Bodily Harm Read online

  People from bigger places, Jake in particular, think that Griswold has an exotic and primitive charm. Rennie doesn't think this. Mostly she tries to avoid thinking about Griswold at all. Griswold, she hopes, is merely something she defines herself against.

  Though it's not always so easy to get rid of Griswold. For instance: When Rennie saw the piece of rope on her bed, she knew what Griswold would have had to say about it. This is what happens to women like you. What can you expect, you deserve it. In Griswold everyone gets what they deserve. In Griswold everyone deserves the worst.

  The night before the operation Jake took Rennie out to dinner, to cheer her up. She didn't feel like going, but she knew she had been boring recently and she'd vowed, a long time ago, when she was still in her early twenties, never to be boring; a vow that had been harder to keep than she'd expected.

  Rennie was an expert on boredom, having done a piece on it for Pandora's "Relationships" column in which she claimed that there were two people involved in boredom, not just one: the borer and the boree. Out-and-out boredom of the jaw-stiffening kind could be avoided by small shifts in attention. Study his tie, she recommended. If you're stuck, make an imaginary earlobe collection and add his. Watch his Adam's apple move up and down. Keep smiling. The assumption was that the active principle, the source of the powerful ergs of boredom, was male, and that the passive recipient was female. Of course this was unfair, but who except women would read a Pandora "Relationships" column? When writing for male-oriented magazines such as Crusoe or Visor she offered self-help hints: "How To Read Her Mind." If she's looking too hard at your earlobes or watching your Adam's apple go up and down, change the subject.

  Jake took her to Fentons, which used to be more than he could afford, and they sat under one of the indoor trees. At first he held her hand, but she felt he was doing it because he thought he ought to and after a while he stopped. He ordered a bottle of wine and urged her to drink more of it than she wanted to. Perhaps he thought she would be less boring if she got drunk, but this was not the case.

  She didn't want to talk about the operation but she couldn't think about anything else. Maybe it would turn out to be benign; on the other hand, maybe they would open her up and find that she was permeated, riddled, rotting away from the inside. There was a good chance she'd wake up minus a breast. She knew she ought to be thinking about how to die with dignity but she didn't want to die with dignity. She didn't want to die at all.

  Jake told stories about people they knew, gossipy stories with a malicious twist, the kind she used to enjoy. She tried to enjoy them but instead she started to think about Jake's fingers: he was holding the stem of his wineglass with his left hand, lightly, but the knuckles were absolutely white. He had a habit of never throwing out empty containers; that morning she'd taken down the Shreddies box and there was nothing in it. How could she know when it was time to get more if he kept leaving empty peanut butter jars and honey jars and cocoa tins on the shelves? She refrained from mentioning this. She felt that Jake's eyes kept slipping away from her face, down to the top button of her blouse; then, as if he'd reached a line, a taboo, back up to her face again. He's fascinated, she thought.

  They walked home with their arms around each other, as if they were still in love. While Jake took a shower, Rennie stood in the bedroom with the closet door open, wondering what she should put on. Two of her nightgowns, the black one with the see-through lace top and the red satin one slit up the sides, had been presents from Jake. He liked buying her things like that. Bad taste. Garters, merry widows, red bikini pants with gold spangles, wired half-cup hooker brassieres that squeezed and pushed up the breasts. The real you, he'd say, with irony and hope. Who'd ever guess? Black leather and whips, that's next.

  She wanted to make it easy for him, she wanted to help him along with the illusion that nothing bad had happened to her or was going to happen. Her body was in the mirror, looking the same as ever. She couldn't believe that in a week, a day, some of it might have vanished. She thought about what they did with the parts.

  In the end she wore nothing. She waited in bed for Jake to come out of the shower. He would smell of body shampoo and he would be damp and slippery. She used to like it when he slid into her wet like that, but tonight she was only waiting for a certain amount of time to be over, as if she were in a dentist's office, waiting for something to be done to her. A procedure.

  At first he couldn't. It had been too sudden; she'd been told, she'd told him, the operation had been scheduled, all in the same day. She could understand his shock and disgust and the effort he was making not to reveal them, since she felt the same way. She wanted to tell him he didn't have to, not if it was too much of an effort, but he wouldn't take that well, he'd think she was being critical.

