Wilderness Tips

by Margaret Atwood

  "How sweet of you to include me," she said. It would be like the "Oh Susanna" piece he'd done about the radio show, no doubt. About her verve and her nerve. She squeezed his arm, and kissed him goodbye on the cheek.

  When Percy's book came out half a year later, it was Bill who phoned her about it. "It's called Stellar Heights," he said. "All about the famous creeps he has known and whether their knickers smell. You're not going to like it."

  "Why?" she said, not believing him. He'd always disliked Percy.

  "Hatchet job, I'd say," said Bill. "Not just a mention. Twenty pages of you. Didn't know the old man had so much bad blood in him."

  "Oh well," she said, catching her breath, trying to laugh it off. "Who's going to read it?"

  "The paper's done an excerpt," he said. "The stuff about you. Almost the whole bit."

  "Why me?" she said. The decision must have been his.

  "Stands to reason," he said. "You're the most prominent person in there, at least for the locals, and he knocks the stuffing out of you."

  "You shit!"

  "Grow up, Susanna. You know the business. It sells copies. But I thought I should warn you."

  "Thanks a heap," she said. She slammed down the phone and went out for a paper. There was a large picture of her, a smaller one of Percy, and a big black header: DRAGON LADY REVEALED. She took it back to her office and closed the door, and told the switchboard she was in a meeting.

  It was all there - their first encounter, their friendship, almost every conversation they'd ever had. Percy had total recall, of a kind. But it was all skewed. How she'd jumped him at the water cooler as a raw girl from the sticks, practically drooling with ambition. How he'd discovered her single-handed, and nursed her along through the initial fumblings and stumblings. How greener pastures had beckoned; how she never called her old newspaper buddies any more. How her path was strewn with the bodies she'd stepped on, going up. A small-town girl with a heart of nails. As for her effortless friendliness, her enthusiastic, puppyish charm, her face of a healthy kindergarten teacher that photographed so well, it was all done with lights and mirrors, and calculation. There was even a hint - though he didn't come right out and say it - that she'd married Emmett for the money.

  There was nothing about how she'd defended him, in the newsroom, behind his back; how she'd stuck up for him and trusted him. That was the worst: she'd trusted him. He was supposed to be older, benign, receptive, appreciative of her. Instead he was spiteful. Petty and malicious. She couldn't understand how she'd been so wrong about him, for so many years.

  She went home and got into the bathtub, where she cried for half an hour with the soapsuds running down her. Then she called the studio. "I have to cancel tomorrow's show. Get a substitute, or something. I'm running a temperature."

  "What is it? Nothing serious, I hope?" Already she could hear the speculation, the unasked questions.

  "Who cares?" she said. "Tell them leukaemia."

  Then she called Bill at the newspaper. "Why did he do that to me?" she said. "I was always so nice to him."

  "Tell a skunk about nice," said Bill. "I warned you, if you'll recall. Come on, buck up, you've had bad press before."

  "Not that bad," she said. "Not from a friend."

  "Some friend," said Bill. "Face it, Susie. He's jealous of you."

  "Why is he jealous?" said Susanna. "Men shouldn't be jealous of women."

  "Why not?" said Bill.

  "Because they're men!" Because I'm the smallest, because I'm the youngest, she was thinking. Because they're bigger.

  "Everyone in the universe is jealous of you, Susie-Q," said Bill in a tired voice. "You've got it all. I'm jealous of you. I just have different ways of showing it, like being the first to tell you about Vedge's nasty little book. It would help if you broke your leg or got a pimple. People don't think of you as human, you know."

  "It isn't fair," said Susanna. She was crying again.

  "Never mind, it's already coming back on him. I've seen two interviews already. He keeps trying to talk about himself, but all they want to ask him about is you. It's like watching an ant trying to get out of a teacup."

  "What about me?"

  "Whether you wear rubber underwear. Whether your claws light up in the dark. Whether you're really Super-bitch. He hems and haws, and says you can be nice on occasion."

  "Oh great. I'm going to have to live with this."

