Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood
What does? she said.
Hope, he said. The mind isn't separate from the body; emotions trigger chemical reactions and vice versa, you know that.
So it's my fault if there's a recurrence? I have cancer of the mind? said Rennie.
It isn't a symbol, it's a disease, said Daniel patiently. We just don't know the cure yet. We have a few clues, that's all. We're looking for the X factor. But we'll get it sooner or later and then people like me will be obsolete. He patted her hand. You'll be fine, he said. You have a life to go back to. Unlike some. You're very lucky.
But she was not fine. She was released from the hospital, she went back to the apartment, she still wasn't fine. She longed to be sick again so that Daniel would have to take care of her.
She constructed a program for herself: schedules and goals. She exercised the muscles of her left arm by lifting it and pressing the forearm against the wall, she squeezed a sponge ball in her left hand twenty times a day. She went to movies with Jake to cheer herself up, funny movies, nothing heavy. She began to type again, a page at a time, reworking her drain-chain jewellery piece, picking up where she'd left off. She learned to brush her hair again and to do up buttons. As she did each of these things, she thought of Daniel watching her and approving. Good, he would say. You can do up buttons now? You can brush your own hair? That's right, go to cheerful movies. You're doing really well.
She went for an examination and to get the stitches out. She wore a red blouse, to show Daniel what a positive attitude she had, and sat up straight and smiled. Daniel told her she was doing really well and she began to cry.
He put his arms around her, which was what she'd wanted him to do. She couldn't believe how boring she was being, how stupid, how predictable. Her nose was running. She sniffed, blotted her eyes on Daniel's pocket, in which, she noted, he kept several cheap ballpoint pens, and pushed him away.
I'm sorry, she said. I didn't mean to do that.
Don't be sorry, he said. You're human.
I don't feel human any more, she said. I feel infested. I have bad dreams, I dream I'm full of white maggots eating away at me from the inside.
He sighed. That's normal, he said. You'll get over it.
Stop telling me I'm fucking normal, she said.
Daniel checked his list of appointments, looked at his watch, and took her down for a swift coffee in the shopping arcade below his office, where he delivered an earnest lecture. This was the second part of her life. It would be different from the first part, she would no longer be able to take things for granted, but perhaps this was a plus because she would see her life as a gift and appreciate it more. It was almost like being given a second life. She must stop thinking of her life as over, because it was far from over.
When I was a student I used to think I would be able to save people, he said. I don't think that any more. I don't even think I can cure them; in this field you can't afford to think that. But in a lot of cases we can give them time. A remission can last for years, for a normal lifespan even. He leaned forward slightly. Think of your life as a clean page. You can write whatever you like on it.
Rennie sat across the table from him, white formica with gold threads in it, thinking what a lot of facile crap he was talking and admiring his eyes, which were an elusive shade between blue and green. Where does he get this stuff, she thought, The Reader's Digest?
How many times have you used that one? she said. Are you just saying that because I'm a journalist? I mean, if I were a dentist, would you say, Your life is like an empty tooth, you can fill it with whatever you like?
Rennie knew you weren't supposed to say things like this to men you were in love with, or to men in general, or to anyone at all for that matter; making fun was rude, especially when the other person was being serious. But she couldn't resist. He would have had a right to be angry, but instead he was startled. He looked at her for a moment almost slyly; then he began to laugh. He was blushing, and Rennie was entranced: the men she knew didn't blush.
I guess you think that's pretty corny, he said.
Corny. My God, thought Rennie, I'm caught in a time warp, it's nineteen fifty-five again. He's from another planet.
I'm sorry, she said. I get pretty surly at times. It's just that, what am I supposed to do with it? All this time I've got. Sit around waiting till it gets me? You know it's going to, sooner or later.
He gazed at her sadly, disappointed again, as if she were talking like a spoiled child. Do what you want to, he said. What you really want to.
What would you do? she said. She fought the impulse to interview him. "When Doctors Get Sick."
