Dancing Girls

by Margaret Atwood

  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 table about pretty nurses. Adrian was cleaning up the top marks in third year. Both of them fit so easily into the definitions that had been provided for them. And who was he supposed to be, what had been left over for him when they were dishing out the roles? The bumbling third son in a fairy tale, with no princess and no good luck. But friendly and generous, kind to old women and dwarves in the forest. He despised his own generosity, which he felt was mostly cowardice.

  Rob was supposed to go into Pre-Meds 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.

  He would not be able to take the scene when they found out, he would just disappear. He thought of the final catastrophe as happening in a classroom. They would all be dissecting a cadaver, and he would suddenly begin to scream. He would run out of the room and down the corridor, reeking of formaldehyde, he would forget his coat and the galoshes that were a fetish of his mother’s, it would be snowing. He would wake up the next morning in a greenish-grey hotel room, with no recollection of what he had done.

  It was his family who had chosen this job, this camp. They felt it would be good practice for him to spend the summer with crippled children; it would be part of the it he had to learn to take. His father knew the Director, and it was all arranged before Rob was told about it. His father and mother had been so enthusiastic, so full of their sense of the wonderful opportunity they’d arranged for him, how could he refuse? “Use your powers of observation,” his father had said to him at the train station. “I wish I’d had this chance when I was your age.”

  For the first week Rob had had nightmares. The dreams were of bodies, pieces of bodies, arms and legs and torsos, detached and floating in mid-air; or he would feel he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, and he would wake up with his skin wet from effort. He found the sight of the children, especially the younger ones, unbearably painful, and he didn’t understand how the other staff members could go around all day with expressions of such bluff professional cheer. Except that he did it himself. Though apparently with less success than he’d thought, since Pam the physiotherapist had come over to sit beside him in the staff lounge after the second-day orientation meeting. She had dull blonde hair held back by a velvet band that matched the blue of her plaid Bermuda shorts. She was pretty, but Rob felt she had too many teeth. Too many and too solid. “It’s rough worki
ng with kids like this,” she said, “but it’s so rewarding.” Rob nodded dutifully: what did she mean, rewarding? He still felt sick to his stomach. He’d been on shift for dinner that evening, and he could barely stand the milk dribbling from the bent plastic feeding tubes, the chair trays splattered with food (“Let them do as much for themselves as they can”), the slurps and suction noises. Pam lit a cigarette and Rob watched the red fingernails on her strong, competent hands. “It doesn’t do them any good for you to be depressed,” she said. “They’ll use it against you. A lot of them don’t know the difference. They’ve never been any other way.” She was going to do this for a living, she was going to do this for the rest of her life! “You’ll get used to it,” she said, and patted his arm in a way that Rob found insulting. She’s trying to be nice, he corrected himself quickly.

  “I know your brother James,” she said, smiling again with her solid teeth. “I met him on a double-date. He’s quite the boy.”

  Rob excused himself and got up. She was older than him anyway, she was probably twenty.

  But she’d been right, he was getting used to it. The nightmares had gone away, though not before he’d aroused the interest of the boys in his cabin. They nicknamed him “The Groaner.” They had nicknames for everyone in the camp.

  “Hey, ya hear the Groaner last night?”

  “Yeah. Uh. Uh. Getting his rocks off good.”

  “Ya have a good time, Groaner?”

  Rob, blushing, would mumble, “I was having a nightmare,” but they would hoot with laughter.

  “Oh yeah. We heard ya. Wish I had nightmares like that.” They were the oldest boys’ cabin, fourteen to sixteen-year-olds, and he’d had trouble with them from the first. They weren’t like the younger children, polite, eager to enjoy themselves in whatever way they could, grateful for help. Instead they were cynical about the camp, about the Director, about Bert (whom they nicknamed “Bert the Nert”) and about themselves and their lives. They drank beer, when they could get hold of it; they smoked furtive cigarettes. They kept girlie magazines hidden under their mattresses, and they told some of the foulest jokes Rob had ever heard. They divided the world into two camps, the “crips” and the “norms,” and for the most part they accepted only the crips. The norms were seen as their oppressors, the dimwits who would never understand, who would never get it right, and whom it was their duty to war against and exploit. It gave them a bitter pleasure to outrage norm sensibility whenever possible, and they’d found Rob an easy target.

  “Hey, Pete,” Dave Snider would start. He’d be sitting in his chair, wearing one of the T-shirts with the cut-off arms that displayed his overdeveloped biceps to advantage. He had a Charles Atlas set at home, Rob knew, and subscribed to bodybuilding magazines.

  “Yeah, Dave?” Pete would answer. They both had classic duck-tails, which they wore covered with grease. They found Rob’s private-school English-style haircut ludicrous. Pete was paralyzed from the neck down, but he’d somehow gained second place in the cabin’s pecking order. Dave combed his duck’s ass for him.

  “What’s black and crawls and catches flies?”

  “Roy Campanella!”

  Raucous laughter, in which the rest of the cabin joined while Rob blushed. “I don’t think that’s very nice,” he’d said the first time.

  “He doesn’t think it’s very nice,” Dave mimicked. “What weighs two thousand pounds and twitches?”

  “Moby Spaz!”

  They called these jokes “spaz jokes.” What bothered Rob most about them was that they reminded him of the kinds of jokes his brothers and their medical-student friends would tell, having a game of pool in their father’s rec room, to relax after classes (“Bring your friends over anytime, boys. You too, Rob.”) Except that theirs were supposed to be true stories. They played endless practical jokes on each other, most of them involving parts of cadavers they would cut off during dissection: eyeballs in the teacup, hands in the coat pocket.

