Dancing Girls

by Margaret Atwood

  The line was busy.

  She did not want to think about her disappointment. She would phone later. There was no more blood, though she could feel it crusted inside her head. So she would stay, she would do the reading, she would collect the fee and use it to pay the rent. What else was possible?

  It was dinnertime and she was hungry, but she couldn’t afford another meal. Sometimes they took the poet out for dinner, sometimes they gave a party afterwards where she could fill up on crackers and cheese. Here there was nothing. They picked her up at the airport, that was it. She could tell there had been no posters, no advance publicity. A small audience, nervous because they were there and nobody else was, caught out attending the wrong reading. And she didn’t even look like a poet, she was wearing a neat navy-blue pantsuit, easy for stairs and cars. Maybe a robe would help, something flowing and ethereal. Bangles, a scarf?

  She sat on the edge of the straightbacked chair, facing a picture of two dead ducks and an Irish setter. There was time to be filled. No television set. Read the Gideon Bible? No, nothing too strenuous, she didn’t want to start bleeding again. In half an hour they would come to pick her up. Then the eyes, the polite hands, the fixed smiles. Afterwards everyone would murmur. “Don’t you feel exposed up there?” a young girl had asked her once. “No,” she’d said, and she didn’t, it wasn’t her, she read only her most soothing poems, she didn’t want to disturb anyone. But they distrusted her anyway. At least she never got drunk beforehand the way a lot of the others did. She wanted to be nice, and everyone approved of that.

  Except the few hungry ones, the ones who wanted to know the secret, who believed there was a secret. They would straggle up afterwards, she knew, hanging around the edges, behind the murmuring committee members, clutching little packets of poems, extending them to her gingerly, as if the pages were raw flesh they could not bear to have touched. She could remember when she had felt like that. Most of the poems would be dismal, but now and then there would be one that had something, the energy, the thing that could not be defined. Don’t do it, she wanted to tell them, don’t make the mistake I made. But what was her mistake? Thinking she could save her soul, no doubt. By the word alone.

  Did I really believe that? Did I really believe that language could seize me by the hair and draw me straight up, out into the free air? But if you stop believing, you can’t do it any longer, you can’t fly. So I’m stuck here on this chair. A sixty-year-old smiling public man. Crisis of faith? Faith in what? Resurrection, that’s what is needed. Up from under. Get rid of these haunts, these fictions, he said, she said, counting up points and grievances; the dialogues of shadows. Otherwise there will be nothing left but the rest of my life. Something is frozen.

  Bernie, save me.

  He was so nice this morning, before she left.

  The phone again, the voice flies through the darkness of space. Hollow ringing, a click.

  “Hi,” A woman’s voice, Marika, she knew who it would be.

  “Could I please speak to Bernie?” Stupid to act as though she didn’t recognize the voice.

  “Hi, Julia,” Marika said. “Bernie’s not here right now. He had to go away for a couple of days, but he knew you’d be calling tonight so he asked me to come over. So you wouldn’t worry or anything. He said to have a good reading, and don’t forget to water the plant when you get back.”

  “Oh, thanks, Marika,” she said. As if she was his secretary, leaving her with messages for the idiot wife while he.… She couldn’t ask where he had gone. She herself went away, why couldn’t he? If he wanted her to know where, he’d tell her. She said goodbye. As she put down the phone, she thought she heard something. A voice, a laugh?

  He hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s there, in the apartment, I can see it, it must have been going on for weeks, months, down at the gallery, I’ve read your book, checking out the competition. I must be feebleminded, everyone knew but me. Trotting over to have coffee with me, casing the joint. Hope they have the grace to change the sheets. Didn’t have the guts to talk to me himself, water the plant my ass, it’s dead anyway. Melodrama in a parking lot, long stretches of asphalt with here and there a splotch of crushed animal, is that what my life has become?

  Rock bottom in this room among the slagheaps, outer space, on the dead moon, with two slaughtered ducks and a stuffed dog, why did you have to do it that way, when I’m out here, you know it cripples me, these ordeals, walking through the eyes, couldn’t you have waited? You set it up so well, I’ll come back and yell and scream, and you’ll deny it all, you’ll look at me, very cool, and say, What are you talking about? And what will I be talking about, maybe I’m wrong, I’ll never know. Beautiful.

