My Evil Mother: A Short Story
Margaret Atwood
You’re so evil,” I said to my mother. I was fifteen, the talk-back age.
“I take that as a compliment,” she said. “Yes, I’m evil, as others might define that term. But I use my evil powers only for good.”
“Yeah, tell me another,” I replied. We were having an argument about my new boyfriend, Brian. “Anyway, who gets to say what’s good?”
My mother was in the kitchen, grinding something in her mortar. She often ground things in her mortar, though sometimes she used the Mixmaster. If I said, “What’s that?” she might say, “Garlic and parsley,” and I’d know she was in Joy of Cooking mode. But if she said, “Look the other way” or “What you don’t know won’t hurt you” or “I’ll tell you when you’re old enough,” I’d realize there was trouble in store for someone.
She was ahead of her time with the garlic, I feel compelled to mention: most people in our kind of neighborhood hadn’t found out about it yet.
Our neighborhood was on the northern margin of Toronto, one of many cities that were rapidly expanding over farm fields and drained swamps, wreaking havoc with the vole populations and flattening burdocks as they went. Out of the bulldozed mud had sprouted postwar split-levels in tidy rows, each with a picture window—ranch style, with flat roofs that hadn’t yet begun to leak in the winters. Those who lived in these houses were young moderns, with children. The fathers had jobs, the mothers not. My mother was an anomaly: no visible husband, no job exactly, though she did seem to have a means of support.
Our kitchen was large and sunlit, with a canary-yellow linoleum floor, a breakfast nook, and a white dresser with rows of blue plates and bowls. My mother had a thing for blue in tableware; she said it warded off any evil eyes intent on ruining the food.
Her eyebrows were plucked into two incredulous arches, as was almost still the fashion. She was neither tall nor short, neither plump nor thin. In everything, she took care to imitate the third choice of Goldilocks: just right. That day she was wearing a flowered apron—tulips and daffodils—over a shirtwaist dress with small white and pastel-green stripes and a Peter Pan collar. Cuban heels. Single strand of pearls, wild, not cultured. (Worth it, she said: only the wild ones had souls.)
Protective coloration, she called her outfits. She looked like a dependable mother from a respectable neighborhood such as ours. As she worked at the kitchen counter, she might have been demonstrating a jiffy recipe in Good Housekeeping magazine—something with tomato aspic, this being the mid-1950s, when tomato aspic was a food group.
She had no close friends in the vicinity—“I keep myself to myself,” she’d say—but she performed the expected neighborly duties: presenting tuna-noodle casseroles to the sick, taking in the mail and newspapers of those on vacations so their houses wouldn’t be targeted by burglars, babysitting the occasional dog or cat. Though not the occasional baby: even when my mother offered, parents of babies hesitated. Could they have picked up on her invisible but slightly alarming aura? (Invisible to others; she claimed that she herself could see it. Purple, according to her.) Maybe they were afraid they’d return to find their infant in a roasting pan with an apple in its mouth. My mother would never have done such a thing, however. She was evil, but not that evil.
Sometimes women in distress—they were always women—would come over to our house, and she would make them a cup of something that might have been tea, sit them at the kitchen table, and listen, scanning their faces, nodding silently. Did money change hands? Is that how she made her living, at least in part? I couldn’t swear to it, but I have my suspicions.
I’d see these consultations going on as I trudged upstairs to do my homework. Or homework was my cover story; I was just as likely to be painting red nail polish on my toes, or examining my mirrored face for flaws—too sallow, too zitty, too chipmunk-toothed—or applying a thick layer of deep-red lipstick and admiring my pouty reflection, or whispering to Brian over the hall telephone. I was tempted to eavesdrop on what my mother was saying, but she could always tell when I was doing it. “Big ears,” she would say. “Off to bed! Beauty sleep!” As if mere sleep would make me more beautiful.
Then the kitchen door would close, and the murmuring would resume. I’m sure my mother gave these troubled women a chunk of advice, at the very least, though it might also have been a mysterious liquid in a jar. She kept a supply of such jars in the refrigerator. The goop in them was of different colors, and they were none of my business. Neither was the herb garden at the back of our house, in which nothing was labeled and everything was off-limits, though I was occasionally allowed to pick flowers from the benevolent decoy ornamentals placed strategically here and there and to stick them into a vase. My mother had no interest in such frilly, girly decorations herself, but she was content to indulge me.
“That’s lovely, my pet,” she would say absentmindedly.
“You didn’t even look at it!” I would whine.
“Yes, I did, my treasure. It’s very aesthetic.”
“I was watching! Your back was turned!”
“Who says you need eyes for seeing?”
To which I had no answer.
The percentage of husbands in our neighborhood who developed coughs or broke their ankles, or who, on the other hand, were promoted at their offices, was probably no higher than elsewhere, but my mother had a way of hinting at her own influence on these events, and I believed her despite the nagging doubts of common sense. I also resented her: she thought she was so clever! Nor would she tell me how she’d done it. “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she’d say.