Dancing Girls & Other Stories by Margaret Atwood
"Lost," people called it. They spoke of her as having lost the child, as though it was wandering around looking for her, crying plaintively, as though she had neglected it or misplaced it somewhere. But where? What limbo had it gone to, what watery paradise? Sometimes she felt as if there had been some mistake, the child had not been born yet. She could still feel it moving, ever so slightly, holding on to her from the inside.
Sarah placed the baby on the rock beside her. She stood up, smoothing out the wrinkles in her skirt. She was sure there would be more flea bites when she got back to the hotel. She picked up the child and walked slowly towards the well, until she was standing at the very brink.
Edward, coming back up the path, saw Sarah at the well's edge, her arms raised above her head. My God, he thought, she's going to jump. He wanted to shout to her, tell her to stop, but he was afraid to startle her. He could run up behind her, grab her ... but she would hear him. So he waited, paralyzed, while Sarah stood immobile. He expected her to hurtle downwards, and then what would he do? But she merely drew back her right arm and threw something into the well. Then she turned, half stumbling, towards the rock where he had left her and crouched down.
"Sarah," he said. She had her hands over her face; she didn't lift them. He kneeled so he was level with her. "What is it? Are you sick?"
She shook her head. She seemed to be crying, behind her hands, soundlessly and without moving. Edward was dismayed. The ordinary Sarah, with all her perversity, was something he could cope with, he'd invented ways of coping. But he was unprepared for this. She had always been the one in control.
"Come on," he said, trying to disguise his desperation, "you need some lunch, you'll feel better." He realized as he said this how fatuous it must sound, but for once there was no patronizing smile, no indulgent answer.
"This isn't like you," Edward said, pleading, as if that was a final argument which would snap her out of it, bring back the old calm Sarah.
Sarah took her hands away from her face, and as she did so Edward felt cold fear. Surely what he would see would be the face of someone else, someone entirely different, a woman he had never seen before in his life. Or there would be no face at all. But (and this was almost worse) it was only Sarah, looking much as she always did.
She took a Kleenex out of her purse and wiped her nose. It is like me, she thought. She stood up and smoothed her skirt once more, then collected her purse and her collapsible umbrella.
"I'd like an orange," she said. "They have them, across from the ticket office. I saw them when we came in. Did you find your bird?"
Training
It must have taken Rob several minutes to notice that the sun was in her eyes. When he did notice, because she was squinting, he moved her sideways a little so she could see better. He felt the padded arms of the chair, where her thin bare arms were kept at rest by the leather straps, to make sure they were not overheated. She should have a hat, they were always being warned about sunburn. So far it had always been sunny during the day, though there had been a thunderstorm the night before. But no hat had been wheeled out with her.
"They forgot your hat," he said to her. "That was stupid of them, wasn't it?" Then he offered her another piece of the wooden puzzle, giving her time to consider it and to look also at the half-finished puzzle on the tray.
"This way?" he said. He watched her left hand for the slight movement towards him that would say yes. It was one of the few controlled movements she could make.
He also watched her eyes and face. She could move her eyes, though her head jerked around if she tried to swivel it too fast. But she had little control of the muscles of her face, so he could never tell if she was trying to smile or whether the contortion of her mouth was caused by the spontaneous knotting and unknotting of her jumpy flesh, the body that would not respond to the enormous will he saw, or thought he saw, sealed up in her eyes like some small fierce animal captured in a metal net. She couldn't get out! She was strapped into the wheelchair, prisoned in her cage of braces, trays, steel wheels, but only because she was strapped into her own body as into some bumpy, sickening carnival ride. Let out of her chair, she would thrash, topple, flail, hurtle through space. It was one of the worst cases they'd ever taken, Pam the physiotherapist had told him.
But everyone agreed she was bright, very bright; it was amazing really what she could do. She could say yes by moving her left hand, and therefore she could play games, answer questions, indicate what she wanted. It just needed more work than usual on the part of the counsellor, and you had to do a lot of guessing. It took time, but after she had beaten him twice in a row at checkers, with no collusion on his part, Rob was willing to spend the time. He wondered about teaching her to play chess. But there were too many pieces, too many moves, a game would take weeks. He thought of her, sitting impatiently inside her body, waiting for him to get to the piece she wanted to move and figure out where she wanted to move it.
She hadn't said anything. He turned the puzzle piece around. Yes, her hand said immediately, and he fitted it in. It was a giraffe, two giraffes, a funny-animal picture, a caricature. It struck him that she might not know what a giraffe was; she might never have seen a real one or even a picture of one.
"Is this puzzle boring?" he asked her. Yes, she said.
"How about a game of checkers?"
That was fine with her. "Okay, killer," he said, "but this time I'm going to beat you." Her blue eyes stared at him; her mouth wavered. He wished she could smile. He wheeled her off to get out the checkers and return the puzzle.
