Dancing Girls

by Margaret Atwood

  Edward was back along the path, out of sight among the bushes, peering around with his new Leitz binoculars. He didn’t like sitting down, it made him restless. On these trips it was difficult for Sarah to sit by herself and just think. Her own binoculars, which were Edward’s old ones, dangled around her neck; they weighed a ton. She took them off and put them into her purse.

  His passion for birds had been one of the first things Edward had confided to her. Shyly, as if it had been some precious gift, he’d shown her the lined notebook he’d started keeping when he was nine, with its awkward, boyish printing – Robin, Bluejay, Kingfisher – and the day and the year recorded beside each name. She’d pretended to be touched and interested, and in fact she had been. She herself didn’t have compulsions of this kind; whereas Edward plunged totally into things, as if they were oceans. For a while it was stamps; then he took up playing the flute and nearly drove her crazy with the practising. Now it was pre-Columbian ruins, and he was determined to climb up every heap of old stones he could get his hands on. A capacity for dedication, she guessed you would call it. At first Edward’s obsessions had fascinated her, since she didn’t understand them, but now they merely made her tired. Sooner or later he’d dropped them all anyway, just as he began to get really good or really knowledgeable; all but the birds. That had remained constant. She herself, she thought, had once been one of his obsessions.

  It wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t insist on dragging her into everything. Or rather, he had once insisted; he no longer did. And she had encouraged him, she’d let him think she shared or at least indulged his interests. She was becoming less indulgent as she grew older. The waste of energy bothered her, because it was a waste, he never stuck with anything, and what use was his encyclopaedic knowledge of birds? It would be different if they had enough money, but they were always running short. If only he would take all that energy and do something productive with it, in his job for instance. He could be a principal if he wanted to, she kept telling him that. But he wasn’t interested, he was content to poke along doing the same thing year after year. His Grade Six children adored him, the boys especially Perhaps it was because they sensed he was a lot like them.

  He’d started asking her to go birding, as he called it, shortly after they’d met, and of course she had gone. It would have been an error to refuse. She hadn’t complained, then, about her sore feet or standing in the rain under the dripping bushes trying to keep track of some nondescript sparrow, while Edward thumbed through his Peterson’s Field Guide as if it were the Bible or the bird was the Holy Grail. She’d even become quite good at it. Edward was nearsighted, and she was quicker at spotting movement than he was. With his usual generosity he acknowledged this, and she’d fallen into the habit of using it when she wanted to get rid of him for a while. Just now, for instance.

  “There’s something over there.” She’d pointed across the well to the tangle of greenery on the other side.

  “Where?” Edward had squinted eagerly and raised his binoculars. He looked a little like a bird himself, she thought, with his long nose and stilt legs.

  “That thing there, sitting in that thing, the one with the tufts. The sort of bean tree. It’s got orange on it.”

  Edward focused. “An oriole?”

  “I can’t tell from here.… Oh, it just flew.” She pointed over their heads while Edward swept the sky in vain.

  “I think it lit back there, behind us.”

  That was enough to send him off. She had to do this with enough real birds to keep him believing, however.

  Edward sat down on the root of a tree and lit a cigarette. He had gone down the first side-path he’d come to; it smelled of piss, and he could see by the decomposing Kleenexes further along that this was one of the places people went when they couldn’t make it back to the washroom behind the ticket counter.

  He took off his glasses, then his hat, and wiped the sweat off his forehead. His face was red, he could feel it. Blushing, Sarah called it. She persisted in attributing it to shyness and boyish embarrassment; she hadn’t yet deduced that it was simple rage. For someone so devious she was often incredibly stupid.

  She didn’t know, for instance, that he’d found out about her little trick with the birds at least three years ago. She’d pointed to a dead tree and said she saw a bird in it, but he himself had inspected that same tree only seconds earlier and there was nothing in it at all. And she was very careless: she described oriole-coloured birds behaving like kingbirds, woodpeckers where there would never be any woodpeckers, mute jays, neckless herons. She must have decided he was a total idiot and any slipshod invention would do.

  But why not, since he appeared to fall for it every time. And why did he do it, why did he chase off after her imaginary birds, pretending he believed her? It was partly that although he knew what she was doing to him, he had no idea why. It couldn’t be simple malice, she had enough outlets for that. He didn’t want to know the real reason, which loomed in his mind as something formless, threatening and final. Her lie about the birds was one of the many lies that propped things up. He was afraid to confront her, that would be the end, all the pretences would come crashing down and they would be left standing in the rubble, staring at each other. There would be nothing left to say and Edward wasn’t ready for that.

  She would deny everything anyway. “What do you mean? Of course I saw it. It flew right over there. Why would I make up such a thing?” With her level gaze, blonde and stolid and immovable as a rock.

  Edward had a sudden image of himself, crashing out of the undergrowth like King Kong, picking Sarah up and hurling her over the edge, down into the sacrificial well. Anything to shatter that imperturbable expression, bland and pale and plump and smug, like a Flemish Madonna’s. Self-righteous, that’s what it was. Nothing was ever her fault. She hadn’t been like that when he’d met her. But it wouldn’t work: as she fell she would glance at him, not with fear but with maternal irritation, as if he’d spilled chocolate milk on a white tablecloth. And she’d pull her skirt down. She was concerned for appearances, always.

