Dancing Girls (14 page)

So I start to shake but after a minute I get control of myself and I say, is he sure the angel voices have got the right person, because I hear the same angel voices and they’ve been telling me for some time that I’m going to give birth to the reincarnation of St. Anne
who in turn has the Virgin Mary and right after that comes Jesus Christ and the end of the world, and he wouldn’t want to interfere with that, would he? So he gets confused and listens some more, and then he asks for a sign and I show him my vaccination mark, you can see it’s sort of an odd-shaped one, it got infected because I scratched the top off, and that does it, he apologizes and climbs out the coal chute again, which is how he got in in the first place, and I say to myself there’s some advantage in having been brought up a Catholic even though I haven’t been to church since they changed the service into English, it just isn’t the same, you might as well be a Protestant. I must write to Mother and tell her to nail up that coal chute, it always has bothered me. Funny, I couldn’t tell you at all what this man looks like but I know exactly what kind of shoes he’s wearing, because that’s the last I see of him, his shoes going up the coal chute, and they’re the old-fashioned kind that lace up the ankles, even though he’s a young fellow. That’s strange, isn’t it?

Let me tell you though I really sweat until I see him safely out of there and I go upstairs right away and make myself a cup of tea. I don’t think about that one much. My mother always said you shouldn’t dwell on unpleasant things and I generally agree with that, I mean, dwelling on them doesn’t make them go away. Though not dwelling on them doesn’t make them go away either, when you come to think of it.

Sometimes I have these short ones where the fellow grabs my arm but I’m really a kung fu expert, can you believe it, in real life I’m sure it would just be a conk on the head and that’s that, like getting your tonsils out, you’d wake up and it would be all over except for the sore places, and you’d be lucky if your neck wasn’t broken or something, I could never even hit the volleyball in gym and a volleyball is fairly large, you know? – and I just go
zap
with my fingers into his eyes and that’s it, he falls over, or I flip him against a wall or something. But I could never really stick my fingers in anyone’s
eyes, could you? It would feel like hot Jell-O and I don’t even like cold Jell-O, just thinking about it gives me the creeps. I feel a bit guilty about that one, I mean how would you like walking around knowing someone’s been blinded for life because of you?

But maybe it’s different for a guy.

The most touching one I have is when the fellow grabs my arm and I say, sad and kind of dignified, “You’d be raping a corpse.” That pulls him up short and I explain that I’ve just found out I have leukaemia and the doctors have only given me a few months to live. That’s why I’m out pacing the streets alone at night, I need to think, you know, come to terms with myself. I don’t really have leukaemia but in the fantasy I do, I guess I chose that particular disease because a girl in my grade four class died of it, the whole class sent her flowers when she was in the hospital. I didn’t understand then that she was going to die and I wanted to have leukaemia too so I could get flowers. Kids are funny, aren’t they? Well, it turns out that he has leukaemia himself, and
he
only has a few months to live, that’s why he’s going around raping people, he’s very bitter because he’s so young and his life is being taken from him before he’s really lived it. So we walk along gently under the street lights, it’s spring and sort of misty, and we end up going for coffee, we’re happy we’ve found the only other person in the world who can understand what we’re going through, it’s almost like fate, and after a while we just sort of look at each other and our hands touch, and he comes back with me and moves into my apartment and we spend our last months together before we die, we just sort of don’t wake up in the morning, though I’ve never decided which one of us gets to die first. If it’s him I have to go on and fantasize about the funeral, if it’s me I don’t have to worry about that, so it just about depends on how tired I am at the time. You may not believe this but sometimes I even start crying. I cry at the ends of movies, even the ones that aren’t all that sad, so I guess it’s the same thing. My mother’s like that too.

The funny thing about these fantasies is that the man is always someone I don’t know, and the statistics in the magazines, well, most of them anyway, they say it’s often someone you do know, at least a little bit, like your boss or something – I mean, it wouldn’t be
my
boss, he’s over sixty and I’m sure he couldn’t rape his way out of a paper bag, poor old thing, but it might be someone like Derek Duck, in his elevator shoes, perish the thought – or someone you just met, who invites you up for a drink, it’s getting so you can hardly be sociable any more, and how are you supposed to meet people if you can’t trust them even that basic amount? You can’t spend your whole life in the Filing Department or cooped up in your own apartment with all the doors and windows locked and the shades down. I’m not what you would call a drinker but I like to go out now and then for a drink or two in a nice place, even if I am by myself, I’m with Women’s Lib on that even though I can’t agree with a lot of the other things they say. Like here for instance, the waiters all know me and if anyone, you know, bothers me.… I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, except I think it helps you get to know a person, especially at first, hearing some of the things they think about. At work they call me the office worry wart, but it isn’t so much like worrying, it’s more like figuring out what you should do in an emergency, like I said before.

Anyway, another thing about it is that there’s a lot of conversation, in fact I spend most of my time, in the fantasy that is, wondering what I’m going to say and what he’s going to say, I think it would be better if you could get a conversation going. Like, how could a fellow do that to a person he’s just had a long conversation with, once you let them know you’re human, you have a life too, I don’t see how they could go ahead with it, right? I mean, I know it happens but I just don’t understand it, that’s the part I really don’t understand.

T
here must be some approach to this, a method, a technique, that’s the word I want, it kills germs. Some technique then, a way of thinking about it that would be bloodless and therefore painless; devotion recollected in tranquillity, I try to conjure up an image of myself at that time, also one of you, but it’s like conjuring the dead. How do I know I’m not inventing both of us, and if I’m not inventing then it really is like conjuring the dead, a dangerous game. Why should I disturb those sleepers, sleepwalkers, as they make their automaton rounds through the streets where we once lived, fading from year to year, their voices thinning to the sound of a thumb drawn across a wet window: an insect squeak, transparent as glass, no words. You can never tell with the dead whether it is they who wish to return or the living who want them to. The usual explanation is that they have something to tell us. I’m not sure I believe it; in this case it’s more likely that I have something to tell them.

