Dancing Girls and Other Stories Part 7

I called you from the Boston train station. You accepted my early return with your usual fatalism, expressing neither glee nor surprise. You were supposed to be doing work on ambiguity in Tennyson's "Locksley Hall," which, you in-formed me, was clearly out of the question. Ambiguity was big in those days.

We went for a walk instead. It was milder and the snow was turning to mush; we ended up at the Charles River, where we rolled s...o...b..a.l.l.s and pitched them into the water. After that we constructed a damp statue of Queen Victoria, complete with jutting bosom, monumental bustle and hooked nose, then demolished it with s...o...b..a.l.l.s and chunks of ice, sn.i.g.g.e.ring at intervals with what I then thought was liberated abandon but now recognize as hyste-ria.

And then, and then. What did I have on? My coat, of course, and a different skirt, a sickly greenish plaid; the same sweater with the burnt hole in it. We slithered to-gether through the partially frozen slush beside the river, holding each other's chilly hands. It was evening and getting colder. From time to time we stopped, to jump up and down and kiss each other, in order to keep warm. On the oily surface of the Charles were reflected, like bright mi-rages, the towers and belfries from which the spring exami-nation hopeless ones would later hurl themselves, as they did every year; in its sludgey depths floated the literary sui-cides, Faulkner's among them, encrusted with crystalline words and glittering like eyes; but we were reckless, we sang in mockery of them, a ragged duet: Two old chairs, and half a candle, One old jug without a handle....

For once you were laughing. I renounced my carefully con-structed script, the ending I had planned for us. The future opened like a wide-screen vista, promising and dangerous, any direction was possible. I felt as if I was walking along the edge of a high bridge. It seemed to us-at least it seemed to me-that wewere actually happy.

When the cold was finally too much for us and you had begun to sneeze, we went to one of the cheap restaurants where, it was rumoured, you could live for nothing by eat-ing the free packets of ketchup, relish and sugar and drink-ing the cream out of the cream-jugs when no one was looking. There we debated the advisability of sleeping to-gether, the pros and cons and, quite soon after that, the ways and means. It was not done lightly, especially by fe-male graduate students, who were supposed to be like nuns, dedicated and unfleshly. Not that in those monastic sur-roundings they had much chance to be anything else, as the male ones mostly went to the opera together in little groups and had sherry parties to which they invited only each other. We both lived in residence; we both had cellmates who were always in the room, biting their nails and com-posing bibliographies. Neither of us had a car, and we were sure the local hotels would reject us. It would have to be somewhere else. We settled on New York at Easter Break.

The day before the trip I went to Filene's Bas.e.m.e.nt and bought, after some deliberation, a red nylon baby-doll nightgown, only one size too big and with a shoulder strap that could easily be sewed back on. I lingered over a mauve one with Carmen-like flounces, but I could wear only one at a time and the money would be needed for other things. On Good Friday I took the bus down to New York. You had left several days earlier, but I had stayed to finish an overdue essay on Mrs. Radcliffe's The Italian. You yourself had three overdue papers by that time, but you no longer seemed to care. You had been spending a lot of time taking showers, which had annoyed your roommate; you had also been suffering from extended nightmares, which features, as I recall, elephants, alligators and other large animals rolling down hills in wheelchairs, and people being nailed to crosses and incinerated. I viewed these as evidence of your sensitivity.

The plan was that you would stay at the apartment of an old friend from your hometown, while I was to get a single hotel room. This would defeat suspicion, we hoped; also it would be less expensive.

At that time I had never been to New York and I was not prepared for it. At first it made me dizzy. I stood in the Port Authority in my long black coat, with my heavy suit-case and my bottomless purse, looking for a phone booth. The crowd was like a political demonstration, though at that time I had never seen a real one. Women jostled each other and spat insults as if they were slogans, hauling grumpy children in their wake; there was a lineup of seedy old men on the benches, and the floor was dotted with gum, candy wrappers and cigarette stubs. I'm not sure but I think there were pinball machines; can that be possible? I wished now that I had asked you to meet the bus, but such depen-dencies were not part of our understanding.

As I headed for what I guessed was the exit, a black man grabbed hold of my suitcase and began to pull.

He had a fresh cut on his forehead from which the blood was run-ning, and his eyes were filled with such desperation that I almost let go. He was not trying to steal my suitcase, I real-ized after a minute; he just wanted to carry it to a taxi for me.

"No thank you," I said. "No money."

He glanced with scorn at my coat-it was, after all, good quality-and did not let go. I pulled harder and he gave up. He shouted something after me that I didn't un-derstand; those words had not yet become common cur-rency.

I knew the address of the hotel, but I didn't know how to get there. I began to walk. The sun was out and I was sweating, from fright as well as heat. I found a telephone booth: the phone had been eviscerated and was a tangle of wires. The next one was intact, but when I called you there was no answer. This was strange, as I'd told you what time I was arriving.

I leaned against the side of the phone booth, making an effort not to panic. New York had been designed like a barred window, so by looking at the street signs and count-ing, I should be able to deduce the location of the hotel. I did not want to ask anyone: the expressions of blank de-spair or active malice made me nervous, and I had pa.s.sed several people who were talking out loud to themselves. New York, like Salem, appeared to be falling to pieces. A rich person might have seen it as potential urban renewal, but the buildings with chunks missing, the holes in the side-walks, did not rea.s.sure me.