  “Hey, we were doing this old guy, and I thought, What the hell, and I cut off his tool, it’s all brown and shrivelled up, like they get, and I slipped it into my briefcase. So I go down to the Babloor, and I have a few beers, and I go into the can and I open my fly, but I stick this old guy’s dork out instead of my own. So I stand there like I’m pissing, and I wait till another guy comes in, and I shake it and it comes off in my hand. So I throw it down and I say, ‘Damn thing never worked anyway’ You should’ve seen the look on his face!”

  They related rumours from Emergency at the hospital, most of which seemed to involve women with broken Coke bottles stuck in them or men who had been masturbating with the hot water tap. “Had to get a plumber to saw him out. Came in with the tap still on and two feet of pipe.” “I heard of one with a crayon. Got stuck in the bladder. He came in because he was pissing blue and he couldn’t figure out why.”

  “I heard about one with a snake.”

  “Why do you tell those stories?” Rob asked them one night when he felt courageous.

  “Why do you listen to them?” James grinned.

  “You’ll do it, too,” Adrian told him. “Wait and see.” Then, after the others had gone home, he said, more seriously, “You have to tell them. I know you think it’s pretty gross, but you don’t know what it’s like. It’s real life out there. You have to laugh or go crazy.” Rob tried to reject this, but it haunted him. Real life would be too much for him, he would not be able to take it. He would not be able to laugh. He would go crazy. He would run out into the snow with no galoshes, he would vanish, he would be lost forever.

  “What weighs two thousand pounds and has an exploding head?”

  “Moby Hydrocephalic!”

  “That’s enough!” Rob said, trying to assert his authority.

  “Look, Groaner,” Dave said. “You’re here to see we have a good time, right? Well, we’re having a good time.”

  “Yeah,” Pete said. “You don’t like it, you can beat me up.”

  “Sure, go on,” Dave said. “Do your Boy Scout good deed for the week. Kill a cripple.” Bullying him with his own guilt.

  It didn’t help that the other counsellor, Gordon Holmes, encouraged them. He smuggled beer and cigarettes into the cabin for them, ogled their girlie magazines, and told them which of the girl counsellors were “easy outs.”

  “Hey, make out last night?” Dave would ask him in the morning.

  “Not bad, not bad.”

  “She go down for ya?”

  Gordon’s secretive smile. Patting Old Spice on the back of his neck.

  “Who was it, Pammer the Slammer?”

  “Every time she pounds my back I get a bone on.”

  “Hey, was it Jo-Anne?”

  “Naw, she’s a crip. Gord wouldn’t take out a crip, would ya, Gord?”

  “You got to go along with them,” Gordon told Rob. “Kid them a little. They’re frustrated, they got normal emotions just like you and me.” He punched Rob on the shoulder. “Take it easy, man, you think too much.”

  Gordon went to a public high school in East York. His mother and father were divorced and he lived with his mother, whom he called “the old lady.” He’d got the job with the camp through the Big Brothers. He wasn’t a juvenile delinquent, and Rob could think of many good points about him, but he couldn’t bear to be around him for long. It did no good for Rob to tell himself that Gord would probably end up as a garage mechanic, that the kind of girls he talked about so freely were what his own mother would call “cheap,” that he would get one of them pregnant and have to get married and end up in a dingy, overcrowded apartment, drinking beer in front of the TV while his wife nagged him about the laundry. He was envious anyway, listening despite himself to the sagas of back seats and forbidden mickeys at the drive-in, of heavy petting, forays into undergarments by Gord’s daring fingers, triumphs over hostile elastic straps, conquests of breasts. He resented this sleazy freedom even though he knew he wouldn’t enjoy it himself, wouldn’t know what to say or where to
put his hands.

  He himself had never taken out anyone but his mother’s friends’ daughters, pallid little girls who needed to be escorted to their own private-school dances and didn’t know anyone else to ask. He bought them wrist corsages and steered them swiftly, correctly, around the floor in their dresses like layers of pastel toilet paper, their small wired bosoms pressing lightly into his chest, his hand against their backs feeling the rows of hooks that might conceivably be undone; but no, that would be too embarrassing. Though he’d sometimes felt his crotch tighten during the joyless foxtrots (he stood out the few chaste rock numbers the hired band would attempt), he hadn’t liked any of these girls, though he tried to make sure they had a good time. He had even kissed one of them goodnight, because he felt she was expecting it. It was three years ago, when he was still wearing bands on his teeth. So was the girl, and when he’d kissed her harder than he’d intended, their teeth had locked painfully together, at her front door, in full view of the entire street. Anyone watching would have thought it was a passionate embrace, but he could still remember the panic in her eyes, though he’d repressed her name.

  Rob turned Jordan right, onto the Nature Walk that ran in a meandering oval through the small woods behind the boys’ cabins. It was paved, like all the other walks. The trees were labelled, and there was a little glass case at the far end of the oval where Bert the Nert, who was a nature buff, put a new exhibit every day. He’d taken Jordan on the Nature Walk several times before, stopping to read the labels on the trees, pointing out chipmunks and once a stray cat. Hardly anyone else seemed to go on it. He liked to wheel her along through the trees, whistling or singing songs to her. He wasn’t shy about his voice when there was no one else but her, he even sang songs from Bert’s repertoire that stuck in his throat when the assembled children sang them, led by red-faced Bert, his master-of-ceremonies smile, and his energetic accordion.