Wilderness Tips

by Margaret Atwood

  "Ah," says Charles, caught unawares. But he will not be hooked without a struggle. "You know I like to put my money where it's doing some real good. These women, you get them out, but I've been told they just go right back and get battered again."

  I've heard it before. They're addicted. They can't get enough of having their eyes punched in. "Give it to the Heart Foundation," I say, "and those ungrateful triple bypasses will just croak anyway, sooner or later. It's like they're asking for it."

  "Touche," says Charles. Oh, good. He knows some French. Not a complete oaf, unlike some. "How about I take you out for dinner on, say" - he consults his little book, the one they all carry around in the breast pocket - "Wednesday? Then you can convince me."

  "Charles," I say, "that's not fair. I would adore to have dinner with you but not as the price of your donation. Give first, and then we can have dinner with a clear conscience."

  Charles likes the idea of a clear conscience. He grins and reaches for his chequebook. He is not going to look cheaper than Bill Henry. Not at this stage of the game.

  Molly came to see me at my office. She didn't phone first. It was right after I'd left my last high-class flunkey company position and set up on my own. I had my own flunkies now and I was wrestling with the coffee problem. If you're a woman, women don't like bringing you coffee. Neither do men.

  "Molly, what's wrong?" I said. "Do you want coffee?"

  "I'm so wired already I couldn't stand it," she said. She looked it. There were half-circles under her eyes the size of lemon wedges.

  "It's Curtis," she said. "Could I sleep over at your place tonight? If I have to?"

  "What's he done?" I said.

  "Nothing," she said. "Not yet. It isn't what he's done, it's how he is. He's heading straight for the edge."

  "In what way?"

  "A while ago he started saying I was having affairs at work. He thought I was having an affair with Maurice, across the hall."

  "Maurice!" I said. We'd both gone to law school with Maurice. "But Maurice is gay!"

  "We aren't talking rational here. Then he started saying I was going to leave him."

  "And were you?"

  "I wasn't. But now, I don't know. Now I think I am. He's driving me to it."

  "He's paranoid," I said.

  "Paranoid," said Molly. "A wide-angle camera for taking snapshots of maniacs." She put her head down on her arms and laughed and laughed.

  "Come over tonight," I said. "Don't even think about it. Just do it."

  "I don't want to rush it," said Molly. "Maybe things will work out. Maybe I can talk him into getting some help. He's been under a lot of strain. I have to think about the kids. He's a good father."

  Victim, they said in the papers. Molly was no victim. She wasn't helpless, she wasn't hopeless. She was full of hope. It was hope that killed her.

  I called her the next evening. I thought she would've come over, but she hadn't. She hadn't phoned either.

  Curtis answered. He said Molly had gone on a trip.

  I asked him when she'd be back. He said he had no idea. Then, he started to cry. "She's left me," he said.

  Good for her, I thought. She's done it, after all.

  It was a week later that the arms and legs started turning up.

  He killed her in her sleep, I'll give him that much credit. She never knew. Or so he said, after he got around to remembering. He claimed amnesia, at first.

  Dismemberment. The act of conscious forgetting.

  I try not to think of Molly like that. I try to remember her whole.

  Charles is walking me to the door, past white tablecloth after white tablecloth, each one held in place by at least four pin-striped elbows. It's like the Titanic just before the iceberg: power and influence disporting themselves, not a care in the world. What do they know about the serfs down in steerage? Piss all, and pass the port.

  I smile to the right, I smile to the left. There are some familiar faces here, some familiar birthmarks. Charles takes my elbow, in a proprietary though discreet way. A light touch, a heavy hand.

  I no longer think that anything can happen. I no longer want to think that way. Happen is what you wait for, not what you do; and anything is a large category. I am unlikely to get murdered by this man, for instance; I am unlikely to get married to him either. Right now, I don't even know whether I'll go so far as dinner on Wednesday. It occurs to me that I don't really have to, not if I don't want to. Some options at least remain open. Just thinking about it makes my feet hurt less.