He looked down at his hands. What I'm doing now, I guess, he said. That's about all I know anything about. But you have an interesting life.
This was the first clue Rennie had that Daniel thought she was interesting.
Rennie looks at the other two postcards. She addresses one to Jake, it would be a courtesy to let him know where she is, but she doesn't write anything on it because she can't think of anything she wants to say to him. The third one she leaves empty. Empty is not the same as clean. She bought the third one for Daniel but she decides not to send it. She'll send it later, when she can say, I'm fine. That's what he would like to hear: that she's fine, that everything is fine, that he's done no damage.
Rennie feels a darker shadow fall over her. "Hi there," says a flat nasal voice, mildly familiar. It's the woman who passed her in the hotel last night. She now sits down beside Rennie uninvited and takes a pack of cigarettes out of her bag. Rennie puts away her postcards.
"You smoke?" says the woman. The fingers holding the cigarette are bitten to the quick, stub-tipped, slightly grubby, the raw skin around the nails nibbled as if mice have been at them, and this both surprises Rennie and repels her slightly. She wouldn't want to touch this gnawed hand, or have it touch her. She doesn't like the sight of ravage, damage, the edge between inside and outside blurred like that.
"No, thanks," says Rennie.
"My name's Lora," says the woman, "With an o, not the other way. Lora Lucas. L's run in our family, my mother's name was Leona." Now that she's talking, the illusion shatters: "Hi there" is about the only thing she's learned to fake, the rest is natural. She's not as young as she looked in the dim light of the hotel. Her hair is down today, flower-child length, dry as hay. She's wearing an above-the-knee oblong of orange knotted across her large breasts.
Her eyes are scanning, all the time, back and forth, taking everything in. "You just come in, eh?" she says, and Rennie thinks, Canadian.
"Yes," says Rennie.
"You got to watch it around here," says Lora. "People see you don't know what you're doing, they rip you off. How much he soak you from the airport last night?"
Rennie tells her and she laughs. "You see?" she says.
Rennie immediately resents her, she resents the intrusion. She wishes she had a book; then she could pretend to read.
"You should watch your stuff, that camera and all," says Lora. "There's been some breakins around here. A girl I know, she woke up in the middle of the night and there was this black guy in a bathing suit holding a knife to her throat. Nothing sexual, he just wanted her money. Said he'd kill her if she told anyone. She was afraid to go to the police."
"Why?" Rennie says, and Lora grins at her.
"She figures he was the police," she says.
In response to some signal Rennie hasn't caught, she stands up and brushes the sand from her orange tie dye. "Boat time," she says. "If that's what you're here for."
It seems they're expected to wade out to the boat. The old couple with the matching binoculars go first. They're both wearing wide-legged khaki shorts, which they roll up even farther, exposing stringy whitish legs which are surprisingly muscular. Even so, the drooping bottoms of their shorts are wet through by the time they reach the boat's ladder. The two speckled pink girls make it with a lot of shrieking. Lora unties her tie dye, under which she's wearing a black bikini ha
Rennie considers her options. She can either hitch up her dress and tuck it into her underpants, with everyone watching her, or get it wet and smell like seaweed for the rest of the day. She compromises, hiking her skirt halfway up and draping it through the sash tie. It gets wet anyway. The man who appears to own the boat smiles widely as the swell hits her. He reaches out a long ropy arm, a hand like a clamp, to help her up. At the last moment, when the motor is already running, five or six children come screaming and laughing out through the waves and swarm onto the boat, clambering up onto the awning, which Rennie now sees is wooden rather than cloth.
"Mind yourself, you fall off," the owner yells at them.
Rennie sits on the wooden bench, dripping, while the boat goes up and down and the exhaust blows into her face. Lora has gone up on top where the kids are, probably to work on her tan. The two girls are flirting with the man running the boat. The old couple are looking at sea birds through their binoculars, murmuring to each other in what sounds like a secret language. "Booby," the old woman says. "Frigate," the man replies.
