Authors: Margaret Atwood
She said that being a servant was like anything else, there was a knack to it which many never learnt, and it was all in the way of looking at it. For instance, we’d been told always to use the back stairs, in order to keep out of the way of the family, but in truth it was the other way around: the front stairs were there so that the family would keep out of our way. They could go traipsing up and down the front stairs in their fancy clothes and trinkets, while the real work of the place went on behind their backs, without them getting all snarled up in it, and interfering, and making a nuisance of themselves. They were feeble and ignorant creatures, although rich, and most of them could not light a fire if their toes were freezing off, because they didn’t know how, and it was a wonder they could blow their own noses or wipe their own backsides, they were by their
nature as useless as a prick on a priest – if you’ll excuse me, Sir, but that was how she put it – and if they were to lose all their money tomorrow and be thrown out on the streets, they would not even be able to make a living by honest whoring, as they would not know which part was to go in where, and they would end up getting – I won’t say the word – in the ear; and most of them did not know their own arse from a hole in the ground. And she said something else about the women, which was so coarse I will not repeat it, Sir, but it made us laugh very much.
She said that the trick to it was to have the work done without it ever being seen to be done; and if any of them was to surprise you at a task, you should simply remove yourself at once. In the end, she said, we had the better of them, because we washed their dirty linen and therefore we knew a good deal about them; but they did not wash ours, and knew nothing about us at all. There were few secrets they could keep from the servants; and if I was ever to be a chambermaid, I would have to learn to carry a bucket full of filth as if it was a bowl of roses, for the thing these people hated the most was to be reminded that they too had bodies, and their shit stank as much as anyone’s, if not worse. And then she would say a poem:
When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?
As I’ve said, Sir, Mary was an outspoken young woman, and did not mince words; and she had very democratic ideas, which it took me some getting used to.
At the very top of the house was a large attic, divided up; and if you climbed the stairs, and then went along past the room where we slept, and down some other stairs, you were in the drying room. It was strung with lines, and had several small windows that opened out under the eaves. And the chimney from the kitchen ran up through this room. It was used to dry the clothes in winter, and when it was raining outside.
As a rule we did not do a wash if the weather threatened; but especially in the summer, the day could start fair and then cloud over all of a sudden, and thunder and rain; and the thunderstorms were very violent, with loud cracks of thunder and fiery flashes of lightning, so much that you would think the end of the world was come. I was terrified the first time it happened, and got under a table and began to cry, and Mary said it was nothing, only a thunderstorm; but then she told me several stories of men who had been out in their fields or even in their barns, and were struck dead by lightning, and also a cow standing under a tree.
When we had a wash hanging out and the first drops began to fall, we would rush out with the baskets and gather all in as quickly as we could, and then haul it up the stairs and hang it out anew in the drying room, as it could not be allowed to sit in the baskets for long because of mildew. I did love the smell of a laundry dried outside, it was a good fresh smell; and the shirts and the nightgowns flapping in the breeze on a sunny day were like large white birds, or angels rejoicing, although without any heads.
But when we hung the same things up inside, in the grey twilight of the drying room, they looked different, like pale ghosts of themselves hovering and shimmering there in the gloom; and the look of them, so silent and bodiless, made me afraid. And Mary, who was very quick in such matters, soon found this out, and would hide behind the sheets, and press up against them so there was the outline of her face, and give out a moaning sound; or she would get behind the nightshirts and make their arms move. Her object was to frighten me, and she would succeed, and I would shriek; and then we would chase up and down between the rows of washing, laughing and screaming, but trying not to laugh and scream too loud, and if I would catch her I would dart in and tickle her, for she was very ticklish; and sometimes we would try on Mrs. Alderman Parkinson’s corsets, over top of our clothes, and walk around with
our chests sticking out and looking down our noses; and we would be so overcome that we would fall backwards into the baskets of linens, and lie there gasping like fish until we had recovered our straight faces again.
These were just the high spirits of youth, which do not always take a very dignified form, as I am sure you have had cause to observe, Sir.
Mrs. Alderman Parkinson had more pieced quilts than I’d ever seen before in my life, as it was not so much the fashion on the other side of the ocean, and printed cottons were not so cheap and plentiful. Mary said that a girl did not consider herself ready for marriage here until she had three such quilts, made by her own hands; and the fanciest ones were the marriage quilts, such as the Tree of Paradise and the Flower Basket. Others, such as the Wild Goose Chase and the Pandora’s Box, had a good many pieces, and took skill; and those such as the Log Cabin and the Nine Patch were for everyday, and were much faster to make. Mary had not begun on her own marriage quilt yet, as she did not have the time, being a servant; but she’d already finished a Nine Patch.
On a fine day in mid-September, Mrs. Honey said that it was time to take out the winter quilts and blankets, and to air them, in preparation for the cold weather; and to mend the rents and tears; and she gave this task to Mary and myself. The quilts were stored in the attic, away from the drying room, to avoid the damp, in a cedar chest, with a sheet of muslin in between each one and enough camphor to kill a cat, and the smell of it made me quite light-headed. We were to carry them downstairs and hang them out on the lines, and brush them down and see if the moths had been at them; for sometimes, despite cedar chests and camphor, the moths will get in, and the winter quilts had wool batts inside them instead of the cotton ones in the summer quilts.
The winter quilts were of deeper colours than the summer ones, with reds and oranges and blues and purples; and some of them had silks and velvets and brocade pieces in them. Over the years in prison, when I have been by myself, as I am a good deal of the time, I have closed my eyes and turned my head towards the sun, and I have seen a red and an orange that were like the brightness of those quilts; and when we’d hung a half-dozen of them up on the line, all in a row, I thought that they looked like flags, hung out by an army as it goes to war.
