’s hearts. When I count to three,
press”

“Three is the mystical number,” Mrs. Symons said. “Four is too, but.…” By this time I’d recognized her: she was one of the old Jordan Chapel regulars. “My name comes out to five,” she continued. “That’s numerology, you know.”

“There’s a story I heard recently that would be appropriate for this occasion,” said Mr. Stewart. “There were once two caterpillars who were walking down the Road of Life, the optimistic caterpillar and the pessimistic.…”

“Not now, Harry,” Leda Sprott said sharply. The ceremony was getting out of hand. She told us to put the rings on each other’s fingers, hastily pronounced us man and wife, and clambered down off the footstool.

“Now the presents!” cried Mrs. Symons. She scurried from the room. Leda produced a certificate, which we were all supposed to sign.

“There’s someone standing behind you,” Mr. Stewart said. His eyes were glazed and he seemed to be talking to himself. “She’s a young woman, she’s unhappy, she has on white gloves … she’s reaching out towards you.…”

“Harry,” Leda said, “go and help Muriel with the presents.”

“We don’t want any presents, really,” I said, and Arthur agreed, but Leda Sprott said, “A wedding isn’t a wedding without presents,” and pink Mrs. Symons was already hurrying in from the hall with several packages wrapped in white tissue paper. We thanked them; we were both acutely embarrassed because these well-meaning, rather pathetic old people had gone to so much trouble and we were secretly so ungrateful. Mr. Stewart gave us the Polaroid snapshot, in which our faces were a sickly blue and the sofa was brownish-red, like dried blood.

“Now I have something to say to the bride and groom … separately,” said Leda Sprott. I followed her into the kitchen. She shut the door and we sat down at the kitchen table, which was an ordinary one covered with checked oilcloth. She poured herself a shot from a half-empty bottle, then looked at me and grinned. One of her eyes, I could see now, was not quite focused; perhaps she was going blind.

“Well,” she said. “I’m pleased to see you again. You’ve changed, but I never forget a face. How is your aunt?”

“She died,” I said, “didn’t you know?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, waving one of her hands impatiently, “of course. But she must still be with you.”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said.

Leda Sprott looked disappointed. “I can see you haven’t taken my advice,” she said. “That’s unfortunate. You have great powers, I told you that before, but you’ve been afraid to develop them.” She took my hand and peered at it for some moments, then dropped it. “I could tell you a lot of mumbo jumbo, which would probably mean just as little to you as the truth,” she said. “But I liked your aunt, so I won’t. You do not choose a gift, it chooses you, and if you deny it it will make use of you in any case, though perhaps in a less desirable way. I used my own gift, as long as I had it. You may think I’m a stupid old woman or a charlatan, I’m used to that. But sometimes I had the truth to tell; there’s no mistaking it when you do. When I had no truth to tell, I told them what they wanted to hear. I shouldn’t have done that. You may think it’s harmless, but it isn’t.” She paused, staring down at her fingers, which were knotted with arthritis. Suddenly I believed in her. I wanted to ask her all the questions I’d saved up for her: she could tell me about my mother.… But my belief faded: hadn’t she just hinted that the Jordan Chapel was fraudulent and her revelations guesswork and playacting?

“People have faith in you,” Leda said. “They trust you. That can be dangerous, especially if you take advantage of it. Everything catches up to you sooner or later. You should stop feeling so sorry for yourself.” She was looking at me sharply with her one good eye, her head on one side, like a bird. She seemed to expect some reply.

“Thank you,” I said awkwardly.

“Don’t say what you don’t mean,” she said irritably. “You do enough of that already. That’s really all I have to say to you, except … yes, you should try the Automatic Writing. Now, send in your new husband.”

I didn’t want Arthur to be alone with her. If she’d been this blunt with me, what was she likely to say to him?

“You won’t tell him, will you?” I said.

“Tell him what?” Leda asked sharply.

It was hard to put into words. “What I was like,” I said. What I meant was:
What I looked like.

“What do you mean?” Leda said. “You were a perfectly nice young girl, as far as I could tell.”

“No, I mean … my shape. I was, you know.” I couldn’t say “fat”; I used that word about myself only in my head.

She saw what I meant, but it only amused her. “Is that all?” she said. “To my mind it’s a perfectly proper shape. But don’t worry, I won’t give away your past, though I must say there are worse tragedies in life than being a little overweight. I expect you not to give mine away, either. Leda Sprott owes a little money here and there.” She laughed wheezily, then started to cough. I went to get Arthur.

Five minutes later he came out of the kitchen. As we left, Mrs. Symons teetered along the hall after us, down the steps and along the walk, throwing handfuls of rice and confetti at us and chirping gaily. “Good luck,” she called, waving her pink-gloved hand.

We walked to the bus stop, carrying the packages. Arthur didn’t say anything; his jaw was grim.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. Had Leda told him about me after all?

“The old fraud ripped me off for fifty bucks,” he said. “On the phone she told me fifteen.”

When we got back to my rented room we opened the tissuepaper packages. They contained a plastic punch bowl with matching cups, a ninety-eight-cent book on health-food cookery, a framed print of Leda, shaking hands with Mackenzie King, and some
government pamphlets about the health-giving properties and correct use of yeast. “She must make quite a profit,” Arthur said.

