Maybe three years ago, I watched an interview with Margaret Atwood—back when all the talk was about The Testaments (either its coming or its arriving), in which she was asked whether she considers herself an optimist or a pessimist and on the following weekend, Mr BIP and I were walking in the Glen Cedar ravine and discussing her answer—that she considers herself a realist. This past weekend, we were walking along the northern lake trails, discussing how she’d been asked the same question in the Take 30 interview 46 years ago and how her answer was the same.
It’s interesting to think about this optimism-pessimism-realism while reading “When It Happens” which is the shortest story in Dancing Girls. Originally it was published in Chatelaine, a Canadian women’s magazine, not as folksy as Family Circle but not as sassy as Cosmopolitan.
[When I searched for the exact date, I found this 2017 flashback coinciding with chatter about the Handmaid’s Tale TV series, which reproduces a 1986 article about Atwood from Chatelaine with photographs of each original magazine page: what a peek into the ‘80s.]
Mrs. Burridge begins “When It Happens” with preserving green tomato pickles; there’s talk of supply and demand, luxury and sustenance, growers and consumers. There in the farm kitchen, there’s talk of ageing and marriage, resignation and complacency, yields and challenges.
In one sense, the setting is ordinary and relatable. In another, she is experiencing such a profound sense of dread that she feels barely connected to the reality she inhabits:
“It used to make her feel safe to have all that food in the cellar; she would think to herself, well, if there’s a snow storm or anything and we’re cut off, it won’t be so bad. It’s doesn’t make her feel safe any more. Instead she thinks that if she has to leave suddenly she won’t be able to take any of the jars with her, they’d be too heavy to carry.”
MARM 2023 PLANS
Each week I’ll share links to some online sources, so that anyone with a few minutes can join in the celebrations. Some poetry and flash fiction, some interviews and reviews, some fresh reads and rereads: mostly reading with a little viewing and, in particular, short stories.
Launch (November 1)
Dancing Girls, “Rape Fantasies” (November 3)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Dancing Girls, “Hair Jewellery” (November 10)
Old Babes in the Wood, “First Aid” (November 12)
Dancing Girls, “A Travel Piece” (November 17)
Margaret Atwood’s 84th Birthday (November 18)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Two Scorched Men” (November 19)
Dancing Girls, “The Resplendent Quetzel” (November 24)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Morte de Smudgie” (November 26)
Wrap-Up (November 29-30)
In some ways, this is an uncharacteristically plotty story. In other ways, most of what happens is in her mind, so it’s still interior in that sense. Either way, if I had come across this story in a magazine, I would have looked for her other work. It’s just enticing enough, just disturbing enough.
While Mrs. Burridge’s pickle-soaked life seems very ordinary outwardly, her imagination flourishes; in “A Travel Piece” Annette’s exhausted by her routine work as a travel writer, but even a plane crash can’t shake her out of her own thoughts.
Annette invites Jeff to accompany her on a work trip because he doesn’t view her articles as real work; when he’s close enough to witness the minutiae and social niceties that fill Annette’s days, he’s convinced it’s not real work. But her exhaustion pervades the story; readers feel the burden of her pleasantries and her ever-changing, never-changing routines.
“People, she found, did not want any hint of danger in the kind of articles it was her business to write. Even the ones who would never go to the places she described, who could not afford it, did not want to hear about danger or even unpleasantness; it was as if they wanted to believe that there was somewhere left in the world where all was well, where unpleasant things did not happen.”
When her plane crashes, readers are almost relieved, so desperate is Annette for something to happen. Like Mrs. Burridge counting her preserves, Annette is in analytical mode and, as she’s preparing to slide out the plane window, gathers supplies: bags of peanuts, some Gingerale, and sandwiches. In end times, women think of food.
Outwardly, Annette is a solid contributor to the group of survivors, being detail-oriented and practical; inwardly, she is constantly redrafting her experience, so accustomed to avoiding and negating true danger that she can barely recognise it unfolding around her.
These two stories are like bookends with their consideration of women whose marriages feel like rehearsals (or substitutes) for real-life, regular responsibilities that sustain and nourish (or, don’t), and the threats we perceive and experiences that change us (or, don’t). Each ends in a memorable but unsettling way, and each requires readers to contemplate how each woman’s perspective on the world has been altered by fear and anxiety.
These two stories sound juicy. Pickle-y? But I’m mostly thinking about your discussion of MA’s answers… Were you both discussing it? Or (as it would be with my husband) were you telling him about it and he was nodding along, pretending to be interested? I hope the first one!
I think I’m still be in the mindset of the preserved food making me feel safe. If we’re leaving the house, I’ll grab the peanut butter.
Hah, yes pickle-y, indeed! 😀
/chuckle Well, I know the kind of conversation you’re describing and sometimes we have those “conversations” about writers or books, heheh, but soon after we’ve moved to TO, he ran into MA in the train station and after that point, when she became a real person in his mind, he took an interest in her in particular.
Just one jar? I feel like there should be a case, with each person being responsible for a certain number of jars. Or maybe you could make a little vest so Exxo could carry them?
Both these stories sound fantastic. And so true that women often think of food, even during the end times. Probably because we’ve been programmed as the people who have to provide it – either through our bodies physically, or through our efforts. I’m curious if there will ever be a day when food prep is not considered a woman’s job LOL
That story about the plane crash and the woman’s experience of it sounds so relatable to me. I’ve never been in a plane crash (and hope to god I never will, flying gives me severe anxiety) but I can see the process of just focusing on the little things (gathering peanuts, etc.) in the face of terror to help ground oneself.
And because we’ve been taught to eat our feelings. LOL
I bet it was weirdly fun to write that story, like the cruise ship story in Stone Mattress.
MA is so waspish that I had to read the whole Chatelaine article to find out if the author really did mean WASPish (he did). Half a century later WASP seems to have gone out of common usage.
It’s an interesting piece and I was a little surprised that Atwood’s US fame came from the book and not the much later TV series.
Having now read both books, I’ll also have to think about her fame at home commencing with the second (Surfacing) rather than the first (The Edible Woman).
That’s true: I started at that too. And, yet, it does seem as though it was making an attempt to address a certain kind of privilege, so one wonders why the term fell away or, at least, wasn’t readopted.
I’m guessing that, in Australia, she took a much more prominent position on the stage with the critical and audience acclaim for the TV series, but she’d been a more prominent figure “at home” from early ddays.
At the time, that would have been chalked up to the fact that TEW was openly set in Canada and Surfacing referenced the U.S. so it was, therefore, an important story.
I haven’t read any of Margaret Atwood’s short stories but I must, thank you for the prompt!
It’s nice to have a choice of poems or stories, graphic novels or novels, essays or reviews when it comes to MARM: never boring!
What a great piece- thank you for this. I read these stories so long ago – now I think I’ll look them up again.
How interesting to see Atwood’s perspective hasn’t changed in all these years. There’s some comfort in that constancy.
Thanks, Joni: very kind of you. They’re definitely worth revisiting (I’d forgotten most of them).
It gives one the sense that she’s been steadily learning and growing, in craft and in life, an essential habit.