Dancing Girls by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online Page B

cardboard-carton apartment buildings. Were there no real ones, mellowed, interesting, possible? Finally he had come upon an available second-storey; the house was pink gravel instead of grey, the filth was daunting and the landlady querulous, but he had taken it immediately just to be able to open a window and look out.
    He had not known what to expect of Louise’s room. He had never visualized her as living anywhere, even though he had collected her and dropped her off outside the house a number of times.
    “I finished the bookshelves yesterday,” she said, waving at a wall-length structure of varnished boards and cement blocks. “Sit down, I’ll make you some cocoa.” She went into the kitchen, still with her fur coat on, and Morrison sat down in the leatherette swivel armchair. He swivelled, surveying, comparing it with the kind of interior he thought of himself as inhabiting but never got around to assembling.
    She had obviously put a lot of energy into it, but the result was less like a room than like several rooms, pieces of which had been cut out and pasted onto one another. He could not decide what created this effect: it was the same unity in diversity he had found in the motels on the way across, the modernish furniture, the conventional framed northern landscapes on the walls. But her table was ersatz Victorian and the prints Picasso. The bed was concealed behind a partly drawn dyed burlap curtain at the end of the room,but visible on the bedside rug were two light blue fuzzy slippers that startled, almost shocked him: they were so unlike her.
    Louise brought the cocoa and sat down opposite him on the floor. They talked as usual about the city: they were both still looking for things to do, a quest based on their shared Eastern assumption that cities ought to be entertaining. It was this rather than mutual attraction which led them to spend as much time together as they did; most of the others were married or had been here too long and had given up.
    The films changed slowly; the one theatre, with its outdated popular comedies, they had sneered at. They had gone to the opera together when it had come, though: local chorus and imported stars –
Lucia
, it had been, and really quite well done, considering. At intermission Morrison had glanced around at the silent, chunky audience in the lobby, some of the women still in early-sixties pointed-toe spike heels, and murmured to Louise that it was like tourist brochures from Russia.
    One Sunday before the snow came they had gone for an impromptu drive; at her suggestion they had aimed for the zoo twenty miles from the city. After they made it through the oil derricks there had been trees; not the right kind of trees – he had felt, as he had on the way across, that the land was keeping itself apart from him, not letting him in, there had to be more to it than this repetitive, non-committal drabness – but still trees; and the zoo once they reached it was spacious, the animals kept in enclosures large enough for them to run in and even hide in if they wanted to.
    Louise had been there before – how, since she had no car, he didn’t ask – and showed him around. “They choose animals that can survive the winter,” she said. “It’s open all year. They don’t even know they’re in a zoo.” She pointed out the artificial mountain made of cement blocks for the mountain goats to climb on. Morrison didn’t as a rule like any animal bigger and wilder than a cat, but these keptfar enough away to be tolerable. That day she had told him a little about herself, a departure: mostly she talked about her work. She had travelled in Europe, she told him, and had spent a year studying in England.
    “What are you doing here?” he had asked.
    She shrugged. “They gave me money; nobody else would.”
    Essentially it was his reason too. It wasn’t the draft; he was really over-age, though here they kept wanting to think he was a dodger, it made his presence more