And since that time I have thought, why is it that women have chosen to sew such flags, and then to lay them on the tops of beds? For they make the bed the most noticeable thing in a room. And then I have thought, it’s for a warning. Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night’s sleep. But it isn’t so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. It is where we are born, and that is our first peril in life; and it is where the women give birth, which is often their last. And it is where the act takes place between men and women that I will not mention to you, Sir, but I suppose you know what it is; and some call it love, and others despair, or else merely an indignity which they must suffer through. And finally beds are what we sleep in, and where we dream, and often where we die.
But I did not have these fancies about the quilts until after I was already in prison. It is a place where you have a lot of time to think, and no one to tell your thoughts to; and so you tell them to yourself.
Here Dr. Jordan asks me to pause a little so he can catch up with his writing; for he says he is much interested in what I have just related. I am glad of this, as I have enjoyed telling about those days, and if I had my own wish I would stay in them as long as I could. So I wait, and watch his hand moving over the paper, and think it must be
pleasant to have the knack of writing so quickly, which can only be done by practice, like playing the piano. And I wonder if he has a good singing voice, and sings duets with young ladies in the evenings, when I am shut up alone in my cell. Most likely he does, as he is a handsome enough and friendly, and unmarried.
And so, Grace, he says, looking up, you consider a bed to be a dangerous place?
There is a different note in his voice; perhaps he is laughing at me up his sleeve. I should not speak to him so freely, and decide I will not, if that is the tone he is going to take.
Well of course not every time you get into it, Sir, I say, only on those occasions which I have mentioned. Then I keep silent, and continue to sew.
Have I offended you somehow, Grace? he says. I did not intend to.
I sew in silence for a few moments more. Then I say, I will believe you, Sir, and take you at your word; and hope such will be returned in future.
Of course, of course, he says warmly. Please do go on with your story. I should not have interrupted.
Surely you do not want to hear about such ordinary things, and daily life, I say.
I want to hear anything you may tell me, Grace, he says. The small details of life often hide a great significance.
I am not certain what he means by that, but I continue.
At last we had all of the quilts carried down and hung out in the sun, and brushed; and we took two of them inside again, to mend them. We stayed in the laundry, where there was no washing going forward, so it was cooler than the attic; and there was a large table where we could spread the quilts out.
One of them was quite strange-looking; it had four grey urns with four green willow trees growing out of them, and a white dove
in each corner, or I believe they were intended for doves, although they looked more like chickens; and in the middle was a woman’s name embroidered in black: Flora. And Mary said it was a Memorial Quilt, done by Mrs. Alderman Parkinson in the memory of a dear departed friend, as was then becoming the fashion.
And the other quilt was called Attic Windows; it had a great many pieces, and if you looked at it one way it was closed boxes, and when you looked at it another way the boxes were open, and I suppose the closed boxes were the attics and the open ones were the windows; and that is the same with all quilts, you can see them two different ways, by looking at the dark pieces, or else the light. But when Mary said the name I did not hear it right, and I thought she said Attic Widows, and I said, Attic Widows, that is a very odd name for a bed quilt. And then Mary told me what the right name was, and we had a fit of laughing, because we pictured an attic all full of widows, in their black dresses with their widow’s caps and the weepers hanging down, pulling mournful faces and wringing their hands, and writing letters on their black-bordered writing paper, and dabbing at their eyes with their black-bordered handkerchiefs. And Mary said, And the boxes and chests in the attic would be stuffed to the brim with their dear deceased husbands’ cut-off hair; and I said, And perhaps the dear deceased husbands are in the chests too.
And that set us off again. We could not stop laughing, even when we heard Mrs. Honey and her keys clanking along the hall. We buried our faces against the quilts, and by the time she’d opened the door Mary was composed again, but I was face down with my shoulders heaving, and Mrs. Honey said, What is the matter, girls, and Mary stood up and said, Please Mrs. Honey, it’s just that Grace is crying about her dead mother, and Mrs. Honey said Very well then, you may take her down to the kitchen for a cup of tea, but don’t be too long about it, and she said that young girls were often weepy but Mary must not indulge me and let it get out
of control. And when she’d gone out we held on to each other, and laughed so much I thought we should die.
Now you may think it very thoughtless in us, Sir, to have made light of widows; and with the deaths in my own family, I should have known it was not a thing to joke over. And if there had been any widows nearby we would never have done it, as it is wrong to make fun of another’s suffering. But there were no widows to hear us, and all I can say, Sir, is that we were young girls, and young girls are often silly in that way; and it is better to laugh than to burst.
Then I thought about widows – about widow’s humps, and widow’s walks, and the widow’s mite in the Bible, which we servants were always being urged to give to the poor out of our wages; and also I thought about how the men would wink and nod when a young and rich widow was mentioned, and how a widow was a respectable thing to be if old and poor, but not otherwise; which is quite strange when you come to consider it.
In September the weather was beautiful, with days just like summer, and then in October many of the trees turned red and yellow and orange, as if they were on fire, and I could never stop looking at them. And one afternoon towards evening I was outside with Mary gathering in the sheets from the lines, and we heard a sound like many hoarse voices calling together, and Mary said, Look up, it’s the wild geese flying south for the winter. The sky above was dark with them, and Mary said, The hunters will be out tomorrow morning. And it was sad to think that these wild creatures were about to be shot.
One night in late October a frightening thing happened to me. I would not tell you about this, Sir, except that you are a doctor and doctors know about it already, so you will not be shocked. I had been using the chamber pot, as I was already in my nightdress and ready to go to bed, so did not want to go outside to the privy in the dark;
and when I happened to look down, there was blood, and some on my nightdress also. I was bleeding from between the legs, and I thought I was dying, and burst into tears.