Wilderness Tips

by Margaret Atwood

  Who knows how many trees there were on the cliff just before Lucy disappeared? Who counted? Maybe there was one more, afterwards.

  Lois sits in her chair and does not move. Her hand with the cup is raised halfway to her mouth. She hears something, almost hears it: a shout of recognition, or of joy.

  She looks at the paintings, she looks into them. Every one of them is a picture of Lucy. You can't see her exactly, but she's there, in behind the pink stone island or the one behind that. In the picture of the cliff she is hidden by the clutch of fallen rocks towards the bottom, in the one of the river shore she is crouching beneath the overturned canoe. In the yellow autumn woods she's behind the tree that cannot be seen because of the other trees, over beside the blue sliver of pond; but if you walked into the picture and found the tree, it would be the wrong one, because the right one would be further on.

  Everyone has to be somewhere, and this is where Lucy is. She is in Lois's apartment, in the holes that open inwards on the wall, not like windows but like doors. She is here. She is entirely alive.

  Uncles

  When she was nearly five, Susanna did a tap dance on a cheese box. The cheese box was cylindrical and made of wood, and decorated with white crepe paper and criss-crossed red ribbons to look like a drum. There were two other cheese boxes with girls on them, but their decorations were blue. Susanna's was the only red one. She was in the centre, and she was also the youngest and the smallest. She had to be lifted up. In the back, behind, there were three rows of other girls who were not good enough to be up on cheese boxes.

  It was for a recital. Susanna wore white socks and shoes and a red hair-ribbon, and a white sailor dress with red braid painstakingly stitched around the square collar by her mother, who could pull herself up out of her daily lethargy for special occasions and clothes. Before the recital Susanna became overexcited backstage and had to go to the bathroom three times; but once she was out on the stage, under the lights, she was fine and did not miss a beat.

  The tune was "Anchors Aweigh." Everything for girls was military that year, because it was still the war. In the magazines there were pictures of women in white navy-cut shorts and middy blouses tied so that their tummies showed, and sailor hats cocked on their heads, looking sideways out with pert, impudent expressions, or with surprised pouts. These women, and these outfits, were said to be cute as a button, which was what was said about Susanna also. Susanna didn't see what was so cute about buttons. She found them hard to do up. But she knew when something good was being said about her.

  It was the aunts who said it. They came with their husbands, the uncles, and sat in the front row, and hugged and kissed Susanna insincerely with their stiff arms and powdery faces. The uncles said little and did not hug or kiss. But Susanna wriggled away from the aunts and ran to be taken out of the auditorium in glory, swinging like a monkey between two of the uncles. It was the uncles that counted.

  Susanna's mother came too, of course. Her father didn't come because he had been lost in the war. No one said killed, so Susanna got the idea that he was wandering around somewhere - she pictured a vacant lot, like the one at the end of her street, where she was forbidden to play - trying to find his way home.

  Susanna repeated the tap dance on Sunday afternoons, for the benefit of the uncles. It was summer, and they would sit on the front porch after dinner. It was when people still sat on their front porches, in rocking chairs or on porch swings. Susanna's front porch had both; the uncles used the chairs. They would be sitting in the sun, blinking like bears, drinking a glass of beer each. They only drank one or two glasses, and never anything stronger; still, the aunts didn't think they should do it on the porch, where people could see. The uncles paid no attention. They blinked, and kept on drinking.

  There were three of them, all fair-haired, balding, and red-faced. They were big men. You did not say "fat" about men. They were strong, too; when they came over to mow Susanna's mother's lawn - they took turns doing it - they would use only one hand to push the lawn mower. They could hold one arm out straight and Susanna could sit on it, steadying herself against their massive beet-coloured necks. They were not rich, but they were comfortable. That was what her mother called it, and Susanna thought this was right: they were like easy chairs. One of them had the hardware store, another was the bank manager, the third was in insurance. This was why the aunts worried about the beer.

