Dancing Girls
Authors: Margaret Atwood
Tags: #Anthologies, #Adult, #Feminism, #Contemporary
INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
Dancing Girls
“Margaret Atwood renders visual, aural, and tactile events in such crisp, surprising language that her images crackle off the page.”
–
Washington Post
“Sheer wizardry, a rich fusion of the ordinary experience made brilliant by symbol, image, and allusion.”
–
Los Angeles Times
“Dancing Girls
is a must.”
–
The Gazette
(Montreal)
“An acute and poetic observer of the eternal, universal, rum relations between women and men.”
–
The Times
(U.K.)
“If anyone has better insight into women and their central problem – men – than Margaret Atwood, and can voice them with as much wit, impact and grace, then they haven’t started writing yet.”
–
Daily Mail (U.K.)
“A brilliant and witty writer.”
–
Cosmopolitan
“Illumines areas of the human condition few writers have witnessed with such intelligence and sympathy.”
–
The Boston Globe
“Tough poet, clever critic, brilliant novelist, feminist, nationalist, our chief literary heroine.… A superb writer.”
–
Toronto Star
BY MARGARET ATWOOD
FICTION
The Edible Woman
(1969)
Surfacing
(1972)
Lady Oracle
(1976)
Dancing Girls
(1977)
Life Before Man
(1979)
Bodily Harm
(1981)
Murder in the Dark
(1983)
Bluebeard’s Egg
(1983)
The Handmaid’s Tale
(1985)
Cat’s Eye
(1988)
Wilderness Tips
(1991)
Good Bones
(1992)
The Robber Bride
(1993)
Alias Grace
(1996)
FOR CHILDREN
Up in the Tree
(1978)
Anna’s Pet
[with Joyce Barkhouse] (1980)
For the Birds
(1990)
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut
(1995)
NON-FICTION
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
(1972)
Days of the Rebels 1815-1840
(1977)
Second Words
(1982)
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature
(1996)
Two Solicitudes: Conversations
[with Victor-Lévy Beaulieu] (1998)
POETRY
Double Persephone
(1961)
The Circle Game
(1966)
The Animals in That Country
(1968)
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
(1970)
Procedures for Underground
(1970)
Power Politics
(1971)
You Are Happy
(1974)
Selected Poems
(1976)
Two-Headed Poems
(1978)
True Stories
(1981)
Interlunar
(1984)
Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986
(1986)
Morning in the Burned House
(1995)
Copyright © 1977, 1982 by O.W. Toad Ltd.
First cloth edition published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 1977.
Trade paperback edition published in 1998.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Atwood, Margaret, 1939 –
Dancing girls and other stories
Contents: The war in the bathroom. – The man from Mars. – Polarities. – Under glass. – The grave of the famous poet. – Rape fantasies. – Hair jewellery. – When it happens. – A travel piece. – The resplendent Quetzal. – Training. – Lives of the poets. – Dancing girls. – Giving birth.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-490-1
I. Title.
PS8501.T86D35 C813’.54 C77-001304-X
PR9199.3.A8D35
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street,
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
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v3.1
Monday
L
ate this afternoon she moved out of the old place into the new one. The moving was accomplished with a minimum of difficulty: she managed to get everything into the two suitcases and was able to carry them herself for the three blocks that separate the old place from the new one. She only had to stop and rest twice. She is quite strong for her age. A man came along and offered to help her, rather a pleasant-looking man, but I have told her never to accept help from strangers.
I think the German woman was glad to see her go. She always regarded her with a certain amount of suspicion. She stood on the wooden porch in her slippers, watching, her arms in their grey ravelled sweater-sleeves folded across her fat stomach, her slip hanging an inch below the figured cotton housedress she always wore. I, for one, have always disliked the German woman. I had become tired of seeing that certain things in the room had been moved (though she took pains to set them back in the approximate proper spot, she was
never quite meticulous enough), and I had begun to suspect lately that she was looking at the mail: the envelopes had greasy thumbprints, and it is still too cold for the postmen to go without their gloves. The new place has a landlord instead of a landlady; I think, on the whole, I prefer them.
When she reached the new place she got the keys from an old man who lives in the ground-floor front room. He answered the doorbell; the landlord was out, but had told him she was to be expected. An agreeable old man with white hair and a benevolent smile. She took the suitcases up the narrow staircase to the second floor, one at a time. She has spent what was left of the day arranging the room. This room is smaller than the old one, but at least it is clean. She put the clothes into the cupboard and some of them into the bureau. There are no shelves so she will have to keep the saucepan, the cup, the plate, the silverware, and the coffee pot in one of the bureau drawers. However there is a small table, and I decided that the teapot may be left on it, even between mealtimes. It has a decorative pattern.
She made up the bed with the sheets and blankets that the landlord had provided. The room has a northern exposure and will be chilly. Fortunately there is an electric heater in the room. She has always been partial to warmth, although I myself have never been overly conscious of temperature. A compensation: the room is the one next to the bathroom, which will be handy.
The Notebook will be kept on the table, beside the teapot.
Tomorrow she must go outside for some groceries, but now she will go to bed.
Tuesday
She was lying in bed this morning trying to get back to sleep. I was looking at the clock and agreeing with her that indeed the mattress
was thin and quite hard, harder even than the one at the old place. It was almost nine and I told her to reach out and shut off the clock before the alarm went off.
Someone came up the front stairs, slowly, with a limping step, and went into the bathroom, closing and locking the door. I have discovered that the walls are not thick and noises tend to carry. She was about to turn over and sleep again when the person in the bathroom began to cough violently. Then there was a sound of clearing and spitting and the toilet being flushed. I am sure I know who it was: it must be the old man from downstairs. The poor man must have a cold. He stayed in the bathroom exactly half an hour though, which is rather long; and he managed to make a number of unpleasant noises. I can see that the room beside the bathroom may have its disadvantages and I am beginning to realize why the landlord was willing to rent it so cheaply.
I finally persuaded her to get up and close the window (I have always felt fresh air to be necessary for one’s health, although she is not fond of it) and turn on the electric heater. She began to go back to bed but I told her to put on the clothes: she had to go shopping, there was nothing to eat. She went into the bathroom, none too soon because there were other footsteps approaching. I thought that the bathroom could have been cleaner; however, this morning she just washed in the basin. Plenty of hot water at any rate.
She went back into the room and put on her coat and overshoes. I told her she had better put on the scarf too as I had noted frost on the storm window. She picked up the purse and went out of the room, locking the door behind her. The bathroom door was closed as she went by; the light showed through the transom. When she reached the bottom of the stairs the old man was in the hall, sorting out the mail on the small dark table that stands near the front door. He was wearing his bathrobe; below it his striped pyjamas went down, then his thin ankles and maroon-leather bedroom slippers.
He smiled beautifully and said good morning. I told her to nod and smile back.
She closed the front door behind her and took the gloves out of her pocket and put them on. She made her way down the porch steps, carefully, since they were icy. I have often noticed that it is much less dangerous for her to go up steps than to go down them.
She walked along the street towards the place, a few blocks along, where I knew there was a store. I gloated over the houses on the street as she passed them, fondling them, placing them in order: red brick houses, double houses mostly, like the one that the room is in, with twin wooden porches. The houses near the old place had been bigger. I had been on this street before, of course (it was not far from the old place), but now I could regard this street for the first time as mine, as part of the new territory through which I could trace out pathways and my own familiar routes. These trees were mine. This sidewalk was mine. When the snow melted and the trees blossomed, the damp earth and the new leaves and the spring water running in the gutters would be mine.