I set out to drag my suitcase to the hotel, stopping at every phone booth to dial your number. In one of these I left your copy of The Education of Henry Adams, by mis-take. It was just as well, as it was the only thing of yours I had; it would have been unlucky to have kept it.

The hotel clerk was nearly as suspicious of me as the one in Salem had been. I had ascribed the distrust of me there to small-town xenophobia, but it occurred to me now for the first time that it might be the way I was dressed. With my cuffs down to my knuckles, I did not look like someone with a credit card.

I sat in my room, which was really very much like the one in Salem, wondering what had happened to you, where you were. I phoned every half hour. There was not much I could do while waiting. I unpacked the red nightgown with the broken strap, only to find I'd forgotten the needle and thread with which I'dintended to repair it; I didn't even have a safety pin. I wanted to take a bath, but the handle of my door kept turning, and although I had fastened the chain I did not want to take the chance. I even kept my coat on. I began to think that you had given me the wrong num-ber, or, worse, that you were something I had invented.

Finally at about seven o'clock someone answered the phone at your end. It was a woman. When I asked for you she laughed, not pleasantly.

"Hey, Voice of Doom," I heard her say. "Some chick wants you." When you came on your voice was even more remote than usual.

"Where were you?" I said, trying not to sound like a nagging wife. "I've been trying to get hold of you since two-thirty."

"It's my friend," you said. "She swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills this morning. I had to walk her around a lot."

"Oh," I said. I'd had the impression that the friend was male. "Couldn't you have taken her to a hospital or some-thing?"

"You don't take people to hospitals here unless you really have to."

"Why did she do it?" I asked.

"Who knows?" you said, in the voice of someone an-noyed at being involved, however peripherally. "To pa.s.s the time, I guess." In the background the woman said some-thing that sounded like "You s.h.i.+t."

The soles of my feet turned cold, my legs went numb. I had realized suddenly that she was not just an old friend, as you had told me. She had been a lover, she was still a lover, she was serious, she had taken the pills because she found out I was arriving that day and she was trying to stop you; yet all this time you were calmly writing down the room number, the phone number, that I was just as calmly giving you. We arranged to meet the next day. I spent the night lying on the bed with my coat on.

Of course you failed to arrive, and by that time I had thought twice about phoning. You did not even return to Boston. In May I got a cryptic note from you on a postcard with a picture of the Atlantic City boardwalk on the front: I ran off to join the Navy but they wouldn't have me, they didn't think Ancient Greek was a good enough qualification. I got a job in a hash joint by lying about my literacy. It's better than jumping off the bell tower. Give my regards to Coromandel.

Ever yours, Bo.

As usual, I couldn't decide whether or not you were sneer-ing.

Of course I mourned; not so much for your departure, as that had been, I now saw, a foregone conclusion, but for its suddenness. I had been deprived of that last necessary scene, the park bench, the light spring wind, the trenchcoat (which I was destined never to buy), your vanis.h.i.+ng figure. Even after I realized that our future would have contained neither the dreaded bungalow and electric razor nor those vague, happy possibilities I had once imagined, but, inevita-ble as a rhymed couplet, an emptied bottle of sleeping pills whose effects you might not have helped me walk off, I continued to mourn.

Because you had not left in the proper way it seemed as though you had never left at all. You hung around, like a miasma or the smell of mice, waiting to deflate my attempts at optimism-for out of sheer fright I soon began to make them-with your own jaundiced view of my behaviour. As if you were my darker twin or an adept in sinister telepathy I could sense on every occasion what your opinion would be.

When I became engaged (seven months later, to an ar-chitect who designed, and continues to design, apartment buildings), you let me know you had expected other things of me. The actual wedding, and yes, I had all the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs including a white gown, filled you with scorn. I could see you in your dingy room, surrounded by empty sardine tins and lint-covered socks, living on nothing but your derision and your refusal to sell out, as I was so palpably doing. (To what? To whom? Unlike later generations, we were never able to pinpoint the enemy.) My two children did not impress you, nor did the aca-demic position which I subsequently achieved. I have be-come, in a minor way, an authority on women domestic novelists of the nineteenth century. I discovered after my marriage that I really had more in common with them than I did with Gothic romances; I suppose this insight into my true character signifies maturity, a word you despise. The most prominent of my subjects is Mrs. Gaskell, but you may have heard of Mrs. J. H. Riddell as well; she wrote also under the pen name of F. G. Trafford. I gave quite a credit-able paper on her George Geith of Fen Court, which was later published in a reputable journal. Needless to say I have tenure, as my department, averse to women for many years, has recently been under some pressure to justify its hiring policies. I am a token, asyou never tire of pointing out. I dress well, too, as befits a token. The drab, defiantly wool-len wardrobe you may remember vanished little by little into the bins of the Salvation Army as I grew richer, and was replaced by a moderately chic collection of pantsuits and brisk dresses. My male colleagues think of me as effi-cient and rather cold. I no longer have casual affairs, as I hate mementoes that cannot be thrown away. My coats no longer flap, and when I attend academic conferences no-body stares.

