Free Dancing Girls by Margaret Atwood Page B

incomplete segments. I didn’t even need the baby. I mean,” she said in a serious whisper, dropping her accent completely, “I
am
the circle. I have the poles within myself. What I have to do is keep myself in one piece, it
depends
on me.”
    At the desk he tried to find out what was officially wrong with Louise but they would not tell him anything; it wasn’t the policy.
    On his next visit she spoke to him almost the whole time in what to his untrained ear sounded like perfectly fluent French. Her mother was a French Protestant, she told him, her father an English Catholic.
“Je peux vous dire tout ceci,”
she said,
“parce que vous êtes americain
. You are outside it.” To Morrison this explained a lot; but the next time she claimed to be the daughter of an Italian opera singer and a Nazi general. “Though I also have some Jewish blood,” she added hastily. She was tense and kept standing up and sitting down again, crossing and recrossing her legs; she would not look at Morrison directly but addressed her staccato remarks to the centre of his chest.
    After this Morrison stayed away for a couple of weeks. He did not think his visits were doing either of them any good, and he had papers to mark. He occupied himself once more with the painting of his apartment and the organ music of the woman downstairs; he shovelled his steps and put salt on them to melt the ice. His landlady, uneasy because she had still not supplied him with a lock, unexpectedly had him to tea, and the tacky plastic grotesqueries of her interior decoration fuelled his reveries for a while. The one good thing in her bogus ranch-style bungalow had been an egg, blown and painted in the Ukrainian manner, but she had dismissed it as ordinary, asking him to admire instead a cake of soap stuck with artificial flowers to resemble a flowerpot; she had got the idea out of a magazine. The Korean came up one evening to ask him about life insurance.
    But the thought of Louise out there in the windswept institution grounds with nothing and no one she knew bothered him in twinges, like a mental neuralgia, goading him finally into the section of the city that passed for downtown: he would buy her a gift. He selected a small box of water-colour paints: she ought to have something to do. He was intending to mail it, but sooner thanhe expected he found himself again on the wide deserted entrance driveway.
    They met once more in the visitors’ cubicle. He was alarmed by the change in her: she had put on weight, her muscles had slackened, her breasts drooped. Instead of sitting rigidly as she had done before, she sprawled in the chair, legs apart, arms hanging; her hair was dull and practically uncombed. She was wearing a short skirt and purple stockings, in one of which there was a run. Trying not to stare at this run and at the white, loose thigh flesh it revealed, Morrison had the first unmistakably physical stirrings of response he had ever felt towards her.
    “They have me on a different drug,” she said. “The other one was having the wrong effect. I was allergic to it.” She mentioned that someone had stolen her hairbrush, but when he offered to bring her another one she said it didn’t matter. She had lost interest in the circle and her elaborate system and did not seem to want to talk much. What little she said was about the hospital itself: she was trying to help the doctors, they didn’t know how to treat the patients but they wouldn’t listen to her. Most of those inside were getting worse rather than better; many had to stay there because no one would take the responsibility of looking after them, even if they were drugged into manageability. They were poor, without relations; the hospital would not let them go away by themselves. She told him about one girl from further north who thought she was a cariboo.
    She hardly glanced at the water-colour paints, though she thanked him sluggishly. Her eyes, normally wide and vivacious, were puffed shut