The Penelopiad. Margaret Atwood
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couple of the maids were with me—they never left me unattended, I was a risk until I was safely married, because who knew what upstart fortune hunter might try to seduce me or seize me and run away with me? The maids were my sources of information. They were ever-flowing fountains of trivial gossip: they could come and go freely in the palace, they could study the men from all angles, they could listen in on their conversations, they could laugh and joke with them as much as they pleased: no one cared who might worm his way in between their legs.
‘Who’s the barrel-chested one?’ I asked.
‘Oh, that’s only Odysseus,’ said one of the maids. He was not considered—by the maids at least—to be a serious candidate for my hand. His father’s palace was on Ithaca, a goat-strewn rock; his clothes were rustic; he had the manners of a small-town big shot, and had already expressed several complicated ideas the others considered peculiar. He was clever though, they said. In fact he was too clever for his own good. The other young men made jokes about him—‘Don’t gamble with Odysseus, the friend of Hermes,’ they said. ‘You’ll never win.’ This was like saying he was a cheat and a thief. His grandfather Autolycus was well known for these very qualities, and was reputed never to have won anything fairly in his life.
‘I wonder how fast he can run,’ I said. In some kingdoms the contest for brides was a wrestling match, in others a chariot race, but with us it was just running.
‘Not very fast, on those short legs of his,’ said one maid unkindly. And indeed the legs of Odysseus were quite short in relation to his body. It was all right when he was sitting down, you didn’t notice, but standing up he looked top-heavy.
‘Not fast enough to catch you,’ said another of the maids. ‘You wouldn’t want to wake up in the morning and find yourself in bed with your husband and a herd of Apollo’s cows.’ This was a joke about Hermes, whose first act of thievery on the day he was born involved an audacious cattle raid. ‘Not unless one of them was a bull,’ said another. ‘Or else a goat,’ said a third. ‘A big strong ram! I bet our young duck would like that! She’d be bleating soon enough!’ ‘I wouldn’t mind one of that kind myself,’ said a fourth. ‘Better a ram than the babyfingers you get around here.’ They all began laughing, holding their hands over their mouths and snorting with mirth.
I was mortified. I didn’t understand the coarser kinds of jokes, not yet, so I didn’t know exactly why they were laughing, though I understood that their laughter was at my expense. But I had no way of making them stop.
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