It was at one of these, the big one, the central flesh market and hiring fair, that I saw you last. Curiously enough, it was held in New York that year. I was giving a paper oh Amelia Edwards and other female journalists of the period. When I saw your name on the agenda I thought it must be someone else. But it was you, all right, and you spent the entire session discussing whether or not John Keats had had syphilis.

You had done a considerable amount of research on the medical uses of mercury in the early part of the century, and your last paragraph was a masterpiece of inconclusion. You had gained weight, in fact you looked healthy, you looked as if you played golf. Though I watched in vain for a sardonic smile: your deliv-ery was deadpan.

Afterwards I went up to congratulate you. You were surprised to see me; you had never thought of me, you said, ending up quite like this, and your possibly dismayed gaze took in my salon haircut, my trim-fitting red jumpsuit, my jaunty boots. You yourself were married, with three chil-dren, and you hastily showed me wallet snapshots, holding them out like protective talismans. I matched them with my own. Neither of us suggested having a drink. We wished each other well; we were both disappointed. You had wanted me, I saw now, to die young of consumption or some equally operatic disease. Underneath it all you too were a romantic.

That should have been that, and I can't understand why it isn't. It is absolutely true that I love my husband and children. In addition to attending faculty meetings, where I crochet afghan squares during discussions of increments and curriculae, I cook them nouris.h.i.+ng meals, arrange birthday parties and make my own bread and pickles, most of the time. My husband admires my achievements and is support-ive, as they say, during my depressions, which become rarer. I have a rich and rewarding s.e.x life, and I can already hear you ridiculing the adjectives, but it is rich and re-warding in spite of you. And you have done no better than I have.

But when I returned from the conference to the house where I live, which is not a bungalow but a two-storey co-lonial and in which, ever since I moved in, you have occu-pied the cellar, you were not gone.

I expected you to have been dispelled, exorcised: you had become real, you had a wife and three snapshots, and ba.n.a.lity is after all the magic antidote for unrequited love. But it was not enough. There you were, in your accustomed place, over by the shelf to the right of the cellar stairs where I keep the preserves, standing dusty and stuffed like Jeremy Bentham in his gla.s.s case, looking at me not with your former scorn, it's true, but with reproach, as if I had let it happen, as if it was my fault. Surely you don't want it back, that misery, those de-caying buildings, that seductive despair and emptiness, that fear? Surely you don't want to be stuck on that slushy Bos-ton street forever. You should have been more careful. I try to tell you it would have ended badly, it was not the way you remember, you are deceiving yourself, but you refuse to be consoled. Goodbye, I tell you, waiting for your glance, pensive, regretful. You are supposed to turn and walk away, past the steamer trunks, around the corner into the laundry room, and vanish behind the twinset washer-dryer; but you do not move.

When It Happens

Mrs. Burridge is putting up green tomato pickles. There are twelve quarts in each lot with a bit left over, and that is the end of the jars. At the store they tell her there's a strike on at the factory where they get made. She doesn't know anything about that but you can't buy them anywhere, and even before this they were double what they were last year; she considers herself lucky she had those in the cellar. She has a lot of green tomatoes because she heard on the weather last night there was going to be a killer frost, so she put on her parka and her work gloves and took the lantern out to the garden in the pitch dark and picked off all the ones she could see, over three bushels. She can lift the full baskets herself but she asked Frank to carry them in for her; he grumbles, but he likes it when she asks. In the morning the news said the growers had been hit and that would shoot the price up, not that the growers would get any of it themselves, every-one knows it's the stores that make the money.

She feels richer than she did yesterday, but on the other hand there isn't that much you can do with green tomatoes. The pickles hardly made a dint in them, and Frank has said, as he does every year, that they will never eat twenty-four quarts of green tomato pickle with just the two of them and the children gone. Exceptwhen they come to visit and eat me out of house and home, Mrs. Burridge adds silently. The truth is she has always made two batches and the children never liked it anyway, it was Frank ate them all and she knows perfectly well he'll do it again, without even notic-ing. He likes it on bread and cheese when he's watching the hockey games, during every commercial he goes out to the kitchen and makes himself another slice, even if he's just had a big meal, leaving a trail of crumbs and bits of pickle from the counter across the floor and over the front room rug to his big chair. It used to annoy Mrs. Burridge, espe-cially the crumbs, but now she watches him with a kind of sadness; she once thought their life together would go on forever but she has come to realize this is not the case.

She doesn't even feel like teasing him about his spare tire any more, though she does it all the same because he would miss it if she stopped. "There you go," she says, in the angular, prodding, metallic voice she cannot change be-cause everyone expects it from her, if she spoke any other way they would think she was ill, "you keep on munching away like that and it'll be easy for me to get you out of bed in the mornings, I'll just give you a push and you'll roll all the way down the stairs like a barrel." And he answers in his methodical voice, pretending to be lazy even though he isn't, "You need a little fun in life," as though his pickles and cheese are slightly disreputable, almost like an orgy. Every year he tells her she's made too much but there would be a fuss all right if he went down to the cellar one day and there wasn't any left.