  He ran his hand over her breast a couple of times, the bad one. Then he began to cry. This was what she'd been afraid she herself would do. She hugged him, stroking the back of his head.

  After that he made love to her, painfully and for a long time. She could hear his teeth grinding together, as if he were angry. He was holding back, waiting for her to come. He thought he was doing her a favour. He was doing her a favour. She couldn't stand the idea of anyone doing her a favour. Her body was nerveless, slack, as if she was already under the anaesthetic. As though he could sense this he gathered skin and muscle, wrenching, twisting, he bit her, not gently, shoving himself into her, trying to break through that barrier of deadened flesh. At last she faked it. That was another vow she'd made once: never to fake it.

  By the time the flight is called it's already dark. They stand at the gate, a dozen or so of them, watching the plane land. The gate isn't even a gate but an opening in the cement wall with a chain across it. The airline officials, two kids, a light-brown girl who looks about sixteen and a boy with a set of earphones, can't decide which gate they should be standing at, so the whole group straggles back and forth several times between one hole in the wall and another. A man in tinted glasses offers to carry her camera bag for her, but Rennie refuses politely. She doesn't want anyone sitting beside her on the plane, especially a man who would wear a safari jacket. She didn't like safari jackets even when they were still possible. He's the only white man in the group.

  When the hole is finally unchained, Rennie follows the others towards the plane, which is tiny and looks alarmingly homemade. Rennie tells herself that you stand a better chance in a small plane like this than in a jumbo jet. Jake has a joke about planes. He says they can't really fly, it's absurd to think a heavy piece of metal like that can fly; what keeps them up is the irrational belief of the passengers, and all plane crashes can be explained by loss of faith.

  He'd have a job with this one, she thinks, anyone can see it'll never get off the ground. St. Antoine isn't a rich country, they probably buy their planes fourth-hand from other countries, then stick them together with Band-Aids and string until they fall apart irreparably. It's like the fat trade in restaurants. Rennie knows a lot about the fat trade in restaurants: the good ones selling their used fat to the second-rate ones, and so on down the line until the fat reaches the chipworks of cheap hamburger stands. Rennie's piece on the fat trade was called, "By Their Fats Ye Shall Know Them." The editor's title, not hers. She wanted to call it "Fat City."

  She climbs the wobbling metal steps through the dark heat which is doubled by the heat of the plane. The camera bag strap cuts into her shoulder and the flesh above her left breast; the scar is pulling again. When it feels like this she's afraid to look down, she's afraid she'll see blood, leakage, her stuffing coming out. It isn't a very big scar as such things go; worse things happen to other people. She's lucky. Why then doesn't she feel lucky?

  I don't want to have the operation, she said. She believed two things at once: that there was nothing wrong with her and that she was doomed anyway, so why waste the time? She had a horror of someone, anyone, putting a knife into her and cutting some of her off, which was what it amounted to no matter what the
y called it. She disliked the idea of being buried one piece at a time instead of all at once, it was too much like those women they were always finding strewn about ravines or scattered here and there in green garbage bags. Dead but not molested. The first time she'd seen that word, in a Toronto newspaper when she was eight, she'd thought a molester was someone who caught moles. A molester is someone who is indecent, said her grandmother. But since that was what her grandmother said about almost everyone, it wasn't much help. Rennie still used that word sometimes, for fun, where other people would use gross.

  Daniel, who at that point was still Dr. Luoma, looked at her as if he was disappointed in her: other women no doubt said similar things. This embarrassed her, since even such a short time ago she still assumed she was unique.

  You don't have to, he said. Or, well, you don't have to do anything. Nobody's forcing you, it's your own decision. He paused here, letting her remember that the alternative he offered her was death. Either/or. Multiple choice: which was not what it said.