In front of Rennie is a raised ledge bordering an oblong piece of glass almost the length of the boat. Rennie leans forward and rests her arms on it. Nothing but greyish foam is visible through the glass. She's doing this, she reminds herself, so she can write about how much fun it is. At first you may think you could get the same effect for a lot less money by putting a little Tide in your Jacuzzi. But wait.
Rennie waits, and the boat stops. They're quite far out. Twenty yards from them, surf crashes over an invisible wall, each wave lifting the boat. In the furrows between the waves they sink down until they're only a foot from the reef. It's an illusion, Rennie thinks. She prefers to believe that people who run things know what they're doing, and these people surely would not do anything so dangerous. She doesn't like the idea of a prong of coral suddenly bursting through the glass.
Rennie looks, which is her function. The water is clouded with fine sand. At the edges of the glass oblong, dark shapes flit and are hidden. Below her, so encrusted in purplish coral that its shape is almost obscured, is a soft-drink bottle. A tiger-striped fish swims near it.
"It's not so great today, it's been too windy, and this one's not such a great one anyway," Lora says to her. She's come down from the roof and is kneeling beside Rennie. "The reef's getting all messed up by the oil and junk from the harbour. What you need is a snorkel and stuff, over at Ste. Agathe. That's where I live, you'd like it a lot better than here."
Rennie doesn't say anything; she doesn't seem expected to. Also she doesn't want to start a conversation. Conversations lead to acquaintances, and acquaintances are too easy to make on these trips. People mistake them for friendships. She smiles and turns back to the glass oblong.
"You write for the magazines, eh?" the woman says.
"How did you know that?" Rennie asks, a little annoyed. This is the third time today.
"Everyone knows everything around here," the woman says. "Word of mouth, the grapevine you might say. Everyone knows what's happening." She pauses. She looks at Rennie, scanning her face as if trying to see through the blue lenses of her sunglasses. "I could tell you stuff to write about," she says darkly. "The story of my life, you could put it in a book all right. Except no one would believe it, you know?"
Rennie is instantly bored. She can't remember how many people have said this to her, at parties, on airplanes, as soon as they've found out what she does. Why do they think their own lives are of general concern? Why do they think that being in a magazine will make them more valid than they are? Why do they want to be seen?
Rennie switches off the sound and concentrates only on the picture. Lora could definitely be improved. She would benefit greatly from a good cut and shape, for instance, and she should grow her eyebrows in, just a little. Plucking them fine like that broadens her face. Rennie arranges her into a Makeover piece, before and after, with a series of shots in between showing the process, Lora being tweezed and creamed and coloured in and fitted with a Norma Klein sweater. After that you could take her to lunch at Winston's and all you'd have to teach her would be how to keep her mouth shut.
They're sitting under a metal umbrella at one of the round white tables on the patio at the Driftwood, Lora with the sun on her back, Rennie in the shade. The other tables are thinly scattered with white people in various phases of hot pink, and one couple who seems to be Indian. The waiters are black or brown; the architecture is roadside modern, the balconies have plastic panels, green and blue. At the edge of the patio there's a tree covered with red flowers, huge lobed blossoms like gigantic sweet peas; a dozen hummingbirds swarm around them. Below, on the other side of the curving stone wall, the surf crashes against the rocks just as it is supposed to, and a fresh wind blows off the Atlantic. To the right is a wide beach devoid of fish heads. There's nobody on it.
Lora orders another pina colada. Rennie is only halfway through hers, but she orders another one anyway.
"Who's paying for this?" Lora asks, too innocently.
"I will," says Rennie, who has always known she would.
"You can put it on your whatchamacallit," Lora says. "Don't they pay for everything, those magazines?"
"Not always," says Rennie, "but I can write it off as an expense. We can pretend I was interviewing you."
"Write it off," says Lora. "Jesus." Rennie can't tell whether she's impressed or disgusted.