Mrs. Burridge has made her own pickles since 1952, which was the first year she had the garden. She remembers it especially because her daughter Sarah was on the way and she had trouble bending down to do the weeding. When she herself was growing up everyone did their own pickles, and their own canning and preserving too. But after the war most women gave it up, there was more money then and it was easier to buy things at the store. Mrs. Burridge never gave it up, though most of her friends thought she was wasting her time, and now she is glad she didn't, it kept her in practice while the others were having to learn all over again. Though with the sugar going up the way it is, she can't understand how long anyone is going to be able to afford even the homemade things.

On paper Frank is making more money than he ever has; yet they seem to have less to spend. They could always sell the farm, she supposes, to people from the city who would use it as a weekend place; they could get what seems like a very high price, several of the farms south of them have gone that way.

But Mrs. Burridge does not have much faith in money; also it is a waste of the land, and this is her home, she has it arranged the way she wants it.

When the second batch is on and simmering she goes to the back door, opens it, and stands with her arms folded across her stomach, looking out. She catches herself doing this four or five times a day now and she doesn't quite know why. There isn't much to see, just the barn and the back field with the row of dead elms Frank keeps saying he's going to cut down, and the top of Clarke's place stick-ing over the hill.

She isn't sure what she is looking for but she has the odd idea she may see something burning, smoke coming up from the horizon, a column of it or perhaps more than one column, off to the south. This is such a pe-culiar thought for her to have that she hasn't told it to any-one else. Yesterday Frank saw her standing at the back door and asked her about it at dinner; anything he wants to talk to her about he saves up till dinner, even if he thinks about it in the morning. He wondered why she was at the back door, doing nothing at all for over ten minutes, and Mrs. Burridge told him a lie, which made her very uneasy. She said she heard a strange dog barking, which wasn't a good story because their own dogs were right there and they didn't notice a thing. But Frank let it pa.s.s; perhaps he thinks she is getting funny in her old age and doesn't want to call attention to it, which would be like him. He'll track mud all over her nice s.h.i.+ny kitchen floor but he'd hate to hurt anyone's feelings. Mrs. Burridge decides, a little wist-fully, that despite his pig-headedness he is a kind and likable man, and for her this is like renouncing a cherished and unquestionable belief, such as the flatness of the earth. He has made her angry so many times.

When the pickles are cool she labels them as she always does with the name and the date and carries them down the cellar stairs. The cellar is the old kind, with stone walls and a dirt floor. Mrs. Burridge likes to have everything neat- she still irons her sheets-so she had Frank build her some shelves right after they were married. The pickles go on one side, jams and jellies on the other, and the quarts of pre-serves along the bottom. It used to make her feel safe to have all that food in the cellar; she would think to herself, well, if there's a snowstorm or anything and we're cut off, it won't be so bad. It doesn't make her feel safe any more. Instead she thinks that if she has to leave suddenly she won't be able to take any of the jars with her, they'd be too heavy to carry.

She comes back up the stairs after the last trip. It's not as easy as it used to be, her knee still bothers her as it has ever since she fell six years ago, she tripped on the second-last step. She's asked Frank a million times to fix the stairs but he hasn't done it, that's what she means by pig-headed. If she asks him more than twice to do something he calls it nagging, and maybe it is, but who's going to do it if he won't? The coldvacant hole at the back of this question is too much for her.

She has to stop herself from going to the back door again. Instead she goes to the back window and looks out, she can see almost the same things anyway. Frank is going towards the barn, carrying something, it looks like a wrench. The way he walks, slower than he used to, bent forward a little-from the back he's like an old man, how many years has he been walking that way?-makes her think, He can't protect me.

She doesn't think this on pur-pose, it simply occurs to her, and it isn't only him, it's all of them, they've lost the power, you can tell by the way they walk. They are all waiting, just as Mrs. Burridge is, for whatever it is to happen. Whether they realize it or not. Lately when she's' gone to the Dominion Store in town she has seen a look on the faces of the women there-she knows most of them, she wouldn't be, mistaken-an anx-ious, closed look, as if they are frightened of something but won't talk about it. They're wondering what they will do, perhaps they think there's nothing they can do. This air of helplessness exasperates Mrs.

Burridge, who has always been practical.

For weeks she has wanted to go to Frank and ask him to teach her how to use the gun. In fact he has two guns, a shotgun and a twenty-two rifle; he used to like going after a few ducks in the fall, and of course there are the ground-hogs, they have to be shot because of the holes they make in the fields Frank drives over on the tractor five or six times a year. A lot of men get injured by overturning tractors. But she can't ask him because she can't explain to him why she needs to know, and if she doesn't explain he will only tease. "Anyone can shoot a gun," he'll say, "all you have to do is pull the trigger... oh, you mean you want to hit some-thing, well now, that's different, who you planning to kill?" Perhaps he won't say that; perhaps this is only the way he talked twenty years ago, before she stopped taking an inter-est in things outside the house. But Mrs. Burridge will never know because she will never ask. She doesn't have the heart to say to him, Maybe you'll be dead. Maybe you'll go off somewhere when it happens, maybe there will be a war. She can remember the last war.