  It’s almost time.

  They will arrive, the two young men who are polite and who do not yet have tenure. She will get into the front seat of their Volvo, and all the way to the reading, as they drive between the snowdrifts piled halfway up the telephone poles, the two young men will discuss the virtues of this car and the relative virtues of the car belonging to the one who is not driving but who is sitting in the back seat with his legs doubled like a grasshopper’s.

  She will not be able to say anything at all. She will watch the snow coming at the windshield and being wiped away by the windshield wipers, and it will be red, it will be like a solid red wall. A violation, this is what she hates, they had promised never to lie.

  Stomach full of blood, head full of blood, burning red, she can feel it at last, this rage that has been going on for a long time, energy, words swarming behind her eyes like spring bees. Something is hungry, something is coiling itself. A long song coils and uncoils itself just in front of the windshield, where the red snow is falling, bringing everything to life. They park the virtuous car and she is led by the two young men into the auditorium, grey cinderblock, where a gathering of polite faces waits to hear the word. Hands will clap, things will be said about her, nothing astonishing, she is supposed to be good for them, they must open their mouths and take her in, like vitamins, like bland medicine. No. No sweet identity, she will clench herself against it. She will step across the stage, words coiled, she will open her mouth and the room will explode in blood.

  Dancing Girls

  The first sign of the new man was the knock on the door. It was the landlady, knocking not at Ann’s door, as she’d thought, but on the other door, the one east of the bathroom. Knock, knock, knock; then a pause, soft footsteps, the sound of unlocking. Ann, who had been reading a book on canals, put it down and lit herself a cigarette. It wasn’t that she tried to overhear: in this house you couldn’t help it.

  “Hi!” Mrs. Nolan’s voice loud, overly friendly. “I was wondering, my kids would love to see your native costume. You think you could put it on, like, and come down?”

  A soft voice, unintelligible.

  “Gee, that’s great! We’d sure appreciate it!”

  Closing and locking, Mrs. Nolan slip-slopping along the hall in, Ann knew, her mauve terry-cloth scuffies and flowered housecoat, down the stairs, hollering at her two boys. “You get into this room right now!” Her voice came up through Ann’s hot air register as if the grate were a PA system. It isn’t those kids who want to see him, she thought. It’s her. She put out the cigarette, reserving the other half for later, and opened her book again. What costume? Which land, this time?

  Unlocking, opening, soft feet down the hall. They sounded bare. Ann closed the book and opened her own door. A white robe, the back of a brown head, moving with a certain stealth or caution toward the stairs. Ann went into the bathroom and turned on the light. They would share it; the person in that room always shared her bathroom. She hoped he would be better than the man before, who always seemed to forget his razor and would knock on the door while Ann was having a bath. You wouldn’t have to worry about getting raped or anything in this house though, that was one good thing. Mrs. Nolan was better than any burglar alarm, and she was always there.

  That one had been from France, st
udying Cinema. Before him there had been a girl, from Turkey, studying Comparative Literature. Lelah, or that was how it was pronounced. Ann used to find her beautiful long auburn hairs in the washbasin fairly regularly; she’d run her thumb and index finger along them, enviously, before discarding them. She had to keep her own hair chopped off at ear level, as it was brittle and broke easily. Lelah also had a gold tooth, right at the front on the outside where it showed when she smiled. Curiously, Ann was envious of this tooth as well. It and the hair and the turquoise-studded earrings Lelah wore gave her a gypsy look, a wise look that Ann, with her beige eyebrows and delicate mouth, knew she would never be able to develop, no matter how wise she got. She herself went in for “classics,” tailored skirts and Shetland sweaters; it was the only look she could carry off. But she and Lelah had been friends, smoking cigarettes in each other’s rooms, commiserating with each other about the difficulties of their courses and the loudness of Mrs. Nolan’s voice. So Ann was familiar with that room; she knew what it looked like inside and how much it cost. It was no luxury suite, certainly, and she wasn’t surprised at the high rate of turnover. It had an even more direct pipeline to the sounds of the Nolan family than hers had. Lelah had left because she couldn’t stand the noise.

