Stone Mattress

“The implication is that Constance has failed to be prepared, which in fact is true. It’s a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.” 

Constance is hopeful to hold on to any wonder that can come to her and feels that being prepared all the time hinders that possibility. Being prepared for everything in life would mean that Constance would have to face the real world. Instead, she’d rather live in a fantasy world. However, even when she enters Alphinland, she doesn’t know what is going to happen.

“If she’d foreseen that Alphinland was going to last so long and be so successful, she would have planned it better. It would have had a shape, a more defined structure; it would have had boundaries. As it is, it’s grown like urban sprawl.” 

Constance is so unprepared in life that she doesn’t even plan out her stories. She would rather place boundaries on the fantasy setting to keep the public out, as it is her world and she is the one who shapes it. Nevertheless, she needs its commercial success to provide her a paycheck.

“This idea is dismaying having some estrogen-plumped babe a quarter of his age contort his stringy, knobbled limbs while comparing the dashing protagonist of his earlier poems, replete with sexual alacrity and sardonic wit, to the atrophied bundle of twine and sticks he has become.” 

Throughout “Revenant,” Gavin curses the present, including his aging body. In this quote, he shares how he feels about himself even though he puts up a different front to those around him. This also relates to his regret over losing Constance, with whom he could have grown old together.

“‘I should have married Constance,’ he says. That’s his ace: plonk! Right down on the table. Those five words are usually very effective: he might score a barrage of hostility, and maybe even some tears. Top marks: a slammed door. Or a projectile. She winged him with an ashtray once. Reynolds smiles. ‘Well, you didn’t marry Constance,’ she said. ‘You married me. So suck it up.’”

When Gavin tells Reynolds that he should have married Constance, he shows he is capable of hurting Reynolds on purpose, as he knows that this announcement will do exactly that. This also shows that Gavin enjoys himself when he makes Reynolds cry, as if it were a game he were playing, and not his marriage. Reynolds, however, doesn’t cry in this scene. Instead, she stands up for herself, showing that she and all the women in Gavin’s life will eventually stand up to him.

“It’s best not to overreact to her. Push, and she pushes back. He hasn’t forgotten her childhood tantrums and the fights she used to get into, flailing her long arms ineffectually as the other children laughed and jeered her on. He’d watch, almost in tears himself: he couldn’t extricate her, confined to the boys’ side of the schoolyard as he was. So he avoids confrontation. Languor is a more efficient method of control.” 

One difference between the Maeve twins is that Tin avoids confrontation     while Jorrie revels in it. Ever since she was a child, Jorrie has thrown tantrums. If someone pushes Jorrie, she will not step away but rather attack that person. When the twins were young, Tin watched Jorrie get in physical fights. As an adult, Jorrie is more of a verbal force. Tin is the opposite of Jorrie and finds that being kind to another person is better than lashing out at them.

“She’s embedding us in amber, thinks Tin. Like ancient insects. Preserving us forever. In amber beads, in amber words. Right before our eyes.”

In this quote, Tin refers to Constance’s habit of making people she doesn’t like in real life into characters in her fantasy world. Even though Tin is skeptical, he knows that Jorrie is reborn in the moment that Constance frees her in Alphinland. This is yet another example of the blurred line between fantasy and reality which Atwood explores.

“Everyone likes to think they are doing good while at the same time pocketing a bag of cash, and our priest was no exception.” 

The family of the narrator of this story bribes their local priest to look the other way when they tell their friends and family that their daughter is dead. While one might think that a priest would refuse money if he thought he was doing a good thing, this is not the case with this priest. This also reflects the narrator’s cynical view of the world, bred by her parents’ treatment of her.

“There’s only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.” 

While the narrator’s mother spends her life tending to the narrator, she eventually feels that the narrator is responsible for her hard life. This is why the mother eventually abandons the narrator, leaving the girl in the house alone. The girl seems to understand the mother’s resentment.

“When demons are required someone will always be found to supply the part, and whether you step forward or are pushed is all the same in the end.” 

It doesn’t matter if one is evil or good—people will make a scapegoat out of other people no matter what. Even if an individual lives a pure life, once someone labels that person as evil, others will see them as such. The narrator in “Lusus Naturae” had a pure and kind heart but because others had deemed her a demon due to the way she looked, she would never be known by the larger world.

“He wasn’t getting any younger, maybe he should settle down. So, what if she wasn’t, to outward appearances, a hot babe? Hot babes could be stuck on themselves; they were demanding and fickle. Gwyneth wasn’t so alluring that she didn’t appreciate what she was getting.” 

Sam is self-centered and believes that he was doing Gwyneth a favor when he married her. This is ironic because it is Gwyneth who eventually wants a divorce from Sam. This split is foreshadowed by Sam’s slimy attitude toward his wife.

“The units have to be cleared out within twenty-four hours, you can’t just leave crap there if you don’t want it: you win it, you own it. The storage guys don't crave the expense of carting your freshly bought trash to the dump.” 

The storage unit represents Sam in this passage. Sam just can’t leave his emotional insecurities anywhere he wants to. Unfortunately, Sam refuses to face this reality and carries his figurative trash with him.

“What is it about winter that causes people to drive as if their hands are feet?” 

Throughout the story collection, winter is a presence. This wintry setting provides an inversion for many characters, with Atwood presenting them as acting out of sorts from how they might otherwise. This inversion corresponds with the deadly threat posed by winter in this story and others.