"This is where people like you stay, most of the time," says Lora.
Rennie dislikes having these kinds of assumptions made about her, she dislikes being lumped in with a fictitious group labelled people like you. She can't stand the self-righteousness of people like Lora, who think that because they've had deprived childhoods or not as much money as everybody else they are in some way superior. She feels like using one of her never-fail ploys. She'll lean across the table, take off her sunglasses, gaze into Lora's round blue-china eyes, eyes that manage to look at the same time aggrieved and secretly delighted, and say, "Why are you being so aggressive?" But she has a feeling this wouldn't work on Lora.
She thinks about unbuttoning her dress and displaying her scar. If they're having a poor-me contest, that should be good for a few points; but she doesn't want to turn into one of those people who use their physical disabilities for social blackmail.
She knows she shouldn't have allowed herself to be picked up on the reef boat, she shouldn't have expressed interest in seeing the other hotels, she should have insisted on a taxi instead of listening to Lora, who said she knew people and why get ripped off when you could get a free ride? "Free rides, that's my motto," she said. Rennie's mother used to say there was no such thing as a free ride.
The free ride turned out to be a battered pickup truck with two yellow eyes painted on the hood. It was delivering toilet paper, and they had to sit on the boxes in the back, perched up there like float queens; groups of people waved and yelled at them as they went past. Outside the town the road got steadily worse, dwindling finally into a two-wheel track of cracked and disintegrating concrete. The driver went as fast as possible, and every time they hit a gap in the concrete Rennie could feel the top of her spine being rammed up into her skull.
She doesn't want to face the ride back, but she doesn't want to stay here either. If she isn't careful she'll be trapped into having dinner. Lora, she's decided, is one of those women you meet in bars in foreign countries, who seem not to have chosen anything but merely ended up wherever they happen to be, and it's too much effort for them to go home. Rennie can't imagine why Lora has been so insistent about coming with her. They have nothing in common. Lora says she has nothing else to do at the moment so she might as well show Rennie around, but Rennie doesn't believe thi
Now Lora opens her purple bag and rustles through it, and suddenly everything falls into place. What she takes out is a poly bag of grass, about an ounce, Rennie guesses. She wants Rennie to buy it. The price, by Toronto standards, is ridiculously low.
"The best," she says. "Colombian, it just came in."
Rennie of course refuses. She's heard about dope laws in foreign countries, she knows about being set up, she has no intention of spending any time at all growing fungus in the local jail while the local bureaucrats try, unsuccessfully, to put the squeeze on her mother. Her mother is a firm believer in taking the consequences for your actions. And who else would get her out? Who would even try?
Lora shrugs. "It's cool," she says. "No harm in asking."
Rennie looks around to see what has become of Lora's drink, and feels herself turn cold.
"My God," she says.
There are two policemen in the bar, they're going from table to table, it looks as if they're asking questions. But Lora stares calmly over at them, she doesn't even put the dope away, she just moves her cloth bag so it's covered. "Don't look so weird," she says to Rennie. "It's cool. I wouldn't say it was cool if it wasn't."
And it turns out after all that they're just selling tickets to the Police Benefit Dance. Rennie thinks she recognizes them from the airport, but she's not sure. One sells, the other stands behind him, dangling his swagger stick and checking out the scene. She produces her own ticket from her purse. "I already have one," she says, a little too smugly, because the one selling grins at her and says, "You need two, man. One for your boyfriend. Some things you can't do by yourself."
The second one laughs, a high giggle.
"That's a real good idea," says Lora, smiling a little tightly, her Holiday Inn smile; so Rennie pays.
"We see you there," says the first policeman, and they saunter off.
"If there's one thing I hate it's cops," says Lora, when they're hardly out of earshot. "They're all in the business if you ask me, one way or another, I've got nothing against that but they take advantage. It's unfair competition. You ever been stopped by a cop? For speeding or anything? Back home I mean, around here they don't bother that much about speeding."