Free Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood Page B

cheese, cod-liver oil. She was like milk.
    One day he bought a bottle of Italian red wine and took the ferry over to Wards Island. He knew Selena lived over there. That at least had been in the poems.
    He didn’t know what he intended to do. He wanted to see her, take hold of her, go to bed with her. He didn’t know how he was going to get from the first step to the last. He didn’t care what came of it. He wanted.
    He got off the ferry and walked up and down the small streets of the island, where he had never been. These were summer homes,cheap and insubstantial, white clapboard or pastel, or sided with insulbrick. Cars were not permitted. There were kids on bicycles, dumpy women in swimsuits taking sunbaths on their lawns. Portable radios played. It was not what he’d had in mind as Selena’s milieu. He thought of asking someone where she lived – they would know, she’d stand out here – but he didn’t want to advertise his presence. He considered turning around, taking the next ferry back.
    Then, off at the end of one of the streets, he saw a minute one-storey cottage, in the shade of two large willows. There had been willows in the poems. He could at least try.
    The door was open. It was her house, because she was in it. She was not at all surprised to see him.
    “I was just making some peanut-butter sandwiches,” she said, “so we could have a picnic.” She was wearing loose black cotton slacks, Oriental in tone, and a sleeveless black top. Her arms were white and thin. Her feet were in sandals; he looked at her long toes, with the toenails painted a light peach-pink. He noted with a wrench of the heart that the nail polish was chipped.
    “Peanut butter?” he said stupidly. She was talking as if she’d been expecting him.
    “And strawberry jam,” she said. “Unless you don’t like jam.” Still that courteous distance.
    He proffered his bottle of wine. “Thanks,” she said, “but you’ll have to drink it all by yourself.”
    “Why?” he said. He’d intended this to go differently. A recognition. A wordless embrace.
    “If I ever started I’d never stop. My father was an alcoholic,” she told him gravely. “He’s somewhere else, because of it.”
    “In the Underworld?” he said, in what he hoped was a graceful allusion to her poetry.
    She shrugged. “Or wherever.” He felt like a dunce. She went back to spreading the peanut butter, at her diminutive kitchen table.Richard, wrung dry of conversation, looked around him. There was only the one room, sparsely furnished. It was almost like a religious cell, or his idea of one. In one corner was a desk with an old black typewriter, and a bookshelf made of boards and bricks. The bed was narrow and covered with a swath of bright purple Indian cotton, to double as a sofa. There was a tiny sink, a tiny stove. One easy chair, Sally-Ann issue. A braided, faded rug. On the walls there were no pictures at all.
    “I don’t need them,” she said. She’d put the sandwiches into a crumpled paper bag and was motioning him out the door.
    She led him to a stone breakwater overlooking the lake, and they sat on it and ate the sandwiches. She had some lemonade in a milk bottle; they passed it back and forth. It was like a ritual, like a communion; she was letting him partake. She sat cross-legged, with sunglasses on. Two people went by in a canoe. The lake rippled, threw off glints of light. Richard felt absurd, and happy.
    “We can’t be lovers,” she said to him after a time, She was licking jam off her fingers. Richard jolted awake. He had never been so abruptly understood. It was like a trick; it made him uncomfortable.
    He could have pretended he didn’t know what she was talking about. Instead he said, “Why not?”
    “You would get used up,” she said. “Then you wouldn’t be there, later.”
    This was what he wanted: to be used up. To burn in divine conflagration. At the same time, he realized that he could not summon up any actual, carnal