Margaret Atwood: Dancing Girls and Other Stories

“You know where he lives?” the first policeman asked. Christine had long ago torn up the letter with his address on it; she shook her head.

“We’ll have to pick him up tomorrow then,” he said. “Think you can keep him talking outside your class if he’s waiting for you?”

After questioning her they held a murmured conversation with her father in the front hall. The girl, clearing away the coffee cups, said if they didn’t lock him up she was leaving, she wasn’t going to be scared half out of her skin like that again.

Next day when Christine came out of her Modern History lecture he was there, right on schedule. He seemed puzzled when she did not begin to run. She approached him, her heart thumping with treachery and the prospect of freedom. Her body was back to its usual size; she felt herself a giantess, self-controlled, invulnerable.

“How are you?” she asked, smiling brightly.

He looked at her with distrust.

“How have you been?” she ventured again. His own perennial smile faded; he took a step back from her.

“This the one?” said the policeman, popping out from behind a notice board like a Keystone Kop and laying a competent hand on the worn jacket shoulder. The other policeman lounged in the background; force would not be required.

“Don’t do anything to him,” she pleaded as they took him away. They nodded and grinned, respectful, scornful. He seemed to know perfectly well who they were and what they wanted.

The first policeman phoned that evening to make his report. Her father talked with him, jovial and managing. She herself was now out of the picture; she had been protected, her function was over.

“What did they do to him?” she asked anxiously as he came back into the livingroom. She was not sure what went on in police stations.

“They didn’t do anything to him,” he said, amused by her concern. “They could have booked him for Watching and Besetting, they wanted to know if I’d like to press charges. But it’s not worth a court case: he’s got a visa that says he’s only allowed in the country as long as he studies in Montreal, so I told them to just ship him down there. If he turns up here again they’ll deport him. They went around to his rooming house, his rent’s two weeks overdue; the landlady said she was on the point of kicking him out. He seems happy enough to be getting his back rent paid and a free train ticket to Montreal.” He paused. “They couldn’t get anything out of him though.”

“Out of him?” Christine asked.

“They tried to find out why he was doing it; following you, I mean.” Her father’s eyes swept her as though it was a riddle to him also. “They said when they asked him about that he just clammed up. Pretended he didn’t understand English. He understood well enough, but he wasn’t answering.”

Christine thought this would be the end, but somehow between his arrest and the departure of the train he managed to elude his escort long enough for one more phone call.

“I see you again,” he said. He didn’t wait for her to hang up.

Now that he was no longer an embarrassing present reality, he could be talked about, he could become an amusing story. In fact, he was the only amusing story Christine had to tell, and telling it preserved both for herself and for others the aura of her strange allure. Her friends and the men who continued to ask her out speculated about his motives. One suggested he had wanted to marry her so he could remain in the country; another said that oriental men were fond of well-built women: “It’s your Rubens quality.”

Christine thought about him a lot. She had not been attracted to him, rather the reverse, but as an idea only he was a romantic figure, the one man who had found her irresistible; though she often wondered, inspecting her unchanged pink face and hefty body in her full-length mirror, just what it was about her that had done it. She avoided whenever it was proposed the theory of his insanity: it was only that there was more than one way of being sane.

But a new acquaintance, hearing the story for the first time, had a different explanation. “So he got you, too,” he said, laughing. “That has to be the same guy who was hanging around our day camp a year ago this summer. He followed all the girls like that. A short guy, Japanese or something, glasses, smiling all the time.”

“Maybe it was another one,” Christine said.

“There couldn’t be two of them, everything fits. This was a pretty weird guy.”

“What… kind of girls did he follow?” Christine asked.

“Oh, just anyone who happened to be around. But if they paid any attention to him at first, if they were nice to him or anything, he was unshakeable. He was a bit of a pest, but harmless.”

Christine ceased to tell her amusing story. She had been one among many, then. She went back to playing tennis, she had been neglecting her game.

A few months later the policeman who had been in charge of the case telephoned her again.

“Like you to know, Miss, that fellow you were having the trouble with was sent back to his own country. Deported.”

“What for?” Christine asked. “Did he try to come back here?” Maybe she had been special after all, maybe he had dared everything for her.

“Nothing like it,” the policeman said. “He was up to the same tricks in Montreal but he really picked the wrong woman this time—a Mother Superior of a convent. They don’t stand for things like that in Quebec—had him out of here before he knew what happened. I guess he’ll be better off in his own place.”

“How old was she?” Christine asked, after a silence.

“Oh, around sixty, I guess.”

“Thank you very much for letting me know,” Christine said in her best official manner. “It’s such a relief.” She wondered if the policeman had called to make fun of her.

She was almost crying when she put down the phone. What had he wanted from her then? A Mother Superior. Did she really look sixty, did she look like a mother? What did convents mean? Comfort, charity? Refuge? Was it that something had happened to him, some intolerable strain just from being in this country; her tennis dress and exposed legs too much for him, flesh and money seemingly available everywhere but withheld from him wherever he turned, the nun the symbol of some final distortion, the robe and veil reminiscent to his near-sighted eyes of the women of his homeland, the ones he was able to understand? But he was back in his own country, remote from her as another planet; she would never know.

He hadn’t forgotten her though. In the spring she got a postcard with a foreign stamp and the familiar block-letter writing. On the front was a picture of a temple. He was fine, he hoped she was fine also, he was her friend. A month later another print of the picture he had taken in the garden arrived, in a sealed manila envelope otherwise empty.

Christine’s aura of mystery soon faded; anyway, she herself no longer believed in it. Life became again what she had always expected. She graduated with mediocre grades and went into the Department of Health and Welfare; she did a good job, and was seldom discriminated against for being a woman because nobody thought of her as one. She could afford a pleasant-sized apartment, though she did not put much energy into decorating it. She played less and less tennis; what had been muscle with a light coating of fat turned gradually into fat with a thin substratum of muscle. She began to get headaches.

As the years were used up and the war began to fill the newspapers and magazines, she realized which eastern country he had actually been from. She had known the name but it hadn’t registered at the time, it was such a minor place; she could never keep them separate in her mind.