Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood
INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
Wilderness Tips
"Atwood is as audacious as ever ... There is something irresistible about this combination of mordant humour and unswerving truth."
-Winnipeg Free Press
"[Atwood possesses] a truly remarkable array of powers.... The wilderness of Wilderness Tips is the one we all live in - whether or not we admit it."
-Books in Canada
"These are stories that speak to all who do not close their ears, and their minds, to the late twentieth-century reality.
-Star-Phoenix (Saskatoon)
"Virtuoso wit and unmistakable style ... Atwood the poet is alive in these stories."
-Chicago Tribune
"The reader has the sense that Atwood has complete access to her people's emotional histories, complete understanding of their hearts and imaginations."
-Publishers Weekly
"[Atwood has the] ability to place her finger firmly on the pulse of what is contemporary."
-Hamilton Spectator
"Wilderness Tips is a grimly comic, often scathing natural history of urban anxiety and middle age."
-London Free Press
"Almost every one of the ten stories in this collection superimposes the past upon the present in a unsettling, often startling manner, which conjures up a sense of the mysterious in even the most banal relationships."
-New York Times Book Review
BOOKS BY MARGARET ATWOOD
FICTION
The Edible Woman (1969)
Surfacing (1972)
Lady Oracle (1976)
Dancing Girls (1977)
Life Before Man (1979)
Bodily Harm (1981)
Murder in the Dark (1983)
Bluebeard's Egg (1983)
The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
Cat's Eye (1988)
Wilderness Tips (1991)
Good Bones (1992)
The Robber Bride (1993)
Alias Grace (1996)
The Blind Assassin (2000)
Good Bones and Simple Murders (2001)
Oryx and Crake (2003)
The Penelopiad (2005)
The Tent (2006)
Moral Disorder (2006)
FOR CHILDREN
Up in the Tree (1978)
Anna's Pet (with Joyce Barkhouse) (1980)
For the Birds (1990)
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995)
Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003)
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004)
NON-FICTION
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)
Days of the Rebels 1815-1840 (1977)
Second Words (1982)
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1996)
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002)
Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 1982-2004 (2004)
POETRY
Double Persephone (1961)
The Circle Game (1966)
The Animals in That Country (1968)
The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)
Procedures for Underground (1970)
Power Politics (1971)
You Are Happy (1974)
Selected Poems (1976)
Two-Headed Poems (1978)
True Stories (1981)
Interlunar (1984)
Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986 (1986)
Morning in the Burned House (1995)
Copyright (c) 1991 by O.W. Toad Ltd.
First cloth edition published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 1991
Trade paperback edition first published 1999
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher - or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency - is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Atwood, Margaret, 1939 -
Wilderness Tips
eISBN: 978-1-55199498-7
I. Title.
PS8501.T86W5 C813'.54 C91-094364-8
PR9199.3.A87W5
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
The content and characters in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons or happenings is coincidental.
The factual material about the Franklin Expedition and exhumation of John Torrington in "The Age of Lead" is from Frozen in Time, by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, Western Producer Prairie Books, 1987. There was a television program on the subject; the one in this story is imagined.
SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN
EMBLEM EDITIONS
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
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Toronto, Ontario
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v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
True Trash
Hairball
Isis in Darkness
The Bog Man
Death by Landscape
Uncles
The Age of Lead
Weight
Wilderness Tips
Hack Wednesday
Acknowledgements
About the Author
True Trash
The waitresses are basking in the sun like a herd of skinned seals, their pinky-brown bodies shining with oil. They have their bathing suits on because it's the afternoon. In the early dawn and the dusk they sometimes go skinny-dipping, which makes this itchy crouching in the mosquito-infested bushes across from their small private dock a great deal more worthwhile.
Donny has the binoculars, which are not his own but Monty's. Monty's dad gave them to him for bird-watching but Monty isn't interested in birds. He's found a better use for the binoculars: he rents them out to the other boys, five minutes maximum, a nickel a look or else a chocolate bar from the tuck shop, though he prefers the money. He doesn't eat the chocolate bars; he resells them, black market, for twice their original price; but the total supply on the island is limited, so he can get away with it.
Donny has already seen everything worth seeing, but he lingers on with the binoculars anyway, despite the hoarse whispers and the proddings from those next in line. He wants to get his money's worth.
"Would you look at that," he says, in what he hopes is a tantalizing voice. "Slobber, slobber." There's a stick poking into his stomach, right on a fresh mosquito bite, but he can't move it without taking one hand off the binoculars. He knows about flank attacks.
"Lessee," says Ritchie, tugging at his elbow.