It was her brightness that fascinated him. It was amazing, but it was horrible too, that mind trapped and strangling. Maybe she was a genius; who could ever tell? Surely she knew things and could sense things that would escape other people. When she looked at him with her ice-blue eyes, clear and cold, hard like mint candies, it was as if she could see into him, past the desperately cheerful kind-uncle act he knew was only an act. He had to be careful what he thought about when he was with her. She would pick it up, and for some reason it mattered what she felt about him.
Sometimes he thought she would be better off if she were like some of the others. The hydrocephalics, for instance, with their watery pumpkin heads and infant's bodies; there were three of them at the camp right now, and they could all talk, but they weren't very bright. Or the muscular dystrophy cases, who looked so normal the first time you saw them, slumped in their wheelchairs, wan and limp as orphans. They would be dead soon; some of them would be dead even before the next summer. Rob found the camp song so painful he could not bring himself to sing it.
Where do you find the girls and boys
Who grow to be women and men?
Eff ay eye ar
EE - ee-dee-ee en!
The tune was the Mickey Mouse song, which made it worse for Rob by conjuring up an image of the Mouseketeers, those plump, pert children with functional arms and legs who had chosen to use their normal, beautiful bodies for that, for prancing and jiggling and acting on television. He would stand looking down, looking away, looking anywhere but at the rows of doomed children ranged in the auditorium, brought there so Bert the Assistant Director could finger his accordion and generate what he called "camp spirit." But the children sang the song with gusto. They liked to sing. Those who could clapped their hands.
Jordan could not clap. But on the other hand, she would live a long time. You didn't die from what she had. She was only nine years old.
GAMES was in the right-hand half of the cabin nearest the main house. The front window had been enlarged and fitted with an awning, a wooden shutter for when it rained, and a counter. Jo-Anne Johnson, who had the shift this week, was sitting behind the counter on a high stool, reading a paperback. She was wearing a white terry T-shirt with an anchor on the left breast and red short-shorts, and she had her legs crossed. Rob looked at the line on her thigh where the tan ended, then switched to the shelves behind her where the Volleyballs and baseball bats were stored. Sh
"We'd like to exchange this puzzle," he told her. "We'd like to get out some checkers."
"Checkers again, eh?" she said. "You must be sick of checkers. That's the fourth time this week."
Rob didn't like the way some people talked in front of Jordan as if she couldn't hear. "Oh no," he said. "I'm playing Jordan. She's beaten me twice."
Jo-Anne smiled at him as if they shared a secret. Then she smiled down at Jordan, who stared back at her, not moving much. "Yes, I've heard she's a real whiz," she said. She crossed out the puzzle in the lined notebook on the counter and wrote in the checkers set opposite his name. "See you later," she said. "Have a good game."
"Let's find some shade," Rob said to Jordan. He wheeled her along the cement pathway, beside the row of cabins. The cabins were white, neat, identical. Each one had a front ramp instead of a doorstep; inside them were the special beds, the special toilets, and the curious smell that was not like the smell of children but was sweeter, heavier and more humid, and reminded him of a greenhouse. A smell of warm earth and baby powder, of things mouldering slightly. Of course there was always a lot of laundry, sitting in bags, waiting to be taken away. Some of the children wore diapers, grotesque when you saw them on a twelve-year-old. In the mornings, before the beds had been changed, the smell was stronger. It took a long time to get everyone ready for the day. The girl counsellors were forbidden to lift the children out of the beds or out of the wheelchairs; only the boys could do that. Rob lifted his own cabin and two girls' cabins, Number Seven and Number Eight, Jordan's cabin. With her Dutch-boy haircut and tough wilful little face, she looked out of place in the frilled pink nightgowns they put on her. He wondered if she were ever allowed to help choose her own clothes.
They reached the corner of the walk and turned left. From the open windows of the auditorium, which doubled as a gym, came the sound of recorded music and a woman's voice: "No, back to your places and try again. You can do it, Susie." Now they had reached the end of the boys' side. The girls' side was across the central field, where there was a baseball game going on, as there had been the day he had arrived. The camp van had stopped in the circular driveway. From the front, the main house could have been a rich man's mansion, and in fact it once had been. Some figures that looked at first like grandmothers in rocking chairs were placed at intervals along the wide verandah. The Director had greeted them and had deputized Bert to give them the tour for new counsellors. Around the corner was the baseball game, and Rob had thought, Well it's not going to be so bad, because from a distance, on the green field, in the full sunlight that seemed to have been shining ever since, the game had seemed almost normal.
The strange thing about it was the silence. Boys that age ought to be shouting, that was part of the game; but games here were played with quiet concentration. These were mostly children who could walk, with the aid of braces or crutches; some could even run. But a few of the players were double, one boy being pushed around the bases in a wheelchair by another. Rob knew from having played that the games were conducted with a politeness and consideration that he found eerie. During baseball games these children behaved as adults were always telling children to behave. The only noisy one at the moment was Bert, the umpire, who was waving his arms and yelling encouragement as Dave Snider, paralyzed by polio from the waist down, knocked the ball straight out past second base. Two outfielders on crutches hobbled after it while Dave spun onto first.
