Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [59]
She slouched her body down, resting her head on the back of the seat and her knees against the seat in front and half-closing her eyes. Not a ladylike position, but nobody could see in the dark; and the seats on either side of her were empty. She had made sure of that: she didn’t want any trouble with furtive old men. She recalled such encounters from early school days, before she had learned about movie theatres. Hands squeezing against knees and similar bits of shuffling pathos, although not frightening (one should just move quietly away), were painfully embarrassing to her simply because they were sincere. The attempt at contact, even slight contact, was crucial for the fumblers in the dark.
The coloured pictures succeeded each other in front of her: gigantic Stetsoned men stretched across the screen on their even more gigantic horses, trees and cactus plants rose in the foreground or faded in the background as the landscape flowed along; smoke and dust and galloping. She didn’t attempt to decide what the cryptic speeches meant or to follow the plot. She knew there must be bad people who were trying to do something evil and good people who were trying to stop them, probably by getting to the money first (as well as Indians who were numerous as buffalo and fair game for everyone), but it didn’t matter to her which of these moral qualities was incarnate in any given figure presented to her. At least it wasn’t one of the new Westerns in which people had psychoses. She amused herself by concentrating on the secondary actors, the bit players, wondering what they did in their no doubt copious spare time and whether any of them still had illusions of future stardom.
It was night, the purplish-blue translucent night that descends only on the technicolour screen. Someone was sneaking through a meadow towards someone else; all was quiet except for the rustling of the grass and the chirping of several mechanical crickets. Close beside her, to the left, she heard a small cracking noise, then the sound of something hard hitting the floor. A gun went off, there was a struggle, and it was day. She heard the cracking noise again.
She turned her head to the left. In the faint reflection from the glare of sunlight on the screen she could barely make out who was sitting beside her, two places away. It was the man from the laundromat. He was slumped in the seat, staring glassily in front of him. Every half-minute or so he would lift his hand to his mouth from a bag he was holding in his other hand, and there would be the small crack and then the sound from the floor. He must be eating something with shells, but they weren’t peanuts. That would make a softer noise. She studied his dim profile, the nose and one eye and the shadowed hunch of one shoulder.
She turned her head to the front again and tried to concentrate all her attention on the screen. Although she found herself being glad that he had suddenly materialized in that seat, it was an irrational gladness: she didn’t intend to speak to him, in fact she was hoping very much that he had not seen her, would not see her sitting alone there in the movie theatre. He seemed entranced by the screen, almost totally absorbed in it, and in whatever he was eating – what could possibly make that exasperating thin cracking sound? – and he might not notice her if she kept quite still. But she had the disquieting sense that he knew perfectly well who she was and had been aware of her presence for some time before she had recognized his. She gazed at the vast featureless expanse of prairie before her. At her side the cracking went on, irritatingly regular.
They were fording a river, men and horses together and one blonde woman in a dishevelled dress, when she noticed a peculiar sensation in her left hand. It wanted to reach across and touch him on the shoulder. Its will seemed independent of her own: surely she herself wanted nothing of the kind. She made its fingers grip the arm of her seat. “That would never do,” she admonished it silently,