Wilderness Tips (26 page)

He was such a beautiful man then. There were a lot of beautiful men, but the others seemed blank, unwritten on, compared to him. He’s the only one she’s ever wanted. She can’t have him, though, because nobody can. George has himself, and he won’t let go.

This is what drives Prue on: she wants to get hold of him finally, open him up, wring some sort of concession out of him. He’s the only person in her life she’s never been able to bully or ignore or deceive or reduce. Portia can always tell when Prue’s back on the attack: there are telltale signs; there are phone calls with no voice attached; there are flights of sincere, melancholy lying from George – a dead giveaway. He knows she knows; he treasures her for saying nothing; she allows herself to be treasured.

There’s nothing going on now, though. Not at the moment, not up here, not at Wacousta Lodge. Prue wouldn’t dare, and neither
would George. He knows where she draws the line; he knows the price of her silence.

Portia looks at her watch: her nap is over. As usual, it has not been restful. She gets up, goes into the washroom, splashes her face. She applies cream lightly, massaging it in around her fallen eyes. The question at this age is what kind of dog you will shortly resemble. She will be a beagle, Prue a terrier. Pamela will be an Afghan, or something equally unearthly.

Her great-grandfather watches her in the mirror, disapproving of her as he always has, although he was dead long before she was born. “I did the best I could,” she tells him. “I married a man like you. A robber king.” She will never admit to him or to anyone else that this might possibly have been a mistake. (Why does her father never figure in her inner life? Because he wasn’t there, not even as a picture. He was at the office. Even in the summers – especially in the summers – he was an absence.)

Outside the window, Roland has stopped chopping and is sitting on the chopping block, his arms on his knees, his big hands dangling, staring off into the trees. He is her favourite; he was the one who always came to her defence. That stopped when she married George. Faced with Prue, Roland had been effective, but George baffled him. No wonder. It’s Portia’s love that protects George, walls him around. Portia’s stupid love.

Where is George? Portia wanders the house, looking for him. Usually at this time of day he’d be in the living room, extended on the couch, dozing; but he isn’t there. She looks around the empty room. Everything is as usual: the snowshoes on the wall, the birchbark canoe she always longed to play with but couldn’t because it was a souvenir, the rug made out of a bearskin, dull-haired and shedding. That bear was a friend once, it even had a name, but she’s
forgotten it. On the bookcase there’s an empty coffee cup. That’s a slip, an oversight; it shouldn’t be there. She has the first stirrings of the feeling she gets when she knows George is with Prue, a numbness that begins at the base of the spine. But no, Prue is in the hammock on the screened veranda, reading a magazine. There can’t be two of her.

“Where’s George?” Portia asks, knowing she shouldn’t.

“How the hell should I know?” says Prue. Her tone is peevish, as if she’s wondering the same thing. “What’s the matter – he slipped his leash? Funny, there’s no bimbo secretaries up here.” In the sunlight she has a disorderly look: her too-orange lipstick is threading into the tiny wrinkles around her mouth; her bangs are brazen; things are going askew.

“There’s no need to be nasty,” says Portia. This is what their mother used to say to Prue, over the body of some dismembered doll, some razed sandbox village, a bottle of purloined nail polish hurled against the wall; and Prue never had an answer then. But now their mother isn’t here to say it.

“There
is”
says Prue with vehemence. “There is a need.”

Ordinarily, Portia would just walk away, pretending she hadn’t heard. Now she says, “Why?”

“Because you always had the best of everything,” says Prue.

Portia is astounded. Surely she is the mute one, the shadow; hasn’t she always played wallflower to Prue’s frantic dancer? “What?” she says. “What did I always have?”

“You’ve always been too good for words,” says Prue with rancour. “Why do you stay with him, anyway? Is it the money?”

“He didn’t have a bean when I married him,” says Portia mildly. She’s wondering whether or not she hates Prue. She isn’t sure what real hatred would feel like. Anyway, Prue is losing that taut, mischievous body she’s done such damage with, and, now that’s going, what will she have left? In the way of weapons, that is.

“When
he
married
you
, you mean,” says Prue. “When Mother married you off. You just stood there and let the two of them do it, like the little suck you were.”

Portia wonders if this is true. She wishes she could go back a few decades, grow up again. The first time, she missed something; she missed a stage, or some vital information other people seemed to have. This time she would make different choices. She would be less obedient; she would not ask for permission. She would not say “I do” but “I am.”

“Why didn’t you ever fight back?” says Prue. She sounds genuinely aggrieved.

Portia can see down the path to the lake, to the dock. There’s a canvas deck-chair down there with nobody in it. George’s newspaper, tucked underneath, is fluttering: there’s a wind coming up. George must have forgotten to put his chair away. It’s unlike him.

“Just a minute,” she says to Prue, as if they’re going to take a short break in this conversation they’ve been having in different ways for fifty years now. She goes out the screen door and down the path. Where has George got to? Probably the outhouse. But his canvas chair is rippling like a sail.

She stoops to fold up the chair, and hears. There’s someone in the boathouse; there’s a scuffling, a breathing. A porcupine, eating salt off the oar handles? Not in broad daylight. No, there’s a voice. The water glitters, the small waves slap against the dock. It can’t be Prue; Prue is up on the veranda. It sounds like her mother, like her mother opening birthday presents – that soft crescendo of surprise and almost pained wonder. Oh. Oh.
Oh
. Of course, you can’t tell what age a person is, in the dark.

Portia folds the chair, props it gently against the wall of the boathouse. She goes up the path, carrying the paper. No sense in having it blow all over the lake. No sense in having the clear waves dirtied with stale news, with soggy human grief. Desire and greed
and terrible disappointments, even in the financial pages. Though you had to read between the lines.

