Part 11: Falling Women
Chapters 56 – 63

After leaving the restaurant where she met Jon in the present narrative, Elaine is met by a Middle Eastern woman who asks for money to help war refugees. Elaine ponders about how this is the war that killed Stephen, however this is not seen as a conflict for Elaine. The immigration that took place in Canada over the years is often presented by Atwood in a sympathetic way toward the immigrants: Mrs Finestein, a displaced Jew after world war 2, Mr Banerji, capable but never promoted, Mr Hrbik, lost without his family in a cycle of womanising and this Middle Eastern lady supporting war refugees who need assistance.

In an eventful stage of younger Elaine’s life, she is torn between her affair with Mr Hrbik and her new relationship with Jon. Jon continues to be a womaniser and holds similar power to Cordelia in that Elaine’s desire not to lose him forces her to tolerate unfair behaviour. Elaine’s art starts to take off after a woman throws ink at her during a feminist exhibition. Susie, Elaine’s fellow student and Mr Hrbik’s lover, attempts an at-home pregnancy termination and calls Elaine who finds her covered in blood and rushes her to the hospital. Mr Hrbik becomes despised by Susie then by Elaine who likewise does not want to see him again.

At this time, Elaine’s parents sell their home and move north. Stephen travels as part of his academic life and pops postcards in once and a while to announce, ‘in California … got married’ and later ‘in New York … got divorced’. Elaine marries Jon after she falls pregnant with her daughter Sarah. Cordelia contacts her from the rest home in which she is staying, asking for Elaine’s help to escape. Elaine refuses and loses contact with her. Cordelia’s mental state is a reminder that she too has suffered torment just as she had once tormented Elaine. Cordelia’s begging highlights the shift in power balance with Elaine now holding all the power to decide Cordelia’s fate.

Part 11 Quotes

‘Please,’ she says. ‘They are killing many people.’ She doesn’t say where. It could be a lot of places, or in between places; homelessness is a nationality now. Somehow the war never ended after all, it just broke up into pieces and got scattered, it gets in everywhere, you can’t shut it out. Killing is endless now, it’s an industry, there’s money in it, and the good side and the bad side are pretty hard to tell apart.
‘Yes,’ I say. This is the war that killed Stephen. (A Middle Eastern woman and Elaine) Chapter 56

As for Jon, I know what he offers. He offers escape, running away from the grown-ups. He offers fun, and mess. He offers mischief. (Elaine) Chapter 57

I ride to the hospital with Susie, in the back of the ambulance. She is now semiconscious, and I hold her hand, which is cold and small. ‘Don’t tell Josef,’ she whispers to me. The pink nightie brings it home to me: she is none of the things I’ve thought about her, she never has been. (Elaine) Chapter 57

But there is also another voice; a small, mean voice, ancient and smug, that comes from somewhere deep inside my head: It serves her right. (Elaine about Susie) Chapter 57

He says Toronto is getting overpopulated, and also polluted. He says the lower Great Lakes are the world’s largest sewer and that if we knew what was going into the drinking water we would all become alcoholics. As for the air, it’s so full of chemicals we should be wearing gas masks. (Elaine about Mr Risley) Chapter 58

He has a look of amazing brilliance, as if at any minute his head will light up and become transparent, disclosing a huge brightly colored brain inside. At the same time he looks rumpled and bewildered, as if he’s just wakened from a pleasant dream to find himself surrounded by Munchkins. (Elaine about Stephen) Chapter 59

Jon comes over, eats, sleeps, and goes away. I watch him with detachment; he notices nothing. Every move I make is sodden with unreality. When no one is around, I bite my fingers. I need to feel physical pain, to attach myself to daily life. My body is a separate thing. It ticks like a clock; time is inside it. It has betrayed me, and I am disgusted with it. (Elaine) Chapter 60

I have no doubt that all of these things are true. Rapists exist, and those who molest children and strangle girls. They exist in the shadows, like the sinister men who lurk in ravines, not one of whom I have ever seen. They are violent, wage wars, commit murders. They do less work and make more money. They shove the housework off on women…. But I am on shaky ground, in this testifying against men, because I live with one. (Elaine in the feminist meeting) Chapter 61

