Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing
by Margaret Atwood
The world is full of women who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing. Get some self-respect
and a day job. Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter bundled up to the neck, instead of
naked as a meat sandwich. Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell. You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous and without material form.
Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way you cut it, but I've a choice
of how, and I'll take the money.
I do give value. Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it's all in the timing. I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything's for sale, and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw *** just before it happens, when thigh, ***, inkblot, crevice, ***, and
*** are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them, my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles, I understand floods and earthquakes, and the
urge to step on ants. I keep the beat,
and dance for them because they can't. The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and languorous as a looted city the day after,
when all the ***'s been done already, and the killing,
and the survivors wander around looking for garbage
to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion. Speaking of which, it's the smiling
tires me out the most. This, and the pretence
that I can't hear them. And I can't, because I'm after all
a foreigner to them. The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slab of ham, but I come from the province of the gods
where meanings are lilting and oblique. I don't let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I'll whisper: My mother was *** by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner. That's what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.
Not that anyone here but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir. Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive in my own body.
They'd like to see through me, but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency. Look--my feet don't hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me. This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.