  Today is Friday. Tomorrow morning I'll go power-walking in the cemetery, for the inner and outer thighs. It's one of the few places you can do it in this city without getting run over. It isn't the cemetery Molly's buried in, whatever of her they could put together. But that doesn't matter. I'll pick out a tombstone where I can do my leg stretches, and I'll pretend it's hers.

  Molly, I'll say. We don't see eye to eye on some things and you wouldn't approve of my methods, but I do what I can. The bottom line is that cash is cash, and it puts food on the table.

  Bottom line, she will answer. What you hit when you get as far down as you're going. After that you stay there. Or else you go up.

  I will bend, I will touch the ground, or as close to it as I can get without rupture. I will lay a wreath of invisible money on her grave.

  Wilderness Tips

  Prue has folded two red bandanna handkerchiefs into triangles and tied them together at one set of corners. The second set of corners is tied behind her back, the third around her neck. She's wrapped another bandanna, a blue one, around her head and made a little reef knot at the front. Now she's strutting the length of the dock, in her improvised halter top and her wide-legged white shorts, her sunglasses with the white plastic frames, her platform sandals.

  "It's the forties look," she says to George, hand on her hip, doing a pirouette. "Rosie the Riveter. From the war. Remember her?"

  George, whose name is not really George, does not remember. He spent the forties rooting through garbage heaps and begging, and doing other things unsuitable for a child. He has a dim memory of some film star posed on a calendar tottering on a latrine wall. Maybe this is the one Prue means. He remembers for an instant his intense resentment of the bright, ignorant smile, the well-fed body. A couple of buddies had helped him take her apart with the rusty blade from a kitchen knife they'd found somewhere in the rubble. He does not consider telling any of this to Prue.

  George is sitting in a green-and-white striped canvas deck-chair, reading The Financial Post and drinking Scotch. The ashtray beside him overflows with butts: many women have tried to cure him of smoking; many have failed. He looks up at Prue from behind his paper and smiles his foxy smile. This is a smile he does with the cigarette held right in the centre of his mouth: on either side of it his lips curl back, revealing teeth. He has long canines, miraculously still his.

  "You weren't born then," he says. This isn't true, but he never misses the chance to bestow a compliment when there's one just lying around. What does it cost? Not a cent, which is something the men in this country have never figured out. Prue's tanned midriff is on a level with his face; it's still firm, still flexible and lithe. At that age his mother had gone soft - loose-fleshed and velvety, like an aging plum. These days they eat a lot of vegetables, they work out, they last longer.

  Prue lowers the sunglasses to the end of her nose and looks at him over the plastic rims. "George, you are totally shameless," she says. "You always were." She gives him an innocent smile, a mischievous smile, a smile with a twist of real evil in it. It's a smile that wavers like a gasoline slick on water, shining, changing tone.

  This smile of Prue's was the first interesting thing George stumbled over when he hit Toronto, back in the late fifties. It was at a party thrown by a real-estate developer with Eastern European connections. He'd been invited because refugees from Hungary were considered noteworthy back then, right after the uprising. At that time he was young, thin as a snake, wi
th a dangerous-looking scar over one eye and a few bizarre stories. A collectible. Prue had been there in an off-the-shoulder black dress. She'd raised her glass to him, looked over the rim, hoisted the smile like a flag.

  The smile is still an invitation, but it's not something George will follow up on - not here, not now. Later, in the city, perhaps. But this lake, this peninsula, Wacousta Lodge itself, are his refuge, his monastery, his sacred ground. Here he will perform no violations.

  "Why is it you cannot bear to accept a gift?" says George. Smoke blows into his eyes; he squints. "If I were younger, I would kneel. I would kiss both your hands. Believe me."

  Prue, who has known him to do these things back in more impetuous times, turns on her heel. "It's lunch-time," she says. "That's what I came to tell you." She has heard refusal.

  George watches her white shorts and her still shapely thighs (with, however, their faint stippling of dimpled fat) going wink, wink, wink through the clear sunlight, past the boathouse, along the stone path, up the hill to the house. From up there a bell is ringing: the lunch bell. For once in her life, Prue is telling the truth.

