Read Online Dancing Girls by Margaret Atwood - Free Book Online Page B

that they needed people from both sides of the river. Dave Jamieson suggested they take his car, but Louise was now off cars: they were as bad as telephones, they had no fixed directions. She wanted to walk. At last they persuaded her onto the bus, pointing out that it ran north and south. She had to make certain first that it went over the right bridge, the one near the gas plant.
    The other couple Louise had named lived in an apartment overlooking the river. She seemed to have picked them not because they were special friends but because from their livingroom, which she had been in once, both the gas plant and the power plant were visible. The apartment door faced south; Louise entered the building with no hesitation.
    Morrison was not overjoyed with Louise’s choice. This couple was foremost among the local anti-Americans: he had to endure Paul’s bitter sallies almost daily in the coffee room, while Leota at staff parties had a way of running on in his presence about the wicked Americans and then turning to him and saying, mouth but not eyes gushing, “Oh, but I forgot –
you’re
an American.” He had found the best defence was to agree. “You Yanks are coming up and taking all our jobs,” Paul would say, and Morrison would nod affably. “That’s right, you shouldn’t let it happen. I wonder why you hired me.” Leota would start in about how the Americans were buying up all the industry, and Morrison would say, “Yes, it’s a shame. Why are you selling it to us?” He saw their point, of course, but he wasn’t Procter and Gamble. What did they want him to do? What were they doing themselves, come to think of it? But Paul had once broken down after too many beers in the Faculty Club and confided that Leota had been thin when he married her but now she was fat. Morrison held the memory of that confession as a kind of hostage.
    He had to admit though that on this occasion Paul was much more efficient than he himself was capable of being. Paul saw at once what it had taken Morrison hours, perhaps weeks, to see: that something was wrong with Louise. Leota decoyed her into the kitchen with a glass of milk while Paul conspired single-handedly in the livingroom.
    “She’s crazy as a coot. We’ve got to get her to the loony bin. We’ll pretend to go along with her, this circle business, and when we get her downstairs we’ll grab her and stuff her into my car. How long has this been going on?”
    Morrison didn’t like the sound of the words “grab” and “stuff.” “She won’t go in cars,” he said.
    “Hell,” said Paul, “I’m not walking in this bloody weather. Besides, it’s miles. We’ll use force if necessary.” He thrust a quickbeer at each of them, and when he judged they ought to have finished they all went into the kitchen and Paul carefully told Louise that it was time to go.
    “Where?” Louise asked. She scanned their faces: she could tell they were up to something. Morrison felt guilt seeping into his eyes and turned his head away.
    “To get the baby,” Paul said. “Then we can form the circle.”
    Louise looked at him strangely. “What baby? What circle?” she said testing him.
    “You
know,” Paul said persuasively. After a moment she put down her glass of milk, still almost full, and said she was ready.
    At the car she balked. “Not in there,” she said, planting her feet. “I’m not going in there.” When Paul gripped her arm and said, soothingly and menacingly, “Now be a good girl,” she broke away from him and ran down the street, stumbling and sliding. Morrison didn’t have the heart to run after her; already he felt like a traitor. He watched stupidly while Dave and Paul chased after her, catching her at last and half-carrying her back; they held her wriggling and kicking inside her fur coat as though it was a sack. Their breath came out in white spurts.
    “Open the back door, Morrison,” Paul said, sergeant-like, giving him a scornful glance as though he was