Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood
The waitress comes and Rennie orders yoghurt and fresh fruit.
"No fresh fruit," says the waitress.
"I'll take the yoghurt anyway," says Rennie, who feels she's in need of some friendly bacteria.
"No yoghurt," says the waitress.
"Why is it on the menu then?" says Rennie.
The waitress looks at her, straight-faced but with her eyes narrowing as if she's about to smile. "Used to be yoghurt," she says.
"When will there be some again?" Rennie says, not sure why this should all be so complicated.
"They got Pioneer Industries for dairy now," the waitress says, as if reciting a lesson. "Government thing. Dairy don't make no yoghurt. Yoghurt need powder milk. Powder milk outlaw, you can't buy it. The yoghurt place shut down now."
Rennie feels that there are connections missing here, but it's too early in the morning to have to deal with this. "What can I have then?" she says.
"What we got," says the waitress, very patiently.
This turns out to be orange juice made from instant powder of some sort, an almost-cooked egg, coffee from a jar with tinned milk, bread with margarine, and guava jelly, too sweet, dark orange, of the consistency of ear wax. Rennie wishes she could stop reviewing the food and just eat it. Anyway, she isn't at the Sunset Inn because of the food. She's here because of the price: this time the deal isn't all-expenses. She can do the other, flossier places for lunch or dinner.
The waitress comes and takes away her plate, the runny egg in its custard cup, the pieces of bread and jam lying beside it. Like a child, she's eaten the centres and left the crusts.
After breakfast comes the rest of the day, which will surely be too long, too hot and bright, to be filled with any activity that will require movement. She wants to go to sleep in the sun on a beach, but she's prudent, she doesn't want to come out like crispy chicken. She needs suntan lotion and a hat. After that she can start going through the motions: places of interest, things to do, tennis courts, notable hotels and restaurants, if any.
She knows you become exhausted in the tropics, you lose momentum, you become comatose and demoralized. The main thing is to keep going. She has to convince herself that if she doesn't manage to complete a well-researched and cheerfully written piece on the pleasures of St. Antoine the universe will be negatively affected.
Maybe she could fake the whole article, concoct a few ravishing little restaurants, some Old World charm in the New World, throw in some romantic history, tart the whole thing up with a few photos from the lesser-known corners of, say, St. Kitts. She pictures legions of businessmen descending on St. Antoine and then, in outrage, on the editorial offices of Visor. It won't do, she'll have to come up with something, she's overdrawn at the bank. She can always talk about development potential.
What I need is a pith helmet, she thinks, and some bearers, or are they beaters, to carry me around in a hammock, and some of what those people in Somerset Maugham are always drinking. Pink gin?
Rennie does what she does because she's good at it, or that's what she says at parties. Also because she doesn't know how to do anything else, which she doesn't say. Once she had ambitions, which she now thinks of as illusions: she believed there was a right man, not several and not almost right, and she believed there was a real story, not several and not almost real. But that was 1970 and she was in college. It was easy to believe such things then. She decided to specialize in abuses: honesty would be her policy. She did a piece for the Varsity on blockbusting as practised by city developers and another on the lack of good day-care centres for single mothers, and she took the nasty and sometimes threatening letters she received as a tribute to her effectiveness.
Then she graduated and it was no longer 1970. Several editors pointed out to her that she could write what she liked, there was no law against it, but no one was under any obligation to pay her for doing it, either. One of them told her she was still a southern Ontario Baptist at heart. United Church, she said, but it hurt.
Instead of writing about the issues, she began interviewing the people who were involved in them. Those pieces were a lot easier to sell. The in wardrobe for the picket line, the importance of the denim overall, what the feminists eat for breakfast. The editors told her she was better at that anyway. Radical chic, they called it. One day she found herself short of petty cash and did a quick piece on the return of hats with veils. It wasn't even radical, it was only chic, and she tried not to feel too guilty about it.
