Read Online Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood - Free Book Online Page A

Industries for dairy now,” the waitress says, as if reciting a lesson. “Government thing. Dairy don’t make no yoghurt. Yoghurt need powder milk. Powder milk outlaw, you can’t buy it. The yoghurt place shut down now.”
    Rennie feels that there are connections missing here, but it’s too early in the morning to have to deal with this. “What can I have then?” she says.
    “What we got,” says the waitress, very patiently.
    This turns out to be orange juice made from instant powder of some sort, an almost-cooked egg, coffee from a jar with tinned milk, bread with margarine, and guava jelly, too sweet, dark orange, of the consistency of ear wax. Rennie wishes she could stop reviewing the food and just eat it. Anyway, she isn’t at the Sunset Inn because of the food. She’s here because of the price: this time the deal isn’t all-expenses. She can do the other, flossier places for lunch or dinner.
    The waitress comes and takes away her plate, the runny egg in its custard cup, the pieces of bread and jam lying beside it. Like a child, she’s eaten the centres and left the crusts.
    After breakfast comes the rest of the day, which will surely be too long, too hot and bright, to be filled with any activity that will require movement. She wants to go to sleep in the sun on a beach, but she’s prudent, she doesn’t want to come out like crispy chicken. She needs suntan lotion and a hat. After that she can start going through the motions: places of interest, things to do, tennis courts, notable hotels and restaurants, if any.
    She knows you become exhausted in the tropics, you lose momentum, you become comatose and demoralized. The main thing is to keep going. She has to convince herself that if she doesn’t manage to complete a well-researched and cheerfully written piece on the pleasures of St. Antoine the universe will be negatively affected.
    Maybe she could fake the whole article, concoct a few ravishing little restaurants, some Old World charm in the New World, throw in some romantic history, tart the whole thing up with a few photos from the lesser-known corners of, say, St. Kitts. She pictures legions of businessmen descending on St. Antoine and then, in outrage, onthe editorial offices of
Visor
. It won’t do, she’ll have to come up with something, she’s overdrawn at the bank. She can always talk about development potential.
    What I need is a pith helmet, she thinks, and some bearers, or are they beaters, to carry me around in a hammock, and some of what those people in Somerset Maugham are always drinking. Pink gin?

    Rennie does what she does because she’s good at it, or that’s what she says at parties. Also because she doesn’t know how to do anything else, which she doesn’t say. Once she had ambitions, which she now thinks of as illusions: she believed there was a right man, not several and not almost right, and she believed there was a real story, not several and not almost real. But that was 1970 and she was in college. It was easy to believe such things then. She decided to specialize in abuses: honesty would be her policy. She did a piece for the
Varsity
on blockbusting as practised by city developers and another on the lack of good day-care centres for single mothers, and she took the nasty and sometimes threatening letters she received as a tribute to her effectiveness.
    Then she graduated and it was no longer 1970. Several editors pointed out to her that she could write what she liked, there was no law against it, but no one was under any obligation to pay her for doing it, either. One of them told her she was still a southern Ontario Baptist at heart. United Church, she said, but it hurt.
    Instead of writing about the issues, she began interviewing the people who were involved in them. Those pieces were a lot easier to sell. The
in
wardrobe for the picket line, the importance of the denim overall, what the feminists eat for breakfast. The editors told her she was better at that anyway.