  George takes one more look at the paper. Quebec is talking Separatism; there are Mohawks behind the barricades near Montreal, and people are throwing stones at them; word is the country is falling apart. George is not worried: he's been in countries that were falling apart before. There can be opportunities. As for the fuss people here make about language, he doesn't understand it. What's a second language, or a third, or a fourth? George himself speaks five, if you count Russian, which he would prefer not to. As for the stone-throwing, it's typical. Not bombs, not bullets: just stones. Even the uproar here is muted.

  He scratches his belly under the loose shirt he wears; he's been gaining a little too much around the middle. Then he stubs out his cigarette, downs the heel of his Scotch, and hauls himself out of his deck-chair. Carefully, he folds the chair and places it inside the boathouse: a wind could come up, the chair could be sent sailing into the lake. He treats the possessions and rituals of Wacousta Lodge with a tenderness, a reverence, that would baffle those who know him only in the city. Despite what some would call his unorthodox business practices, he is in some ways a conservative man; he loves traditions. They are thin on the ground in this country, but he knows one when he sees one, and does it homage. The deck-chairs here are like the escutcheons elsewhere.

  As he walks up the hill, more slowly than he used to, he hears the sound of wood being split behind the kitchen wing. He hears a truck on the highway that runs along the side of the lake; he hears wind in the white pines. He hears a loon. He remembers the first time he heard one, and hugs himself. He has done well.

  Wacousta Lodge is a large, oblong, one-storey structure with board-and-batten walls stained a dark reddish brown. It was built in the first years of the century by the family's great-grandfather, who made a bundle on the railways. He included a maid's room and a cook's room at the back, although no maid or cook had ever been induced to stay in them, not to George's knowledge, certainly not in recent years. The great-grandfather's craggy, walrus-whiskered face, frowning above the constriction of a stiff collar, hangs oval-framed in the washroom, which is equipped only with a sink and a ewer. George can remember a zinc bathtub, but it's been retired. Baths take place in the lake. For the rest, there's an outhouse, placed discreetly behind a clump of spruce.

  What a lot of naked and semi-naked bodies the old man must have seen over the years, thinks George, lathering his hands, and how he must have disapproved of them. At least the old boy isn't condemned to the outhouse: that would be too much for him. George makes a small, superstitious, oddly Japanese bow toward the great-grandfather as he goes out the door. He always does this. The presence of this scowling ancestral totem is one of the reasons he behaves himself, more or less, up here.

  The table for lunch is set on the wide, screened-in veranda at the front of the house, overlooking the lake. Prue is not sitting at it, but her two sisters are: dry-faced Pamela, the eldest, and soft Portia, the youngest of the three and George's own wife. There is also Roland, the brother, large, rounded, and balding. George, who is not all that fond of men on purely social occasions because there are few ways he can manipulate them, gives Roland a polite nod and turns the full force of his vulpine smile upon the two women. Pamela, who distrusts him, sits up straight and pretends not to notice. Portia smiles at him, a wistful, vague smile, as if he were a cloud. Roland ignores him, though not on purpose, because Roland has the inner life of a tree, or possibly of a stump. George can never tell what Roland is thinking, or even if he is thinking at all.

  "Isn't the weather marvellous?" George says to Pamela. He has learned over the years that the weather is the proper opening topic here for any conversation at all. Pamela is too well brought up to refuse an answer to a direct question.

  "If you like postcards," she says. "At least it's not snowing." Pamela has recently been appointed a Dean of Women, a title George has not yet figured out completely. The Oxford dictionary has informed him that a dean might be the head of ten monks in a monastery, or "as tr. med. L. decanus, applied to the teoding-ealdor, the headman of a tenmannetale." Much of what Pamela says sounds more or less like this: incomprehensible, though it might turn out to have a meaning if studied.

  George would like to go to bed with Pamela, not because she is beautiful - she is much too rectilinear and slab-shaped for his tastes, she has no bottom at all, and her hair is the colour of dried grass - but because he has never done it. Also, he wants to know what she would say. His interest in her is anthropological. Or perhaps geological: she would have to be scaled, like a glacier.

  "Did you have a nice read?" says Portia. "I hope you didn't get sunburned. Is there any news?"

  "If you can call it news," says Pamela. "That paper's a week old. Why is 'news' plural? Why don't we say 'olds'?"