  Their conversation on the porch was minimal, so there was lots of room for Susanna, in her ruffled yellow cotton sun-dress, to hum the tune, stamp her feet, hop up and down, tap her heels and toes, do the salutes. The uncles would beam and clap, and afterwards she would get to sit on one of their enormous laps and smell their beery, soapy, shaving-lotion smells and go through their pockets, looking for the Chiclets that would be hidden there, or cajole them into doing tricks. They each had a different trick. One could blow smoke rings. Another could make his handkerchief into a mouse that would hop up his arm. The third would sing "Oh Susanna" in a funny woman's voice, squeaky and mournful, making lugubrious faces while he did it. It was about the only time his face ever changed expression.

  "Oh Susanna, oh don't you cry for me...." He would pretend to cry, and Susanna would pretend to console him. This, and these afternoons, set a high standard for delight which in later years she found hard to match.

  Once in a while Susanna's mother would make an appearance on the porch. "Susanna, don't show off," she would say, or, "Susanna, don't pester your uncles." Then an uncle would say, "She's no trouble, Mae." Mostly Susanna's mother stayed in the kitchen, doing the dishes along with the aunts, which in Susanna's opinion was where they all belonged.

  It was the aunts who brought most of the food for the Sunday dinners. They would arrive with roasts, lemon meringue pies, cookies, jars of their own pickles. Her mother might cook some potatoes, or make a jellied salad. Not a great deal was expected of her, because she was a war widow; she was still getting over the loss, and she had a child to bring up single-handed. On the outside it didn't seem to bother her. She was cheerful and rounded, and slow-moving by nature. The uncles had clubbed together to buy her the house, because she was their little sister, they had all grown up on a farm together, they were close.

  The aunts had a hard time forgiving this. It would come up at the dinner table, in oblique references to how you had to scrimp to meet two sets of mortgage payments. The uncles would look at their wives with baffled reproach, and pass their plates down to Susanna's mother for another helping of mashed potatoes. You could not turn your own flesh and blood out on the streets to starve. Susanna knew this because she heard an uncle saying it as he lumbered down the front walk to his car.

  "You didn't have to get such a big house," the aunt said. "It's almost as big as ours." Her high heels clipped on the cement as she hurried to keep up. All of the aunts were small, brisk women, with short legs.

  Susanna was rocking in the giant white wicker rocker on the porch. She stopped rocking and scrunched down so her head was out of sight, to listen in.

  "Come on, Adele," said the uncle. "You wouldn't want them living in a hut."

  "She could get a job." This was an insult and the aunt knew it. It would mean that the uncle could not provide.

  "Who would look after Susanna?" said the uncle, coming to a stop while he hunted for his keys. "Not you, that's for sure."

  There was a note of bitterness in the uncle's voice that was new to Susanna. She felt sorry for him. For the aunt she felt no pity.

  The uncles had children, but they were all boys, and older. They ran in a pack. They were told to sit up straight, to take their fingers out of their ears. They were told they had dirty fingernails. They were forbidden to talk back. "Don't be a smart aleck," they were told. They took it out on the local cats, in the vacant lot, with stones and slingshots. When they were over for Sunday dinner they ignored Susanna, or stared at her across the table with impersonal disdain. Susanna stayed out of their way, and within reach of the protective
shadows cast by the uncles on the porch floor. The uncles would take care of her; she knew she was valuable to them. Yet in another way she was unimportant. It didn't really matter whether she sat up straight or not. She could put her finger into her ear, she could be a smart aleck. She could do whatever she liked, and still be cute as a button.

  When she was old enough to go to school, the more sentimental of her teachers would attempt to coddle her, because she had no father. "But I have three uncles," she would say, and they would shake their heads and sigh. But three were better than one.

  She did have a father, in a way. He was in two pictures: one of him alone on the mantelpiece over the fireplace with its glass coals that lit up when you turned the switch, one on her mother's dressing table, of the two of them. In both he was in uniform. In the mantelpiece picture he was solemn and unsmiling, his dark eyes looking straight out from his thin face with an expression that made Susanna uneasy. Sometimes it was like longing, at others like determination; or fear, or anger.

