Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [36]
In the morning David fished from the dock, catching nothing; Anna read, she was on her fourth or fifth paperback. I swept the floor, the broom webbing itself with long threads, dark and light, from where Anna and I brushed our hair in front of the mirror; then I tried to work. Joe stayed on the wall bench, arms wrapped around his knees in lawn-dwarf position, watching me. Every time I glanced up his eyes would be there, blue as ball point pens or Superman; even with my head turned away I could feel his x-ray vision prying under my skin, a slight prickling sensation as though he was tracing me. It was hard to concentrate; I re-read two of the folk tales, about the king who learned to speak with animals and the fountain of life, but I got no further than a rough sketch of a thing that looked like a football player. It was supposed to be a giant.
“What’s wrong?” I said to him finally, putting down my brush, giving up.
“Nothing,” he said. He took the cover off the butter dish and started carving holes in the butter with his forefinger.
I should have realized much earlier what was happening, I should have got out of it when we were still in the city. It was unfair of me to stay with him, he’d become used to it, hooked on it, but I didn’t realize that and neither did he. When you can’t tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you’re an addict. I did that, I fed him unlimited supplies of nothing, he wasn’t ready for it, it was too strong for him, he had to fill it up, like people isolated in a blank room who see patterns.
After lunch they all sat around expectantly, as though waiting for me to dole out the crayons and plasticine or regiment the sing-song, tell them what to play. I searched through the past: what did we do when it was sunny and there was no work?
“How would you like,” I said, “to pick some blueberries?” Offering it as a surprise; work disguised in some other form, it had to be a game.
They seized on it, glad of the novelty. “A groove,” David said. Anna and I made peanut butter sandwiches for a mid-afternoon snack; then we basted our noses and the lobes of our ears with Anna’s suntan lotion and started out.
David and Anna went in the green canoe, we took the heavier one. They still couldn’t paddle very well but there wasn’t much wind. I had to use a lot of energy just to keep us pointed straight, because Joe didn’t know how to steer; also he wouldn’t admit it, which made it harder.
We wavered around the stone point where the trail goes; then we were in the archipelago of islands, tips of sunken hills, once possibly a single ridge before the lake was flooded. None of them is big enough to have a name; some are no more than rocks, with a few trees clutched and knotted to them by the roots. On one of them, further along, was the heron colony. I had to strain my eyes to spot it: the young in the nests were keeping their serpent necks and blade heads immobile, imitating dead branches. The nests were all in a single tree, white pine, grouped for mutual protection like bungalows on the outskirts. If the herons get within pecking range they fight.
“See them?” I said to Joe, pointing.
“See what?” he said. He was sweating, overworked, the wind was against us. He scowled up at the sky but he couldn’t make them out until one of them lifted and settled, wings balancing.
Beyond the herons’ island was a larger one, flattish, with several red pines rising straight as masts from a ground harsh with blueberry bushes. We landed and tied the canoes and I gave each of them a tin cup. The blueberries were only beginning to ripen, the dots of them showing against the green like first rain pocking the lake. I took my own cup and started to work along the shore, they ripen earlier there.
During the war or was it after they would pay us a cent a cup; there was nowhere to