They all seem to have more friends than I do, more close women friends. I’ve never really considered it before, this absence; I’ve assumed that other women were like me. They were, once. And now they are not.
There is Cordelia, of course. But I haven’t seen her for years. (Elaine) Chapter 62

It takes me a moment to recognize Cordelia, because she doesn’t look at all the same. Or rather she doesn’t look the way she did when I last saw her, in her wide cotton skirt and barbaric bracelet, elegant and confident. She is in an earlier phase, or a later one: the soft green tweeds and tailored blouses of her good-taste background, which now appear matronly on her, because she has put on weight. Or has she? (Elaine meeting Cordelia) Chapter 63

‘I can’t, Cordelia,’ I say gently. But I don’t feel gentle toward her. I am seething, with a fury I can neither explain nor express. How dare you ask me? (Elaine meeting Cordelia) Chapter 63

I imitate relief. I feel free, and weightless.
But I am not free, of Cordelia. (Elaine) Chapter 63

Part 12: One Wing
Chapters 64 – 66

Named after one of her father’s expressions, you can’t fly on one wing, this chapter encapsulates the idea that like a wounded bird cannot survive neither can a wounded person. Elaine’s ‘one wing’ condition further deteriorates when she slashes her wrist with an Exacto knife following repeated fights with Jon that have led her into severe anxiety and depression. Jon finds her in time and rushes her to the hospital. Soon afterwards Elaine leaves town with her daughter. The suicide and the fleeing are typical of Elaine’s ‘walk away’ approach which she first learned through the fainting episodes of her early years and through her final response to the bullying which effectively ended it. In Vancouver Elaine meets and marries Ben, a stable travel agent.

In the present day, Elaine sleeps with Jon, not feeling disloyal to her current husband Ben, but as a way to repair old anger and wounds.

Part 12 Quotes

The past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as decor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into. (Elaine) Chapter 64

Young women need unfairness, it’s one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. (Elaine) Chapter 64

I don’t feel I’m being disloyal to Ben, only loyal to something else; which predates him, which has nothing to do with him. An old score. (Elaine with Jon) Chapter 64

I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can’t even see it, something that’s drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead. (Elaine) Chapter 65

I’ve already decided what I will do, afterward, tomorrow. I’ll wear my arm in a sling and say I broke my wrist. So I don’t have to tell him, or Jon, or anyone else, about the voice. I know it wasn’t really there. Also I know I heard it. (Elaine) Chapter 65

I’m good at leaving. The trick is to close yourself off. Don’t hear, don’t see. Don’t look back. (Elaine) Chapter 66

Ben considers me good, and I don’t disturb this faith: he doesn’t need my more unsavory truths. He considers me also a little fragile, because artistic: I need to be cared for, like a potted plant. I’m good at leaving. The trick is to close yourself off. Don’t hear, don’t see. Don’t look back. (Elaine) Chapter 66

Part 13: Picoseconds
Chapters 67 – 70

Elaine is distracted on the way to the gallery opening and swings past her old neighbourhood, noticing the changes and the concluded development of the urban sprawl. Her old school has been pulled down, like her own memories of childhood, replaced, changed. It is Halloween and this too reminds her of change, parents now unwilling to let their children trick or treat in fear of harm. The cemetery, a place to remember her family’s deaths: Stephen, an innocent, following his dream to explore the world was tragically taken by hijackers and killed on a plane, Elaine’s parents, never really recovered from their son’s untimely death, passed within a year of each other. The final days of her mother included a visit from Elaine when her mother raises the point about the ‘girls’ from her childhood. Elaine had looked at the trinkets, which were clear to her but failed to fully connect with the past, amongst which was the cat’s eye marble.

