Authors: Margaret Atwood
“Avez-vous du viande hâché?” I ask her, blushing because of my accent.
She grins then and the two men grin also, not at me but at each other. I see I’ve made a mistake, I should have pretended to be an American.
“Amburger, oh yes we have lots.
How
much?” she asks, adding the final H carelessly to show she can if she feels like it. This is border country.
“A pound, no two pounds,” I say, blushing even more because I’ve been so easily discovered, they’re making fun of me and I have no way of letting them know I share the joke. Also I agree with them, if you live in a place you should speak the language. But this isn’t where I lived.
She hacks with a cleaver at a cube of frozen meat, weighs it. “Doo leevers,” she says, mimicking my school accent. The two men snigger. I solace myself by replaying the man from the government, he was at a gallery opening, a handicraft exhibit, string wall hangings, woven place mats, stoneware breakfast sets; Joe wanted to go so he could resent not being in it. The man seemed to be a cultural attaché of some sort, an ambassador; I asked him if he knew this part of the country, my part, and he shook his head and said “Des barbares, they are not civilized.” At the time that annoyed me.
I pick up some fly dope in a spray can for the others, also some eggs and bacon, bread and butter, miscellaneous tins. Everything is more expensive here than in the city; no one keeps hens or cows or pigs any more, it’s all imported from more fertile districts. The bread is in wax paper wrappers, tranché.
I would like to back out the door, I don’t want them staring at me from behind; but I force myself to walk slowly, frontwards.
There used to be only one store. It was in the front part of a house, run by an old woman who was also called Madame: none of the women had names then. Madame sold khaki-coloured penny candies which we were forbidden to eat, but her main source of power was that she had only one hand. Her other arm ended in a soft pink snout like an elephant’s trunk and she broke the parcel string by wrapping it around her stump and pulling. This arm devoid of a hand was for me a great mystery, almost as puzzling as Jesus. I wanted to know how the hand had come off (perhaps she had taken it off herself) and where it was now, and especially whether my own hand could ever come off like that; but I never asked, I must have been afraid of the answers. Going down the steps, I try to remember what the rest of her was like, her face, but I can see only the potent candies, inaccessible in their glass reliquary, and the arm, miraculous in an unspecified way like the toes of saints or the cut-off pieces of early martyrs, the eyes on the plate, the severed breasts, the heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.
I find the others in the small chilly room labelled
BAR
; they’re the only customers. They have six beer bottles and four glasses on their orange formica-topped table. A mottled boy with a haircut like the ones of the men in the store, only blonde, is sitting with them.
David waves at me as I come in: he’s happy about something. “Have a beer,” he says. “This is Claude, his father owns this joint.”
Claude shambles off morosely to get me a beer. Underneath the bar itself is a crudely carved wooden fish with red and blue dots on it, intended possibly for a speckled trout; on its leaping back it supports the fake marble surface. Above the bar is a T
.V.
, turned off or broken, and the regulation picture, scrolled gilt frame, blown-up photograph of a stream with trees and rapids and a man fishing. It’s an imitation
of other places, more southern ones, which are themselves imitations, the original someone’s distorted memory of a nineteenth century English gentleman’s shooting lodge, the kind with trophy heads and furniture made from deer antlers, Queen Victoria had a set like that. But if this is what succeeds why shouldn’t they do it?
“Claude told us business is bad this year,” David says, “on accounta word is around the lake’s fished out. They’re going to other lakes, Claude’s dad flies them in his seaplane, neat eh? But he says some of the men went out in the spring with a dragnet and there’s all kinds of them down there, real big ones, they’re just gettin’ too smart.” David is slipping into his yokel dialect; he does it for fun, it’s a parody of himself, the way he says he talked back in the fifties when he wanted to be a minister and was selling Bibles door-to-door to put himself through theological seminary: “Hey lady, wanna buy a dirty book?” Now though it seems to be unconscious, maybe he’s doing it for Claude, to make it clear he too is a man of the people. Or maybe it’s an experiment in Communications, that’s what he teaches, at night, the same place Joe works; it’s an Adult Education programme. David calls it Adult Vegetation; he got the job because he was once a radio announcer.
