Bluebeard's Egg Read Free

notice anything. They both feel that this act of unmentionable urination has been done, not by the cat, but by my mother. And so they continue, in a straight line that takes them over the Atlantic and past the curvature of the earth, out through the moon’s orbit and into the dark reaches beyond.
    Meanwhile, back on earth, my mother says: “I had to throw the skirt out. It was a good skirt, too, but nothing could get rid of the smell.”

    “I only heard your father swear once,” says my mother. My mother herself never swears. When she comes to a place in a story in which swearing is called for, she says “dad-ratted” or “blankety-blank.”
    “It was when he mashed his thumb, when he was sinking the well, for the pump.” This story, I know, takes place before I was born, up north, where there is nothing underneath the trees and their sheddings but sand and bedrock. The well was for a hand pump, which in turn was for the first of the many cabins and houses my parents built together. But since I witnessed later wells being sunk and later hand pumps being installed, I know how it’s done. There’s a pipe with a point at one end. You pound it into the ground with a sledge hammer, and as it goes down you screw other lengths of pipe onto it, until you hit drinkable water. To keep from ruining the thread on the top end, you hold a block of wood between the sledge hammer and the pipe. Better, you get someone else to hold it for you. This is how my father mashed his thumb: he was doing both the holding and the hammering himself.
    “It swelled up like a radish,” says my mother. “He had to make a hole in the nail, with his toad-sticker, to ease the pressure. The blood spurted out like pips from a lemon. Later on the whole nail turned purple and black and dropped off. Luckily he grew another one. They say you only get two chances. When he did it though, he turned the air blue for yards around. I didn’t even know he knew those words. I don’t know where he picked them up.” She speaks as if these words are a minor contagious disease, like chicken pox.
    Here my father looks modestly down at his plate. For him, there are two worlds: one containing ladies, in which you do not use certain expressions, and another one – consisting of logging camps and other haunts of his youth, and of gatherings of acceptable sorts of men – in which you do. To let the men’s world slip over verbally into the ladies’ would reveal you as a mannerless boor, but to carry the ladies’ world over into the men’s brands you a prig and maybe even a pansy. This is the word for it. All of this is well understood between them.
    This story illustrates several things: that my father is no pansy, for one; and that my mother behaved properly by being suitably shocked. But my mother’s eyes shine with delight while she tells this story. Secretly, she thinks it funny that my father got caught out, even if only once. The thumbnail that fell off is, in any significant way, long forgotten.

    There are some stories which my mother does not tell when there are men present: never at dinner, never at parties. She tells them to women only, usually in the kitchen, when they or we are helping with the dishes or shelling peas, or taking the tops and tails off the string beans, or husking corn. She tells them in a lowered voice, without moving her hands around in the air, and they contain no sound effects. These are stories of romantic betrayals, unwanted pregnancies, illnesses of various horrible kinds, marital infidelities, mental breakdowns, tragic suicides, unpleasant lingering deaths. They are not rich in detail or embroidered with incident: they are stark and factual. The women, their own hands moving among the dirty dishes or the husks of vegetables, nod solemnly.
    Some of these stories, it is understood, are not to be passed on to my father, because they would upset him. It is well known that women can deal with this sort of thing better than men