Dancing Girls (13 page)

T
he way they’re going on about it in the magazines you’d think it was just invented, and not only that but it’s something terrific, like a vaccine for cancer. They put it in capital letters on the front cover, and inside they have these questionnaires like the ones they used to have about whether you were a good enough wife or an endomorph or an ectomorph, remember that? with the scoring upside down on page 73, and then these numbered do-it-yourself dealies, you know?
RAPE, TEN THINGS TO DO ABOUT IT
, like it was ten new hairdos or something. I mean, what’s so new about it?

So at work they all have to talk about it because no matter what magazine you open, there it is, staring you right between the eyes, and they’re beginning to have it on the television, too. Personally I’d prefer a June Allyson movie anytime but they don’t make them any more and they don’t even have them that much on the Late Show. For instance, day before yesterday, that would be Wednesday, thank god it’s Friday as they say, we were sitting around in the women’s lunch room – the
lunch
room, I mean you’d think you could get some peace and quiet in there – and Chrissy closes up
the magazine she’s been reading and says, “How about it, girls, do you have rape fantasies?”

The four of us were having our game of bridge the way we always do, and I had a bare twelve points counting the singleton with not that much of a bid in anything. So I said one club, hoping Sondra would remember about the one club convention, because the time before when I used that she thought I really meant clubs and she bid us up to three, and all I had was four little ones with nothing higher than a six, and we went down two and on top of that we were vulnerable. She is not the world’s best bridge player. I mean, neither am I but there’s a limit.

Darlene passed but the damage was done, Sondra’s head went round like it was on ball bearings and she said,
“What
fantasies?”

“Rape fantasies,” Chrissy said. She’s a receptionist and she looks like one; she’s pretty but cool as a cucumber, like she’s been painted all over with nail polish, if you know what I mean. Varnished. “It says here all women have rape fantasies.”

“For Chrissake, I’m eating an egg sandwich,” I said, “and I bid one club and Darlene passed.”

“You mean, like some guy jumping you in an alley or something,” Sondra said. She was eating her lunch, we all eat our lunches during the game, and she bit into a piece of that celery she always brings and started to chew away on it with this thoughtful expression in her eyes and I knew we might as well pack it in as far as the game was concerned.

“Yeah, sort of like that,” Chrissy said. She was blushing a little, you could see it even under her makeup.

“I don’t think you should go out alone at night,” Darlene said, “you put yourself in a position,” and I may have been mistaken but she was looking at me. She’s the oldest, she’s forty-one though you wouldn’t know it and neither does she, but I looked it up in the employees’ file. I like to guess a person’s age and then look it
up to see if I’m right. I let myself have an extra pack of cigarettes if I am, though I’m trying to cut down. I figure it’s harmless as long as you don’t tell. I mean, not everyone has access to that file, it’s more or less confidential. But it’s all right if I tell you, I don’t expect you’ll ever meet her, though you never know, it’s a small world. Anyway.

“For
heaven’s
sake, it’s only
Toronto,”
Greta said. She worked in Detroit for three years and she never lets you forget it, it’s like she thinks she’s a war hero or something, we should all admire her just for the fact that she’s still walking this earth, though she was really living in Windsor the whole time, she just worked in Detroit. Which for me doesn’t really count. It’s where you sleep, right?

“Well, do you?” Chrissy said. She was obviously trying to tell us about hers but she wasn’t about to go first, she’s cautious, that one.

“I certainly don’t,” Darlene said, and she wrinkled up her nose, like this, and I had to laugh. “I think it’s disgusting.” She’s divorced, I read that in the file too, she never talks about it. It must’ve been years ago anyway. She got up and went over to the coffee machine and turned her back on us as though she wasn’t going to have anything more to do with it.

“Well,” Greta said. I could see it was going to be between her and Chrissy. They’re both blondes, I don’t mean that in a bitchy way but they do try to outdress each other. Greta would like to get out of Filing, she’d like to be a receptionist too so she could meet more people. You don’t meet much of anyone in Filing except other people in Filing. Me, I don’t mind it so much, I have outside interests.