“Any news?” Joe asks, in a neutral mumble that signals he’d prefer it if I kept from showing any reaction, no matter what has happened.
“No,” I say, “Nothing different.” Voice level, calm. Perhaps that was what he liked about me, there must have been something, though I can’t reconstruct our first meeting, now I can: it was in a store, I was buying some new brushes and a spray tin of fixative. He said Do you live around here and we went to the corner for a coffee, except I had a 7-up instead. What impressed him that time, he even mentioned it later, cool he called it, was the way I took off my clothes and put them on again later very smoothly as if I were feeling no emotion. But I really wasn’t.
Claude comes back with the beer and I say “Thank you” and glance up at him and his face dissolves and re-forms, he was about eight the last time I was here; he used to peddle worms in rusted tin cans to the fishermen down by the government dock. He’s uneasy now, he can tell I recognize him.
“I’d like to go down the lake for a couple of days,” I say, to David because it’s his car. “I’d like to look around, if that’s okay.”
“Great,” says David, “I’m gonna get me one of them smart fish.” He brought along a borrowed fishing rod, though I warned him he might not have a chance to use it: if my father had turned up after all we would have gone away without letting him find out we were here. If he’s safe I don’t want to see him. There’s no point, they never forgave me, they didn’t understand the divorce; I don’t think they even understood the marriage, which wasn’t surprising since I didn’t understand it myself. What upset them was the way I did it, so suddenly, and then running off and leaving my husband and child, my attractive full-colour magazine illustrations, suitable for framing. Leaving my child, that was the unpardonable sin; it was no use trying to explain to them why it wasn’t really mine. But I admit I was stupid, stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results, and I didn’t have any excuses, I was never good at them. My brother was, he used to make them up in advance of the transgressions; that’s the logical way.
“Oh god,” Anna says, “David thinks he’s a great white hunter.” She’s teasing him, she does that a lot; but he doesn’t hear, he’s getting up, Claude is hustling him off to make him out a licence, it seems Claude is in charge of the licences. When David comes back I want to ask how much he paid, but he’s too pleased, I don’t want to spoil it. Claude is pleased also.
We find out from Claude we can hire Evans, who owns the Blue Moon Cabins, to run us down the lake. Paul would take us for nothing, he offered, but I wouldn’t feel right about it; also I’m sure
he would misinterpret Joe’s amorphous beard and David’s moustache and Three Musketeers hair. They’re just a style now, like crew cuts, but Paul might feel they are dangerous, they mean riots.
David eases the car down the turnoff, two ruts and a rock hump in the centre that scrapes the car’s belly. We brake in front of the cabin marked
OFFICE
; Evans is there, a bulky laconic American in checked shirt and peaked cap and a thick knitted jacket with an eagle on the back. He knows where my father’s place is, all the older guides know every house on the lake. He moves his cigarette butt to the corner of his mouth and says he’ll take us there, ten miles, for five dollars; for another five he’ll pick us up two days from now, in the morning. That will give us the rest of the day to drive back to the city. He’s heard of the disappearance, of course, but he doesn’t mention it.
“A groovy old guy, eh?” David says when we’re outside. He’s enjoying himself, he thinks this is reality: a marginal economy and grizzled elderly men, it’s straight out of Depression photo essays. He spent four years in New York and became political, he was studying something; it was during the sixties, I’m not sure when. My friends’ pasts are vague to me and to each other also, any one of us could have amnesia for years and the others wouldn’t notice.
When David has backed the car down to the Blue Moon dock we unload our stuff, the packsacks of clothes, the camera equipment, the samsonite case with my career in it, the half dozen Red Caps they got at the motel and the paper bag of food. We scramble into the boat, a battered wood-hulled launch; Evans starts the motor and we churn out slowly. Summer cottages beginning to sprout here, they spread like measles, it must be the paved road.
David sits in front beside Evans. “Gettin’ many fish?” he asks, folksy, chummy, crafty. “Here and there, here and there,” Evans says, giving no free handouts; then he switches the motor into high gear and I can’t hear any more.