Now that she no longer suffers from illusions, Rennie views her kind of honesty less as a virtue than a perversion, one from which she still suffers, true; but, like psoriasis and hemorrhoids, those other diseases typical of Griswold, it can be kept under control. Why make such things public? Her closet honesty is - there's no doubt about it - a professional liability.
Other people have no such scruples. Everything is relative, everything is fashion. When a thing or a person has been too widely praised, you merely reverse the adjectives. No one considers this perverse, it's simply the nature of the business, and the business runs on high turnover. You write about something until people become tired of reading about it or you become tired of writing about it, and if you're good enough or lucky enough it's the same thing. Then you write about something else.
Rennie is still close enough to Griswold to find this attitude irritating at times. Last year she went into the office of the Toronto Star when some of the younger staff members were making up a list. It was close to New Year's and they were drinking gallon white wine out of styrofoam coffee cups and killing themselves laughing. The list was a regular feature. Sometimes it was called "In and Out," sometimes "Plus and Minus"; such lists reassured people, including those who wrote them. It made them think they could make distinctions, choices that would somehow vindicate them. She had once composed such lists herself.
This time the list was called "Class: Who Has It, Who Doesn't." Ronald Reagan didn't have class, Pierre Trudeau did. Jogging didn't have class, contemporary dance did, but only if you did it in jogging pants, which did, for that but not for jogging, but not in stretchy plunge-back leotards, which didn't for that but did if you went swimming in them, instead of in bathing suits with built-in bra cups, which didn't. Marilyn's didn't, the Lickin' Chicken on Bloor, which didn't sell chicken, did.
"What else for the No list?" they asked her, giggling already, anticipating her answer. "What about Margaret Trudeau?"
"What about the word class?" she said, and they weren't sure whether that was funny or not.
Which is a problem she has. The other problem is the reputation she's getting for being too picky. She's aware of this, she listens to gossip; people are beginning to think she won't finish assignments. There's some truth to this: increasingly there are things she can't seem to do. Maybe it isn't can't, maybe it's won't. What she wants is something legitimate to say. Which is childish. Loss of nerve, she's decided. It started before the operation but it's getting worse. Maybe she's having a mid-life crisis, way too soon. Maybe it's Griswold squeezing her head: If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. Not that its own maxims ever stopped Griswold.
Two months ago she was offered a good piece, a profile in Pandora's "Women of Achievement" series. A ballet dancer, a poet, a female executive from a cheese food company, a judge, a designer who specialized in shoes with glitter faces on the toes. Rennie wanted the designer but they gave her the judge, because the judge was supposed to be hard to do and Rennie was supposed to be good.
Rennie was not prepared for the panic that overtook her the first day out. The judge was nice enough, but what did you say? What does it feel like to be a judge? she asked. What does it feel like to be anything? said the judge, who was only a year older than Rennie. She smiled. It's a job. I love it.
The judge had two wonderful children and an adoring husband who didn't at all mind the time she spent being a judge, because he found his own job so satisfying and rewarding. They had a charming house, Rennie
I can't do it, she told the editor at Pandora. The editor's name was Tippy; she was a contact of Rennie's. She opens her mouth and out comes this ticker tape.
She's a control freak, Tippy said. She's controlling the interview. You've got to turn it around, get an angle on her. Our readers want them to be human too, a few cracks in the armour, a little pain. Didn't she have to suffer on her way up?
I asked her that, said Rennie. She didn't.
What you have to do, said Tippy, is ask her if you can just sort of hang out with her. Follow her around all day. There's a real story in there somewhere. How she fell in love with her husband, did you ask that? Look in the medicine cabinet, go for the small details, it matters what they roll on under their arms, Arrid or Love, it makes a difference. Stick with them long enough and sooner or later they crack. You've got to dig. You're not after dirt, just the real story.
Rennie looked across the desk, which was messy, at Tippy, who was also messy. She was ten years older than Rennie, her skin was sallow and unhealthy, there were pouches under her eyes. She chain-smoked and drank too much coffee. She was wearing green, the wrong colour for her. She was a good journalist, she'd won all sorts of awards before she became an editor, and now she was telling Rennie to peer into other people's medicine cabinets. A woman of achievement.
