Dancing Girls (22 page)

“Nature is very definitely calling,” said the woman with the handbag. “I couldn’t get in before, there was such a lineup.”

“Take a Kleenex,” the other woman said. “There’s no paper. Not only that, you just about have to wade in. There’s water all over the floor.”

“Maybe I’ll just duck into the bushes,” the first woman said.

Edward stood up and massaged his left leg, which had gone to sleep. It was time to go back. If he stayed away too long, Sarah would be querulous, despite the fact that it was she herself who had sent him off on this fool’s expedition.

He started to walk back along the path. But then there was a flash of orange, at the corner of his eye. Edward swivelled and raised his binoculars. They were there when you least expected it. It was an oriole, partly hidden behind the leaves; he could see the breast, bright orange, and the dark barred wing. He wanted it to be a Hooded Oriole, he had not yet seen one. He talked to it silently, begging it to come out into the open. It was strange the way birds were completely magic for him the first time only, when he had never seen them before. But there were hundreds of kinds he would never see; no matter how many he saw there would always be one more. Perhaps this was why he kept looking. The bird was hopping
farther away from him, into the foliage.
Come back
, he called to it wordlessly, but it was gone.

Edward was suddenly happy. Maybe Sarah hadn’t been lying to him after all, maybe she had really seen this bird. Even if she hadn’t, it had come anyway, in answer to his need for it. Edward felt he was allowed to see birds only when they wanted him to, as if they had something to tell him, a secret, a message. The Aztecs thought hummingbirds were the souls of dead warriors, but why not all birds, why just warriors? Or perhaps they were the souls of the unborn, as some believed. “A jewel, a precious feather,” they called an unborn baby, according to
The Daily Life of the Aztecs. Quetzal
, that
was feather
.

“This is the bird I want to see,” Sarah said when they were looking through
The Birds of Mexico
before coming down.

“The Resplendent Quetzal,” Edward said. It was a green and red bird with spectacular iridescent blue tail plumes. He explained to her that Quetzal Bird meant Feather Bird. “I don’t think we’re likely to see it,” he said. He looked up the habitat.
“ ‘Cloud forests.’
I don’t think we’ll be in any cloud forests.”

“Well, that’s the one I want,” Sarah said. “That’s the only one I want.”

Sarah was always very determined about what she wanted and what she didn’t want. If there wasn’t anything on a restaurant menu that appealed to her, she would refuse to order anything; or she would permit him to order for her and then pick around the edges, as she had last night. It was no use telling her that this was the best meal they’d had since coming. She never lost her temper or her self-possession, but she was stubborn. Who but Sarah for instance would have insisted on bringing a collapsible umbrella to Mexico in the dry season? He’d argued and argued, pointing out its uselessness and the extra weight, but she’d brought it anyway. And then yesterday afternoon it had rained, a real cloudburst. Everyone else had run for
shelter, huddling against walls and inside the temple doorways, but Sarah had put up her umbrella and stood under it, smugly This had infuriated him. Even when she was wrong, she always managed, somehow, to be right. If only just once she would admit … what? That she could make mistakes. This was what really disturbed him: her assumption of infallibility.

And he knew that when the baby had died she had blamed it on him. He still didn’t know why. Perhaps it was because he’d gone out for cigarettes not expecting it to be born so soon. He wasn’t there when she was told; she’d had to take the news alone.

“It was nobody’s fault,” he told her repeatedly “Not the doctor’s, not yours. The cord was twisted.”

“I know,” she said, and she had never accused him; nevertheless he could feel the reproach, hanging around her like a fog. As if there was anything he could have done.

“I wanted it as much as you did,” he told her. And this was true. He hadn’t thought of marrying Sarah at all, he’d never mentioned it because it had never occurred to him she would agree, until she told him she was pregnant. Up until that time, she had been the one in control; he was sure he was just an amusement for her. But the marriage hadn’t been her suggestion, it had been his. He’d dropped out of Theology, he’d taken his public-school teaching certificate that summer in order to support them. Every evening he had massaged her belly, feeling the child move, touching it through her skin. To him it was a sacred thing, and he included her in his worship. In the sixth month, when she had taken to lying on her back, she had begun to snore, and he would lie awake at night listening to these gentle snores, white and silver they seemed to him, almost songs, mysterious talismans.… Unfortunately Sarah had retained this habit, but he no longer felt the same way about it.

When the child had died, he was the one who had cried, not Sarah. She had never cried. She got up and walked around almost
immediately, she wanted to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. The baby clothes she’d been buying disappeared from the apartment; he never found out what she’d done with them, he’d been afraid to ask.

Since that time he’d come to wonder why they were still married. It was illogical. If they’d married because of the child and there was no child, and there continued to be no child, why didn’t they separate? But he wasn’t sure he wanted this. Maybe he was still hoping something would happen, there would be another child. But there was no use demanding it. They came when they wanted to, not when you wanted them to. They came when you least expected it. A jewel, a precious feather.

