Authors: Margaret Atwood
I spread the first six pages out on the table and studied them, using what they called my intelligence, it shortcircuits those other things. The notes and numbers were apparently a location code, it was like a puzzle he’d left for me to solve, an arithmetic problem; he taught us arithmetic, our mother taught us to read and write. Geometry, the first thing I learned was how to draw flowers with compasses, they were like acid patterns. Once they thought you could see God that way but all I saw was landscapes and geometrical shapes; which would be the same thing if you believed God was a mountain or a circle. He said Jesus was a historical figure and God was a superstition, and a superstition was a thing that didn’t exist. If you tell your children God doesn’t exist they will be forced to believe you are the god, but what happens when they find out you are human after all, you have to grow old and die? Resurrection is like plants, Jesus Christ is risen today they sang at Sunday School, celebrating the daffodils; but people are not onions, as he so reasonably pointed out, they stay under.
The numbers were a system, a game; I would play it with him, it would make him seem less dead. I lined up the pages and compared the notes, carefully as a jeweller.
On one of the drawings, another antlered figure, I finally spotted the key: a name I recognized, White Birch Lake where we went bass fishing, it was connected to the main lake by a portage. I went into David’s and Anna’s room where the map of the district was tacked to the wall. Marked on a point of land was a tiny red x and a number, identical with the number on the drawing. The printed name was different,
Lac des Verges Blanches
, the government had been translating all the English names into French ones, though the Indian names remained the same. Scattered here and there were other xs, like a treasure map.
I wanted to go there and verify, match the drawing with reality; that way I’d be sure I’d followed the rules and done it right. I could disguise it as a fishing trip, David hadn’t caught anything since his first attempt, though he’d been trying. We’d have time to go there and get back with two days to spare.
I heard Anna’s voice approaching, singing, the words trailing off as her breath gave out climbing the steps. I went back to the main room.
“Hi,” she said, “do I look burnt?”
She was pink now, parboiled, white showing around the orange edges of her suit, neck dividing body colour from applied face colour. “A little,” I said.
“Listen,” she said, her voice shifting into concern, “what’s wrong with Joe? I was down on the dock with him and he didn’t say one word.”
“He doesn’t talk much,” I said.
“I know, but this was different. He was just lying there.” She was pushing, demanding answers.
“He thinks we should get married,” I said.
Her eyebrows lifted like antennae. “Really? Joe? That’s not …”
“I don’t want to.”
“Oh,” she said, “then that’s awful. You must feel awful.” She’d found out; now she was rubbing after-sun lotion on her shoulders. “Mind?” she said, handing me the plastic tube.
I didn’t feel awful; I realized I didn’t feel much of anything, I hadn’t for a long time. Perhaps I’d been like that all my life, just as some babies are born deaf or without a sense of touch; but if that was true I wouldn’t have noticed the absence. At some point my neck must have closed over, pond freezing or a wound, shutting me into my head; since then everything had been glancing off me, it was like being in a vase, or the village where I could see them but not hear them because I couldn’t understand what was being said. Bottles distort for the observer too: frogs in the jam jar stretched wide, to them watching I must have appeared grotesque.
“Thanks,” Anna said, “I hope I won’t peel. I think you should go talk to him, or something.”
“I have,” I said; but her eyes were accusing, I hadn’t done enough, conciliation, expiation. I went obediently towards the door.
“Maybe you can work it out,” she called after me.
Joe was still on the dock but he was sitting on the edge now with his feet in the water, I crouched down beside him. His toes had dark hairs on the tops, spaced like the needles on a balsam twig.
“What is it?” I said. “Are you sick?”
“You know fucking well,” he said after a minute.
“Let’s go back to the city,” I said, “the way it was before.” I took hold of his hand so I could feel the calloused palm, thickened by the wheel, concrete.
“You’re screwing around with me,” he said, still not looking at me. “All I want is a straight answer.”
“About what?” I said. Near the dock there were some water skippers, surface tension holding them up; the fragile shadows of the dents where their feet touched fell on the sand underwater, moving
when they moved. His vulnerability embarrassed me, he could still feel, I should have been more careful with him.
