Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [59]
“I won’t take her if she doesn’t want to,” Joe said.
“It’s token resistance,” David said, “she wants to, she’s an exhibitionist at heart. She likes her lush bod, don’t you? Even if she is getting too fat.”
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” Anna said, as though she’d guessed a riddle. “You’re trying to humiliate me.”
“What’s humiliating about your body, darling?” David said caressingly. “We all love it, you ashamed of it? That’s pretty stingy of you, you should share the wealth; not that you don’t.”
Anna was furious now, goaded, her voice rose. “Fuck off, you want bloody everything don’t you, you can’t use that stuff on me.”
“Why not,” David said evenly, “it works. Now just take it off like a good girl or I’ll have to take it off for you.”
“Leave her alone,” Joe said, swinging his legs, bored or excited, it was impossible to tell.
I wanted to run down to the dock and stop them, fighting was wrong, we weren’t allowed to, if we did both sides got punished as in a real war. So we battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defence was flight, invisibility. I sat down on the top step.
“Shut up, she’s my wife,” David said. His hand clamped down above her elbow. She jerked away, then I saw his arms go around her as if to kiss her and she was in the air, upside down over his shoulder, hair hanging in damp ropes. “Okay twatface,” he said, “is it off or into the lake?”
Anna’s fists grabbed bunches of his shirt. “If I go in, you go in too.” The words spurted from behind her fallen hair, she was kicking, I couldn’t see whether she was laughing or crying.
“Shoot,” David said to Joe, and to Anna, “I’ll count to ten.”
Joe swivelled the camera and trained it on them like a bazooka or a strange instrument of torture and pressed the button, lever, sinister whirr.
“All right,” Anna said under its coercion, “you shmuck bastard, God damn you.” He set her down and stepped aside. Her arms, elbows out, struggled with the fastener like a beetle’s on its back and the top dropped away: I saw her cut in half, one breast on either side of a thin tree.
“Bottoms too,” David said as though to a recalcitrant child. Anna glanced at him, contemptuous, and bent. “Look sexy now, move it; give us a little dance.”
Anna stood for a moment, brown-red with yellow fur and white markings like underwear, glaring at them. Then she stuck her middle finger in the air at them and ran to the end of the dock and jumped into the lake. It was a bellyflop, the water splattered out like a dropped egg. She came up with her hair in streaks over her forehead and started to swim around towards the sand point, clumsy, arms flailing.
“Get that?” David said mildly over his shoulder.
“Some of it,” Joe said. “Maybe you could order her to do it again.” I thought he was being sarcastic but I wasn’t sure. He began to unscrew the camera from the tripod.
I could hear Anna splashing and then stumbling below on the sand point; she was really crying now, her indrawn breaths rasping. The bushes rustled, she swore; then she appeared over the top of the hill, she must have climbed up by holding on to the leaning trees. Her pink face was dissolving, her skin was covered with sand and pine needles like a burned leech. She went into the cabin without looking at me or saying anything.
I stood up. Joe was gone but David was still on the dock, sitting now crosslegged. One at a time they were safer; I went down for the canoe.
“Hi,” he said, “how goes it?” He didn’t know I’d been watching. He had his shoes off and was picking at a toenail as though nothing had happened.
David is like me, I thought, we are the ones that don’t know how to love, there is something essential missing in us, we were born that way, Madame at the store with one hand, atrophy of the heart. Joe and Anna are lucky, they do it badly and suffer because of it: but it’s better to see than to be blind, even though that way you had to let in the crimes and atrocities too. Or perhaps we are normal and the ones who can love are freaks,