Already it has turned too chilly to sit outdoors and read, unless the sun is shining, which it was not when I wanted to sit with Payback and Dancing Girls this week. But it’s still warm enough to be comfortable in a sweater to do the raking and burlapping (isn’t this a word?), and the final finishes for the summer’s garden. There are a lot of slender birch trees that have been choked by wild grape vines on this property, so we are trying to work them free from the trees’ trunks and branches, while still allowing some grapes to grow in other places.

Thinking about this negotiation for territory, in the yard, as a balance system fits with the second chapter of Payback; next, Margaret Atwood considers how the imbalanced state of indebtedness has been linked with the concept of sin. I was thinking about Anne’s comment (on earlier MARM posts this year) about it being a dry narrative and it’s true that I approach these lectures with a sense of doing some homework.

In this chapter, there’s not quite as much mythology to sort through, but there’s more religion, and that does smack of the classroom (or pulpit). There are also quite a few quotations from literary works, including Mary Webb’s Precious Bane and George Orwell’s 1984. However, as with a good teacher, once I’m sitting in my seat, Atwood offers just enough entertainment to hold my interest.

She, herself, is aware that we learn best when we are fully engaged. She recalls being a child in Sunday school and how the “most interesting parts of the Bible” were “studiously avoided.” Which ones? “[T]hose dealing with sex, rape, child sacrifice, mutilations, massacres, the gathering up in baskets of the lopped-off heads of your enemy’s kids, and the cutting up of concubines’ bodies and sending them around as invitations-to-a war.” She doesn’t go to those lengths in Payback (good thing!).

The primary source from which she draws elements of entertainment is her own life, memories of her upbringing most often. I got a huge giggle out of the idea that, as a chid, she assumed that “pawnshops had something to do with chess.” Isn’t that just sensible, really?

I also loved the story about her aunt and her aunt’s friend travelling to Montreal from Nova Scotia to help her mother, who was in hospital (following her brother’s birth), and what debts were incurred (financial and social) in that process. It’s a very natural way to illustrate a set of relationships’ give-and-take, of an exchange system. (She also refers to Lewis Hyde’s The Gift here, too: a formative text for Atwood.)

The details surrounding the journey and her mother’s care are fascinating. My favourite part is how the two women, on their journey home, travelling on the cheapest fares (so, sitting upright the whole way home, in rigid wooden seats), negotiated to “rent” two pillows for forty-eight cents, when the rate was twenty-five cents per pillow. I won’t spoil it (it’s only a little spicy).

Another detail that tickled me is the origin of the talk of a “clean slate” or a “dirty slate.” Atwood observes how the phrase has come to mean you’ve atoned for your sins, you’ve made “reparation for whatever you’ve done wrong.” But the colloquial use of the term is based on the “slate in bars and pubs where regular customers’ running tabs were recorded” where a “dirty slate” is “smeared all over with debts,” a situation which is “dirty for both debtor and creditor alike.” Who knew?

The next story in Dancing Girls is “The Man from Mars” and it was originally published in the Ontario Review which, despite its name, is actually an American journal/literary magazine, edited for many years by Joyce Carol Oates and Raymond Smith. (Once upon a time, Margaret Atwood was only published in literary journals and magazines too: emerging writers—have hope, don’t give up! Also once upon a time, JCO’s oeuvre was still in the double digits. Again, who knew?)

It’s fascinating to read this decades-old story that grapples with a privileged class’s insincerity towards people whose cultural identities are rooted elsewhere—rooted in “other” places, with the limitations of small-L liberal sympathy and compassion, with the superficial habit of “tolerance” which is a world apart from “acceptance.” In this story, the liberal love-everybody-but-NIMBY ideology rests in Christine’s mother but, ultimately, Christine recognises that she has inherited more of this outlook than she wants to admit.

Christine is critical of, but not antagonistic towards, her mother: “She prided herself on her tolerance; also there was a scarcity of girls.” She acknowledges the contradictions, in her mother being willing to employ a hired girl that most women would refuse, and she also acknowledges the friction that her mother’s deeply rooted beliefs and behaviours towards “the girl” bring to the situation—what, today, could be called microaggressions.

When her mother catches wind of “The Man from Mars,” she invites him to the house on a telephone call; Christine is appalled, but she goes through the motions. Readers are sympathetic to her because she recognises that she is not all that different from her mother, and her self-awareness makes us curious about how her own beliefs and ideas might shift or remain rigid.

She’s a young woman in her mother’s home, and we readers wait, with these women, for the young man to arrive. Perhaps Christine will provide a counterweight to her mother’s judgement. But “he wasn’t quite the foreign potentate her [mother’s] optimistic, veil-fragile mind had concocted.” And we realise that Christine knew that and she allowed the young man to accept the invitation anyway.

Christine puts her mother in a position where she will openly judge the young man’s “other-ness” (my word) and puts the young man in an awkward (and eventually devastating) situation by allowing this pantomime to play out, allowing this tolerance-that-actually-masks-intolerance to unfurl.

Going much further risks a spoiler, but not yet. This part only sounds like a spoiler: “’That kind don’t hurt you,’ one of the policemen said: ‘They just kill you.’” The other policeman says: “Nut cases.” This isn’t a spoiler because, although it sounds like something horrible has happened, nothing has happened. Nothing actually ever happens. Not in terms of plot or story.

The spoiler bit comes in the final pages of the story, when Christine comes to realise something about the young man and about her response to him and her ideas of what life is like on “Mars.” (It’s also not a spoiler to say that the story has nothing to do with Mars and that’s not where he’s from. Although, if you want to think more about Margaret Atwood and science-fiction, check out Bill’s post for MARM.)

The story works, even decades later, because it rests with Christine, with one woman’s attempts to challenge and conform to various expectations:

“Her parents never expected her to be a brilliant social success and weren’t overly disappointed when she wasn’t. She was spared the manoeuvring and anxiety she witnessed among others her age, and she even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the categories they commonly used when talking about girls; she wasn’t a cock-tease, a cold fish, an easy lay or a snarky bitch; she was an honorary person. She had grown to share their contempt for most women.”

The story works because, even decades later, these expectations still don’t work; we all have to wrestle with some version of them, have to make our own way knowing that means we are disappointing some people even when we are satisfying others.

What are you reading for MARM this year?

Or, are you just about to choose…right now!

(This is the fifth iteration of Margaret Atwood Reading Month: here are links to previous participants’ posts, if you’re looking to reminisce or to find some inspiration to join. If you notice that one of your earlier posts is missing, please let me know!)