“Well,” Greta said, “I sometimes think about, you know my apartment? It’s got this little balcony, I like to sit out there in the summer and I have a few plants out there. I never bother that much about locking the door to the balcony, it’s one of those sliding glass ones, I’m on the eighteenth floor for heaven’s sake, I’ve got a good
view of the lake and the CN Tower and all. But I’m sitting around one night in my housecoat, watching TV with my shoes off, you know how you do, and I see this guy’s feet, coming down past the window, and the next thing you know he’s standing on the balcony, he’s let himself down by a rope with a hook on the end of it from the floor above, that’s the nineteenth, and before I can even get up off the chesterfield he’s inside the apartment. He’s all dressed in black with black gloves on” – I knew right away what show she got the black gloves off because I saw the same one – “and then he, well, you know.”

“You know what?” Chrissy said, but Greta said, “And afterwards he tells me that he goes all over the outside of the apartment building like that, from one floor to another, with his rope and his hook … and then he goes out to the balcony and tosses his rope, and he climbs up it and disappears.”

“Just like Tarzan,” I said, but nobody laughed.

“Is that all?” Chrissy said. “Don’t you ever think about, well, I think about being in the bathtub, with no clothes on …”

“So who takes a bath in their clothes?” I said, you have to admit it’s stupid when you come to think of it, but she just went on, “…  with lots of bubbles, what I use is Vitabath, it’s more expensive but it’s so relaxing, and my hair pinned up, and the door opens and this fellow’s standing there.…”

“How’d he get in?” Greta said.

“Oh, I don’t know, through a window or something. Well, I can’t very well get out of the bathtub, the bathroom’s too small and besides he’s blocking the doorway, so I just
lie
there, and he starts to very slowly take his own clothes off, and then he gets into the bathtub with me.”

“Don’t you scream or anything?” said Darlene. She’d come back with her cup of coffee, she was getting really interested. “I’d scream like bloody murder.”

“Who’d hear me?” Chrissy said. “Besides, all the articles say it’s better not to resist, that way you don’t get hurt.”

“Anyway you might get bubbles up your nose,” I said, “from the deep breathing,” and I swear all four of them looked at me like I was in bad taste, like I’d insulted the Virgin Mary or something. I mean, I don’t see what’s wrong with a little joke now and then. Life’s too short, right?

“Listen,” I said, “those aren’t
rape
fantasies. I mean, you aren’t getting
raped
, it’s just some guy you haven’t met formally who happens to be more attractive than Derek Cummins” – he’s the Assistant Manager, he wears elevator shoes or at any rate they have these thick soles and he has this funny way of talking, we call him Derek Duck – “and you have a good time. Rape is when they’ve got a knife or something and you don’t want to.”

“So what about you, Estelle,” Chrissy said, she was miffed because I laughed at her fantasy, she thought I was putting her down. Sondra was miffed too, by this time she’d finished her celery and she wanted to tell about hers, but she hadn’t got in fast enough.

“All right, let me tell you one,” I said. “I’m walking down this dark street at night and this fellow comes up and grabs my arm. Now it so happens that I have a plastic lemon in my purse, you know how it always says you should carry a plastic lemon in your purse? I don’t really do it, I tried it once but the darn thing leaked all over my chequebook, but in this fantasy I have one, and I say to him, ‘You’re intending to rape me, right?’ and he nods, so I open my purse to get the plastic lemon, and I can’t find it! My purse is full of all this junk, Kleenex and cigarettes and my change purse and my lipstick and my driver’s licence, you know the kind of stuff; so I ask him to hold out his hands, like this, and I pile all this junk into them and down at the bottom there’s the plastic lemon, and I can’t get the top off So I hand it to him and he’s very obliging, he twists the top off and hands it back to me, and I squirt him in the eye.”

I hope you don’t think that’s too vicious. Come to think of it, it is a bit mean, especially when he was so polite and all.

“That’s
your rape fantasy?” Chrissy says. “I don’t believe it.”

“She’s a card,” Darlene says, she and I are the ones that’ve been here the longest and she never will forget the time I got drunk at the office party and insisted I was going to dance under the table instead of on top of it, I did a sort of Cossack number but then I hit my head on the bottom of the table – actually it was a desk – when I went to get up, and I knocked myself out cold. She’s decided that’s the mark of an original mind and she tells everyone new about it and I’m not sure that’s fair. Though I did do it.

