Dancing Girls

by Margaret Atwood

  But she was doing what she wanted, no doubt of that. In high school she had planned to be an architect, but while finishing the preliminary courses at university she had realized that the buildings she wanted to design were either impossible – who could afford them? – or futile. They would be lost, smothered, ruined by all the other buildings jammed inharmoniously around them. This was why she had decided to go into Urban Design, and she had come here because this school was the best. Or rumoured to be the best. By the time she finished, she intended to be so well-qualified, so armoured with qualifications, that no one back home would dare turn her down for the job she coveted. She wanted to rearrange Toronto. Toronto would do for a start.

  She wasn’t yet too certain of the specific details. What she saw were spaces, beautiful green spaces, with water flowing through them, and trees. Not big golf-course lawns, though; something more winding, something with sudden turns, private niches, surprising vistas. And no formal flower beds. The houses, or whatever they were, set unobtrusively among the trees, the cars kept … where? And where would people shop, and who would live in these places? This was the problem: she could see the vistas, the trees and the streams or canals, quite clearly, but she could never visualize the people. Her green spaces were always empty.

  She didn’t see her next-door neighbour again until February. She was coming back from the small local supermarket where she bought the food for her cheap, carefully balanced meals. He was leaning in the doorway of what, at home, she would have called a vestibule, smoking a cigarette and staring out at the rain, through the glass panes at the side of the front door. He should have moved a little to give Ann room to put down her umbrella, but he didn’t. He didn’t even look at her. She squeezed in, shook her deflated umbrella and checked her mail box, which didn’t have a key. There weren’t usually any letters in it, and today was no exception. He was wearing a white shirt that was too big for him and some greenish trousers. His feet were not bare, in fact he was wearing a pair of prosaic brown shoes. He did have tattoo marks, though, or rather scars, a set of them running across each cheek. It was the first time she had seen him from the front. He seemed a little shorter than he had when she’d glimpsed him heading towards the stairs, but perhaps it was because he had no hat on. He was curved so listlessly against the doorframe, it was almost as if he had no bones.

  There was nothing to see through the front of Mrs. Nolan’s door except the traffic, sizzling by the way it did every day. He was depressed, it must be that. This weather would depress anyone. Ann sympathized with his loneliness, but she did not wish to become involved in it, implicated by it. She had enough trouble dealing with her own. She smiled at him, though since he wasn’t looking at her this smile was lost. She went past him and up the stairs.

  As she fumbled in her purse for her key, Mrs. Nolan stumped out of the bathroom. “You see him?” she whispered.

  “Who?” Ann said.

  “Him” Mrs. Nolan jerked her thumb. “Standing down there, by the door. He does that a lot. He’s bothering me, like. I don’t have such good nerves.”

  “He’s not doing anything,” Ann said.

  “That’s what I mean,” Mrs. Nolan whispered ominously. “He never does nothing. Far as I can tell, he never goes out much. All he does is borrow my vacuum cleaner.”

  “Your vacuum cleaner?” Ann said, startled into responding.

  “That’s what I said.” Mrs. Nolan had a rubber plunger which she was fingering. “And there’s more of them. They come in the other night, up to his room. Two more, with the same marks and everything, on their faces. It’s like some kind of, like, a religion or something. And he never gave the vacuum cleaner back till the next day.”

  “Does he pay the rent?” Ann said, trying to switch the conversation to practical matters. Mrs. Nolan was letting her imagination get out of control.

  “Regular,” Mrs. Nolan said. “Except I don’t like the way he comes down, so quiet like, right into my house. With Fred away so much.”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” Ann said in what she hoped was a soothing voice. “He seems perfectly nice.”

  “It’s always that kind,” Mrs. Nolan said.

  Ann cooked her dinner, a chicken breast, some peas, a digestive biscuit. Then she washed her hair in the bathroom and put it up in rollers. She had to do that, to give it body. With her head encased in the plastic hood of her portable dryer she sat at her table, drinking instant coffee, smoking her usual half-cigarette, and attempting to read a book about Roman aqueducts, from which she hoped to get some novel ideas for her current project. (An aqueduct, going right through the middle of the obligatory shopping centre? Would anyone care?) Her mind kept flicking, though, to the problem of the man next door. Ann did not often try to think about what it would be like to be a man. But this particular man … Who was he, and what was happening to him? He must be a student, everyone here was a student. And he would be intelligent, that went without saying. Probably on scholarship. Everyone here in the graduate school was on scholarship, except the real Americans, who sometimes weren’t. Or rather, the women were, but some of the men were still avoiding the draft, though President Johnson had announced he was going to do away with all that. She herself would never have made it this far without scholarships; her parents could not have afforded it.