Rob knew he should be volunteering for more sports and supervision, but he wanted to spend the time with Jordan. Besides, he hated baseball. It was his family's game, the one he was expected to excel at as a matter of course, just as he was expected to become a doctor. His father was the one who insisted on the games, with some echo in his mind perhaps of the golden Kennedys, as featured recently in Life magazine playing touch football. Joseph Kennedy and his three fine boys. His father wore a T-shirt with CHAMP on it, given to him by his mother. His two older brothers were good players, and so were the Miller boys. Dr. Miller was a surgeon too, like his father; they had the place next door. His father did hearts, Dr. Miller did brains, and both of the Miller boys were going to be doctors, too.
They played on the beach, and for Rob the sense of hopelessness and failure that went with these games went also with blue skies, full sunlight and waves breaking on sand. These things, that for other people meant carefree vacations, meant for him an almost intolerable bondage. To refuse to play would have been unthinkable. If he'd been a better player, he would have been able to say he didn't feel like a game, but, as it was, the cries of spoilsport and poor loser would have been too truthful. No one held it against him that he was so wretched a player, that he could barely hit the ball, because of his bad eyesight perhaps, the sunlight glinting into his eyes from the frames of his glasses, that he would not see the ball when it came hurtling towards him out of the sizzling blue sky like an assassin's bomb, numbing his fingers when he raised his hands to fend it off, knocking him on the head or neck, or, even more humiliating, ignoring him so completely so that he had to run after it, chase it down the beach or into the lake. His family treated him as a joke, even, and especially, his mother. "What did you hurt today?" she would ask him, as she doled out the snacks afterwards on the patio deck above the boathouse, sandwiches and Cokes for the boys, beers for the men. In the city his father drank Scotch, but at the cottage, which he called his "summer place," he drank beer. The others would tell funny stories about Rob's blunderings, his losing duels with the demonic white ball, while he would grin. The grin was obligatory, to show he was a good sport and didn't mind. "You have to be able to take it," his father was fond of saying, without being too specific about what it was. He also said, after almost every game, that competitive sports were good for you because they taught you how to handle failure. Rob knew his father was only trying to make him feel better; nevertheless, he felt like answering that he'd had enough practice at that and he wouldn't mind being taught how to handle success.
But he had to be careful about saying things like that. "He's the sensitive one," his mother was in the habit of telling her friends, half proud, half rueful. Her favourite picture of him was the one in his choirboy surplice, taken the year before his voice cracked. His oldest brother was supposed to be the handsome one, his middle brother was the smart one, Rob was the sensitive one. For this reason it was necessary, he knew, to appear as insensitive as possible. Lately he had begun to succeed, and his mother was now complaining that he never talked to her any more. He found even her moments of solicitous interest painful.
She trusted the others to make their own way, but she didn't trust him, and secretly Rob agreed with her estimate. He knew he could never be a doctor, although he felt he wanted to. He wanted to be good at baseball too, but he wasn't, and all he could see ahead for himself at Medical School was catastrophe. How to confess that even the drawings in his father's medical books, those interiors of bodies abstract as plaster models, made him queasy, that he'd actually fainted - though no one knew, because he'd been lying down anyway - when he'd given blood this year at the clinic and had seen for the first time the hot purple worm of his own blood inching through the clear tube across his bare arm? His father thought it was a great treat for his boys to be allowed into the observation bubble at the hospital while he was doing open-heart surgery, but Rob was unable to turn down the offer or admit his nausea. (Red rubber, it's only red rubber, he would repeat to himself over and over, closing his eyes when his brothers weren't watching.) He would come away from these ordeals with his knees jellied and his palms scored with the marks of his jagged, bitten nails. He couldn't do it, he could never do it.
James, the handsome one, was already interning, and the family made jokes at the Sunday dinner t
Rob was supposed to go into PreMeds in the fall, and dutifully he would do it. But sooner or later he would be forced to drop out, and what then? He saw himself on top of a boxcar like some waif from the thirties, penniless, fleeing his family's disappointment, heading for some form of oblivion so foreign to him he could not even picture it. But there was no one he could talk to about his knowledge of his own doom. A year ago his father had taken him aside for the pep talk Rob was sure he'd had with both of the others. Medicine wasn't just a job, he told Rob. It was a calling, a vocation. One of the noblest things a man could do was to dedicate his life selflessly to the saving of others. His father's eyes gleamed piously: was Rob worthy? (Speedboat, Rob thought, summer place on the bay, two cars, Forest Hill house.) "Your grandfather was a doctor," his father said, as if this was the clincher. His grandfather had been a doctor, but he'd been a country doctor, driving a sleigh and team through blizzards to deliver babies. They had often heard these heroic stories. "He wasn't very good at collecting his bills," Rob's father would say, shaking his head with a mixture of admiration and indulgent contempt. This was not one of his own weaknesses. "During the Depression we lived on chickens; the farmers gave them to us instead of money. I had only one pair of shoes." Rob thought of the shoe rack that ran the length of his father's triple-doored closet, the twinkling shoes arranged on it like testimonials.