Part 13 Quotes

My brother Stephen died five years ago. I shouldn’t say died: was killed. I try not to think of it as murder, although it was, but as some kind of accident, like an exploding train. Or else a natural catastrophe, like a landslide. What they call for insurance purposes an act of God. (Elaine) Chapter 68

They’re like those characters in old comic books, the ones with two identities. These men have been caught halfway through their transformation: ordinary bodies but with powerful, supernatural heads, deformed in the direction of heroism, or villainy. I don’t know whether or not this is what my brother thought. But it’s what I think for him, now. (Elaine thinking for Stephen on the plane) Chapter 68

Then he is falling, faster than the speed of light. This is how my brother enters the past. (Elaine thinking for Stephen on the plane) Chapter 68

‘Those girls gave you a bad time,’ she says one day. I’ve made both or us a cup of tea—she’s permitted this—and we sit at the kitchen table, drinking it. (Mrs Risley to Elaine) Chapter 69

‘A marble!’ says my mother, with a child’s delight. ‘Remember all those marbles Stephen used to collect?’
‘Yes,’ I say. But this one was mine.
I look into it, and see my life entire. (Elaine) Chapter 69

Part 14: Unified Field Theory
Chapters 71 – 73

Another chapter named after one of Stephen’s physics theories, this chapter focuses on the gallery opening. The past and present timelines converge and present-day Elaine is at the gallery looking at her retrospective exhibition considering the inspiration for each piece. In a revelation of the artistic process, the reader can now imagine the described pieces and connect it to people, emotions and circumstances. There is an amount of juxtaposition that shows others’ interpretation of art may not be the same as the artist’s intention, inspiration or process. Charna is pleased with the event. Elaine is disappointed that Cordelia does not make an appearance. It shows that although at one stage she held so much power and presence in Elaine’s life, that eventually it passes.

The Five Paintings:

‘The first one is called Picoseconds. “A jeu d’esprit,” says Charna, “which takes on the Group of Seven and reconstructs their vision of landscape in the light of contemporary experiment and postmodern pastiche.” It is in fact a landscape, done in oils, with the blue water, the purple underpainting, the craggy rocks and windswept raggedy trees and heavy impasto of the twenties and thirties. … in much the same out-of-the-way position as the disappearing legs of Icarus in the painting by Bruegel, my parents are making lunch. They have their fire going, the billy tin suspended over it… Our Studebaker is parked in the background. … It’s as if a different light falls on them; as if they are being seen through a window which has opened in the landscape itself, to show what lies behind or within it. Underneath them, like a subterranean platform, holding them up, is a row of iconic-looking symbols painted in the flat style of Egyptian tomb frescoes… They are in fact the logos from old gas pumps of the forties. By their obvious artificiality, they call into question the reality of landscape and figures alike.’

‘The second painting is called The Three Muses. Charna has had some trouble with this one. “Risley continues her disconcerting deconstruction of perceived gender and its relationship to perceived power, especially in respect to numinous imagery,” she says. … I can see where she gets that: all Muses are supposed to be female, and one of these is not. … To the right is a short woman, dressed in a flowered housecoat and mules with real fur. On her head is a red pillbox hat with cherries…, and is carrying … an orange. To the left is an older woman with blue-gray hair, wearing a waltz-length lavender silk gown. In her sleeve is tucked a lace handkerchief, over her nose and mouth is a gauze nurse’s mask. … In her hands she holds a globe of the world. … In the middle is a thin man with medium-brown skin and white teeth, smiling an uncertain smile. He … too holds out a round object: it’s flat like a disc and appears to be made of purple stained glass. On its surface are arranged, seemingly at random, several bright pink objects not unlike those to be found in abstract paintings. They are in fact spruce budworm eggs, … They hold their gifts forward, as if presenting them to someone who sits or stands outside the painting. Mrs Finestein, Miss Stuart from school, Mr Banerji. Not as they were, to themselves… Who knows what death camp ashes blew daily through the head of Mrs Finestein… Mr Banerji probably could not walk down a street here without dread, of a shove or some word whispered or shouted. Miss Stuart was in exile, from plundered Scotland … To them I was incidental, their kindness to me casual and minor…. But why shouldn’t I reward them, if I feel like it? Play God, translate them into glory, in the afterlife of paint. Not that they’ll ever know. They must be dead by now, or elderly. Elsewhere.’

‘The third picture is called One Wing. I painted it for my brother, after his death. It’s a triptych. There … panels. In one is a World War Two airplane, … the other is a large pale-green luna moth. In the larger, central panel, a man is falling from the sky. That he is falling and not flying is clear from his position, which is almost upside-down, slantwise to the few clouds; nevertheless he appears calm. He is wearing a World War Two RCAF uniform. He has no parachute. In his hand is a child’s wooden sword. This is the kind of thing we do, to assuage pain.’