  So he was here on scholarship, studying something practical, no doubt, nuclear physics or the construction of dams, and, like herself and the other foreigners, he was expected to go away again as soon as he’d learned what he’d come for. But he never went out of the house; he stood at the front door and watched the brutish flow of cars, the winter rain, while those back in his own country, the ones that had sent him, were confidently expecting him to return some day, crammed with knowledge, ready to solve their lives.…He’s lost his nerve, Ann thought. He’ll fail. It was too late in the year for him ever to catch up. Such failures, such paralyses, were fairly common here, especially among the foreigners. He was far from home, from the language he shared, the wearers of his native costume; he was in exile, he was drowning. What did he do, alone by himself in his room at night?

  Ann switched her hair dryer to COOL and wrenched her mind back to aqueducts. She could see he was drowning but there was nothing she could do. Unless you were good at it you shouldn’t even try, she was wise enough to know that. All you could do for the drowning was to make sure you were not one of them.

  The aqueduct, now. It would be made of natural brick, an earthy red; it would have low arches, in the shade of which there would be ferns and, perhaps, some delphiniums, in varying tones of blue. She must learn more about plants. Before entering the shopping complex (trust him to assign a shopping complex; before that he had demanded a public housing project), it would flow through her green space, in which, she could now see, there were people walking. Children? But not children like Mrs. Nolan’s. They would turn her grass to mud, they’d nail things to her trees, their mangy dogs would shit on her ferns, they’d throw bottles and pop cans into her aqueduct.… And Mrs. Nolan herself, and her Noah’s Ark of seedy, brilliant foreigners, where would she put them? For the houses of the Mrs. Nolans of this world would have to go; that was one of the axioms of Urban Design. She could convert them to small offices, or single-floor apartments; some shrubs and hanging plants and a new coat of paint would do wonders. But she knew this was temporizing. Around her green space, she could see, there was now a high wire fence. Inside it were trees, flowers and grass, outside the dirty snow, the endless rain, the grunting cars and the half-frozen mud of Mrs. Nolan’s drab backyard. That was what exclusive meant, it meant that some people were excluded. Her parents stood in the rain outside the fence, watching with dreary pride while she strolled about in the eternal sunlight. Their one success.

  Stop it, she commanded herself. They want me to he doing this. She unwound her hair and brushed it out. Three hours from now, she knew, it would be limp as ever because of the damp.

  The next day, she tried to raise
her new theoretical problem with her friend Jetske. Jetske was in Urban Design, too. She was from Holland, and could remember running through the devastated streets as a child, begging small change, first from the Germans, later from the American soldiers, who were always good for a chocolate bar or two.

  “You learn how to take care of yourself,” she’d said. “It didn’t seem hard at the time, but when you are a child, nothing is that hard. We were all the same, nobody had anything.” Because of this background, which was more exotic and cruel than anything Ann herself had experienced (what was a gas pump compared to the Nazis?), Ann respected her opinions. She liked her also because she was the only person she’d met here who seemed to know where Canada was. There were a lot of Canadian soldiers buried in Holland. This provided Ann with at least a shadowy identity, which she felt she needed. She didn’t have a native costume, but at least she had some heroic dead bodies with which she was connected, however remotely.

  “The trouble with what we’re doing …” she said to Jetske, as they walked towards the library under Ann’s umbrella. “I mean, you can rebuild one part, but what do you do about the rest?”

  “Of the city?” Jetske said.

  “No,” Ann said slowly. “I guess I mean of the world.”

  Jetske laughed. She had what Ann now thought of as Dutch teeth, even and white, with quite a lot of gum showing above them and below the lip. “I didn’t know you were a socialist,” she said. Her cheeks were pink and healthy, like a cheese ad.

  “I’m not,” Ann said. “But I thought we were supposed to be thinking in total patterns.”

  Jetske laughed again. “Did you know,” she said, “that in some countries you have to get official permission to move from one town to another?”

  Ann didn’t like this idea at all. “It controls the population flow,” Jetske said. “You can’t really have Urban Design without that, you know.”

  “I think that’s awful,” Ann said.

  “Of course you do,” Jetske said, as close to bitterness as she ever got. “You’ve never had to do it. Over here you are soft in the belly, you think you can always have everything. You think there is freedom of choice. The whole world will come to it. You will see.” She began teasing Ann again about her plastic headscarf. Jetske never wore anything on her head.

  Ann designed her shopping complex, putting in a skylight and banks of indoor plants, leaving out the aqueduct. She got an A.

  In the third week of March, Ann went with Jetske and some of the others to a Buckminster Fuller lecture. Afterwards they all went to the pub on the corner of the Square for a couple of beers. Ann left with Jetske about eleven o’clock and walked a couple of blocks with her before Jetske turned off towards her lovely old house with the stained glass. Ann continued by herself, warily, keeping to the lighted streets. She carried her purse under her elbow and held her furled umbrella at the ready. For once it wasn’t raining.

  When she got back to the house and started to climb the stairs, it struck her that something was different. Upstairs, she knew. Absolutely, something was out of line. There was curious music coming from the room next door, a high flute rising over drums, thumping noises, the sound of voices. The man next door was throwing a party, it seemed. Good for him, Ann thought. He might as well do something. She settled down for an hour’s reading.