Be careful
, I want to write,
There is a future
, God’s hand on the temple wall, clear and unavoidable in the new snow, just in front of them where they are walking – I see it as December – along the brick
sidewalk in Boston, city of rotting dignities, she in her wavering high heels, getting her feet wet from sheer vanity. Boots were ugly then, heavy shapeless rubber like rhinoceros paws, flight boots they called them, or furred at the tops like old ladies’ or bedroom slippers, with stringy bows; or there were those plastic wedge-shaped rainboots, they would yellow quickly and become encrusted with dirt on the inside, they looked like buried teeth.

That’s my technique, I resurrect myself through clothes. In fact it’s impossible for me to remember what I did, what happened to me, unless I can remember what I was wearing, and every time I discard a sweater or a dress I am discarding a part of my life. I shed identities like a snake, leaving them pale and shrivelled behind me, a trail of them, and if I want any memories at all I have to collect, one by one, those cotton and wool fragments, piece them together, achieving at last a patchwork self, no defence anyway against the cold. I concentrate, and this particular lost soul rises miasmic from the Crippled Civilians’ Clothing Donation Box in the Loblaws parking lot in downtown Toronto, where I finally ditched that coat.

The coat was long and black. It was good quality – good quality mattered then, and the women’s magazines had articles about basic wardrobes and correct pressing and how to get spots out of camel’s hair – but it was far too big for me, the sleeves came to my knuckles, the hem to the tops of my plastic rainboots, which did not fit either. When I bought it I meant to alter it, but I never did. Most of my clothes were the same, they were all too big, perhaps I believed that if my clothes were large and shapeless, if they formed a sort of tent around me, I would be less visible. But the reverse was true; I must have been more noticeable than most as I billowed along the streets in my black wool shroud, my head swathed in, was it a plaid angora scarf, also good quality; at any rate, my head swathed.

I bought these clothes, when I bought clothes at all – for you must remember that, like you, I was poor, which accounts for at
least some of our desperation – in Filene’s Basement, where good quality clothes that failed to sell at the more genteel levels were disposed of at slashed prices. You often had to try them on in the aisles as there were few dressing rooms, and the cellar, for it was a cellar, low-ceilinged, dimly lit, dank with the smell of anxious armpits and harassed feet, was filled on bargain days with struggling women in slips and bras, stuffing themselves into torn and soiled designer originals to the sound of heavy breathing and a hundred sticking zippers. It is customary to laugh at bargain-hunting women, at their voraciousness, their hysteria, but Filene’s Basement was, in its own way, tragic. No one went there who did not aspire to a shape-change, a transformation, a new life; but the things never did quite fit.

Under the black coat I wear a heavy tweed skirt, grey in colour, and a brown sweater with only one not very noticeable hole, valued by me because it was your cigarette that burned it. Under the sweater I have a slip (too long), a brassiere (too small), some panties with little pink roses on them, also from Filene’s Basement, only twenty-five cents, five for a dollar, and a pair of nylon stockings held up by a garter belt which, being too large, is travelling around my waist, causing the seams at the backs of my legs to spiral like barbers’ poles. I am lugging a suitcase which is far too heavy – no one carried packsacks then except at summer camp – as it contains another set of my weighty, oversized clothes as well as six nineteenth-century Gothic novels and a sheaf of clean paper. On the other side, counterbalancing the suitcase, are my portable typewriter and my Filene’s Basement handbag, gargantuan, bottomless as the tomb. It is February, the wind whips the black coat out behind me, my plastic rainboots skid on the ice of the sidewalk, in a passing store window I see a woman thick and red-faced and bundled. I am hopelessly in love and I am going to the train station to escape.

If I had been richer it would have been the airport. I would have gone to California, Algiers, somewhere oily and alien and above all warm. As it was, I had just enough money for a return ticket and three days in Salem, the only other place both accessible and notable being Walden Pond, which was not much good in winter. I had already justified the trip to myself: it would be more educational to go to Salem than to Algiers, for I was supposed to be “doing work” on Nathaniel Hawthorne. “Doing work,” they called it; they still call it that. I would be able to soak up atmosphere; perhaps from this experience, to which I did not look forward, the academic paper required for my survival as a scholar would emerge, like a stunted dandelion from a crack in the sidewalk. Those dismal streets, that Puritanical melancholy combined with the sodden February sea-winds would be like a plunge into cold water, shocking into action my critical faculties, my talent for word-chopping and the construction of plausible footnotes which had assured so far the trickle of scholarship money on which I subsisted. For the past two months these abilities had been paralyzed by unrequited love. I thought that several days away from you would give me time to think things over. In my subsequent experience, this does no good at all.

Unrequited love was, at that period of my life, the only kind I seemed to be capable of feeling. This caused me much pain, but in retrospect I see it had advantages. It provided all the emotional jolts of the other kind without any of the risks, it did not interfere with my life, which, although meagre, was mine and predictable, and it involved no decisions. In the world of stark physical reality it might call for the removal of my ill-fitting garments (in the dark or the bathroom, if possible: no woman wants a man to see her safety pins), but it left undisturbed their metaphysical counterparts. At that time I believed in metaphysics. My Platonic version of myself resembled an Egyptian mummy, a mysteriously wrapped object that might or
might not fall into dust if uncovered. But unrequited love demanded no stripteases.