"Piss off," says Donny. He shifts the binoculars, taking in a slippery bared haunch, a red-polka-dotted breast, a long falling strand of bleach-blonde hair: Ronette the tartiest, Ronette the most forbidden. When there are lectures from the masters at St. Jude's during the winter about the dangers of consorting with the town girls, it's those like Ronette they have in mind: the ones who stand in line at the town's only movie theatre, chewing gum and wearing their boyfriends' leather jackets, their ruminating mouths glistening and deep red like mushed-up raspberries. If you whistle at them or even look, they stare right t
Ronette has everything but the stare. Unlike the others, she has been known to smile. Every day Donny and his friends make bets over whether they will get her at their table. When she leans over to clear the plates, they try to look down the front of her sedate but V-necked uniform. They angle towards her, breathing her in: she smells of hair spray, nail polish, something artificial and too sweet. Cheap, Donny's mother would say. It's an enticing word. Most of the things in his life are expensive, and not very interesting.
Ronette changes position on the dock. Now she's lying on her stomach, chin propped on her hands, her breasts pulled down by gravity. She has a real cleavage, not like some of them. But he can see her collar-bone and some chest ribs, above the top of her suit. Despite the breasts, she's skinny, scrawny; she has little stick arms and a thin, sucked-in face. She has a missing side tooth, you can see it when she smiles, and this bothers him. He knows he's supposed to feel lust for her, but this is not what he feels.
The waitresses know they're being looked at: they can see the bushes jiggling. The boys are only twelve or thirteen, fourteen at most, small fry. If it was counsellors, the waitresses would giggle more, preen more, arch their backs. Or some of them would. As it is, they go on with their afternoon break as if no one is there. They rub oil on one another's backs, toast themselves evenly, turning lazily this way and that and causing Ritchie, who now has the binoculars, to groan in a way that is supposed to madden the other boys, and does. Small punches are dealt out, mutterings of "Jerk" and "Asshole." "Drool, drool," says Ritchie, grinning from ear to ear.
The waitresses are reading out loud. They are taking turns: their voices float across the water, punctuated by occasional snorts and barks of laughter. Donny would like to know what they're reading with such absorption, such relish, but it would be dangerous for him to admit it. It's their bodies that count. Who cares what they read?
"Time's up, shitface," he whispers to Ritchie.
"Shitface yourself," says Ritchie. The bushes thrash.
What the waitresses are reading is a True Romance magazine. Tricia has a whole stash of them, stowed under her mattress, and Sandy and Pat have each contributed a couple of others. Every one of these magazines has a woman on the cover, with her dress pulled down over one shoulder or a cigarette in her mouth or some other evidence of a messy life. Usually these women are in tears. Their colours are odd: sleazy, dirt-permeated, like the hand-tinted photos in the five-and-ten. Knee-between-the-legs colours. They have none of the cheerful primaries and clean, toothy smiles of the movie magazines: these are not success stories. True Trash, Hilary calls them. Joanne calls them Moan-o-dramas.
Right now it's Joanne reading. She reads in a serious, histrionic voice, like someone on the radio; she's been in a play, at school. Our Town. She's got her sunglasses perched on the end of her nose, like a teacher. For extra hilarity she's thrown in a fake English accent.
The story is about a girl who lives with her divorced mother in a cramped, run-down apartment above a shoe store. Her name is Marleen. She has a part-time job in the store, after school and on Saturdays, and two of the shoe clerks are chasing around after her. One is dependable and boring and wants them to get married. The other one, whose name is Dirk, rides a motorcycle and has a knowing, audacious grin that turns Marleen's knees to jelly. The mother slaves over Marleen's wardrobe, on her sewing machine - she makes a meagre living doing dressmaking for rich ladies who sneer at her, so the wardrobe comes out all right - and she nags Marleen about choosing the right man and not making a terrible mistake, the way she did. The girl herself has planned to go to trade school and learn hospital management, but lack of money makes this impossible. She is in her last year of high school and her grades are slipping, because she is discouraged and also she can't decide between the two shoe clerks. Now the mother is on her case about the slipping grades as well.
"Oh God," says Hilary. She is doing her nails, with a metal file rather than an emery board. She disapproves of emery boards. "Someone please give her a double Scotch."
"Maybe she should murder the mother, collect the insurance, and get the hell out of there," says Sandy.
"Have you heard one word about any insurance?" says Joanne, peering over the tops of her glasses.
"You could put some in," says Pat.
"Maybe she should try out both of them, to see which one's the best," says Liz brazenly.
"We know which one's the best," says Tricia. "Listen, with a name like Dirk! How can you miss?"
"They're both creeps," says Stephanie.
"If she does that, she'll be a Fallen Woman, capital F, capital W," says Joanne. "She'd have to Repent, capital R."
The others hoot. Repentance! The girls in the stories make such fools of themselves. They are so weak. They fall helplessly in love with the wrong men, they give in, they are jilted. Then they cry.
"Wait," says Joanne. "Here comes the big night." She reads on, breathily. "My mother had gone out to deliver a cocktail dress to one of her customers. I was all alone in our shabby apartment."
"Pant, pant," says Liz.
"No, that comes later. I was all alone in our shabby apartment. The evening was hot and stifling. I knew I should be studying, but I could not concentrate. I took a shower to cool off. Then, on impulse, I decided to try on the graduation formal my mother had spent so many late-night hours making for me."
