THE SALT GARDEN
by Margaret Atwood, 1983

In Margaret Atwood's story "The Salt Garden," collected in Bluebeard's Egg, the protagonist Alma is involved in a bizarre web of relationships that leaves her bewildered. She is separated from her husband Mort but is still seeing him. His lover does not know of Alma's existence, and Alma finds that she is the one who has to be discreet with her own husband: "He sneaks out on Fran to see Alma and calls Alma from telephone booths." Meanwhile, she is having an affair of her own. Nothing is certain, nothing secure, and she finds herself being carried away by circumstances, fearing resolution.

The story's themes and symbols revolve around Alma's contradictory feelings about time. She wants to know what is going to happen but is afraid of what she might lose, and so she wants to stop time from moving. For example, she thinks back to her childhood, although she dismisses her nostalgia with the thought that it shows "she's getting old." Instead of choosing, she would rather let life take her where it will. She is also disturbed by her daughter Carol's wish to grow up, wondering why children are so desperate for time to pass quickly: "It upsets Alma to see them trying on her high heels and putting lipstick on their little mouths…. They wiggle their hips, imitating something they've seen on television." Alma would prefer time to slow down.

But Alma's fears about the future cannot be denied, and she suffers periodic blackouts accompanied by hallucinations about the outbreak of nuclear war. These apocalyptic visions represent her terror that the careful balance of emotions she has established in her relationships with her husband and lover, and with the other women in their lives, will be upset so that everything comes crashing down. In her calmer moments she treats her visions sardonically, wondering how she could survive a real nuclear attack, and she makes vague plans to buy a farm far from Toronto, one fully equipped with a root cellar and, magically, enough food and water to sustain survivors. The plans, of course, do not stand up to close scrutiny, and Alma is too down-to-earth to let her imagination run away with her. But suppressing her fears only causes them to break out in violent ways. Her intimations of disaster even invade her more lucid thoughts about nuclear war, and in her daydream the "hill of the root cellar, honeycombed with tunnels, too thoroughly mined, fell in upon itself, and all perished."

Alma's first blackout occurs just after Mort has attempted to discuss with her "how things could be arranged better." She does not want to face the implications of her situation, especially the fact that it cannot go on forever. Mort has his own way of trying to prevent apocalypse; he marches and signs petitions. Her lover Theo "deals with the question by not dealing with it at all…. Theo has said he doesn't see any percentage in negative thinking." We sense that he represents for Alma a successful denial of the future, a solution to which she aspires.

The story also contains references to magic and the occult, familiar themes in Atwood's writing. Atwood's works, Lady Oracle, for example, often reflect the structure and are parodies of gothic romances, which are so much a part of women's cultural mythology. At one point Alma compares her hallucinations to religious visions:

She suspects that other people are having similar or perhaps identical experiences, just as, during the Middle Ages, many people saw (for instance) the Virgin Mary, or witnessed miracles: flows of blood that stopped at the touch of a bone, pictures that spoke, statues that bled.

Nowadays, Alma suggests, the need to find something outside mundane existence expresses itself in accounts of alien abductions and in health food stores that contain "magical foods that will preserve you from death." Perhaps it would be possible to prevent the end of the world with talismans: "You could … carry around oranges stuck with cloves."

The story's central symbol, the salt garden that can be made with thread and a supersaturated solution, combines these two main themes. It is a form of magic, as is seen in the instruction book to Alma's childhood chemistry set: "Astonish your friends. Turn water to milk. Turn water to blood…. How to make a magical salt garden." Through chemistry she can gain apparent control over her environment. The salt garden also represents a timeless, perfect world of her own, and she remembers "the enclosed, protected world in the glass, the crystals forming on the thread." Making the garden is her expression of her desire for stasis in, to use Frank Davey's words, an "'alternative' wordless language of symbol and aphoristic gesture."

At the end of the story two events conspire to force Alma back into the real world. One is an accident in which the doors of the streetcar she is riding close on the arm of a woman. Despite cries from passengers to stop, the driver continues, and the woman is dragged along the street. Like Alma, the woman suffers pain in virtual isolation: "The most frightening thing must have been not the pain but the sense that no one could see or hear her." Alma visits Theo, hoping to postpone making a choice: "She wants it to go on the way it is forever." But after she and Theo make love, he says, "'I hope … that when this is all over we won't be enemies' … he didn't say 'if,' he said 'when."' The finality of his words, the implication that there will be a future, provokes another fainting spell, another vision of nuclear apocalypse. Her final image is of the comforting timelessness of the salt garden: "It is so beautiful. Nothing can kill it. After everything is over, she thinks, there will still be salt." If only our uncertain lives could be so easily crystallized.

—Allan Weiss