  During the morning of the day on which she had her routine, once-a-year appointment at the gynecologist's, Rennie was working on a piece about drain-chain jewellery. You could get it for pennies at your local Woolworth's, she wrote. Buy as many lengths as you need, make the chains as long as you like with those cunning little peanut-shaped connectors, wear them on any part of your anatomy: wrists, neck, waist, even ankles, if you wanted the slave-girl effect. It was the latest Queen Street thing, she wrote, a New Wave sleaze put-on of real jewellery. Or beyond New Wave even: nouveau wave.

  In fact it wasn't the latest Queen Street thing. It wasn't a thing at all, it was an embellishment Rennie had spotted on one of her friends, Jocasta, who ran Ripped Off, a second-hand store on Peter Street that specialized in violently ugly clothes from the fifties, springolator pumps, tiger-stripe pedal pushers, formals with jutting tits and layers of spangles and tulle.

  Jocasta was five foot nine, with the cheekbones of an ex-model. She went in for fake leopard-skin shortie coats. The women who hung out at Ripped Off were half Jocasta's age and wore a lot of black leather. They had hair dyed green or bright red, or they shaved their heads with an Iroquois fringe running down the middle. Some of them had safety pins in their ears. They looked up to Jocasta, who was right over the edge in the creative sleaze line and could carry it off, too. In her display window she made arrangements that she called Junk Punk: a stuffed lizard copulating with a mink collar in a child's rocking chair, motorized, a cairn of false teeth with a born-again tract propped against it: "How Can I Be Saved?" Once she hung a coat tree with blown-up condoms sprayed with red enamel and a sign: NATIONAL LOVE A REFUGEE WEEK.

  Of course it's gross, said Jocasta. But so's the world, you know what I mean? Me, I'm relaxed. A little deep breathing, mantras of one syllable, bran for breakfast. Can I help it if I'm the wave of the future?

  Jocasta wasn't Jocasta's name: her real name was Joanne. She changed it when she was thirty-eight because, as she said, what can you do with a name like Joanne? Too nice. She didn't dye her hair green or wear a safety pin in her ear but calling herself Jocasta was the equivalent. Good taste kills, said Jocasta.

  Rennie met Jocasta when she was doing a piece on the Queen Street renaissance for Toronto Life, all about the conversion of hardware stores and wholesale fabric outlets into French restaurants and trendy boutiques. She did not necessarily believe that a trendy boutique was any improvement over a wholesale fabric outlet, but she knew enough to avoid such negative value judgements in print. At first she thought Jocasta was a lesbian, because of the way she dressed, but later she decided Jocasta was merely bizarre. Rennie liked Jocasta because Jocasta was much more bizarre than Rennie felt she herself could ever be. Partly she admired this quality, partly she felt it was dangerous, and partly, being from Griswold after all, she had a certain contempt for it.

  Jocasta wore drain chains because she was miserly and they were cheap. She hadn't even bought her chains, she'd raided the sinks of neighbouring restaurants for them: "All I did was take the plug off with a pair of pliers, and voila." But sometimes Rennie liked to write pieces about trends that didn't really exist, to see if she could make them exist by writing about them. Six to one she'd see at least ten women with bathplug chains looped around their necks two weeks after the piece came out. Successes of this kind gave her an odd pleasure, half gleeful, half sour: people would do anything not to be thought outmoded.

  Usually her articles on fake trends were just as plausible as the ones on real trends; sometimes more so, because she tried harder with them. Even the editors were taken in, and when they weren't they'd go along anyway, half-believing that what Rennie had to say on subjects like this would eventually come true, even if it wasn't true at the moment. When she wasn't fooling around she was uncanny, they told each other: as if she could see into the future.

  If I could see into the future, Rennie said to one of them (a man, who kept suggesting that they should have drinks sometime soon), do you think I'd waste my time on this sort of thing? The colour of women's lipstick, the length of their skirts, the height of their heels, what bits of plastic or gilt junk they choose to stick on themselves? I see into the present, that's all. Surfaces. There's not a whole lot to it.

  Rennie became a quick expert on surfaces when she first moved away from Griswold. (On a university scholarship: the only other respectable way out of Griswold for a young single woman, she used to say, is straight down.) Surfaces determined whether or not people took you seriously, and what was mandatory in Griswold was, more often than not, ludicrous in the real world. Griswold, for instance, was an early convert to polyester knit.