“Do you love me, that’s all,” he said. “That’s the only thing that matters.”
It was the language again, I couldn’t use it because it wasn’t mine. He must have known what he meant but it was an imprecise word; the Eskimoes had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love.
“I want to,” I said. “I do in a way.” I hunted through my brain for any emotion that would coincide with what I’d said. I did want to, but it was like thinking God should exist and not being able to believe.
“Fucking jesus,” he said, pulling his hand away, “just yes or no, don’t mess around.”
“I’m trying to tell the truth,” I said. The voice wasn’t mine, it came from someone dressed as me, imitating me.
“The truth is,” he said bitterly, “you think my work is crap, you think I’m a loser and I’m not worth it.” His face contorted, it was pain: I envied him.
“No,” I said, but I couldn’t say it right and he needed more than that.
“Come up to the cabin,” I said; Anna was there, she would help. “I’ll make some tea.” I got up but he wouldn’t follow.
While the stove was heating I took the leather album from the shelf in their room and opened it on the table, where Anna was reading. It was no longer his death but my own that concerned me; perhaps I would be able to tell when the change occurred by the differences in my former faces, alive up to a year, a day, then frozen. The duchess at the French court before the Revolution, who stopped laughing or crying so her skin would never change or wrinkle, it worked, she died immortal.
Grandmothers and grandfathers first, distant ancestors, strangers,
in face-front firing-squad poses: cameras weren’t ordinary then, maybe they thought their souls were being stolen, as the Indians did. Underneath them were labels in white, my mother’s cautious printing. My mother before she was married, another stranger, with bobbed hair and a knitted hat. Wedding pictures, corseted smiles. My brother before I was born, then pictures of me beginning to appear. Paul taking us down the lake with his sleigh and horses before the ice went out. My mother, in her leather jacket and odd long 1940s hair, standing beside the tray for the birds, her hand stretched out; the jays were there too, she’s training them, one is on her shoulder, peering at her with clever thumbtack eyes, another is landing on her wrist, wings caught as a blur. Sun sifting around her through the pines, her looking straight at the camera, frightened, receding into the shadows of her head like a skull’s, a trick of the light.
I watched myself grow larger. Mother and father in alternate shots, building the house, walls and then the roof, planting the garden. Around them were borders of blank paper, at each corner a hinge, they were like small grey and white windows opening into a place I could no longer reach. I was in most of the pictures, shut in behind the paper; or not me but the missing part of me.
School pictures, my face lined up with forty others, colossal teachers towering above us. I could find myself always, I was the one smudged with movement or turning the other way. Further on, glossy colour prints, forgotten boys with pimples and carnations, myself in the stiff dresses, crinolines and tulle, layered like store birthday cakes; I was civilized at last, the finished product. She would say “You look very nice, dear,” as though she believed it; but I wasn’t convinced, I knew by then she was no judge of the normal.
“Is that you?” Anna said, putting down
The Mystery At Sturbridge.
“Christ, how could we ever wear that stuff?”
The last pages of the album were blank, with some loose prints stuck in between the black leaves as though my mother hadn’t
wanted to finish. After the formal dresses I disappeared; no wedding pictures, but of course we hadn’t taken any. I closed the cover, straightening the edges.
No hints or facts, I didn’t know when it had happened. I must have been all right then; but after that I’d allowed myself to be cut in two. Woman sawn apart in a wooden crate, wearing a bathing suit, smiling, a trick done with mirrors, I read it in a comic book; only with me there had been an accident and I came apart. The other half, the one locked away, was the only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal. I was nothing but a head, or no, something minor like a severed thumb; numb. At school they used to play a joke, they would bring little boxes with cotton wool in them and a hole cut in the bottom; they would poke their finger through the hole and pretend it was a dead finger.
W
e pushed off from the dock at ten by David’s watch. The sky was watercolour blue, the cloud bunches white on the backs and grey on the bellies. Wind from the stern, waves overtaking, my arms lifting and swinging, light and automatic as though they knew what to do. I was at the front, figurehead; behind me Joe shoved at the water, the canoe surged forward.
