Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [20]
She stopped humming. “Manage what?”
“Being married. How do you keep it together?”
She glanced at me quickly as though she was suspicious. “We tell a lot of jokes.”
“No but really,” I said. If there was a secret trick I wanted to learn it.
She talked to me then, or not to me exactly but to an invisible microphone suspended above her head: people’s voices go radio when they give advice. She said you just had to make an emotional commitment, it was like skiing, you couldn’t see in advance what would happen but you had to let go. Let go of what, I wanted to ask her; I was measuring myself against what she was saying. Maybe that was why I failed, because I didn’t know what I had to let go of. For me it hadn’t been like skiing, it was more like jumping off a cliff. That was the feeling I had all the time I was married; in the air, going down, waiting for the smash at the bottom.
“How come it didn’t work out, with you?” Anna said.
“I don’t know,” I said, “I guess I was too young.”
She nodded sympathetically. “You’re lucky you didn’t have kids though.”
“Yes,” I said. She doesn’t have any herself; if she did she couldn’t have said that to me. I’ve never told her about the baby; I haven’t told Joe either, there’s no reason to. He won’t find out the usual way, there aren’t any pictures of it peering out from a crib or a window or through the bars of a playpen in my bureau drawer or my billfold where he could stumble across them and act astonished or outraged or sad. I have to behave as though it doesn’t exist, because for me it can’t, it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh cancelled. Lapse, relapse, I have to forget.
The trail’s winding now through high ground where there are boulders coming up out of the earth, carried and dropped by glaciers, moss on them and ferns, it’s a damp climate. I keep my eyes on the ground, names reappearing, wintergreen, wild mint, Indian cucumber; at one time I could list every plant here that could be used or eaten. I memorized survival manuals, How To Stay Alive in the Bush, Animal Tracks and Signs, The Woods in Winter, at the age when the ones in the city were reading True Romance magazines: it wasn’t till then I realized it was in fact possible to lose your way. Maxims float up: always carry matches and you will not starve, in a snowstorm dig a hole, avoid unclassified mushrooms, your hands and feet are the most important, if they freeze you’re finished. Worthless knowledge; the pulp magazines with their cautionary tales, maidens who give in and get punished with mongoloid infants, fractured spines, dead mothers or men stolen by their best friends would have been more practical.
The trail dips down and across a swamp inlet at the tip of a bay, cedars here and bullrushes, blueflags, ooze. I go slowly, looking for footprints. There’s nothing but a deer track, no sign of anyone: apparently Paul and the searchers didn’t make it this far. The mosquitoes have scented us and swarm around our heads; Joe swears gently, David loudly, at the end of the line I hear Anna slapping.
We swing away from the shore and here it’s a jungle, branches growing in across the path, hazel and moose maple, pithy junk trees. Sight is blocked two feet in, trunks and leaves a solid interlocking fence, green, green-grey, greybrown. None of the branches is chopped or broken back, if he’s been here he’s gone miraculously around and between them rather than through. I stand aside and David hacks at the wall with his machete, not very well; he tatters and bends rather than slicing.
We come up against a tree fallen across the trail. It’s brought several young balsams down with it: they lie tangled together, logjam. “I don’t think anyone’s been through here,” I say, and Joe says “Right on,” he’s annoyed: it’s obvious. I peer into the forest to see if another trail has been cut around the windfall but there’s no sign; or there are too many signs,