  The room was smaller and cheaper than her room, though painted the same depressing shade of green. Unlike hers, it did not have its own tiny refrigerator, sink and stove; you had to use the kitchen at the front of the house, which had been staked out much earlier by a small enclave of mathematicians, two men and one woman, from Hong Kong. Whoever took that room either had to eat out all the time or run the gamut of their conversation, which even when not in Chinese was so rarefied as to be unintelligible. And you could never find any space in the refrigerator, it was always full of mushrooms. This from Lelah; Ann herself never had to deal with them since she could cook in her own room. She could see them, though, as she went in and out. At mealtimes they usually sat quietly at their kitchen table, discussing surds, she assumed. Ann suspected that what Lelah had really resented about them was not the mushrooms: they simply made her feel stupid.

  Every morning, before she left for classes, Ann checked the bathroom for signs of the new man – hairs, cosmetics – but there was nothing. She hardly ever heard him; sometimes there was that soft, barefooted pacing, the click of his lock, but there were no radio noises, no coughs, no conversations. For the first couple of weeks, apart from that one glimpse of a tall, billowing figure, she didn’t even see him. He didn’t appear to use the kitchen, where the mathematicians continued their mysteries undisturbed; or if he did, he cooked while no one else was there. Ann would have forgotten about him completely if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Nolan.

  “He’s real nice, not like some you get,” she said to Ann in her piercing whisper. Although she shouted at her husband, when he was home, and especially at her children, she always whispered when she was talking to Ann, a hoarse, avid whisper, as if they shared disreputable secrets. Ann was standing in front of her door with the room key in her hand, her usual location during these confidences. Mrs. Nolan knew Ann’s routine. It wasn’t difficult for her to pretend to be cleaning the bathroom, to pop out and waylay Ann, Ajax and rag in hand, whenever she felt she had something to tell her. She was a short, barrel-shaped woman: the top of her head came only to Ann’s nose, so she had to look up at Ann, which at these moments made her seem oddly childlike.

  “He’s from one of them Arabian countries. Though I thought they wore turbans, or not turbans, those white things, like. He just has this funny hat, sort of like the Shriners. He don’t look much like an Arab to me. He’s got these tattoo marks on his face.… But he’s real nice.”

  Ann stood, her umbrella dripping onto the floor, waiting for Mrs. Nolan to finish. She never had to say anything much; it wasn’t expected. “You think you could get me the rent on Wednesday?” Mrs. Nolan asked. Three days early; the real point of the conversation, probably. Still, as Mrs. Nolan had said back in September, she didn’t have much of anyone to talk to. Her husband was away much of the time and her children escaped outdoors whenever they could. She never went out herself except to shop, and for Mass on Sundays.

  “I’m glad it was you took the room,” she’d said to Ann. “I can talk to you. You’re not, like, foreign. Not like most of them. It was his idea, getting this big house to rent out. Not that he has to do the work or put up with them. You never know what they’ll do.”

  Ann wanted to point out to her that she was indeed foreign, that she was just as foreign as any of the others, but she knew Mrs. Nolan would not understand. It would be like that fiasco in October. Wear your native costumes. She had responded to the invitation out of a sense of duty, as well as one of irony. Wait till they get a load of my native costume, she’d thought, contemplating snowshoes and a parka but actually putting on her good blue wool suit. There was only one thing native costume reminded her of: the cover picture on the Missionary Sunday School paper they’d once handed out, which showed children from all the countries of the world dancing in a circle around a smiling white-faced Jesus in a bedsheet. That, and the poem in the Golden Windows Reader:

  Little Indian, Sioux or Cree,

  Oh, don’t you wish that you were me?

  The awful thing, as she told Lelah later, was that she was the only one who’d gone. “She had all this food ready, and not a single other person was there. She was really upset, and I was so embarrassed for her. It was some Friends of Foreign Students thing, just for women: students and the wives of students. She obviously didn’t think I was foreign enough, and she couldn’t figure out why no one else came.” Neither could Ann, who had stayed far too long and had eaten platefuls of crackers and cheese she didn’t want in order to soothe her hostess’ thwarted sense of hospitality. The woman, who had tastefully-streaked ash-blonde hair and a livingroom filled with polished and satiny traditional surfaces, had alternately urged her to eat and stared at the door, as if expecting a parade of foreigners in their native costumes to come trooping gratefully through it.

