Margaret Atwood - Dancing Girls and Other Stories

Stop it, she commanded herself. They want me to be doing this. She unwound her hair and brushed it out. Three hours from now, she knew, it would be limp as ever because of the damp.

The next day, she tried to raise her new theoretical problem with her friend Jetske. Jetske was in Urban Design, too. She was from Holland, and could remember running through the devastated streets as a child, begging small change, first from the Germans, later from the American soldiers, who were always good for a chocolate bar or two.

“You learn how to take care of yourself,” she’d said. “It didn’t seem hard at the time, but when you are a child, nothing is that hard. We were all the same, nobody had anything.” Because of this background, which was more exotic and cruel than anything Ann herself had experienced (what was a gas pump compared to the Nazis?), Ann respected her opinions. She liked her also because she was the only person she’d met here who seemed to know where Canada was. There were a lot of Canadian soldiers buried in Holland. This provided Ann with at least a shadowy identity, which she felt she needed. She didn’t have a native costume, but at least she had some heroic dead bodies with which she was connected, however remotely.

“The trouble with what we’re doing… ,” she said to Jetske, as they walked towards the library under Ann’s umbrella. “I mean, you can rebuild one part, but what do you do about the rest?”

“Of the city?” Jetske said.

“No,” Ann said slowly. “I guess I mean of the world.”

Jetske laughed. She had what Ann now thought of as Dutch teeth, even and white, with quite a lot of gum showing above them and below the lip. “I didn’t know you were a socialist,” she said. Her cheeks were pink and healthy, like a cheese ad.

“I’m not,” Ann said. “But I thought we were supposed to be thinking in total patterns.”

Jetske laughed again. “Did you know,” she said, “that in some countries you have to get official permission to move from one town to another?”

Ann didn’t like this idea at all. “It controls the population flow,” Jetske said. “You can’t really have Urban Design without that, you know.”

“I think that’s awful,” Ann said.

“Of course you do,” Jetske said, as close to bitterness as she ever got. “You’ve never had to do it. Over here you are soft in the belly, you think you can always have everything. You think there is freedom of choice. The whole world will come to it. You will see.” She began teasing Ann again about her plastic headscarf. Jetske never wore anything on her head.

Ann designed her shopping complex, putting in a skylight and banks of indoor plants, leaving out the aqueduct. She got an A.

In the third week of March, Ann went with Jetske and some of the others to a Buckminster Fuller lecture. Afterwards they all went to the pub on the corner of the Square for a couple of beers. Ann left with Jetske about eleven o’clock and walked a couple of blocks with her before Jetske turned off towards her lovely old house with the stained glass. Ann continued by herself, warily, keeping to the lighted streets. She carried her purse under her elbow and held her furled umbrella at the ready. For once it wasn’t raining.

When she got back to the house and started to climb the stairs, it struck her that something was different. Upstairs, she knew. Absolutely, something was out of line. There was curious music coming from the room next door, a high flute rising over drums, thumping noises, the sound of voices. The man next door was throwing a party, it seemed. Good for him, Ann thought. He might as well do something. She settled down for an hour’s reading.

But the noises were getting louder. From the bathroom came the sound of retching. There was going to be trouble. Ann checked her door to make sure it was locked, got out the bottle of sherry she kept in the cupboard next to the oven, and poured herself a drink. Then she turned out the light and sat with her back against the door, drinking her sherry in the faint blue light from the funeral home next door. There was no point in going to bed: even with her earplugs in, she could never sleep.

The music and thumpings got louder. After a while there was a banging on the floor, then some shouting, which came quite clearly through Ann’s hot air register. “I’m calling the police! You hear? I’m calling the police! You get them out of here and get out yourself!” The music switched off, the door opened, and there was a clattering down the stairs. Then more footsteps—Ann couldn’t tell whether they were going up or down—and more shouting. The front door banged and the shouts continued on down the street. Ann undressed and put on her nightgown, still without turning on the light, and crept into the bathroom. The bathtub was full of vomit.

This time Mrs. Nolan didn’t even wait for Ann to get back from classes. She waylaid her in the morning as she was coming out of her room. Mrs. Nolan was holding a can of Drano and had dark circles under her eyes. Somehow this made her look younger. She’s probably not much older than I am, Ann thought. Until now she had considered her middle-aged.

“I guess you saw the mess in there,” she whispered.

“Yes, I did,” Ann said.

“I guess you heard all that last night.” She paused.

“What happened?” Ann asked. In fact she really wanted to know.

“He had some dancing girls in there! Three dancing girls, and two other men, in that little room! I thought the ceiling was gonna come right down on our heads!”

“I did hear something like dancing,” Ann said.

“Dancing! They was jumping, it sounded like they jumped right off the bed onto the floor. The plaster was coming off. Fred wasn’t home, he’s not home yet. I was afraid for the kids. Like, with those tattoos, who knows what they was working themselves up to?” Her sibilant voice hinted of ritual murders, young Jimmy and runny-nosed Donny sacrificed to some obscure god.

“What did you do?” Ann asked.

“I called the police. Well, the dancing girls, as soon as they heard I was calling the police, they got out of here, I can tell you. Put on their coats and was down the stairs and out the door like nothing. You can bet they didn’t want no trouble with the police. But not the others, they don’t seem to know what police means.”

She paused again, and Ann asked, “Did they come?”

“Who?”

“The police.”

“Well, you know around here it always takes the police a while to get there, unless there’s some right outside. I know that, it’s not the first time I’ve had to call them. So who knows what they would’ve done in the meantime? I could hear them coming downstairs, like, so I just grabs the broom and I chased them out. I chased them all the way down the street.”

Ann saw that she thought she had done something very brave, which meant that in fact she had. She really believed that the man next door and his friends were dangerous, that they were a threat to her children. She had chased them single-handedly, yelling with fear and defiance. But he had only been throwing a party.

“Heavens,” she said weakly.

“You can say that again,” said Mrs. Nolan. “I went in there this morning, to get his things and put them out front where he could get them without me having to see him. I don’t have such good nerves, I didn’t sleep at all, even after they was gone. Fred is just gonna have to stop driving nights, I can’t take it. But you know? He didn’t have no things in there. Not one. Just an old empty suitcase?”

“What about his native costume?” Ann said.

“He had it on,” Mrs. Nolan said. “He just went running down the street in it, like some kind of a loony. And you know what else I found in there? In one corner, there was this pile of empty bottles. Liquor. He must’ve been drinking like a fish for months, and never threw out the bottles. And in another corner, there was this pile of burnt matches. He could’ve burnt the house down, throwing them on the floor like that. But the worst thing was, you know all the times he borrowed my vacuum cleaner?”