Dancing girls and other stories by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood [Atwood, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary, Modern fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction
ISBN: 9780770428297
Publisher: Seal Books
Published: 1999-05-18T06:22:42+00:00

wheel her along through the trees, whistling or singing songs to her. He wasn't shy about his voice when

there was no one else but her, he even sang songs from Bert's repertoire that stuck in his throat when the

assembled children sang them, led by red-faced Bert, his master-of-ceremonies smile, and his en-ergetic

accordion.

Jordan River is chilly and cold,

Hallelujah,

Chills the body but not the soul,

Hallelujah.

"Your name is the name of a famous river," he told her. He hoped she would be pleased by that. He

wondered if her parents had known about her, about what she was going to be like, when they named her,

and whether they'd felt later that the expensive-sounding name was wasted because she would never

match it, never sip cocktails on a terrace or smile like Grace Kelly in cool lipstick. But they must have

known; it said in her file that it was a birth defect. She had one brother and one sister, both normal, and her

father was something in a bank.

Sometimes, thinking of the catastrophe ahead of him, his failure and his flight, he thought about taking her

with him. That was her clinging to his neck as he scrambled up the boxcar (but she couldn't cling!), she was

with him in the hotel room when he woke up, sitting in her chair (how had he got her there?), looking into

his eyes with her icy blue ones, her face miraculously still. Then she would open her mouth and words

would come out, she would stand up, he would somehow have cured her.... Sometimes, very quickly (and

he would repress it immediately) he would see both of them hurtling from the top of a building. An

acci-dent, an accident, he would tell himself. I don't mean that.

Jordan River is chilly and wide,

Hallelujah,

Rob crooned. He was heading for a bench, there was one up ahead, where he could sit and they could

have their game of chequers.

"Hey, look at this." It was Bert's glass case. "Shelf fun-gus, " he read from the typed card. "There are

several species of shelf fungus. The shelf fungus is a saprophyte which feeds on decaying vegetable

matter and can often be found grow-ing on dead trees. You can write your name on the bottom with a

stick," he said. He used to do that at the cottage, without removing the fungus from the tree, and it gave him

pleasure to think of his name growing in secret, getting a little bigger every year. It was hard to tell whether

or not she was interested.

He found the bench, turned Jordan to face it and un-folded the board. "I was red last time," he said, "so

you get it this time, okay?" There was one chequer missing, on her side. "We'll use something else," he said.

He looked around for a flat stone, but there wasn't one. Finally he pulled a button off his shirtsleeves. "That

okay?" he said.

Jordan's hand moved yes. He began the laborious trial-and-error process of determining how she wanted

to move. He would point at each chequer in turn until she signalled. Then he would point to each possible

square.

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