  At first she'd looked in order to copy; later on she'd looked in order not to copy. After that she just looked. When Marxist college professors and hard-line feminists gave her a rough time at parties about the frivolity of her subject matter she would counter with a quote from Oscar Wilde to the effect that only superficial people were not concerned with appearances. Then she would tactfully suggest certain alterations to their wardrobes that would improve their own appearances no end. They were usually vain enough to be interested: nobody wanted to be in bad taste.

  Most of the people she knew thought Rennie was way out ahead of it, but she saw herself as off to the side. She preferred it there; she'd noted, many times, the typical pose of performers, celebrities, in magazine shots and publicity stills and especially on stage. Teeth bared in an ingratiating smile, arms flung wide to the sides, hands open to show that there were no concealed weapons, head thrown back, throat bared to the knife; an offering, an exposure. She felt no envy towards them. In fact she found them embarrassing, their eagerness, their desperation, for that was what it was, even when they were successful. Underneath it they would do anything; they'd take their clothes off if there was no other way, they'd stand on their heads, anything, in that frenzied grab for attention. She would much rather be the one who wrote things about people like this than be the one they got written about.

  Rennie finished the first draft of her piece on drain-chain jewellery and spent some time thinking about the title. Eventually she discarded "The Chain Gang" in favour of "Chain Reaction." The pictures would be easy to get, but she'd leave that to the magazine. She never shot high-gloss fashion, she wasn't good enough.

  At eleven-thirty Jake surprised her by coming home, "for a lunchtime quickie," he said. That was fine, since she liked being surprised by him. At that time he was still inventive. Sometimes he would climb up the fire escape and in through the window instead of coming through the door, he'd send her ungrammatical and obscene letters composed of words snipped from newspapers, purporting to be from crazy men, he'd hide in closets and spring out at her, pretending to be a lurker. Apart from the first shock, none of these things had ever alarmed her.

  So they had the lunchtime quickie and afterwards Rennie made grilled cheese sandwiches and they ate them in bed, which wasn't as pleasant as she'd thought it would be because some of t
he crumbs and melted cheese got on the sheets, and Jake went back to his office. Rennie had a bath, because her background was still with her and she felt it would be inconsiderate to go to the gynecologist right after making love without having had a bath.

  Ready to have babies yet? the doctor asked, his standard opening joke as he snapped on his prophylactic gloves. You're heading for the cutoff point. He'd been saying this for six years. Half an hour later, everything ceased to be funny.

  Though as she walked home she was still thinking in the ways she was used to. For instance, she could do a piece on it. "Cancer, The Coming Thing." Homemakers might take it, or Chatelaine. How about "The Cutoff Point"?

  This is a fact, it's happened to you, and right now you can't believe it, she would begin. You've been used to thinking of yourself as a person, but all of a sudden you're just a statistic. Dying was in bad taste, no doubt of that. But at some point it would be a trend, among the people she knew. Maybe she was way out ahead on that one too.

  On the plane they serve warm ginger ale in paper cups and sandwiches wrapped in plastic film. The sandwiches are made of slices of white bread, with slightly rancid butter and a thin piece of roast beef between them. Rennie picks out the lettuce: she's been to Mexico, she knows about amoebic dysentery.

  The seats are hard and covered with scratchy maroon plush, like those on ancient buses. The stewardesses, two of them, one with straightened upswept hair like Betty Grable's, one with cornrows and beaded Rasta braids, wear hot-pink satin outfits with tiny white aprons. They teeter up and down the narrow aisles on high-heeled sandals, open-toed with multiple straps, magenta: fuck-me shoes, Jake would call them. When the plane bumps they grab for the back of the nearest seat, but they seem used to it.

  Though the plane is just half full, there's a man beside Rennie. It isn't the white man in the safari jacket, who's sitting at the very front reading a newspaper, but an older man, brown. He's wearing a dark suit, despite the heat, and a tie in which a small pin shines. She notices that he's taken only one bite of his sandwich. When the remains of the sandwiches are being collected he speaks to Rennie, throwing his voice above the drone of the engines.