“You don’t find yourself encased in several layers of plastic with tape on the zippers, wearing formal wedding fancy dress, without getting murdered first.” 

Sam finds a dead man in one of the storage units he wins at an auction. The dead man is obviously the groom in a wedding gone wrong as the unit also holds a number of other wedding supplies and souvenirs. It is obvious that the dead man did not die of natural causes.

“Why had Zenia done it? All of it? Why do cats eat birds? Was Roz’s unhelpful answer.” 

Roz’s answer to the unpleasant situations that Zenia creates is that it was just in Zenia’s nature to hurt others. This casts Zenia as something monstrous, like the vampires in the horror movies they watch. Yet Charis recasts Zenia’s monstrousness to render her a protector.

“Charis could have chosen a detached home, but she was maybe losing track of things sometimes—that was how she put it, causing Tony to say, ‘No shit!’ privately to Roz over the phone—and the concept was that she would live in one half of the duplex and rent the other half to someone who was, well, better with tools than she was, and she would trade that person lower rent for maintenance and repairs. Skill-trading was so much less mercenary than charging market value rent, didn’t Roz and Tony feel that?” 

Roz and Tony believe that Charis cannot survive by herself. This is why they recommend she buy a duplex instead of a detached home. Just like her home is half of something, the duplex represents that Charis is not whole without other people.

“Jaffrey lived there, too, a cause of jealous brooding for Jack: how easy for Jaffrey to slither along the hall in his malodorous wool-sock feet, drooling and slavering with unwholesome lust, to Irena’s door, unseen, unheard, when Jack himself was dead to the world in his attic cubby.” 

A sleeping Jack is described as “dead” here, just like the hand featured in his bestselling novel is dead. The book’s hand awakens to get what it wants, just like Jack needs to awaken from the fantasy worlds he’s lived in. Like Constance, Jack’s book is form of escapism for both readers and himself.

“Oh Jack, Jack, he tells himself, eyeing his baggy eyes in the mirror, fingering the thin patch at the back of his head, sucking in his belly, though he can’t hold it in for long. You’re such a wreck. You’re such a dupe. You’re so alone. Oh Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, with your once-dependable candlestick and your knack for impromptu bullshit. You used to be so full of beans. You used to be so trusting. You used to be so young.”

Atwood references the “Jack Be Nimble” nursery rhyme where jumping over a candlestick without being hurt by the flame is considered good luck. Jack, in “The Dead Hand Loves You,” no longer has the ability to avoid the flame’s pain now that he is older. There is also an allusion to the “Jack and the Beanstalk” fairytale, where a Jack has magic beans that grow a beanstalk which Jack climbs up to the sky.

“He drowned his sorrows, though like other drowned things they had a habit of floating to the surface when least expected.” 

The saying “drown your sorrows” is a reference to people who drink alcohol to forget about their problems. This is also a way for people to escape reality and create their own fantasy world. This saying is ironic because drowned things always return to the surface; Jack does himself no help by trying to solve his problems in this way.

“‘Verna,’ he says ‘That’s a lovely name.’ ‘Old-fashioned,’ she says. ‘From the Latin word for “spring” when everything springs to life again.’ That line, so filled with promises of phallic renewal, had been effective in helping to secure her second husband.” 

Verna allows men to believe she will light up their lives and offer a sense of renewal. She does this with the ultimate goal of getting revenge on the man who raped her in high school. Verna’s desire for revenge has sustained over and over again, as she’s moved from husband to husband and victim to victim.

“There was an infection, with complications and scarring, but it was all for the best, she overheard one brisk nurse telling another, because those sorts of girls made unfit mothers anyway.” 

Verna went through a hard labor when she gave birth to her baby at the nunnery. It left her with scars but these physical scars were not as lasting as the emotional ones Verna carried from the rape that conceived the child. This passage also reflects the extent to which society blames victims of sexual assault, casting them as immoral.

“Sometimes there’s nothing to be seen by Tobias except the usual comings and goings. Every day there will be visitors—‘civilians,’ Tobias calls them—marching briskly from the guest car park towards the main door, bearing a potted begonia or geranium, hauling a young, reluctant grandchild, summoning up false cheer, hoping to get this rich-old-relative thing over with as fast as possible.” 

By calling these citizens “civilians,” Atwood creates two separate groups of people, making private citizens outsiders to the fantasy world of the nursing home. Tobias refers to all of the visitors outside the building as outsiders creating a barrier between them and the nursing home residents. This rift will culminate in the attack on the nursing home by the younger generations.

“According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they’re less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it?” 

Tobias believes that people lose their integrity as they grow older. He believes women live longer because they don’t need their integrity, at least as much, in order to survive. Tobias may intend this as a sexist attack on women, yet it also betrays how society mistreats women, thus preparing them for ageism later on.

“You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, non-physical realm. But it’s only through ecstasy you can do that, and ecstasy is achieved through the body itself. Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight. Without that ecstasy you can only be dragged further down by the body, into its machinery. Its rusting, creaking, vengeful, brute machinery.” 

Growing old is a contradiction. Wilma believes that aging can make her rise above her physical ailments and her beauty, but that is only possible if the body works and is beautiful. In this manner, her own thought processes become the fantasy world to which she escapes as her body grows decrepit.