Nothing has changed outside the window, so she turns away and sits down at the kitchen table to make out her shopping list. Tomorrow is their day for going into town. She tries to plan the day so she can sit down at intervals; otherwise her feet start swelling up. That began with Sarah and got worse with the other two children and it's never really gone away. All her life, ever since she got married, she has made lists of things that have to be bought, sewed, planted, cooked, stored; she already has her list made for next Christmas, all the names and the gift she will buy for each, and the list of what she needs for Christmas dinner. But she can't seem to get interested in it, it's too far away. She can't believe in a distant future that is orderly like the past, she no longer seems to have the energy; it's as if she is saving it up for when she will have to use it.

She is even having trouble with the shopping list. In-stead of concentrating on the paper-she writes on the backs of the used-up days off the page-a-day calendar Frank gives her every New Year's-she is gazing around the kitchen, looking at all the things she will have to leave be-hind when she goes. That will be the hardest part. Her mother's china, her silver, even though it is an old-fash-ioned pattern and the silver is wearing off, the egg timer in the shape of a chicken Sarah gave her when she was twelve, the ceramic salt-and-pepper shakers, green horses with per-forated heads, that one of the other children brought back from the Ex. She thinks of walking up the stairs, the sheets folded in the chest, the towels stacked neatly on the shelves, the beds made, the quilt that was her grandmother's, it makes her want to cry. On her bureau, the wedding picture, herself in a s.h.i.+ny satin gown (the satin was a mistake, it emphasized her hips), Frank in the suit he has not worn since except to funerals, his hair cut too short on the sides and a surprising tuft at the top, like a woodp.e.c.k.e.r's. The children when they were babies. She thinks of her girls now and hopes they will not have babies; it is no longer the right time for it.

Mrs. Burridge wishes someone would be more precise, so she could make better plans. Everyone knows something is going to happen, you can tell by reading the newspapers and watching the television, but n.o.body is sure what it will be, n.o.body can be exact. She has her own ideas about it though. At first it will simply become quieter. She will have an odd feeling that something is wrong but it will be a few days before she is able to pin it down. Then she will notice that the planes are no longer flying over on their way to the Malton Airport, and that the noise from the highway two miles away, which is quite distinct when the leaves are off the trees, has almost disappeared. The television will be non-committal about it; in fact, the television, which right now is filled with bad news, of strikes, shortages, famines, layoffs and price increases, will become sweet-tempered and placating, and long intervals of cla.s.sical music will appear on the radio. About this time Mrs. Burridge will realize that the news is being censored as it was during the war.

Mrs. Burridge is not positive about what will happen next; that is, she knows what will happen but she is not positive about the order. She expects it will be the gas and oil: the oil delivery man will simply not turnup at his usual time, and one morning the corner filling station will be closed. Just that, no explanations, because of course they- she does not know who "they" are, but she has always be-lieved in their existence-they do not want people to panic. They are trying to keep things looking normal, possibly they have already started on this program and that is in fact why things still do look normal. Luckily she and Frank have the diesel fuel tank in the shed, it is three-quarters full, and they don't use the filling station anyway, they have their own gas pump. She has Frank bring in the old wood stove, the one they stored under the barn when they had the furnace and the electricity put in, and for once she blesses Frank's habit of putting things off. She was after him for years to take that stove to the dump. He cuts down the dead elms, finally, and they burn them in the stove.

The telephone wires are blown down in a storm and no one comes to fix them; or this is what Mrs.

Burridge de-duces. At any rate, the phone goes dead. Mrs. Burridge doesn't particularly mind, she never liked using the phone much anyway, but it does make her feel cut off.

About now men begin to appear on the back road, the gravel road that goes past the gate, walking usually by themselves, sometimes in pairs. They seem to be heading north. Most of them are young, in their twenties, Mrs. Bur-ridge would guess. They are not dressed like the men around here. It's been so long since she has seen anyone walking along this road that she becomes alarmed. She be-gins leaving the dogs off their chains, she has kept them chained at night ever since one of them bit a Jehovah's Wit-ness early one Sunday morning. Mrs. Burridge doesn't hold with the Witnesses-she is United-but she respects their perseverance, at least they have the courage of their convic-tions which is more than you can say for some members of her own church, and she always buys a Watchtower. Maybe they have been right all along.

It is about this time too that she takes one of the guns, she thinks it will be the shotgun as she will have a better chance of hitting something, and hides it, along with the sh.e.l.ls, under a piece of roofing behind the barn. She does not tell Frank; he will have the twenty-two. She has already picked out the spot.

They do not want to waste the little gasoline they still have left in the pump so they do not make unnecessary trips. They begin to eat the chickens, which Mrs. Burridge does not look forward to. She hates cleaning and plucking them, and the angriest she ever got at Frank was the time he and Henry Clarke decided to go into turkey farming. They did it too, despite all she had to say against it, and she had to cope with the turkeys escaping and scratching in the garden and impossible to catch, in her opinion they were the stupidest birds in G.o.d's creation, and she had to clean and pluck a turkey a week until luckily the blackhead wiped out a third of the flock, which was enough to discourage them, they sold off the rest at a loss. It was the only time she was actually glad to see Frank lose money on one of his ven-tures.