  Though there would be something inappropriate about throwing Sarah into the sacrificial well, just as she was, with all her clothes on. He remembered snatches from the several books he’d read before they came down. (And that was another thing: Sarah didn’t believe in reading up on places beforehand. “Don’t you want to understand what you’re looking at?” he’d asked her. “I’ll see the same thing in any case, won’t I?” she said. “I mean, knowing all those facts doesn’t change the actual statue or whatever.” Edward found this attitude infuriating; and now that they were here, she resisted his attempts to explain things to her by her usual passive method of pretending not to hear.

  “That’s a Chac-Mool, see that? That round thing on the stomach held the bowl where they put the hearts, and the butterfly on the head means the soul flying up to the sun.”

  “Could you get out the suntan lotion, Edward. I think it’s in the tote bag, in the left-hand pocket.”

  And he would hand her the suntan lotion, defeated once again.)

  No, she wouldn’t be a fit sacrifice, with or without lotion. They only threw people in – or perhaps they jumped in, of their own free will – for the water god, to make it rain and ensure fertility. The drowned were messengers, sent to carry requests to the god. Sarah would have to be purified first, in the stone sweat-house beside the well. Then, naked, she would kneel before him, one arm across her breast in the attitude of submission. He added some ornaments: a gold necklace with a jade medallion, a gold circlet adorned with feathers. Her hair, which she usually wore in a braid coiled at the back of her head, would be hanging down. He thought of her body, which he made slimmer and more taut, with an abstract desire which was as unrelated as he could make it to Sarah herself. This was the only kind of desire he could feel for her any more: he had to dress her up before he could make love to her at all. He thought about their earlier days, before they’d married. It wa
s almost as if he’d had an affair with another woman, she had been so different. He’d treated her body then as something holy, a white and gold chalice, to be touched with care and tenderness. And she had liked this; even though she was two years older than he was and much more experienced she hadn’t minded his awkwardness and reverence, she hadn’t laughed at him. Why had she changed?

  Sometimes he thought it was the baby, which had died at birth. At the time he’d urged her to have another right away, and she’d said yes, but nothing had happened. It wasn’t something they talked about. “Well, that’s that,” she said in the hospital afterwards. A perfect child, the doctor said; a freak accident, one of those things that happen. She’d never gone back to university either and she wouldn’t get a job. She sat at home, tidying the apartment, looking over his shoulder, towards the door, out the window, as if she was waiting for something.

  Sarah bowed her head before him. He, in the feathered costume and long-nosed, toothed mask of the high priest, sprinkled her with blood drawn with thorns from his own tongue and penis. Now he was supposed to give her the message to take to the god. But he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to ask for.

  And at the same time he thought: what a terrific idea for a Grade Six special project! He’d have them build scale models of the temples, he’d show the slides he’d taken, he’d bring in canned tortillas and tamales for a Mexican lunch, he’d have them make little Chac-Mools out of papier-mâché … and the ball game where the captain of the losing team had his head cut off, that would appeal to them, they were bloodthirsty at that age. He could see himself up there in front of them, pouring out his own enthusiasm, gesturing, posturing, acting it out for them, and their response.… Yet afterwards he knew he would be depressed. What were his special projects anyway but a substitute for television, something to keep them entertained? They liked him because he danced for them, a funny puppet, inexhaustible and a little absurd. No wonder Sarah despised him.

  Edward stepped on the remains of his cigarette. He put his hat back on, a wide-brimmed white hat Sarah had bought for him at the market. He had wanted one with a narrower brim, so he could look up through his binoculars without the hat getting in his way; but she’d told him he would look like an American golfer. It was always there, that gentle, patronizing mockery.

  He would wait long enough to be plausible; then he would go back.

  Sarah was speculating about how she would be doing this whole trip if Edward had conveniently died. It wasn’t that she wished him dead, but she couldn’t imagine any other way for him to disappear. He was omnipresent, he pervaded her life like a kind of smell; it was hard for her to think or act except in reference to him. So she found it harmless and pleasant to walk herself through the same itinerary they were following now, but with Edward removed, cut neatly out of the picture. Not that she would be here at all if it wasn’t for him. She would prefer to lie in a deck chair in, say, Acapulco, and drink cooling drinks. She threw in a few dark young men in bathing suits, but took them out: that would be too complicated and not relaxing. She had often thought about cheating on Edward – somehow it would serve him right, though she wasn’t sure what for – but she had never actually done it. She didn’t know anyone suitable, any more.

  Suppose she was here, then, with no Edward. She would stay at a better hotel, for one thing. One that had a plug in the sink; they had not yet stayed in a hotel with a plug. Of course that would cost more money, but she thought of herself as having more money if Edward were dead: she would have all of his salary instead of just part of it. She knew there wouldn’t be any salary if he really were dead, but it spoiled the fantasy to remember this. And she would travel on planes, if possible, or first-class buses, instead of the noisy, crowded second-class ones he insisted on taking. He said you saw more of the local colour that way and there was no point going to another country if you spent all your time with other tourists. In theory she agreed with this, but the buses gave her headaches and she could do without the closeup tour of squalor, the miserable thatched or tin-roofed huts, the turkeys and tethered pigs.