  "Don't take it so hard, Susie," said Bill. "It's only old Vedge. Nobody cares what he says, really. You're all right, you know. A bit snobby of late, but all right."

  "Thank you, Bill," said Susanna. She felt unusually grateful.

  She climbed into bed in her dressing gown with a box of Kleenex, and tried to watch a cop show on television. She thought it would help to see people murdering one another. But she couldn't concentrate, so she turned it off. She was shivering. She felt betrayed, bereft. Loss of face, the Japanese called it. They knew. She felt as though her face, so carefully prepared and nourished, had been ripped off.

  When Emmett came home he found her in the darkened bedroom. She held on to him, and cried and cried.

  "Honey, what's wrong?" he said. "I've never seen you like this."

  "Do you think I'm a nice person?" she said, while he cradled her and stroked her hair. She no longer trusted herself to know how he felt about her.

  After a while she stopped crying and blew her nose. She asked him not to turn on the light; she knew her face was all puffy. "Maybe I've remembered my whole life wrong," she told him. "Maybe I've been wrong about everyone."

  "I'll get you a drink," Emmett said, as if to a sick child. "We'll talk about it." He patted her hand and left the room.

  Susanna lay propped up, gazing through the twilight at the opposite wall. She was back in the auditorium, at the recital, in her sailor suit and her flapping red hair-ribbon, on top of the cheese box in the glare of the lights, hopping up and down and grinning like a trained monkey, making a fool of herself. Sassy and obsolete; a show-off, an obnoxious brat. Was that how the uncles had really seen her, all along?

  But the uncles were not there, in the front row where they should have been, beaming at her, applauding. Instead there was only her mother, in the wedding-picture dress, looking sideways off into the wings, bored by her dance. Beside her sat Susanna's lost father, come home at last from the war, from the vacant lot. He was in his uniform. His face was thin and resentful. He was staring at her with hate.

  The Age of Lead

  The man has been buried for a hundred and fifty years. They dug a hole in the frozen gravel, deep into the permafrost, and put him down there so the wolves couldn't get to him. Or that is the speculation.

  When they dug the hole the permafrost was exposed to the air, which was warmer. This made the permafrost melt. But it froze again after the man was covered up, so that when he was brought to the surface he was completely enclosed in ice. They took the lid off the coffin and it was like those maraschino cherries you used to freeze in ice-cube trays for fancy tropical drinks: a vague shape, looming through a solid cloud.

  Then they melted the ice and he came to light. He is almost the same as when he was buried. The freezing water has pushed his lips away from his teeth into an astonished snarl, and he's a beige colour, like a gravy stain on linen, instead of pink, but everything is still there. He even has eyeballs, except that they aren't white but the light brown of milky tea. With these tea-stained eyes he regards Jane: an indecipherable gaze, innocent, ferocious, amazed, but contemplative, like a werewolf meditating, caught in a flash of lightning at the exact split second of his tumultuous change.

  Jane doesn't watch very much television. She used to watch it more. She used to watch comedy series, in the evenings, and when she was a student at university she would watch afternoon soaps about hospitals and rich people, as a way of procrastinating. For a while, not so long ago, she would watch the evening news, taking in the disasters with her feet tucked up on the chesterfield, a throw rug ov
er her legs, drinking a hot milk and rum to relax before bed. It was all a form of escape.

  But what you can see on the television, at whatever time of day, is edging too close to her own life; though in her life, nothing stays put in those tidy compartments, comedy here, seedy romance and sentimental tears there, accidents and violent deaths in thirty-second clips they call bites, as if they were chocolate bars. In her life, everything is mixed together. Laugh, I thought I'd die, Vincent used to say, a very long time ago, in a voice imitating the banality of mothers; and that's how it's getting to be. So when she flicks on the television these days, she flicks it off again soon enough. Even the commercials, with their surreal dailiness, are beginning to look sinister, to suggest meanings behind themselves, behind their facade of cleanliness, lusciousness, health, power, and speed.

