Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [67]
“That’s all right,” I said; I knew he was lying.
They sat around the table in the regular places and I served dinner. There hadn’t been any lunch but no one mentioned that.
“What time is Evans coming tomorrow?” I said.
“Ten, ten-thirty,” David said. “Have a nice afternoon?” he said to Anna. Joe stuck a new potato with his fork and put it into his mouth.
“Fantastic,” Anna said. “I got some sun and finished my book, then I had a long talk with Joe and went for a stroll.” Joe chewed, his closed mouth moving, silent refutation. “And you?”
“Great,” David said, his voice buoyant, inflated. He bent his arm onto the table, his hand brushing mine casually, as though by accident, for her to see. I flinched away, he was lying about me, the animals don’t lie.
Anna smiled mournfully at him. I watched him, he wasn’t laughing, he was staring at her, the lines in his face deepening and sagging. They know everything about each other, I thought, that’s why they’re so sad; but Anna was more than sad, she was desperate, her body her only weapon and she was fighting for her life, he was her life, her life was the fight: she was fighting him because if she ever surrendered the balance of power would be broken and he would go elsewhere. To continue the war.
I didn’t want to join. “It’s not what you think,” I said to Anna. “He asked me to but I wouldn’t.” I wanted to tell her I hadn’t acted against her.
Her eyes flicked from him to me. “That was pure of you,” she said. I’d made a mistake, she resented me because I hadn’t given in, it commented on her.
“She’s pure all right,” David said, “she’s a little purist.”
“Joe told me she won’t put out for him any more,” Anna said, still looking at me. Joe didn’t say anything; he was eating another potato.
“She hates men,” David said lightly. “Either that or she wants to be one. Right?”
A ring of eyes, tribunal; in a minute they would join hands and dance around me, and after that the rope and the pyre, cure for heresy.
Maybe it was true, I leafed through all the men I had known to see whether or not I hated them. But then I realized it wasn’t the men I hated, it was the Americans, the human beings, men and women both. They’d had their chance but they had turned against the gods, and it was time for me to choose sides. I wanted there to be a machine that could make them vanish, a button I could press that would evaporate them without disturbing anything else, that way there would be more room for the animals, they would be rescued.
“Aren’t you going to answer?” Anna said, taunting.
“No,” I said.
Anna said, “God, she really is inhuman,” and they both laughed a little, sorrowfully.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I cleared the table and scraped the canned ham fat scraps from the plates into the fire, food for the dead. If you fed them enough they would come back; or was it the reverse, if you fed them enough they would stay away, it was in one of the books but I’d forgotten.
Anna said she would wash the dishes. It was an apology perhaps, reparation for the fact that she’d found it easier to fight on his side than against him. For once. She rattled the cutlery in the pan, singing to avoid discussion, we were beyond the time for confidences; her voice occupied the room, territorial.
It had to be inside the house. Before supper I searched the toolshed, while I was getting the shovel, and the garden when I dug up the potatoes; but it wasn’t there, I would have recognized it. It had to be something out of place, something that wasn’t here when I left, apple in the row of oranges like the old arithmetic workbooks. She would have brought it here especially for me and hidden it where I would discover it when I was ready; like my father’s puzzle it would mediate, we cannot approach them directly. I dried the dishes