The landmarks passed, unscrolling, one-dimensional map thickening into stone and wood around us: point, cliff, leaning dead tree, heron island with the intricate bird silhouettes, blueberry island sailed by its mast pines, foregrounds. On the next island there was once a trapper’s cabin, logs chinked with grass and a straw mound where the bed had been; I could see nothing left but a muddle of rotting timber.
In the morning we talked, uselessly but in calm rational voices as though discussing the phone bill; which meant it was final. We were still in bed, his feet stuck out at the bottom. I could hardly wait till I was old so I wouldn’t have to do this any more.
“When we get back to the city,” I said, “I’ll move out.”
“I will if you like,” he said generously.
“No, you’ve got all your pots and things there.”
“Have it your way,” he said, “you always do.”
He thought of it as a contest, like the children at school who would twist your arm and say Give in? Give in? until you did; then they would let go. He didn’t love me, it was an idea of himself he loved and he wanted someone to join him, anyone would do, I didn’t matter so I didn’t have to care.
The sun was at twelve. We had lunch on a jagged island almost out in the wide part of the lake. After we landed we found that someone had built a fireplace already, on the shore ledge of bare granite; trash was strewn around it, orange peelings and tin cans and a rancid bulge of greasy paper, the tracks of humans. It was like dogs pissing on a fence, as if the endlessness, anonymous water and unclaimed land, compelled them to leave their signature, stake their territory, and garbage was the only thing they had to do it with. I picked up the pieces of clutter and piled them to one side, I would burn them afterwards.
“That’s disgusting,” Anna said. “How can you touch it?”
“It’s the sign of a free country,” David said. “Germany under Hitler was very tidy.”
We didn’t need to use the axe, the island was covered with dry sticks, branches discarded from trees. I boiled the water and made tea and we had chicken noodle soup, out of a package, and sardines and tinned applesauce.
We sat in the shade, white smoke and the smell of scorching orange peels wrapping over us when the wind swerved. I hooked the billy tin off the fire and poured the tea; ashes and bits of twig were floating in it.
“Gentlemen,” David said, raising his tin cup, “Up the Queen. Did that once in a bar in New York and these three Limeys came over and wanted to start a fight, they thought we were Yanks insulting
their Queen. But I said she was our Queen too so we had the right, and they ended up buying us a drink.”
“I think it would be more fair,” Anna said, “if you did it, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Up the Queen and the Duke.’ “
“None of that Women’s Lib,” David said, his eyes lidding, “or you’ll be out on the street. I won’t have one in the house, they’re preaching random castration, they get off on that, they’re roving the streets in savage bands armed with garden shears.”
“I’ll join if you will,” Anna said to me, joking.
I said “I think men ought to be superior.” But neither of them heard the actual words; Anna looked at me as though I’d betrayed her and said “Wow, are you ever brainwashed,” and David said “Want a job?” and to Joe, “Hear that, you’re superior.” But when Joe only grunted he said “You should wire him for sound. Or fix him up with a plug and a shade, he’d make a great end-table lamp. I’m having him give a guest lecture in Adult Vegetation next year, ‘How Pots Communicate,’ he’ll walk in and say nothing for two hours, that’ll freak them.” Joe smiled at last, wanly.
In the night I had wanted rescue, if my body could be made to sense, respond, move strongly enough, some of the red lightbulb synapses, blue neurons, incandescent molecules might seep into my head through the closed throat, neck membrane. Pleasure and pain are side by side they said but most of the brain is neutral; nerveless, like fat. I rehearsed emotions, naming them: joy, peace, guilt, release, love and hate, react, relate; what to feel was like what to wear, you watched the others and memorized it. But the only thing there was the fear that I wasn’t alive: a negative, the difference between the shadow of a pin and what it’s like when you stick it in your arm, in school caged in the desk I used to do that, with pen-nibs and compass points too, instruments of knowledge, English and Geometry; they’ve discovered rats prefer any sensation to none. The insides of my arms were stippled with tiny wounds, like an
addict’s. They slipped the needle into the vein and I was falling down, it was like diving, sinking from one layer of darkness to a deeper, deepest; when I rose up through the anaesthetic, pale green and then daylight, I could remember nothing.