  Tonight she leaves the television on, because what she is seeing is so unlike what she usually sees. There is nothing sinister behind this image of the frozen man. It is entirely itself. What you sees is what you gets, as Vincent also used to say, crossing his eyes, baring his teeth at one side, pushing his nose into a horror-movie snout. Although it never was, with him.

  The man they've dug up and melted was a young man. Or still is: it's difficult to know what tense should be applied to him, he is so insistently present. Despite the distortions caused by the ice and the emaciation of his illness, you can see his youthfulness, the absence of toughening, of wear. According to the dates painted carefully onto his nameplate, he was only twenty years old. His name was John Torrington. He was, or is, a sailor, a seaman. He wasn't an able-bodied seaman though; he was a petty officer, one of those marginally in command. Being in command has little to do with the ableness of the body.

  He was one of the first to die. This is why he got a coffin and a metal nameplate, and a deep hole in the permafrost - because they still had the energy, and the piety, for such things, that early. There would have been a burial service read over him, and prayers. As time went on and became nebulous and things did not get better, they must have kept the energy for themselves; and also the prayers. The prayers would have ceased to be routine and become desperate, and then hopeless. The later dead ones got cairns of piled stones, and the much later ones not even that. They ended up as bones, and as the soles of boots and the occasional button, sprinkled over the frozen stony treeless relentless ground in a trail heading south. It was like the trails in fairy tales, of bread crumbs or seeds or white stones. But in this case nothing had sprouted or lit up in the moonlight, forming a miraculous pathway to life; no rescuers had followed. It took ten years before anyone knew even the barest beginnings of what had been happening to them.

  All of them together were the Franklin Expedition. Jane has seldom paid much attention to history except when it has overlapped with her knowledge of antique furniture and real estate - "19th C. pine harvest table," or "Prime location Georgian centre hall, impeccable reno" - but she knows what the Franklin Expedition was. The two ships with their bad-luck names have been on stamps - the Terror, the Erebus. Also she took it in school, along with a lot of other doomed expeditions. Not many of those explorers seemed to have come out of it very well. They were always getting scurvy, or lost.

  What the Franklin Expedition was looking for was the Northwest Passage, an open seaway across the top of the Arctic, so people, merchants, could get to India from England without going all the way around South America. They wanted to go that way because it would cost less and increase their profits. This was much less exotic than Marco Polo or the headwaters of the Nile; nevertheless, the idea of exploration appealed to her then: to get onto a boat and just go somewhere, somewhere mapless, off into the unknown. To launch yourself into fright; to find things out. There was something daring and noble about it, despite all of the losses and failures, or perhaps because of them. It was like having sex, in high school, in those days before the Pill, even if you took precautions. If you were a girl, that is. If you were a boy, for whom such a risk was fairly minimal, you had to do other things: things with weapons or large amounts of alcohol, or high-speed vehicles, which at her suburban Toronto high school, back then at the beginning of the sixties, meant switchblades, beer, and drag races down the main streets on Saturday nights.

  Now, gazing at the television as the lozenge of ice gradually melts and the outline of the young sailor's body clears and sharpens, Jane remembers Vincent, sixteen and with more hair then, quirking one eyebrow and lifting his lip in a mock sneer and saying, "Franklin, my dear, I don't give a damn." He said it loud enough to be heard, but the history teacher ignored him, not knowing what else to do. It was hard for the teachers to keep Vincent in line, because he never seemed to be afraid of anything that might happen to him.

  He was hollow-eyed even then; he frequently looked as if he'd been up all night. Even then he resembled a very young old man, or else a dissipated child. The dark circles under his eyes were the ancient part, but when he smiled he had lovely small white teeth, like the magazine ads for baby foods. He made fun of everything, and was adored. He wasn't adored the way other boys were adored, those boys with surly lower lips and greased hair and a studied air of smouldering menace. He was adored like a pet. Not a dog, but a cat. He went where he liked, and nobody owned him. Nobody called him Vince.