Mrs. Burridge will feel things are getting serious on the day the electricity goes off and does not come back on. She knows, with a kind of fatalism, that this will happen in No-vember, when the freezer is full of the vegetables but before it is cold enough to keep the packages frozen outside. She stands and looks at the pliofilm bags of beans and corn and spinach and carrots, melting and sodden, and thinks, Why couldn't they have waited till spring. It is the waste, of food and also of her hard work, that aggravates her the most.

She salvages what she can. During the Depression, she remem-bers, they used to say those on farms were better off than those in the city, because at least they had food; if you could keep the farm, that is; but she is no longer sure this is true. She feels beleaguered, isolated, like someone shut up inside a fortress, though no one has bothered them, in fact no one has pa.s.sed their way for days, not even any of the solitary walking men.

With the electricity off they can no longer get the televi-sion. The radio stations, when they broadcast at all, give out nothing but soothing music, which Mrs. Burridge does not find soothing in the least.

One morning she goes to the back door and looks out and there are the columns of smoke, right where she's been expecting to see them, off to the south. She calls Frank and they stand watching. The smoke is thick and black, oily, as though something has exploded. She does not know what Frank is thinking; she herself is wondering about the chil-dren. She has had no news of them in weeks, but how could she? They stopped delivering mail some time ago.

Fifteen minutes later, Henry Clarke drives into the yard in his half-ton truck. This is very unusual as no one has been driving anywhere lately. There is another man with him, and Mrs. Burridge identifies him as the man three farms up who moved in four or five years ago. Frank goes out and talks with them, and they drive over to the gas pump and start pumping the rest of the precious gas into the truck. Frank comes back to the house. He tells her there's a little trouble down the road, they are going along to see about it and she isn't to worry. He goes into the back room, comes out with the twenty-two, asks her where the shotgun is.

She says she doesn't know. He searches for it, fruitlessly-she can hear him swearing, he does not swear in her presence-until he gives up. He comes out, kisses her goodbye, which is unusual too, and says he'll be back in a couple of hours. She watches the three of them drive off in Henry Clarke's truck, towards thesmoke; she knows he will not come back. She supposes she ought to feel more emotional about it, but she is well prepared, she has been saying goodbye to him silently for years.

She re-enters the house and closes the door. She is fifty-one, her feet hurt, and she does not know where she can go, but she realizes she cannot stay here. There will now be a lot of hungry people, those that can make it this far out of the cities will be young and tough, her house is a beacon, signalling warmth and food.

It will be fought over, but not by her.

She goes upstairs, searches in the cupboard, and puts on her heavy slacks and her two thickest sweaters.

Downstairs she gathers up all the food that will be light enough for her to carry: raisins, cooking chocolate, dried prunes and apri-cots, half a loaf of bread, some milk powder which she puts into a quart freezer bag, a piece of cheese. Then she un-earths the shotgun from behind the barn. She thinks briefly of killing the livestock, the chickens, the heifers and the pig, so no one will do it who does not know the right way; but she herself does not know the right way, she has never killed anything in her life, Frank always did it, so she contents herself with opening the henhouse door and the gate into the back field. She hopes the animals will run away but she knows they probably will not.

She takes one last look around the house. As an after-thought, she adds her toothbrush to the bundle: she does not like the feel of unbrushed teeth. She does not go down into the cellar but she has an image of her carefully sealed bottles and jars, red and yellow and purple, shattered on the floor, in a sticky puddle that looks like blood. Those who come will be wasteful, what they cannot eat themselves they will destroy. She thinks about setting fire to the house her-self, before anyone else can do it.

Mrs. Burridge sits at her kitchen table. On the back of her calendar page, it's for a Monday, she has written Oatmeal, in her evenly s.p.a.ced public school handwriting that always got a star and has not changed very much since then. The dogs are a problem. After some thought she un-chains them, but she does not let them past the gate: at a crucial moment they might give her away. She walks north in her heavy boots, carrying her parka because it is not yet cold enough to put it on, and her package of food and the shotgun which she has taken care to load. She pa.s.ses the cemetery where her father and mother and her grandmother and grandfather are buried; the church used to be there but it burned down sixteen years ago and was rebuilt closer to the highway. Frank's people are in the other cemetery, his go back to the great-grandfather but they are Anglican, not that he kept it up. There is no one else on the road; she feels a little foolish. What if she is wrong and Frank comes back after all, what if nothing, really, is the matter?

Shortening, she writes. She intends to make a lemon meringue pie for Sunday, when two of the children are coming up from the city for dinner.

It is almost evening and Mrs. Burridge is tired. She is in a part of the country she cannot remember, though she has stayed on the same road and it is a road she knows well; she has driven along it many times with Frank. But walking is not the same as driving. On one side there is a field, no buildings, on the other a woodlot; a stream flows through a culvert under the road. Mrs. Burridge kneels down to drink: the water is ice-cold and tastes of iron. Later there will be a frost, she can feel it. She puts on her parka and her gloves, and turns into the forest where she will not be seen. There she will eat some raisins and cheese and try to rest, waiting for the moon to rise so she can continue walking. It is now quite dark. She smells earth, wood, rotting leaves.