‘The fourth painting is called Cat’s Eye. It’s a self-portrait, of sorts. My head is in the right foreground, …. I’ve put in the incipient wrinkles, the little chicken feet at the corners of the lids. A few grey hairs…. Behind my half-head, in the centre of the picture, in the empty sky, a pier glass is hanging, convex and encircled by an ornate frame, In it, a section of the back of my head is visible; but the hair is different, younger. At a distance, and condensed by the curved space of the mirror, there are three small figures, dressed in the winter clothing of the girls of forty years ago. They walk forward, their faces shadowed, against a field of snow.’

‘The last painting is Unified Field Theory. It’s a vertical oblong, larger than the other paintings. Cutting across it a little over a third up is a wooden bridge. To either side of the bridge are the tops of trees, … Positioned above the top railing of the bridge, but so her feet are not quite touching it, is a woman dressed in black, with a black hood or veil covering her hair. … The sky behind her is the sky after sunset; at the top of it is the lower half of the moon. Her face is partly in shadow. She is the Virgin of Lost Things. Between her hands, at the level of her heart, she holds a glass object: an oversized cat’s eye marble, with a blue centre. Underneath the bridge is the night sky, as seen through a telescope. …At the lower edge of the painting the darkness pales and merges to a lighter tone, the clear blue of water, because the creek flows there, underneath the earth, underneath the bridge, down from the cemetery. The land of the dead people.’

Part 14 Quotes

I was unbaptized, a nest for demons: how could she know what germs of blasphemy and unfaith were breeding in me? And yet she took me in. Some of this must be true. I have not done it justice, or rather mercy. Instead I went for vengeance. An eye for an eye leads only to more blindness. (Elaine about Mrs Smeath) Chapter 71

Who knows what death camp ashes blew daily through the head of Mrs Finestein, in those years right after the war? Mr Banerji probably could not walk down a street here without dread, of a shove or some word whispered or shouted. Miss Stuart was in exile, from plundered Scotland still declining, three thousand miles away. To them I was incidental, their kindness to me casual and minor; I’m sure they didn’t give it a second thought, or have any idea of what it meant. (Elaine, Three Muses) Chapter 71

I think about escaping, out the back way. I could send a telegram later, claiming illness. (Elaine) Chapter 72

Really it’s Cordelia I expect, Cordelia I want to see. There are things I need to ask her. Not what happened, back then in the time I lost, because now I know that. I need to ask her why. If she remembers. (Elaine) Chapter 72

You’re dead, Cordelia.
No I’m not.
Yes you are. You’re dead.
Lie down. (Elaine) Chapter 73

Part 15: Bridge
Chapters 74 – 75

In the final chapter Elaine revisits the bridge where Cordelia threw her hat into the ravine. She thinks she sees Cordelia and is ready to forgive her, she then releases Cordelia from her memory by expressing that it is okay for Cordelia to go home now, the same words that the Virgin Mary used in Elaine’s vision when she was last in the ravine. Above all, she regrets that she will never get to grow old and have a strong friendship with Cordelia, someone to giggle with and reflect on life with. She is lonely yet life goes on, time has not yet ended. She reflects on the stars, they are not as eternal as she once thought like the pain or the memories of the past. If they were sounds they would only be echoes, not the original, and that we only have a little light to see with, enough of a perspective to grasp some things just enough to live by.

Part 15 Quotes

I know she’s looking at me, the lopsided mouth smiling a little, the face closed and defiant. There is the same shame, the sick feeling in my body, the same knowledge of my own wrongness, awkwardness, weakness; the same wish to be loved; the same loneliness; the same fear. But these are not my own emotions any more. They are Cordelia’s; as they always were.
I am the older one now, I’m the stronger. If she stays here any longer she will freeze to death; she will be left behind, in the wrong time. It’s almost too late.
I reach out my arms to her, bend down, hands open to show I have no weapon. It’s all right, I say to her. You can go home now. (Elaine) Chapter 74

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea. (Elaine) Chapter 74

If they were sounds, they would be echoes, of something that happened millions of years ago: a word made of numbers. Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing. It’s old light, and there’s not much of it. But it’s enough to see by. (Elaine) Chapter 74