  Strangely enough, Jane's mother approved of him. She didn't usually approve of the boys Jane went out with. Maybe she approved of him because it was obvious to her that no bad results would follow from Jane's going out with him: no heartaches, no heaviness, nothing burdensome. None of what she called consequences. Consequences: the weightiness of the body, the growing flesh hauled around like a bundle, the tiny frill-framed goblin head in the carriage. Babies and marriage, in that order. This was how she understood men and their furtive, fumbling, threatening desires, because Jane herself had been a consequence. She had been a mistake, she had been a war baby. She had been a crime that had needed to be paid for, over and over.

  By the time she was sixteen, Jane had heard enough about this to last her several lifetimes. In her mother's account of the way things were, you were young briefly and then you fell. You plummeted downwards like an overripe apple and hit the ground with a squash; you fell, and everything about you fell too. You got fallen arches and a fallen womb, and your hair and teeth fell out. That's what having a baby did to you. It subjected you to the force of gravity.

  This is how she remembers her mother, still: in terms of a pendulous, drooping, wilting motion. Her sagging breasts, the down-turned lines around her mouth. Jane conjures her up: there she is, as usual, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of cooling tea, exhausted after her job clerking at Eaton's department store, standing all day behind the jewellery counter with her bum stuffed into a girdle and her swelling feet crammed into the mandatory medium-heeled shoes, smiling her envious, disapproving smile at the spoiled customers who turned up their noses at pieces of glittering junk she herself could never afford to buy. Jane's mother sighs, picks at the canned spaghetti Jane has heated up for her. Silent words waft out of her like stale talcum powder: What can you expect, always a statement, never a question. Jane tries at this distance for pity, but comes up with none.

  As for Jane's father, he'd run away from home when Jane was five, leaving her mother in the lurch. That's what her mother called it - "running away from home" - as if he'd been an irresponsible child. Money arrived from time to time, but that was the sum total of his contribution to family life. Jane resented him for it, but she didn't blame him. Her mother inspired in almost everyone who encountered her a vicious desire for escape.

  Jane and Vincent would sit out in the cramped backyard of Jane's house, which was one of the squinty-windowed little stuccoed wartime bungalows at the bottom of the hill. At the top of the hill were the richer houses, and the richer people: the girls who owned cashmere sweaters, at least one of them, instead of the Orion and lambswool so familiar to Jane. Vincent lived about halfway up the hill. He still had a father, in t
heory.

  They would sit against the back fence, near the spindly cosmos flowers that passed for a garden, as far away from the house itself as they could get. They would drink gin, decanted by Vincent from his father's liquor hoard and smuggled in an old military pocket flask he'd picked up somewhere. They would imitate their mothers.

  "I pinch and I scrape and I work my fingers to the bone, and what thanks do I get?" Vincent would say peevishly. "No help from you, Sonny Boy. You're just like your father. Free as the birds, out all night, do as you like and you don't care one pin about anyone else's feelings. Now take out that garbage."

  "It's love that does it to you," Jane would reply, in the resigned, ponderous voice of her mother. "You wait and see, my girl. One of these days you'll come down off your devil-may-care high horse." As Jane said this, and even though she was making fun, she could picture love, with a capital L, descending out of the sky towards her like a huge foot. Her mother's life had been a disaster, but in her own view an inevitable disaster, as in songs and movies. It was Love that was responsible, and in the face of Love, what could be done? Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it, it went over you and you came out flat.

  Jane's mother waited, fearfully and uttering warnings, but with a sort of gloating relish, for the same thing to happen to Jane. Every time Jane went out with a new boy her mother inspected him as a potential agent of downfall. She distrusted most of these boys; she distrusted their sulky, pulpy mouths, their eyes half-closed in the up-drifting smoke of their cigarettes, their slow, sauntering manner of walking, their clothing that was too tight, too full: too full of their bodies. They looked this way even when they weren't putting on the sulks and swaggers, when they were trying to appear bright-eyed and industrious and polite for Jane's mother's benefit, saying goodbye at the front door, dressed in their shirts and ties and their pressed heavy-date suits. They couldn't help the way they looked, the way they were. They were helpless; one kiss in a dark corner would reduce them to speechlessness; they were sleepwalkers in their own liquid bodies. Jane, on the other hand, was wide awake.