I wait until we’re into the middle of the lake. At the right moment I look over my shoulder as I always did and there is the village, suddenly distanced and clear, the houses receding and grouping, the white church startling against the dark of the trees. The feeling I expected before but failed to have comes now, homesickness, for a place where I never lived, I’m far enough away; then the village shrinks, optical illusion, and we’re around a point of land, it’s behind us.
The three of us are together on the back seat, Anna beside me. “This is good,” she says to me, voice shrilling over the engine roar, “it’s good for us to get away from the city”; but when I turn to answer there are tears on her cheek and I wonder why, she’s always so cheerful. Then I realize they aren’t tears, it’s started to drizzle. The raincoats are in our packsacks; I didn’t notice it had clouded over. We won’t be very wet though, with this boat it will only take half an hour; before, with the heavier boats and primitive motors, it took two to three hours depending on the wind. In the city people would say to my mother, “Aren’t you afraid? What if something happened?” They were thinking of the time it would take to get to a doctor.
I’m cold, I huddle my shoulders up; drops ping onto my skin. The shoreline unrolls and folds together again as we go past; forty miles from here there’s another village, in between there’s nothing but a tangled maze, low hills curving out of the water, bays branching in, peninsulas which turn into islands, islands, necks of land leading to other lakes. On a map or in an aerial photograph the water pattern radiates like a spider, but in a boat you can see only a small part of it, the part you’re in.
The lake is tricky, the weather shifts, the wind swells up quickly; people drown every year, boats loaded topheavy or drunken fishermen running at high speed into deadheads, old pieces of tree waterlogged and partly decayed, floating under the surface, there are a lot of them left over from the logging and the time they raised the lake
level. Because of the convolutions it’s easy to lose the way if you haven’t memorized the landmarks and I watch for them now, dome-shaped hill, point with dead pine, stubble of cut trunks poking up from a shallows, I don’t trust Evans.
But he’s taken the right turns so far, we’re coming into my territory, two short bends and through a passage between granite shores and out into a wider bay. The peninsula is where I left it, pushing out from the island shore with the house not even showing through the trees, though I know where it is; camouflage was one of my father’s policies.
Evans arches the boat around the point and slows for the dock. The dock slants, the ice takes something away from it every winter and the water warps and rots it; it’s been repaired so much all the materials are different, but it’s the same dock my brother fell off the time he drowned.
He used to be kept in a chicken-wire enclosure my father built for him, large cage or small playground, with trees, a swing, rocks, a sandpile. The fence was too high for him to climb over but there was a gate and one day he learned how to open it. My mother was alone in the house; she glanced out the window, checking, and he was no longer in the cage. It was a still day, no wind noise, and she heard something down by the water. She ran to the dock, he wasn’t there, she went out to the end of it and looked down. My brother was under the water, face upturned, eyes open and unconscious, sinking gently; air was coming out of his mouth.
It was before I was born but I can remember it as clearly as if I saw it, and perhaps I did see it: I believe that an unborn baby has its eyes open and can look out through the walls of the mother’s stomach, like a frog in a jar.
W
e unload our baggage while Evans idles the motor. When David has paid him he gives us an uninterested nod and backs the boat out, then turns it and swings around the point, the sound dwindling to a whine and fading as land and distance move between us. The lake jiggles against the shore, the waves subside, nothing remains but a faint iridescent film of gasoline, purple and pink and green. The space is quiet, the wind has gone down and the lake is flat, silver-white, it’s the first time all day (and for a long time, for years) we have been out of the reach of motors. My ears and body tingle, aftermath of the vibration, like feet taken out of roller-skates.
The others are standing aimlessly; they seem to be waiting for me to tell them what comes next. “We’ll take the things up,” I say. I warn them about the dock: it’s slippery with the drizzle, which is lighter now, almost a mist; also some of the boards may be soft and treacherous.
What I want to do is shout “Hello!” or “We’re here!” but I don’t, I don’t want to hear the absence.