  He applied the same logic to restaurants. There was a perfectly nice one in the village where they were staying, she’d seen it from the bus and it didn’t look that expensive; but no, they had to eat in a seedy linoleum-tiled hutch, with plastic-covered tablecloths. They were the only customers in the place. Behind them four adolescent boys were playing dominoes and drinking beer, with a lot of annoying laughter, and some smaller children watched television, a program that Sarah realized was a rerun of The Cisco Kid, with dubbed voices.

  On the bar beside the television set there was a crêche, with three painted plaster Wise Men, one on an elephant, the others on camels. The first Wise Man was missing his head. Inside the stable a stunted Joseph and Mary adored an enormous Christ Child which was more than half as big as the elephant. Sarah wondered how the Mary could possibly have squeezed out this colossus; it made her uncomfortable to think about it. Beside the crêche was a Santa Claus haloed with flashing lights, and beside that a radio in the shape of Fred Flintstone, which was playing American popular songs, all of them ancient.

  “Oh someone help me, help me, plee-ee-ee-eeze …”

  “Isn’t that Paul Anka?” Sarah asked.

  But this wasn’t the sort of thing Edward could be expected to know. He launched into a defence of the food, the best he’d had in Mexico, he said. Sarah refused to give him the consolation of her agreement. She found the restaurant even more depressing than it should have been, especially the crêche. It was painful, like a cripple trying to walk, one of the last spastic gestures of a religion no one, surely, could believe in much longer.

  Another group of tourists was coming up the path behind her, Americans by the sound of them. The guide was Mexican, though. He scrambled up onto the altar, preparing to give his spiel.

  “Don’t go too near the edge, now.”

  “Who me, I’m afraid of heights. What d’you see down there?”

  “Water, what am I supposed to see?”

  The guide clapped his hands for attention. Sarah only half-listened: she didn’t really want to know anything more about it.

  “Before, people said they threw nothing but virgins in here,” the guide began. “How they could tell that, I do not know. It is always hard to tell.” He waited for the expected laughter, which came. “But this is not true. Soon, I will tell you how we have found this out. Here we have the altar to the rain god Tlaloc …”

  Two women sat down near Sarah. They were both wearing cotton slacks, high-heeled sandals and wide-brimmed straw hats.

  “You go up the big one?”

  “Not on your life. I made Alf go up, I took a picture of him at the top.”

  “What beats me is why they built all those things in the first place.”

  “It was their religion, that’s what he said.”

  “Well, at least it would keep people busy.”

  “Solve the unemployment problem.” They both laughed.

  “How many more of these ruins is he gonna make us walk around?”

  “Beats me. I’m about ruined out. I’d rather go back and sit on the bus.”

  “I’d rather go shopping. Not that there’s much to buy.”

  Sarah, listening, suddenly felt indignant. Did they have no respect? The sentiments weren’t that far from her own of a moment ago, but to hear them from these women, one of whom had a handbag decorated with tasteless straw flowers, made her want to defend the well.

  “Nature is very definitely calling,” said the woman with the handbag. “I couldn’t get in before, there was such a lineup.”

  “Take a Kleenex,” the other woman said. “There’s no paper. Not only that, you just about have to wade in. There’s water all over the floor.”

  “Maybe I’ll just duck into the bushes,” the first woman said.

  Edward stood up and massaged his left leg, which had gone to sleep. It was time to go back. If he stayed away too long
, Sarah would be querulous, despite the fact that it was she herself who had sent him off on this fool’s expedition.

  He started to walk back along the path. But then there was a flash of orange, at the corner of his eye. Edward swivelled and raised his binoculars. They were there when you least expected it. It was an oriole, partly hidden behind the leaves; he could see the breast, bright orange, and the dark barred wing. He wanted it to be a Hooded Oriole, he had not yet seen one. He talked to it silently, begging it to come out into the open. It was strange the way birds were completely magic for him the first time only, when he had never seen them before. But there were hundreds of kinds he would never see; no matter how many he saw there would always be one more. Perhaps this was why he kept looking. The bird was hopping farther away from him, into the foliage. Come back, he called to it wordlessly, but it was gone.

  Edward was suddenly happy. Maybe Sarah hadn’t been lying to him after all, maybe she had really seen this bird. Even if she hadn’t, it had come anyway, in answer to his need for it. Edward felt he was allowed to see birds only when they wanted him to, as if they had something to tell him, a secret, a message. The Aztecs thought hummingbirds were the souls of dead warriors, but why not all birds, why just warriors? Or perhaps they were the souls of the unborn, as some believed. “A jewel, a precious feather,” they called an unborn baby, according to The Daily Life of the Aztecs. Quetzal, that was feather.

  “This is the bird I want to see,” Sarah said when they were looking through The Birds of Mexico before coming down.