Bluebeard's Egg Read Free Page B

which I start rattling the silverware, or ask for another cup of tea. “You used to march into houses that were strange to you, and you would say in a loud voice, ‘What’s that funny smell?’ ” If there are guests present, they shift a little away from me, conscious of their own emanations, trying not to look at my nose.
    “I used to be so embarrassed,” says my mother absent-mindedly. Then she shifts gears. “You were such an easy child. You used to get up at six in the morning and play by yourself in the play room, singing away.…” There is a pause. A distant voice, mine, high and silvery, drifts over the space between us. “You used to talk a blue streak. Chatter, chatter, chatter, from morning to night.” My mother sighs imperceptibly, as if wondering why I have become so silent, and gets up to poke the fire.
    Hoping to change the subject, I ask whether or not the crocuses have come up yet, but she is not to be diverted. “I never had to spank you,” she says. “A harsh word, and you would be completely reduced.” She looks at me sideways; she isn’t sure what I have turned into, or how. “There were just one or two times. Once, when I had to go out and I left your father in charge.” (This may be the real point of the story: the inability of men to second-guess small children.) “I came back along the street, and there were you and your brother, throwing mud balls at an old man out of the upstairs window.”
    We both know whose idea this was. For my mother, the proper construction to be put on this event is that my brother was a hell-raiser and I was his shadow, “easily influenced,” as my mother puts it. “You were just putty in his hands.”
    “Of course, I had to punish both of you equally,” she says. Of course. I smile a forgiving smile. The real truth is that I was sneakier than my brother, and got caught less often. No front-line charges into enemy machine-gun nests for me, if they could be at all avoided. My own solitary acts of wickedness were devious and well concealed; it was only in partnership with my brother that I would throw caution to the winds.
    “He could wind you around his little finger,” says my mother. “Your father made each of you a toy box, and the rule was –” (my mother is good at the devising of rules) “–the rule was that neither of you could take the toys out of the other one’s toy box without permission. Otherwise he would have got all your toys away from you. But he got them anyway, mind you. He used to talk you into playing house, and he would pretend to be the baby. Then he would pretend to cry, and when you asked what he wanted, he’d demand whatever it was out of your toy box that he wanted to play with at the moment. You always gave it to him.”
    I don’t remember this, though I do remember staging World War Two on the living-room floor, with armies of stuffed bears and rabbits; but surely some primal patterns were laid down. Have these early toy-box experiences – and “toy box” itself, as a concept, reeks with implications – have they made me suspicious of men who wish to be mothered, yet susceptible to them at the same time? Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornucopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother thinks was merely cute may have been lethal.
    But this is not her only story about my suckiness and gullibility. She follows up with the coup de grâce , the tale of the bunny-rabbit cookies.
    “It was in Ottawa. I was invited to a government tea,” says my mother, and this fact alone should signal an element of horror: my mother hated official functions, to which however she was obliged to go because she was the wife of a civil servant. “I had to drag you kids along; we couldn’t