  But the noises were getting louder. From the bathroom came the sound of retching. There was going to be trouble. Ann checked her door to make sure it was locked, got out the bottle of sherry she kept in the cupboard next to the oven, and poured herself a drink. Then she turned out the light and sat with her back against the door, drinking her sherry in the faint blue light from the funeral home next door. There was no point in going to bed: even with her earplugs in, she could never sleep.

  The music and thumpings got louder. After a while there was a banging on the floor, then some shouting, which came quite clearly through Ann’s hot-air register. “I’m calling the police! You hear? I’m calling the police! You get them out of here and get out yourself!” The music switched off, the door opened, and there was a clattering down the stairs. Then more footsteps – Ann couldn’t tell whether they were going up or down – and more shouting. The front door banged and the shouts continued on down the street. Ann undressed and put on her nightgown, still without turning on the light, and crept into the bathroom. The bathtub was full of vomit.

  This time Mrs. Nolan didn’t even wait for Ann to get back from classes. She waylaid her in the morning as she was coming out of her room. Mrs. Nolan was holding a can of Drano and had dark circles under her eyes. Somehow this made her look younger. She’s probably not much older than I am, Ann thought. Until now she had considered her middle-aged.

  “I guess you saw the mess in there,” she whispered.

  “Yes, I did,” Ann said.

  “I guess you heard all that last night.” She paused.

  “What happened?” Ann asked. In fact she really wanted to know.

  “He had some dancing girls in there! Three dancing girls, and two other men, in that little room! I thought the ceiling was gonna come right down on our heads!”

  “I did hear something like dancing,” Ann said.

  “Dancing! They was jumping, it sounded like they jumped right off the bed onto the floor. The plaster was coming off. Fred wasn’t home, he’s not home yet. I was afraid for the kids. Like, with those tattoos, who knows what they was working themselves up to?” Her sibilant voice hinted of ritual murders, young Jimmy and runny-nosed Donny sacrificed to some obscure god.

  “What did you do?” Ann asked.

  “I called the police. Well, the dancing girls, as soon as they heard I was calling the police, they got out of here, I can tell you. Put on their coats and was down the stairs and out the door like nothing. You can bet they didn’t want no trouble with the police. But not the others, they don’t seem to know what police means.”

  She paused again, and Ann asked, “Did they come?”

  “Who?”

  “The police.”

  “Well, you know around here it always takes the police a while to get there, unless there’s some right outside. I know that, it’s not the first time I’ve had to call them. So who knows what they would’ve done in the meantime? I could hear them coming downstairs, like, so I just grabs the broom and I chased them out. I chased them all the way down the street.”

  Ann saw that she thought she had done something very brave, which meant that in fact she had. She really believed that the man next door and his friends were dangerous, that they were a threat to her children. She had chased them single-handedly, yelling with fear and defiance. But he had only been throwing a party.

  “Heavens,” she said weakly.

  “You can say that again,” said Mrs. Nolan. “I went in there this morning, to get his things and put them out front where he could get them without me having to see him. I don’t have such good nerves, I didn’t sleep at all, even after they was gone. Fred is just gonna have to stop driving nights, I can’t take it. But you know? He didn’t have no things in there. Not one. Just an old empty suitcase.”

  “What about his native costume?” Ann said.

  “He had it on,” Mrs. Nolan said. “He just went running down the street in it, like some kind of a loony. And you know what else I found in there? In one corner, there was this pile of empty bottles. Liquor. He must’ve been drinking like a fish for months, and never threw out the bottles. And in another corner, there was this pile of burnt matches. He could’ve burnt the house down, throwing them on the floor like that. But the worst thing was, you know all the times he borrowed my vacuum cleaner?”

  “Yes,” Ann said.

  “Well, he never threw away the dirt. There it all was, in the other corner of the room. He must’ve just emptied it out and left it there. I don’t get it.” Mrs. Nolan, by now, was puzzled rather than angry.

  “Well,” Ann said. “That certainly is strange.”

  “Strange?�
�� Mrs. Nolan said. “I’ll tell you it’s strange. He always paid the rent though, right on time. Never a day late. Why would he put the dirt in a corner like that, when he could’ve put it out in a bag like everyone else? It’s not like he didn’t know. I told him real clear which were the garbage days, when he moved in.”

  Ann said she was going to be late for class if she didn’t hurry. At the front door she tucked her hair under her plastic scarf. Today it was just a drizzle, not heavy enough for the umbrella. She started off, walking quickly along beside the double line of traffic.

  She wondered where he had gone, chased down the street by Mrs. Nolan in her scuffies and flowered housecoat, shouting and flailing at him with a broom. She must have been at least as terrifying a spectacle to him as he was to her, and just as inexplicable. Why would this woman, this fat crazy woman, wish to burst in upon a scene of harmless hospitality, banging and raving? He and his friends could easily have overpowered her, but they would not even have thought about doing that. They would have been too frightened. What unspoken taboo had they violated? What would these cold, mad people do next?