Rennie went home. She looked at what she'd already written about the judge and decided that it was, after all, the real story. She tore it up and started a new page.
A profile used to mean a picture of somebody's nose seen from the side, she wrote. Now it means the picture of somebody's nose seen from the bottom. Which was as far as she got.
Rennie takes her camera, on the off chance. She's not very good, she knows that, but she forced herself to learn because she knew it would increase her scope. If you do both the pictures and the text you can go almost anywhere, or so they say.
She picks up a mimeographed map of Queenstown and a tourist brochure from the registration desk. "St. Antoine and Ste. Agathe," the brochure says. "Discover Our Twin Islands In The Sun." On the front is a tanned white woman laughing on a beach, sheathed in one-piece aqua Spandex with a modesty panel across the front. A black man in a huge straw hat is sitting on the sand beside her, handing up a coconut with a couple of straws sticking out of it. Behind him is a machete propped against a tree. He's looking at her, she's looking at the camera.
"When was this printed?" Rennie asks.
"We get them from the Department of Tourism," says the woman behind the desk. "That's the only kind there is." She's British and seems to be the manager, or perhaps the owner. Rennie is always slightly cowed by women like this, women who can wear thick-soled khaki shoes and lime-green polyester jersey skirts without being aware of their ugliness. This woman's no doubt responsible for the lounge chairs and the scabby plant. Rennie envies people who are unaware of ugliness: it gives them an advantage, they can't be embarrassed.
"I understand you're a travel writer," the woman says severely. "We don't usually have them here. You ought to be at the Driftwood."
For a moment Rennie wonders how she knows, but then remembers that it says "freelance journalist" on her disembarkation card, which is in the office safe. Not a hard deduction. What she probably means is that Rennie can't expect special treatment because there isn't any, and in particular she's not supposed to ask for a discount.
The hotel is on the second floor of an old building. Rennie goes down the outside stone staircase, the steps worn concave in the centres, to an inner courtyard that smells of piss and gasoline, then under an archway into the street. Sunlight hits her like a wind, and she rummages in her purse for sunglasses. She realizes she's stepped over a pair of legs, trousers with bare feet at the ends, but she doesn't look down. If you look they want something. She walks along beside the wall of the hotel, patchy stucco that was once white. At the corner she crosses the main street, which is pocked with holes; thick brown sludge moves in the gutters. There aren't many cars. On the other side of the street is an overhang supported by columns, a colonnade, like the ones bordering the zocalos in Mexican towns. It's hard to tell how old things are, she'll have to find out. The tourist brochure says the Spaniards were through here, once, along with everyone else. "Leaving a charming touch of Old Spain" is how they put it.
She walks in the shade, looking for a drugstore. Nobody bothers her or even looks at her much, except for a small boy who tries to sell her some spotty bananas. This is a relief. In Mexico, whenever she left Jake at the hotel and ventured out by herself, she was followed by men who made sucking noises at her with their mouths. She buys a straw hat, overpriced, in a shop that sells batiks and shell-work necklaces made from the vertebrae of fish. It also sells bags, and because of that it's called Bagatelle. Not bad, thinks Rennie. There are familiar signs: The Bank of Nova Scotia, The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. The bank buildings are new, the buildings surrounding them are old.
In the Bank of Nova Scotia she cashes a traveller's cheque. A couple of doors down there's a drugstore, also new-looking, and she goes into it and asks for some suntan lotion.
"We have Quaaludes," the man says as she's paying for the lotion.
"Pardon?" says Rennie.
"Any amount," the man says. He's a short man with a gambler's moustache, balding, his pink sleeves rolled to the elbows. "You need no prescription. Take it back to the States," he says, looking at her slyly. "Make you a little money."
Well, it's a drugstore, Rennie thinks. It sells drugs. Why be surprised? "No thank you," she says. "Not today."
