Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [31]
“Adam and Eve and Pinch Me,” they shouted,
Went to the river to bathe;
Adam and Eve fell in,
So who do you think was saved?
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You have to answer,” they said, “that’s the rules.”
“Adam and Eve,” I said craftily. “They were saved.”
“If you don’t do it right we won’t play with you,” they said. Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform.
It was harder for my brother; our mother had taught him that fighting was wrong so he came home every day beaten to a pulp. Finally she had to back down: he could fight, but only if they hit first.
I didn’t last long at Sunday School. One girl told me she had prayed for a Barbara Ann Scott doll with figure skates and swans-down trim on the costume and she got it for her birthday; so I decided to pray too, not like the Lord’s Prayer or the fish prayer but for something real. I prayed to be made invisible, and when in the morning everyone could still see me I knew they had the wrong God.
A mosquito lights on my arm and I let it bite me, waiting till its abdomen globes with blood before I pop it with my thumb like a grape. They need the blood before they can lay their eggs. There’s a breeze, filtering through the screened window; it’s better here than in the city, with the exhaust-pipe fumes and the damp heat, the burnt rubber smell of the subway, the brown grease that congeals on your skin if you walk around outside. How have I been able to live so long in the city, it isn’t safe. I always felt safe here, even at night.
That’s a lie, my own voice says out loud. I think hard about it, considering it, and it is a lie: sometimes I was terrified, I would shine the flashlight ahead of me on the path, I would hear a rustling in the forest and know it was hunting me, a bear, a wolf or some indefinite thing with no name, that was worse.
I look around at the walls, the window; it’s the same, it hasn’t changed, but the shapes are inaccurate as though everything has warped slightly. I have to be more careful about my memories, I have to be sure they’re my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, I’ll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone. I run quickly over my version of it, my life, checking it like an alibi; it fits, it’s all there till the time I left. Then static, like a jumped track, for a moment I’ve lost it, wiped clean; my exact age even, I shut my eyes, what is it? To have the past but not the present, that means you’re going senile.
I refuse to panic, I force my eyes open, my hand, life etched on it, reference: I flatten the palm and the lines fragment, spread like ripples. I concentrate on the spiderweb near the window, flyhusks caught in it catching in turn the sun, in my mouth tongue forming my name, repeating it like a chant. …
Then someone knocks on the door. “Ready or not, you must be caught,” says a voice, it’s David, I can identify him, relief, I slip back into place.
“Just a minute,” I say, and he knocks again and says “Snappy with the crap in there,” giving a Woody Woodpecker laugh.
Before lunch I tell them I’m going for a swim. The others don’t want to, they say it will be too cold, and it is cold, like icewater. I shouldn’t be going by myself, we were taught that, I might get cramps.
What I used to do was run to the end of the dock and jump, it was like a heart attack or lightning, but as I walk towards the lake I find I no longer have the nerve for that.
This was where he drowned, he got saved only by accident; if there had been a wind she wouldn’t have heard him. She leaned over and reached down and grabbed him by the hair, hauled him up and poured the water out of him. His drowning never seemed to have affected him as much as I thought it should, he couldn’t even remember it. If it had happened to me I would have felt there was something special about me, to be raised