  The summer she was ten, Susanna decided to lay a flower in front of this picture every day. The flowers were always marigolds, because that was the only kind Susanna's mother ever got around to planting, in a straggly, unweeded row along the two sides of the front walk. Susanna kept the flowers up for almost a month. Her mother thought it was because she loved her father, or this is what Susanna overheard her telling the aunts in the kitchen. But it was not. How could she love someone she'd never known? The flowers were because she didn't love him, but was terrified he would find out. She didn't want him reading her thoughts, as it was well known God did; so why not dead people, who were in the same place? During this time his expression seemed to be one of pure and intense resentment. He hated it that he was dead, and Susanna herself was still alive.

  At times she indulged in the old fantasy that he was only lost, that he would come back. But what if he did? She had several nightmares about it, this return: a long shadow coming in through her bedroom door, a pair of baleful eyes. He might not like her.

  In the dressing-table picture he was different. For one thing, he was handsomer. He was looking down at the ground, smiling as if embarrassed. Her mother, apple-cheeked and only eighteen, too young, as she never tired of saying, was holding on to his arm, gazing at the camera with a soulful, pensive smirk Susanna had never seen on her in daily life. This picture was a disappointment, because it was a wedding picture but Susanna's mother was only wearing an ordinary hat and dress, not a long white gown. Susanna's mother explained that this was because of the war. People got married in a hurry then, they didn't have time for all the trimmings.

  Susanna put it down to laziness: really it was because her mother couldn't be bothered. She cut corners in the housekeeping too. Susanna had seen the aunts tut-tutting over the part of the kitchen floor that was under the kitchen table, or taking the jumble of tea towels out of the drawer where they'd been stuffed and refolding them neatly, or twitching weeds out from among the ratty marigolds as they went down the walk. In some ways the aunts regarded Susanna's house as their own. They pointedly gave Susanna's mother fancy aprons for Christmas, but it did no good. The aprons too were stuffed into drawers, and Susanna's mother spent hours in the bath, or lying on her unmade bed in her slip reading women's magazines, or doing her nails in front of her dressing-table mirror even though she wasn't going out, and the dirty laundry accumulated in stale, fragrant little piles in the corners of her room. Even her sewing projects went as often as not unfinished; there were cutout dresses pinned into bundles and crammed behind the magazine rack; there were stray threads on the chesterfield that clung to you when you stood up.

  The good part was that she didn't expect Susanna to help that much. When she hit the age of twelve and began to take home economics in school, Susanna would sometimes clean up in self-defence, or nag her mother. This too had no effect.

  Susanna herself was not lazy, though she didn't put much effort into the tea towels. That was aunts' work. She was thin and wiry, more like her father's side of the family, and she had the energy to go with it. In grade nine she did high jumping, and after that volleyball. She was in the Drama Club, which put on one-act plays with no dubious language in them, and also Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, varied occasionally by Oklahoma! and Brigadoon. The uncles came and sat in the front row, and beamed and clapped. They were older now and redder, and almost completely bald. They still came to do the lawn, though by this time they had a power mower. Susanna put her head to one side and smiled roguishly at them and sang and danced; though she knew that singing and dancing was no longer quite enough to please them.

  One of the uncles, the one with the hardware store, took her aside one Sunday and told her she had a head on her shoulders and ought to use it. Another, the banker, said that a knowledge of double-entry bookkeeping never hurt you in any line of work, and showed her how to do it. The third said she should not throw herself away by getting married too soon, and that a woman who knew how to earn a living would never have to be dependent. Susanna knew they were talking about her mother. She paid attention.

  In the last years of high school, Susanna studied hard and performed well - "performed well" was what the uncles said - and won a small scholarship to university. The uncles paid for the rest. Their own sons had not turned out as well as expected. One of them had become a ballet dancer.