"That's right, pour on the guilt," says Hilary with satisfaction. "If it was me I'd axe the mother."
"It was a dream of pink -"
"A dream of pink what?" says Tricia.
"A dream of pink, period, and shut up. I looked at myself in the full-length mirror in my mother's tiny bedroom. The dress was just right for me. It fitted my ripe but slender body to perfection. I looked different in it, older, beautiful, like a girl used to every luxury. Like a princess. I smiled at myself. I was transformed.
"I had just undone the hooks at the back, meaning to take the dress off and hang it up again, when I heard footsteps on the stairs. Too late I remembered that I'd forgotten to lock the door on the inside, after my mother's departure. I rushed to the door, holding up my dress - it could be a burglar, or worse! But instead it was Dirk."
"Dirk the jerk," says Alex, from underneath her towel.
"Go back to sleep," says Liz.
Joanne drops her voice, does a drawl. " 'Thought I'd come up and keep you company,' he said mischievously. 'I saw your mom go out.' He knew I was alone! I was blushing and shivering. I could hear the blood pounding in my veins. I couldn't speak. Every instinct warned me against him - every instinct but those of my body, and my heart."
"So what else is there?" says Sandy. "You can't have a mental instinct."
"You want to read this?" says Joanne. "Then shush. I held the frothy pink lace in front of me like a shield. 'Hey, you look great in that,' Dirk said. His voice was rough and tender. 'But you'd look even greater out of it.' I was frightened of him. His eyes were burning, determined. He looked like an animal stalking its prey."
"Pretty steamy," says Hilary.
"What kind of animal?" says Sandy.
"A weasel," says Stephanie.
"A skunk," says Tricia.
"Shh," says Liz.
"I backed away from him," Joanne reads. "I had never seen him look that way before. Now I was pressed against the wall and he was crushing me in his arms. I felt the dress slipping down ..."
"So much for all that sewing," says Pat.
"... and his hand was on my breast, his hard mouth was seeking mine. I knew he was the wrong man for me but I could no longer resist. My whole body was crying out to his."
"What did it say?"
"It said, Hey, body, over here!"
"Shh."
"I felt myself lifted. He was carrying me to the sofa. Then I felt the length of his hard, sinewy body pressing against mine. Feebly I tried to push his hands away, but I didn't really want to. And then - dot dot dot - we were One, capital O, exclamation mark."
There is a moment of silence. Then the waitresses laugh. Their laughter is outraged, disbelieving. One. Just like that. There has to be more to it.
"The dress is a wreck," says Joanne in her ordinary voice. "Now the mother comes home."
"Not today, she doesn't," says Hilary briskly. "We've only got ten more minutes. I'm going for a swim, get some of this oil off me." She stands up, clips back her honey-blonde hair, stretches her tanned athlete's body, and does a perfect swan-dive off the end of the dock.
"Who's got the soap?" says Stephanie.
Ronette has not said anything during the story. When the others have laughed, she has only smiled. She's smiling now. Hers is an off-centre smile, puzzled, a little apologetic.
"Yeah, but," she says to Joanne, "why is it funny?"
The waitresses stand at their stations around the dining hall, hands clasped in front of them, heads bowed. Their royal-blue uniforms come down almost to the tops of their white socks, worn with white bucks or white-and-black saddle shoes or white sneakers. Over their uniforms they wear plain white aprons. The rustic log sleeping cabins at Camp Adanaqui don't have electric lights, the toilets are outhouses, the boys wash their own clothes, not even in sinks but in the lake; but there are waitresses, with uniforms and aprons. Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.
Mr. B. is saying grace. He owns the camp, and is a master at St. Jude's as well, during the winters. He has a leathery, handsome face, the grey, tailored hair of a Bay Street lawyer, and the eyes of a hawk: he sees all, but pounces only sometimes. Today he's wearing a white V-necked tennis sweater. He could be drinking a gin and tonic, but is not.
Behind him on the wall, above his head, there's a weathered plank with a motto painted on it in black Gothic lettering: As the Twig Is Bent. A piece of bleached driftwood ornaments each end of the plank, and beneath it are two crossed paddles and a gigantic pike's head in profile, its mouth open to show its needle teeth, its one glass eye fixed in a ferocious maniac's glare.
To Mr. B.'s left is the end window, and beyond it is Georgian Bay, blue as amnesia, stretching to infinity. Rising out of it like the backs of whales, like rounded knees, like the calves and thighs of enormous floating women, are several islands of pink rock, scraped and rounded and fissured by glaciers and lapping water and endless weather, a few jack pines clinging to the larger ones, their twisted roots digging into the cracks. It was through these archipelagos that the waitresses were ferried here, twenty miles out from shore, by the same cumbersome mahogany inboard launch that brings the mail and the groceries and everything else to the island. Brings, and takes away. But the waitresses will not be shipped back to the mainland until the end of summer: it's too far for a day off, and they would never be allowed to stay away overnight. So here they are, for the duration. They are the only women on the island, except for Mrs. B. and Miss Fisk, the dietitian. But those two are old and don't count.