  "George likes old stuff," says Prue, coming in with a platter of food. She's put on a man's white shirt over her kerchief arrangement but hasn't done it up. "Lucky for us ladies, eh? Gobble up, everyone. It's yummy cheese-and-chutney sandwiches and yummy sardines. George? Beer or acid rain?"

  George drinks a beer, and eats and smiles, eats and smiles, while the family talks around him - all but Roland, who absorbs his nutriments in silence, gazing out at the lake through the trees, his eyes immobile. George sometimes thinks Roland can change colour slightly to blend in with his backgrounds; unlike George himself, who is doomed to stand out.

  Pamela is complaining again about the stuffed birds. There are three of them, kept under glass bells in the living room: a duck, a loon, a grouse. These were the bright ideas of the grandfather, meant to go with the generally lodge-like decor: the mangy bearskin rug, complete with claws and head; the miniature birchbark canoe on the mantelpiece; the snowshoes, cracked and drying, crossed above the fireplace; the Hudson's Bay blanket nailed to the wall and beset by moths. Pamela is sure the stuffed birds will get moths too.

  "They're probably a sea of maggots, inside," she says, and George tries to picture what a sea of maggots would look like. It's her metaphoric leaps, her tangled verbal stringworks, that confuse him.

  "They're hermetically sealed," says Prue. "You know: nothing goes in, nothing comes out. Like nuns."

  "Don't be revolting," says Pamela. "We should check them for frass."

  "Who, the nuns?" says Prue.

  "What is frass?" says George.

  "Maggot excrement," says Pamela, not looking at him. "We could have them freeze-dried."

  "Would it work?" says Prue.

  Prue, who in the city is the first with trends - the first white kitchen, the first set of giant shoulder pads, the first leather pants suit have been hers over the years - is here as resistant to change as the rest of them. She wants everything on this peninsula to stay exactly the way it always has been. And it does, though with a gradual decline into shabbiness. George doesn't mind the shabbiness, however. Wacousta Lodge is a little slice of
the past, an alien past. He feels privileged.

  A motorboat goes by, one of the plastic-hulled, high-speed kind, far too close. Even Roland flinches. The wake jostles the dock.

  "I hate those," says Portia, who hasn't shown much interest in the stuffed-bird question. "Another sandwich, dear?"

  "It was so lovely and quiet here during the war," says Pamela. "You should have been here, George." She says this accusingly, as if it's his fault he wasn't. "Hardly any motorboats, because of the gas rationing. More canoes. Of course, the road wasn't built then, there was only the train. I wonder why we say 'train of thought' but never 'car of thought'?"

  "And rowboats," says Prue. "I think all those motorboat people should be taken out and shot. At least the ones who go too fast." Prue herself drives like a maniac, but only on land.

  George, who has seen many people taken out and shot, though not for driving motorboats, smiles, and helps himself to a sardine. He once shot three men himself, though only two of them were strictly necessary. The third was a precaution. He still feels uneasy about that, about the possibly harmless one with his too-innocent informer's eyes, his shirtfront dappled with blood. But there would be little point in mentioning that, at lunch or at any other time. George has no desire to be startling.

  It was Prue who brought him north, brought him here, during their affair, the first one. (How many affairs have there been? Can they be separated, or are they really one long affair, with interruptions, like a string of sausages? The interruptions were Prue's marriages, which never lasted long, possibly because she was monogamous during them. He would know when a marriage was nearing its end: the phone at his office would ring and it would be Prue, saying, "George. I can't do it. I've been so good, but I just can't go on. He comes into the bathroom when I'm flossing my teeth. I long to be in an elevator with you, stuck between floors. Tell me something filthy. I hate love, don't you?")

  His first time here he was led in chains, trailed in Prue's wake, like a barbarian in a Roman triumph. A definite capture, also a deliberate outrage. He was supposed to alarm Prue's family, and he did, though not on purpose. His English was not good, his hair was too glossy, his shoes too pointed, his clothes too sharply pressed. He wore dark glasses, kissed hands. The mother was alive then, though not the father; so there were four women ranged against him, with no help at all from the impenetrable Roland.