Dancing Girls and Other Stories by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood [Atwood, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_contemporary
ISBN: 0385491093
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 1998-05-07T19:00:00+00:00

A Travel Piece

Annette is wiped right out. She never used to be this wiped out after a job; she supposes it’s the medication. Any kind of a pill is a drain on the system, she doesn’t like taking them but there you are.

She chews on one of the vacu-packed peanuts, thumbing through the travel brochure from the seat pocket, letting her mind drift among the coloured pictures. Thirty-six vacations in the sun, described in glowing terms, with the prices, all-inclusive it says but of course there are extras. A gem of an island almost undiscovered by tourists, with brilliant white sand beaches and bluegreen lagoons complemented by the friendliness of the people. Annette is returning from just such an island and she too writes pieces like this, but hers are not advertisements, they’re for the newspaper and, when she gets lucky, for the glossy magazines as well, so the things she writes have to be less bland: little anecdotes, the personal touch, details on where to eat and how good the service is, jokes told by the barman if any, where to go shopping for bargains, all those straw hats and curios, out-of-the-way things you might do, such as climbing an extinct volcano or cooking a parrot-fish on a coral reef, if you had the energy and the desire. Increasingly she doesn’t, but she puts herself through the paces anyway, she would consider it cheating to recommend these things without having done them. This is what makes her a good travel writer, among other things; and she has a knack for discovering local oddities, she knows what to look for, she has an eye for detail.

She’s learned though that she has to strike the right balance between what she manages to notice, spontaneously and candidly—and she always takes a camera with her, just in case, though for the glossies they usually send down their own photographer—and what she chooses to leave out. For instance, by lifting her head slightly she can read: LIFE JEST INDER FRONT OF YOUR SEAT. It says LIFE JEST because the lettering, which is embroidered right into the cloth of the pocket, has been worn away by the outgoing and incoming thighs of countless passengers. It would strike a humorous note but she can’t use it; the airline company would resent the implication that its planes were falling to pieces and that would be it for the complimentary tickets.

People, she found, did not want any hint of danger in the kind of articles it was her business to write. Even the ones who would never go to the places she described, who could not afford it, did not want to hear about danger or even unpleasantness; it was as if they wanted to believe that there was somewhere left in the world where all was well, where unpleasant things did not happen. An unspoiled Eden; that had been a useful phrase. Once, it seemed a long time ago, staying home meant safety, though tedium as well,

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