Suddenly her eye is caught by a flicker of red, and be-fore she can turn back-how can this happen so quickly?- it takes shape, it is a small fire, off to the right, and two men are crouching near it. They have seen her, too: one of them rises and comes towards her. His teeth bare, he is smiling; he thinks she will be easy, an old woman. He says some-thing but she cannot imagine what it is, she does not know how people dressed like that would talk.

They have spotted her gun, their eyes have fastened on it, they want it. Mrs. Burridge knows what she must do. She must wait until they are close enough and then she must raise the gun and shoot them, using one barrel for each, aiming at the faces. Otherwise they will kill her, she has no doubt about that. She will have to be fast, which is too bad because her hands feel thick and wooden; she is afraid, she does not want the loud noise or the burst of red that will follow, she has never killed anything in her life. She has no pictures beyond this point. You never know how you will act in a thing like that until it actually happens.

Mrs. Burridge looks at the kitchen clock. On her list she writes Cheese, they are eating more cheese now than they used to because of the price of meat. She gets up and goes to the kitchen door.

A Travel Piece

Annette is wiped right out. She never used to be this wiped out after a job; she supposes it's themedication. Any kind of a pill is a drain on the system, she doesn't like taking them but there you are.

She chews on one of the vacu-packed peanuts, thumb-ing through the travel brochure from the seat pocket, letting her mind drift among the coloured pictures. Thirty-six va-cations in the sun, described in glowing terms, with the prices, all-inclusive it says but of course there are extras. A gem of an island almost undiscovered by tourists, with bril-liant white sand beaches and bluegreen lagoons comple-mented by the friendliness of the people. Annette is returning from just such an island and she too writes pieces like this, but hers are not advertis.e.m.e.nts, they're for the newspaper and, when she gets lucky, for the glossy maga-zines as well, so the things she writes have to be less bland: little anecdotes, the personal touch, details on where to eat and how good the service is, jokes told by the barman if any, where to go shopping for bargains, all those straw hats and curios, out-of-the-way things you might do, such as climbing an extinct volcano or cooking a parrot-fish on a coral reef, if you had the energy and the desire.

Increasingly she doesn't, but she puts herself through the paces anyway, she would consider it cheating to recommend these things without having done them. This is what makes her a good travel writer, among other things; and she has a knack for discovering local oddities, she knows what to look for, she has an eye for detail.

She's learned though that she has to strike the right bal-ance between what she manages to notice, spontaneously and candidly-and she always takes a camera with her, just in case, though for the glossies they usually send down their own photographer-and what she chooses to leave out. For instance, by lifting her head slightly she can read: LIFE JEST INDER FRONT OF YOUR SEAT. It says LIFE JEST because the letter-ing, which is embroidered right into the cloth of the pocket, has been worn away by the outgoing and incoming thighs of countless pa.s.sengers. It would strike a humorous note but she can't use it; the airline company would resent the implication that its planes were falling to pieces and that would be it for the complimentary tickets.

People, she found, did not want any hint of danger in the kind of articles it was her business to write.

Even the ones who would never go to the places she described, who could not afford it, did not want to hear about danger or even unpleasantness; it was as if they wanted to believe that there was somewhere left in the world where all was well, where unpleasant things did not happen. An unspoiled Eden; that had been a useful phrase. Once, it seemed a long time ago, staying home meant safety, though tedium as well, and going to the places that were her specialty-the Carib-bean, the northern half of South America, Mexico-meant adventure, threat, pirates, brigands, lawlessness. Now it was the reverse, home was the dangerous place and people went on vacation to s.n.a.t.c.h a few weeks of uneventfulness. If small black beads of oil were appearing on the white sand beaches, if the barman's niece had stabbed her husband, if things were stolen or it rained, they did not want to know about it; if they felt like disasters or crimes they could read about them in the other pages of the newspaper. So she did not report such things and she tried her best not to notice them. There was that pig on the beach in Mexico, being killed by a man who didn't know how to do it properly, because some tourist had wanted a Polynesian feast. That was the sort of thing you had to filter out. Her job was to be pleased, and she did this well, she was evenly tanned and in trim physical shape, she had direct blue eyes and a white smile and was good at asking interested, polite questions and coping with minor emergencies, such as lost suitcases, cheerfully and without becoming irritated. She seldom had trouble; there was something about her, an air of profes-sionalism, she was too thorough to be an ordinary tourist; those in the industry sensed it would be bad for business to upset her.

So she went her way undisturbed among the green trees, along the white beaches, between the blue sky and the indecently blue ocean, which more and more lately had come to seem like a giant screen, flat and with pictures painted on it to create the illusion of solidity. If you walked up to it and kicked it, it would tear and your foot would go right through, into another s.p.a.ce which Annette could only visualize as darkness, a night in which something she did not want to look at was hiding. Things were being kept from her, she had begun to feel, especially in lobbies and in cars taking her to and from airports; people were watching her, as if they were aware of this. It was the constant sur-veillance that was exhausting her, and the effort she had been making not to find out.

