Bodily Harm (8 page)

My aunts kept watch on her through the kitchen window while she wandered around in the yard, prowling through the frost-bitten ruins of the garden which my mother didn’t have the time to keep up any more. Once it had been filled with flowers, zinnias and scarlet runner beans on poles where the hummingbirds would come. My grandmother once told me heaven would be like that: if you were good enough you would get everlasting life and go to a place where there were always flowers. I think she really believed it. My mother and my aunts didn’t believe it, though my mother went to church and when my aunts visited they all sang hymns in the kitchen after supper when they were doing the dishes.

She seems to think it’s still there, said my aunt from Winnipeg. Look. She’ll freeze to death out there.

Put her in a home, said my other aunt, looking at my mother’s caved face, the mauve half-moons under her eyes.

I can’t, my mother would say. On some days she’s perfectly all right. It would be like killing her.

If I ever get like that, take me out to a field and shoot me, said my other aunt.

All I could think of at that time was how to get away from Griswold. I didn’t want to be trapped, like my mother. Although I admired her – everyone was always telling me how admirable she was, she was practically a saint – I didn’t want to be like her in any way. I didn’t want to have a family or be anyone’s mother, ever; I had none of those ambitions. I didn’t want to own any objects or inherit
any. I didn’t want to cope. I didn’t want to deteriorate. I used to pray that I wouldn’t live long enough to get like my grandmother, and now I guess I won’t.

Rennie wakes up finally at eight. She lies in bed and listens to the music, which seems to be coming from downstairs now, and decides she feels much better. After a while she gropes her way through the mosquito netting and gets out of bed. She leans on the windowsill, looking out at the sunlight, which is very bright but not yet ferocious. Down below is a cement courtyard, she seems to be at the back of the hotel, where a woman is washing sheets in a zinc tub.

She considers her wardrobe. There isn’t a lot of choice, since she packed the minimum.

She remembers picking out the basic functional sunbreak mix ’n’ match, wrinkle-free for the most part. That was only the day before yesterday. After she’d packed, she had gone through her cupboard and her bureau drawers, sorting, rearranging, folding, tucking the sleeves of her sweaters carefully behind their backs, as if someone would be staying in her apartment while she was away and she needed to leave things as tidy and manageable as possible. That was only the clothes. The food in the refrigerator she’d disregarded. Whoever it was wouldn’t be eating.

Rennie puts on a plain white cotton dress. When the dress is on she looks at herself in the mirror. She still looks normal.

Today she has an appointment with the radiologist at the hospital. Daniel made it for her weeks ago, he wants more tests. A workup, they call it. She didn’t even cancel the appointment before taking off. She knows that later she will regret this lack of courtesy.

Right now she only feels she’s escaped. She doesn’t want the tests; she doesn’t want the tests because she doesn’t want the results. Daniel wouldn’t have scheduled more tests unless he thought there was something wrong with her again, though he said it was routine. She’s in remission, he says.
But we’ll have to keep an eye on you, we always will. Remission
is the good word,
terminal
is the bad one. It makes Rennie think of bus stations: the end of the line.

She wonders whether she’s already become one of those odd wanderers, the desperate ones, who cannot bear the thought of one more useless hospital ordeal, pain and deathly sickness, the cells bombarded, the skin gone antiseptic, the hair falling out. Will she go off on those weird quests too, extract of apricot pits, meditation on the sun and moon, coffee enemas in Colorado, cocktails made from the juice of cabbages, hope in bottles, the laying on of hands by those who say they can see vibrations flowing out of their fingers in the form of a holy red light? Faith healing. When will she get to the point where she’ll try anything? She doesn’t want to be considered crazy but she also doesn’t want to be considered dead.

Either I’m living or I’m dying, she said to Daniel. Please don’t feel you can’t tell me. Which is it?

Which does it feel like? said Daniel. He patted her hand. You’re not dead yet. You’re a lot more alive than many people.

This isn’t good enough for Rennie. She wants something definite, the real truth, one way or the other. Then she will know what she should do next. It’s this suspension, hanging in a void, this half-life she can’t bear. She can’t bear not knowing. She doesn’t want to know.

She goes into the bathroom, intending to brush her teeth. In the sink there’s a centipede, ten inches long at least, with far too many legs, blood-red, and two curved prongs at the back, or is it the front?
It’s wriggling up the side of the slippery porcelain sink, falling back again, wriggling up, falling back. It looks venomous.

Rennie is unprepared for this. She’s not up to squashing it, what would she use anyway? And there’s nothing to spray it with. The creature looks far too much like the kind of thing she’s been having bad dreams about: the scar on her breast splits open like a diseased fruit and something like this crawls out. She goes into the other room and sits down on the bed, clasping her hands together to keep them from shaking. She waits five minutes, then wills herself back into the bathroom.

The thing is gone. She wonders whether it dropped from the ceiling in the first place, or came up through the drain, and now where has it gone? Over the side onto the floor, into some crack, or back down the drain again? She wishes she had some Drano and a heavy stick. She runs some water into the sink and looks around for the plug. There isn’t one.