“I’m being totally honest,” I say. I always am and they know it. There’s no point in being anything else, is the way I look at it, and sooner or later the truth will out so you might as well not waste the time, right? “You should hear the one about the Easy-Off Oven Cleaner.”

But that was the end of the lunch hour, with one bridge game shot to hell, and the next day we spent most of the time arguing over whether to start a new game or play out the hands we had left over from the day before, so Sondra never did get a chance to tell about her rape fantasy.

It started me thinking though, about my own rape fantasies. Maybe I’m abnormal or something, I mean I have fantasies about handsome strangers coming in through the window too, like Mr. Clean, I wish one would, please god somebody without flat feet and big sweat marks on his shirt, and over five feet five, believe me being tall is a handicap though it’s getting better, tall guys are starting to like someone whose nose reaches higher than their belly button. But if you’re being totally honest you can’t count those as rape fantasies. In a real rape fantasy, what you should feel is this anxiety, like when you think about your apartment building catching on fire and whether you should use the elevator or the stairs or
maybe just stick your head under a wet towel, and you try to remember everything you’ve read about what to do but you can’t decide.

For instance, I’m walking along this dark street at night and this short, ugly fellow comes up and grabs my arm, and not only is he ugly, you know, with a sort of puffy nothing face, like those fellows you have to talk to in the bank when your account’s overdrawn – of course I don’t mean they’re all like that – but he’s absolutely covered in pimples. So he gets me pinned against the wall, he’s short but he’s heavy, and he starts to undo himself and the zipper gets stuck. I mean, one of the most significant moments in a girl’s life, it’s almost like getting married or having a baby or something, and he sticks the zipper.

So I say, kind of disgusted, “Oh for Chrissake,” and he starts to cry. He tells me he’s never been able to get anything right in his entire life, and this is the last straw, he’s going to go jump off a bridge.

“Look,” I say, I feel so sorry for him, in my rape fantasies I always end up feeling sorry for the guy, I mean there has to be something
wrong
with them, if it was Clint Eastwood it’d be different but worse luck it never is. I was the kind of little girl who buried dead robins, know what I mean? It used to drive my mother nuts, she didn’t like me touching them, because of the germs I guess. So I say, “Listen, I know how you feel. You really should do something about those pimples, if you got rid of them you’d be quite good looking, honest; then you wouldn’t have to go around doing stuff like this. I had them myself once,” I say, to comfort him, but in fact I did, and it ends up I give him the name of my old dermatologist, the one I had in high school, that was back in Leamington, except I used to go to St. Catharines for the dermatologist. I’m telling you, I was really lonely when I first came here; I thought it was going to be such a big adventure and all, but it’s a lot harder to meet people in a city. But I guess it’s different for a guy.

Or I’m lying in bed with this terrible cold, my face is all swollen up, my eyes are red and my nose is dripping like a leaky tap, and this fellow comes in through the window and
he
has a terrible cold too, it’s a new kind of flu that’s been going around. So he says, “I’b goig do rabe you” – I hope you don’t mind me holding my nose like this but that’s the way I imagine it – and he lets out this terrific sneeze, which slows him down a bit, also I’m no object of beauty myself, you’d have to be some kind of pervert to want to rape someone with a cold like mine, it’d be like raping a bottle of LePage’s mucilage the way my nose is running. He’s looking wildly around the room, and I realize it’s because he doesn’t have a piece of Kleenex! “Id’s ride here,” I say, and I pass him the Kleenex, god knows why he even bothered to get out of bed, you’d think if you were going to go around climbing in windows you’d wait till you were healthier, right? I mean, that takes a certain amount of energy. So I ask him why doesn’t he let me fix him a Neo-Citran and scotch, that’s what I always take, you still have the cold but you don’t feel it, so I do and we end up watching the Late Show together. I mean, they aren’t all sex maniacs, the rest of the time they must lead a normal life. I figure they enjoy watching the Late Show just like anybody else.

I do have a scarier one though … where the fellow says he’s hearing angel voices that’re telling him he’s got to kill me, you know, you read about things like that all the time in the papers. In this one I’m not in the apartment where I live now, I’m back in my mother’s house in Leamington and the fellow’s been hiding in the cellar, he grabs my arm when I go downstairs to get a jar of jam and he’s got hold of the axe too, out of the garage, that one is really scary. I mean, what do you say to a nut like that?