"You want the hard stuff?" the man asks.
Rennie buys some insect repellent, which he rings up half-heartedly on the cash register. Already he's lost interest in her.
Rennie walks uphill, to the Church of St. Antoine. It's the oldest one left, says the tourist brochure. There's a graveyard surrounding it, the plots enclosed by wrought-iron fences, the gravestones tipping and overgrown with vines. On the lawn there's a family planning poster: KEEP YOUR FAMILY THE RIGHT SIZE. No hints about what that might be. Beside it is another poster: ELLIS IS KING. There's a picture of a fattish man, smiling like a Buddha. It's been defaced with red paint.
Inside, the church is completely empty. It feels Catholic, though there are no squat guttering red candles. Rennie thinks of the Virgins in Mexico, several of them in each church, dressed in red or white or blue or black; you chose one and prayed to it according to your needs. Black was for loss. The skirts of the Virgins had been studded with little tin images, tin arms, tin legs, tin children, tin sheep and cows, even tin pigs, in thanks for what had been restored, or perhaps only in hope that it might be. She'd found the idea quaint, then.
There's an altar at the front, a table at the back with a slotted box where you can buy postcards, and a large picture on the west wall, "by an early unknown local artist," says the brochure. It's St. Anthony, being tempted in the desert; only the desert is bursting with tropical vegetation, vivid succulent red flowers, smooth fat leaves bulging with sap, brightly coloured birds with huge beaks and yellow eyes, and St. Anthony is black. The demons are noticeably paler, and most of them are female. St. Anthony is on his knees in an attitude of prayer, his eyes turned up and away from the scaly thighs, the breasts and pointed scarlet tongues of the demons. He isn't wearing one of those bedspreads she remembers from the Griswold Sunday school handouts but an ordinary shirt, white and open at the throat, and brown pants. His feet are bare. The figures are flat, as if they've been cut from paper, and they cast no shadows.
There are postcards of the painting on the table, and Rennie buys three. She has her notebook with her but she doesn't write anything in it. Then she sits down in the back pew. What part of hers
Jake went to Mexico with her. It was their first trip together. He didn't like the churches much: churches didn't do a whole lot for him, they reminded him of Christians. Christians have funny eyes, he said. Clean-minded. They're always thinking about how you'd look as a bar of soap.
I'm one, said Rennie, to tease him.
No, you're not, said Jake. Christians don't have cunts. You're only a shiksa. That's different.
Want to hear me sing "Washed in the Blood of the Lamb"? said Rennie.
Don't be perverted, said Jake. You're turning me on.
Turning? said Rennie. I thought you were on all the time.
It was a whole week. They were euphoric, they held hands on the street, they made love in the afternoons, the wooden louvres of the old windows closed against the sun, they got flea bites, there was nothing that didn't amuse them, they bought dubious cakes and strange fried objects from roadside stands, they ate them recklessly, why not? They found a sign in a little park that read, Those found sitting improperly in the park will be punished by the authorities. It can't mean that, said Rennie. We must've translated it wrong. What is sitting improperly? They walked through the crowded streets at night, curious, fearless. Once there was a fiesta, and a man ran past them with a wickerwork cage balanced on his head, shooting off rockets and Catherine wheels. It's you, Rennie said. Mr. General Electric.
She loved Jake, she loved everything. She felt she was walking inside a charmed circle: nothing could touch her, nothing could touch them. Nevertheless, even then, she could feel the circle diminishing. In Griswold they believed that everything evened out in the end: if you had too much good luck one day, you'd have bad the next. Good luck was unlucky.
Still, Rennie refused to feel guilty about anything, not even the beggars, the women wrapped in filthy rebozos, with the fallen-in cheeks of those who have lost teeth, suckling inert babies, not even brushing the flies away from their heads, their hands held out, for hours on end it seemed, in one position as if carved. She remembered stories she'd heard about people who mutilated themselves and even their children to make tourists feel sorry for them; or was that in India?