  Lelah smiled, showing her wise tooth. “Don’t they know any better than to throw those things at night?” she said. “Those men aren’t going to let their wives go out by themselves at night. And the single ones are afraid to walk on the streets alone, I know I am.”

  “I’m not,” Ann said, “as long as you stay on the main ones, where it’s lighted.”

  “Then you’re a fool,” Lelah said. “Don’t you know there was a girl murdered three blocks from here? Left her bathroom window unlocked. Some man climbed through the window and cut her throat.”

  “I always carry my umbrella,” Ann said. Of course there were certain places where you just didn’t go. Scollay Square, for instance, where the prostitutes hung out and you might get followed, or worse. She tried to explain to Lelah that she wasn’t used to this, to any of this, that in Toronto you could walk all over the city, well, almost anywhere, and never have any trouble. She went on to say that no one here seemed to understand that she wasn’t like them, she came from a different country, it wasn’t the same; but Lelah was quickly bored by this. She had to get back to Tolstoy, she said, putting out her cigarette in her unfinished cup of instant coffee. (Not strong enough for her, I suppose, Ann thought)

  “You shouldn’t worry,” she said. “You’re well off. At least your family doesn’t almost disown you for doing what you want to do.” Lelah’s father kept writing her letters, urging her to return to Turkey, where the family had decided on the perfect husband for her. Lelah had stalled them for one year, and maybe she could stall them for one more, but that would be her limit. She couldn’t possibly finish her thesis in that time.

  Ann hadn’t seen much of her since she’d moved out. You lost sight of people quickly here, in the ever-shifting population of hopeful and despairing transients.

  No one wrote her letters urging her to come home, no one had picked out the perfect husband for her. On the contrary. She could imagine her mot
her’s defeated look, the greying and sinking of her face, if she were suddenly to announce that she was going to quit school, trade in her ambitions for fate, and get married. Even her father wouldn’t like it. Finish what you start, he’d say, I didn’t and look what happened to me. The bungalow at the top of Avenue Road, beside a gas station, with the roar of the expressway always there, like the sea, and fumes blighting the Chinese elm hedge her mother had planted to conceal the pumps. Both her brothers had dropped out of high school; they weren’t the good students Ann had been. One worked in a print shop now and had a wife; the other had drifted to Vancouver, and no one knew what he did. She remembered her first real boyfriend, beefy, easygoing Bill Decker, with his two-tone car that kept losing the muffler. They’d spent a lot of time parked on side streets, rubbing against each other through all those layers of clothes. But even in that sensual mist, the cocoon of breath and skin they’d spun around each other, those phone conversations that existed as a form of touch, she’d known this was not something she could get too involved in. He was probably flabby by now, settled. She’d had relationships with men since then, but she had treated them the same way. Circumspect.

  Not that Mrs. Nolan’s back room was any step up. Out one window there was a view of the funeral home next door; out the other was the yard, which the Nolan kids had scraped clean of grass and which was now a bog of half-frozen mud. Their dog, a mongrelized German Shepherd, was kept tied there, where the kids alternately hugged and tormented it. (“Jimmy! Donny! Now you leave that dog alone!” “Don’t do that, he’s filthy! Look at you!” Ann covering her ears, reading about underground malls.) She’d tried to fix the room up, she’d hung a Madras spread as a curtain in front of the cooking area, she’d put up several prints, Braque still lifes of guitars and soothing Cubist fruit, and she was growing herbs on her windowsill; she needed surroundings that at least tried not to be ugly. But none of these things helped much. At night she wore earplugs. She hadn’t known about the scarcity of good rooms, hadn’t realized that the whole area was a student slum, that the rents would be so high, the available places so dismal. Next year would be different; she’d get here early and have the pick of the crop. Mrs. Nolan’s was definitely a leftover. You could do much better for the money; you could even have a whole apartment, if you were willing to live in the real slum that spread in narrow streets of three-storey frame houses, fading mustard yellow and soot grey, nearer the river. Though Ann didn’t think she was quite up to that. Something in one of the good old houses, on a quiet back street, with a little stained glass, would be more like it. Her friend Jetske had a place like that.