Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [40]
CHAPTER ELEVEN
At night Joe kept turned away from me, he wasn’t going to compromise. I ran my fingers over his furry back to show I wanted a truce, the borders restored to where they’d been, but after he twitched me off and grunted irritably I withdrew. I curled up, concentrating on excluding him: he was merely an object in the bed, like a sack or a large turnip. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn’t see why they would want to skin a cat even one way. I stared at the wall and thought of maxims: two can play that game, marry in haste, repent at leisure, least said soonest mended, traditional wisdom which was never any help.
At breakfast he ignored me and the others too, hunching over his plate, mumbling replies.
“What’s with him?” David said. His new beard was sprouting, a brown smudge on his chin.
“Shut up,” Anna said; but she glanced at me, inquisitive, holding me responsible for it whatever it was.
Joe wiped his sweat shirt sleeve across his mouth and went out of the house, letting the screen door slam behind him.
“Maybe he’s constipated,” David said, “it makes them grouchy. You sure he’s been getting enough exercise?” Then he went “Arf, arf” like Popeye, wiggling his ears.
“Stupid,” Anna said fondly; she rumpled his hair.
“Hey, don’t do that,” he said, “it’ll all fall out.” He jumped up and went to the mirror and rearranged the hair down over his forehead; I hadn’t noticed before that he combed it that way to cover the patches where it had once grown.
I gathered up the bacon rinds and the crusts from the toast and took them out to the bird tray. The jays were there, they saw I had food and told each other about it with hoarse cries. I stood quietly with my hand outstretched but they wouldn’t fly down; they winged overhead, reconnoitring. Perhaps I was moving without knowing it, you had to convince them you were a thing, not an enemy. Our mother made us watch from inside the house, she said we frightened them. Once people believed the flight of birds was a portent: augury.
I heard the mosquito whine of a motor approaching; I left my handful of crumbs on the tray and went out on the point to watch. It was Paul’s boat, white-painted and squarish, handmade; he waved to me from the stern. There was another man with him, sitting in the bow, backwards.
They pulled in to the dock and I ran down the steps to greet them; I caught the rope and tied it. “Careful,” I said as they stepped out, “it’s rotten in places.”
Paul had brought me a huge wad of vegetables from his garden: he handed me a bouquet of swiss chard, a quart basket of green beans, a bundle of carrots, a brain-sized cauliflower, bashfully, as though the gift might not be acceptable. The proper reply would have been an equally large or perhaps larger assortment. I thought with dismay of the spindly broccoli and the radishes already gone to seed.
“Here is a man,” he said. “They send him to me because I know your father.” He stepped backwards, effacing himself, and almost slipped off the dock.
“Malmstrom,” the man said as though it was a secret code; his hand shot towards me. I transferred the swiss chard to the crook of my arm and took the hand, which squeezed mine confidentially. “Bill Malmstrom, please call me Bill.” He had trimmed grey hair and an executive moustache like the shirt ads, the vodka ads; his clothes were woodsy, semi-worn, verging on the authentic. Slung around his neck was a pair of binoculars in a suede case.
We walked to the land; he had taken out a pipe and was lighting it. I wondered if he was from the government. “Paul, here, was telling me,” he said, looking around for Paul, “what a nice place you have.”
“It’s my father’s,” I said.
His face drooped into the appropriate downward curve; if he’d been wearing a hat he would have taken it off. “Ah yes,” he said, “a tragedy.” I distrusted him: I couldn’t place the accent, the name sounded German.
“Where are you from?” I asked, trying to be polite.
“Michigan,” he