There’s a lounge where you can have afternoon tea; it’s furnished with dark green leatherette chairs that look as if they’ve been hoisted from an early-fifties hotel foyer in some place like Belleville. Rennie waits on one of the sticky chairs while they set a table for her in the diningroom, grudgingly, since she’s half an hour late. In addition to the chairs there’s a glass-topped coffee table with wrought-iron legs on which there are copies of
Time
and
Newsweek
eight months old, and a mottled plant. Gold tinsel is looped around the tops of the windows, left over from Christmas; or perhaps they never take it down.

The tablecloths from the night before have been removed; underneath, the tables are grey formica with a pattern of small red squares. Instead of the pleated linen fans there are yellow paper
napkins. Rennie looks around for Paul but there’s no sign of him. The hotel seems fuller, though. There’s an older woman, white, thin-faced, by herself, who stares perkily around the diningroom as if expecting to be charmed by everything, and an Indian family, the wife and grandmother in saris, the little girls in frilled sundresses. Luckily, Rennie is placed one table away from the older woman, who looks unpleasantly Canadian. She doesn’t want to have a conversation about scenery or the weather. The three little girls parade the room, giggling, being chased and pinched playfully by the two waitresses, who smile for them in a way they do not smile for adults.

The older woman is joined by another like herself, plumper but with hair as tight. Listening to them, watching them consult their little books, Rennie discovers that they aren’t Canadian but German: one of that army of earnest travellers that is everywhere now on the strength of the Deutschmark, even in Toronto, blue-eyed, alert, cataloguing the world. Why not? thinks Rennie. It’s their turn.

The waitress comes and Rennie orders yoghurt and fresh fruit.

“No fresh fruit,” says the waitress.

“I’ll take the yoghurt anyway,” says Rennie, who feels she’s in need of some friendly bacteria.

“No yoghurt,” says the waitress.

“Why is it on the menu then?” says Rennie.

The waitress looks at her, straight-faced but with her eyes narrowing as if she’s about to smile. “Used to be yoghurt,” she says.

“When will there be some again?” Rennie says, not sure why this should all be so complicated.

“They got Pioneer Industries for dairy now,” the waitress says, as if reciting a lesson. “Government thing. Dairy don’t make no yoghurt. Yoghurt need powder milk. Powder milk outlaw, you can’t buy it. The yoghurt place shut down now.”

Rennie feels that there are connections missing here, but it’s too early in the morning to have to deal with this. “What can I have then?” she says.

“What we got,” says the waitress, very patiently.

This turns out to be orange juice made from instant powder of some sort, an almost-cooked egg, coffee from a jar with tinned milk, bread with margarine, and guava jelly, too sweet, dark orange, of the consistency of ear wax. Rennie wishes she could stop reviewing the food and just eat it. Anyway, she isn’t at the Sunset Inn because of the food. She’s here because of the price: this time the deal isn’t all-expenses. She can do the other, flossier places for lunch or dinner.

The waitress comes and takes away her plate, the runny egg in its custard cup, the pieces of bread and jam lying beside it. Like a child, she’s eaten the centres and left the crusts.

After breakfast comes the rest of the day, which will surely be too long, too hot and bright, to be filled with any activity that will require movement. She wants to go to sleep in the sun on a beach, but she’s prudent, she doesn’t want to come out like crispy chicken. She needs suntan lotion and a hat. After that she can start going through the motions: places of interest, things to do, tennis courts, notable hotels and restaurants, if any.

She knows you become exhausted in the tropics, you lose momentum, you become comatose and demoralized. The main thing is to keep going. She has to convince herself that if she doesn’t manage to complete a well-researched and cheerfully written piece on the pleasures of St. Antoine the universe will be negatively affected.

Maybe she could fake the whole article, concoct a few ravishing little restaurants, some Old World charm in the New World, throw in some romantic history, tart the whole thing up with a few photos from the lesser-known corners of, say, St. Kitts. She pictures legions of businessmen descending on St. Antoine and then, in outrage, on
the editorial offices of
Visor
. It won’t do, she’ll have to come up with something, she’s overdrawn at the bank. She can always talk about development potential.

What I need is a pith helmet, she thinks, and some bearers, or are they beaters, to carry me around in a hammock, and some of what those people in Somerset Maugham are always drinking. Pink gin?

Rennie does what she does because she’s good at it, or that’s what she says at parties. Also because she doesn’t know how to do anything else, which she doesn’t say. Once she had ambitions, which she now thinks of as illusions: she believed there was a right man, not several and not almost right, and she believed there was a real story, not several and not almost real. But that was 1970 and she was in college. It was easy to believe such things then. She decided to specialize in abuses: honesty would be her policy. She did a piece for the
Varsity
on blockbusting as practised by city developers and another on the lack of good day-care centres for single mothers, and she took the nasty and sometimes threatening letters she received as a tribute to her effectiveness.