She doesn’t want to go into the house. She skirts around behind the kitchen, avoiding the woodshed where she can hear the
chock, chock
of Roland piling wood, goes back along the path that leads to the small, sandy bay where they all swam as children, before they were old enough to dive in off the dock. She lies down on the ground there and goes to sleep. When she wakes up there are pine needles sticking to her cheek and she has a headache. The sun is low in the sky; the wind has fallen; there are no more waves. A dead flat calm. She takes off her clothes, not bothering even to listen for motorboats. They go so fast anyway she’d just be a blur.

She wades into the lake, slipping into the water as if between the layers of a mirror: the glass layer, the silver layer. She meets the doubles of her own legs, her own arms, going down. She floats with only her head above water. She is herself at fifteen, herself at twelve, herself at nine, at six. On the shore, attached to their familiar reflections, are the same rock, the same white stump that have always been there. The cold hush of the lake is like a long breathing-out of relief. It’s safe to be this age, to know that the stump is her stump, the rock is hers, that nothing will ever change.

There’s a bell, ringing faintly from the distant house. The dinner bell. It’s Pamela’s turn to cook. What will they have? A strange concoction. Pamela has her own ideas about food.

The bell rings again, and Portia knows that something bad is about to happen. She could avoid it; she could swim out further, let go, and sink.

She looks at the shore, at the water line, where the lake ends. It’s no longer horizontal: it seems to be on a slant, as if there’d been a slippage in the bedrock; as if the trees, the granite outcrops, Wacousta Lodge, the peninsula, the whole mainland were sliding gradually down, submerging. She thinks of a boat – a huge boat, a passenger
liner – tilting, descending, with the lights still on, the music still playing, the people talking on and on, still not aware of the disaster that has already overcome them. She sees herself running naked through the ballroom – an absurd, disturbing figure with dripping hair and flailing arms, screaming at them, “Don’t you see? It’s coming apart, everything’s coming apart, you’re sinking. You’re finished, you’re over, you’re dead!”

She would be invisible, of course. No one would hear her. And nothing has happened, really, that hasn’t happened before.

M
arcia has been dreaming about babies. She dreams there is a new one, hers, milky-smelling and sweet-faced and shining with light, lying in her arms, bundled in a green knitted blanket. It even has a name, something strange that she doesn’t catch. She is suffused with love, and with longing for it, but then she thinks, Now I will have to take care of it. This wakes her up with a jolt.

Downstairs the news is on. Something extra has happened, she can tell by the announcer’s tone of voice, by the heightened energy. A disaster of some kind; that always peps them up. She isn’t sure she’s ready for it, at least not so early. Not before coffee. She considers the window: a whitish light is coming through it; maybe it’s snowing. In any case, it’s time to get up again.

Time is going faster and faster; the days of the week whisk by like panties. The panties she’s thinking about are the kind she had when she was a little girl, in pastels, with “Monday,” “Tuesday,” “Wednesday” embroidered on them. Ever since then the days of the week have had colours for her: Monday is blue, Tuesday is cream, Wednesday is lilac. You counted your way through each week by
panty, fresh on each day, then dirtied and thrown into the bin. Marcia’s mother used to tell her that she should always wear clean panties in case a bus ran over her, because other people might see them as her corpse was being toted off to the morgue. It wasn’t Marcia’s potential death that loomed uppermost in her mind, it was the state of her panties.

Marcia’s mother never actually said this. But it was the kind of thing she ought to have said, because the other mothers really did say it, and it has been a useful story for Marcia. It embodies the supposed Anglo-Canadian prudery, inhibition, and obsession with public opinion, and as such has mythic force. She uses it on foreigners, or on those lately arrived.

Marcia eases herself out of bed and finds the slippers, made from dyed-pink sheepskin, which were given to her last Christmas by her twenty-year-old daughter, out of concern for her aging feet. (Her son, at a loss as usual, gave her chocolates.) She struggles into her dressing gown, which has surely become smaller than it used to be, then gropes through the panty drawer. No embroidery in here, no old-fashioned nylon, even. Romance has given way to comfort, as in much else. She is thankful to God she doesn’t live in the age of corsets.

Fully dressed except for the bright pink sheepskin slippers, which she keeps on because of the coldness of the kitchen floor, Marcia makes her way down the stairs and along the hallway. Walking in the slippers, which are slightly too big and flop around, she waddles slightly. Once she was light on her feet, a waif. Now she casts a shadow.

Eric is sitting at the kitchen table having his morning rage. His once red hair, now the colour of bleached-out sand, is standing straight up on his head like a bird’s crest, and he’s run his hands through it in exasperation. There’s marmalade in it again, off his toast.

“Ass-licking suck,” he says. Marcia knows that this is not directed at her: the morning paper is spread all over the table. They cancelled
– Eric cancelled – their subscription to this paper five months ago, in a fit of fury over its editorial policies and its failure to use recycled newsprint, although it’s the paper Marcia writes her column for. But he can’t resist the temptation: every so often he ducks out before Marcia is up and buys one from the corner box. The adrenalin gets him going, now that he’s no longer allowed coffee.

Marcia turns down the radio, then kisses the bristly back of his neck. “What is it today?” she says. “The benefits of Free Trade?”

There’s a tearing sound, like fingernails on a blackboard. Outside the glass kitchen-door, the cat has dug its claws into the screen and is sliding slowly down it. This is its demand to be let in. It has never bothered to learn meowing.

“One of these days I’m going to kill that beast,” says Eric. It’s Marcia’s belief that Eric would never do such a thing, because he is tender-hearted to a fault. Eric’s view of himself is more savage.

“You poor baby!” says Marcia, scooping up the cat, which is overweight. It’s on a diet, but mooches in secret from the neighbours. Marcia sympathizes.