  Soon after Susanna graduated, in a black gown, with the uncles applauding and the aunts beside them smiling their tight little smiles because they knew how much it had cost, the uncles died, one after the other. They had remained big eaters, lovers of roast beef and fried chicken, of whipped cream and thick slabs of pie. They had never grown any thinner, only softer. They all died suddenly, of heart attacks, and for a time Susanna felt the world had gone deaf.

  Each of the uncles had left some money to Susanna's mother, and some to Susanna as well. Not a lot, but it was too much for the aunts, who felt that enough had been spent on Susanna already. When, soon afterwards, her mother married again, a man she'd met through the uncles - a widower, once in the roofing business, now retired - and went to live in California, they were even more outraged. Her mother's worst crime was to sell the house and keep the money for herself. They felt it should have gone to them, because of everything the uncles had invested. That the widower was well off made it worse. They took his wealth as a personal affront.

  This was a relief for Susanna: she no longer had to pretend to like them. She found a job in Toronto, a minor job with one of the big daily papers, compiling obituaries and birth notices and accounts of weddings and doing dogsbody research. She was marking time. The money from the uncles was stowed safely away in the bank. She could have used it to go on in school, in graduate school or one of the professions; her marks were high enough. But although she was good at a lot of things, there was nothing in particular she especially wanted to do.

  It was the same with men. She'd had boyfriends over the years, by this time even a couple of lovers, but they were her own age and she had trouble taking them seriously. She told them jokes when the conversation got too personal, when they wanted to know what she really felt about them; she teased, asked impudent questions, pushed herself into their privacy. She had the knack of appearing warmly interested, although she was not. Curious was more like it. She assumed that flirtation was harmless, and that men would always indulge her. There had been some bad scenes. Angry boys had cornered her in the kitchen at parties, or in the room where the coats were piled, and accused her of leading them on. She'd had a couple of narrow escapes from parked cars. She'd laughed during a marriage proposal; she hadn't meant to be nasty, but the idea had struck her as funny. The man threw a plate at her, but he was drunk. It was at another party, and that was what men did at parties, then.

  Susanna's reaction on these occasions was never anger, only surprise. The surprise was that she had somehow failed to please.

  At the newspaper there was one man she truly admired. His name was Percy
Marrow. He did most of the cultural things: not that there were many of them in Toronto, in those days. But if a play came to town it was Percy who reviewed it; or a dance company from England, or a visiting string quartet. Percy was known to take trips to New York, although the paper didn't pay for them. This gave him a cosmopolitan outlook: he was fond of decrying the provincial tastes and boorishness of the locals. He did jazz too, and film reviews, and sometimes a book. He did these things because nobody else at the paper wanted to do them.

  "Percy does all the fairy stuff," was how it was explained to Susanna in the newsroom, which she had to walk through in order to get to her own cramped desk with its stacks of the newly married and the freshly dead. The newsroom prided itself on being rough on people. Percy Marrow was known there, behind his back, as Vedge, which was short for vegetable marrow. This was cruel, because it did describe his shape. From a distance, which was the only vantage point from which Susanna had yet seen him, he looked like Humpty Dumpty, or like Mr. Weatherbee, the bald egg-shaped high-school principal in the Archie comic books. The photo of his head that appeared above his weekly "Doings Around Town" column resembled a peeled potato, with small features glued on, old-fashioned rimless half-glasses, and a little tuft of fuzz on top.

  "Don't be so mean," Susanna said when she first heard his nickname. "He's not fat. He's just big."

  "Susie-Q's sticking up for Vedge," said Marty, the sports editor. "Vedge is a busy bee. He looks after himself."

  "Vedge is a pompous twit," said Bill, who was an imported Cockney and did hard news such as murders. He was the paper's pet left-winger, excused because he was foreign. "All those artsy-fartsies are."

  "Artsy-fatsies," said Cam, who covered politicians and was the most cynical of them all.

  Susanna, who usually joked back with them, found herself getting angry. She thought they were jealous because Percy Marrow knew a lot more than they did, about more interesting things. But she knew better than to say this. She walked past them to her desk, through the smoke-filled, raucous, clattering air, followed by the yum-yum noises and lip-smackings that were their habit.