Surely we would have to go through it all over again at the City Hall, I thought; the ceremony with the footstool and the stuffed owl couldn’t possibly be legal. “Do you think we’re really married?” I asked.

“I doubt it,” Arthur said. But strangely enough we were.

W
e went on our honeymoon four years later, in 1968. It was Arthur’s Quebec separatist incarnation, so he insisted on going to Quebec City, where he confused all the waiters by trying to speak
joual
to them. Most of them found it insulting; the ones who really were separatists sneered at his pronunciation, it was too Parisian for them. We spent the first night watching the funeral of Robert Kennedy on the bunny-eared television set in the cheap motel where we were staying. It wouldn’t work unless you held onto the bunny ears with one hand and put your other hand on the wall. I did the wall-touching, Arthur did the watching. By that time I was feeling truly married.

It took me a while. At first our life was unsettled. We had no money except what I could earn by writing Costume Gothics and pretending to take odd jobs, and we lived in rooming houses instead of the tawdry apartments we later sought out. Sometimes there would be a kitchen alcove concealed by a bamboo curtain or a plastic accordion door, but more often there would be only a single-burner hot plate. I would cook dinners of vegetables in boilable plastic
packages, or tins of ravioli, and we would eat them sitting on the edge of the bed and trying not to get any more tomato sauce on the sheets. After the meal I would scrape the plates into the rooming-house toilet and rinse them in the bathtub, as these rooms rarely had sinks. This meant that during baths, which we took together, with me soaping Arthur’s back, his ribs sticking out like Death’s in a medieval woodcut, we would often be surprised by the odd noodle or pea, floating in the soap scum like an escaped fragment of Sargasso Sea. I felt it added a welcome touch of the tropics to those otherwise polar bathrooms but Arthur didn’t like it. Although he denied it, he had a thing about germs.

I complained a lot about the inconvenience of this improvised suitcase life, and after two years of it, when Arthur was a teaching assistant in Political Science and had a salary of sorts, he broke down and we got a real apartment. It was in a slum – which has since become fashionably white-painted and coach-lamped – but at least it had a full kitchen in addition to the cockroaches. I then discovered to my dismay that Arthur expected me to cook, actually cook, out of raw ingredients such as flour and lard. I’d never cooked in my life. My mother had cooked, I had eaten, those were our roles; she wouldn’t even let me in the kitchen when she was cooking, for fear I would break something, stick my germ-laden finger in a sauce, or tread too heavily, causing her cake to fall. I hadn’t taken Home Economics in high school; I took Business Practices instead. I wouldn’t have minded the cooking, though from the other girls’ accounts it was mostly about nutrition; but I shrank from the thought of sewing. How could I possibly sit there, sewing a huge billowing tent for myself, while the others worked away at their trim tailored skirts and ruffled blouses?

But for Arthur’s sake I would try anything, though cooking wasn’t as simple as I’d thought. I was always running out of staples such as butter or salt and making flying trips to the corner store, and there
were never enough clean dishes, since I hated washing them; but Arthur didn’t like eating in restaurants. He seemed to prefer my inedible food: the Swiss fondue which would turn to lymph and balls of chewing gum from too high a heat, the poached eggs which disintegrated like mucous membranes and the roast chickens which bled when cut; the bread that refused to rise, lying like quicksand in the bowl; the flaccid pancakes with centers of uncooked ooze; the rubbery pies. I seldom wept over these failures, as to me they were not failures but successes, they were secret triumphs over the notion of food itself. I wanted to prove that I didn’t really care about it.

Occasionally I neglected to produce any food at all because I had forgotten completely about it. I would wander into the kitchen at midnight to find Arthur making himself a peanut-butter sandwich and be overwhelmed with guilt at the implication that I’d been starving him. But though he criticized my cooking, he always ate it, and he resented its absence. The unpredictability kept him diverted; it was like mutations, or gambling. It reassured him, too. His view of the world featured swift disasters set against a background of lurking doom, and my cooking did nothing to contradict it. Whereas for me these mounds of dough, these lumps burning at the edges, this untransformed blood, represented something quite different. Each meal was a crisis, but a crisis out of which a comfortable resolution could be forced to emerge, by the addition of something … a little pepper, some vanilla.… At heart I was an optimist, with a lust for happy endings.

It took me a while to realize that Arthur enjoyed my defeats. They cheered him up. He loved hearing the crash as I dropped a red-hot platter on the floor, having forgotten to put on my oven mitt; he liked to hear me swearing in the kitchen; and when I would emerge sweaty-faced and disheveled after one of my battles, he would greet me with a smile and a little joke, or perhaps even a kiss, which was as much for the display, the energy I’d wasted, as for the
food. My frustration and anger were real, but I wasn’t that bad a cook. My failure was a performance and Arthur was the audience. His applause kept me going.

That was all right with me. Being a bad cook was much easier than learning to be a good one, and the extra noise and flourishes didn’t strain my powers of invention. My mistake was in thinking that these expectations of Arthur’s were confined to cooking. It only looked that way at first, because as far as he could tell I attempted nothing else.