Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [18]
I surface again later; Joe is wide awake now, he’s come out from under the sheet. “You talked in your sleep again,” I tell him. Sometimes I think he says more when he’s asleep than he does when he’s awake.
He gives a noncommittal growl. “I’m hungry.” Then, after a pause, “What did I say?”
“The usual. You wanted to know where you were and who I was.” I’d like to hear about the dream itself; I used to have dreams but I don’t any longer.
“That’s pretty boring,” he says. “Was that all?”
I throw back the covers and lower my feet to the floor, a minor ordeal: even in midsummer here the nights are cold. I get dressed as fast as possible and go out to start the fire. Anna is there, still in her sleeveless nylon nightgown and bare feet, standing in front of the wavery yellowish mirror. There’s a zippered case on the counter in front of her, she’s putting on makeup. I realize I’ve never seen her without it before; shorn of the pink cheeks and heightened eyes her face is curiously battered, a worn doll’s, her artificial face is the natural one. The backs of her arms have goose pimples.
“You don’t need that here,” I say, “there’s no one to look at you.” My mother’s phrase, used to me once when I was fourteen; she was watching, dismayed, as I covered my mouth with Tango Tangerine. I told her I was just practising.
Anna says in a low voice, “He doesn’t like to see me without it,” and then, contradicting herself, “He doesn’t know I wear it.” I glimpse the subterfuge this must involve, or is it devotion: does she have to sneak out of the bed before he’s awake every morning and into it at night with the lights out? Maybe David is telling generous lies; but she blends and mutes herself so well he may not notice.
While the stove is heating I go outside, first up to the outhouse and down again to the lake to dip my hands and face, then to the refrigerator, a metal garbage can sunk in the ground with a tight-fitting raccoon-proof lid and over that a heavy wooden cover. When the game wardens arrived in their police launch, as they did once a year, they could never believe we didn’t have an icebox, they used to search everywhere for hidden, illegal fish.
I reach down for the eggs; the bacon is in a screened box under the cabin, ventilated but protected from flies and mice. In a settler’s house these would have been rootcellar and smoke-house; my father is an improvisor on standard themes.
I carry the food inside and start the breakfast. Joe and David are up, Joe sitting on the wall bench, face still fuzzy with sleep, David examining his chin in the mirror.
“I can make you hot water if you want to shave,” I suggest, but his reflection grins and he shakes his head.
“Naaa,” he says, “I’m gonna grow me a little old beard.”
“Don’t you dare,” Anna says. “I don’t like him kissing me when he has a beard, it reminds me of a cunt.” Her hand goes over her mouth as though she is shocked. “Isn’t that awful?”
“Filthy talk, woman,” David says, “she’s uncultured and vulgar.”
“Oh I know, I’ve always been like that.”
It’s a quick skit, Joe and I are the audience, but Joe is still off in the place inside himself where he spends most of his time and I’m at the stove turning the bacon, I can’t watch them so they stop.
I crouch down in front of the stove and open the firebox door to make the toast over the coals. There are no dirty words any more, they’ve been neutered, now they’re only parts of speech; but I recall the feeling, puzzled, baffled, when I found out some words were dirty and the rest were clean. The bad ones in French are the religious ones, the worst ones in any language were what they were most afraid of and in English it was the body, that was even scarier than God. You could also say Jeesus Christ, but it meant you were angry or disgusted. I learned about religion the way most children then learned about sex, not in the gutter but in the gravel and cement schoolyard, during the winter months of real school. They would cluster in groups, holding each others’ mittened hands and whispering. They terrified me by telling me there was