She attempted once to describe these feelings to her husband, but the attempt was not a success. Her capacity for being easily pleased, delighted even, had pervaded their marriage as well as her job, and he reacted at first with a kind of restrained, offended outrage, as if she had com-plained to the maitre d' about a wine. Very well, madam, it shall be replaced, and a look that says: Stupid b.i.t.c.h. Jeff seemed hurt that she was not totally and altogether happy, that she had been coming home from her trips too tired to go out for special little dinners with him, that she crawled into bed and remained there between her mock vacations, emerging only long enough to plod through the required exercises at the typewriter. When she said, "Sometimes I feel I'm not alive," he took it as a comment on his love-making, and she had to spend half anhour rea.s.suring him, telling him that wasn't what she meant; she'd been talking about her job. But his view of her job was that it was a lucky accident, she was a very fortunate girl to have a job like that. He himself was interning at a hospital-she'd put him through medical school on her own salary-and he felt abused and overworked. He could not understand why she wanted to stay home more; finally he swiped the pills for her, telling her they would steady her nerves. Which they have, she supposes, but then her nerves have not been un-steady, quite the contrary. It's the unbroken calm, both within and without, that is getting to her.

Real events hap-pen to other people, she thinks, why not me? And then there's her conviction that they are happening, all around her, but that they're being kept from her.

Once she took Jeff along with her, to Bermuda, though they couldn't really afford it as his way had to be paid, of course. She thought it would be good for them, he would see what she really did and stop idealizing her; she felt that perhaps he had married her because of her tan, he found her glamorous. And it would be fun to get away together. But it hadn't been. All he'd wanted to do was lie in the sun and he'd refused to eat the pumpkin soup, he was a meat and potatoes man. "Relax," he kept telling her, "why don't you just lie down beside me and relax?" He hadn't understood why she needed to go shopping, to explore the markets, to visit all the possible beaches and restaurants. "It's my job," she told him, to which he replied, "Some job, I should have a job like that." "You're not suited for it," she said, think-ing of the fuss he had made over the fried plantain. He could not understand that being pleased was hard work, and he thought she was being too friendly with the taxi drivers.

The plane starts to tilt down as Annette is finis.h.i.+ng her martini. Jeff told her she should go easy on mixing the pills and liquor, but one wouldn't hurt, so dutifully she ordered only one. For a minute or two no one notices; then the stewardesses are at their posts and a blurred, alarmed voice is coming through the intercom, but as usual it's inaudible, and half of it is in French anyway. Hardly anyone is screaming. Annette takes off her high-heeled shoes, Cuban actually, they're better for walking, slips them under the seat, and rests her forehead on her knees, protecting it with her arms. She's following the instructions on the card tucked into the seat pocket; there's a diagram on it too, about how to blow up the life vest by pulling the k.n.o.bs. When the girls went through their routine at the beginning of the flight she didn't watch; she hasn't watched for a long time.

By twisting her head to the right she can see the card sticking out of the pocket of the seat next to her, and the edge of the vomit bag as well; they don't say vomit but discomfort, which fits. Next to the vomit bag is a man's knee. Nothing seems to be happening so Annette looks up to see what's going on. A lot of the people don't have their heads down on their knees the way they've been told, they're sitting bolt upright, just staring, as if they're watch-ing a movie. The man next to Annette is white as a sheet. She asks him if he wants a Rolaid, but he doesn't, so she eats one herself. She carries a small a.r.s.enal of patent medi-cines with her on these trips, laxatives, cold remedies, vitamin C, aspirins; everything you can get she's had a dose of at one time or another.

The plane is going down in a long glide, it's a lot easier than she would have expected. There's a faint smell of burn-ing rubber, that's all, no explosions; she feels hardly any discomfort, though her ears are popping. The descent is si-lent too because the engines aren't working, and except for one woman who is still screaming half-heartedly and an-other who is crying, none of the pa.s.sengers is making much noise.

"Where you from?" the man beside her says, abruptly, perhaps it's the only thing he can think of to say to a woman on an airplane, no matter what the circ.u.mstances; but before Annette can answer there's a jolt that knocks her teeth together, it isn't at all like hitting water. More like a slightly b.u.mpy runway, as if the sea is hard, like cement.

It must have damaged the loudspeakers though, because the blurred voices have stopped. The pa.s.sengers crowd into the aisles, released, their mingled voices rising excitedly, like children let out of school. Annette thinks they are being remarkably calm, though real panic, with stampeding feet and people being trampled on, is difficult when the aisle is so narrow. She always notes the locations of the emergency exits and tries to sit near one but she has not managed it this time, so she decides to wait in her seat until the jam is over. The back door appears to be stuck so everyone is shoving to the front. The man sitting beside her is trying to elbow his way into the lineup, which is like a supermarket queue, they even have bundles. Annette folds her hands and looks out through the oval porthole window but all she can see is the surface of the ocean, flat as a parking lot; there isn't even any smoke or flames.

When the aisle is clearer she stands up, lifts the seat as the instruction card has told her and takes out the life vest. She has noticed that many people, in their rush to get out, have been forgetting to do this. She collects her coat from the overhead rack, which is still crammed with other coats, abandoned by their owners. The sun is s.h.i.+ning as brightly as ever, but it may cool off at night. She has the coat with herbecause when she steps off the plane at the other end it will still be winter. She picks up her camera bag and her large purse, which doubles as a flight bag; she's familiar with the advantages of travelling light, she once did a fash-ion piece on crushable dresses.