“Now I will tell you,” said the guide. “The archaeologists have dived down into the well. They have dredged up more than fifty skeletons, and they have found that some of them were not virgins at all but men. Also, most of them were children. So as you can see, that is the end of the popular legend.” He made an odd little movement from the top of the altar, almost like a bow, but there was no applause. “They do not do these things to be cruel,” he continued. “They believe these people will take a message to the rain god, and live forever in his paradise at the bottom of the well.”

The woman with the handbag got up. “Some paradise,” she said to her friend. “I’m starting back. You coming?”

In fact the whole group was moving off now, in the scattered way they had. Sarah waited until they had gone. Then she opened her purse and took out the plaster Christ Child she had stolen from the crêche the night before. It was inconceivable to her that she had done such a thing, but there it was, she really had.

She hadn’t planned it beforehand. She’d been standing beside the crêche while Edward was paying the bill, he’d had to go into the kitchen to do it as they were very slow about bringing it to the table.
No one was watching her: the domino-playing boys were absorbed in their game and the children were riveted to the television. She’d just suddenly reached out her hand, past the Wise Men and through the door of the stable, picked the child up and put it into her purse.

She turned it over in her hands. Separated from the dwarfish Virgin and Joseph, it didn’t look quite so absurd. Its diaper was cast as part of it, more like a tunic, it had glass eyes and a sort of pageboy haircut, quite long for a newborn. A perfect child, except for the chip out of the back, luckily where it would not be noticed. Someone must have dropped it on the floor.

You could never be too careful. All the time she was pregnant, she’d taken meticulous care of herself, counting out the vitamin pills prescribed by the doctor and eating only what the books recommended. She had drunk four glasses of milk a day, even though she hated milk. She had done the exercises and gone to the classes. No one would be able to say she had not done the right things. Yet she had been disturbed by the thought that the child would be born with something wrong, it would be a mongoloid or a cripple, or a hydrocephalic with a huge liquid head like the ones she’d seen taking the sun in their wheelchairs on the lawn of the hospital one day. But the child had been perfect.

She would never take that risk, go through all that work again. Let Edward strain his pelvis till he was blue in the face; “trying again,” he called it. She took the Pill every day, without telling him. She wasn’t going to try again. It was too much for anyone to expect of her.

What had she done wrong? She hadn’t done anything wrong, that was the trouble. There was nothing and no one to blame, except, obscurely, Edward; and he couldn’t be blamed for the child’s death, just for not being there. Increasingly since that time he had simply absented himself. When she no longer had the child inside her he had lost interest, he had deserted her. This, she realized, was
what she resented most about him. He had left her alone with the corpse, a corpse for which there was no explanation.

“Lost,”
people called it. They spoke of her as having lost the child, as though it was wandering around looking for her, crying plaintively, as though she had neglected it or misplaced it somewhere. But where? What limbo had it gone to, what watery paradise? Sometimes she felt as if there had been some mistake, the child had not been born yet. She could still feel it moving, ever so slightly, holding on to her from the inside.

Sarah placed the baby on the rock beside her. She stood up, smoothing out the wrinkles in her skirt. She was sure there would be more flea bites when she got back to the hotel. She picked up the child and walked slowly towards the well, until she was standing at the very brink.

Edward, coming back up the path, saw Sarah at the well’s edge, her arms raised above her head.
My God
, he thought,
she’s going to jump
. He wanted to shout to her, tell her to stop, but he was afraid to startle her. He could run up behind her, grab her … but she would hear him. So he waited, paralyzed, while Sarah stood immobile. He expected her to hurtle downwards, and then what would he do? But she merely drew back her right arm and threw something into the well. Then she turned, half stumbling, towards the rock where he had left her and crouched down.

“Sarah,” he said. She had her hands over her face; she didn’t lift them. He kneeled so he was level with her. “What is it? Are you sick?”

She shook her head. She seemed to be crying, behind her hands, soundlessly and without moving. Edward was dismayed. The ordinary Sarah, with all her perversity, was something he could cope with, he’d invented ways of coping. But he was unprepared for this. She had always been the one in control.

“Come on,” he said, trying to disguise his desperation, “you need some lunch, you’ll feel better.” He realized as he said this how fatuous it must sound, but for once there was no patronizing smile, no indulgent answer.

“This isn’t like you,” Edward said, pleading, as if that was a final argument which would snap her out of it, bring back the old calm Sarah.

Sarah took her hands away from her face, and as she did so Edward felt cold fear. Surely what he would see would be the face of someone else, someone entirely different, a woman he had never seen before in his life. Or there would be no face at all. But (and this was almost worse) it was only Sarah, looking much as she always did.

She took a Kleenex out of her purse and wiped her nose.
It is like me
, she thought. She stood up and smoothed her skirt once more, then collected her purse and her collapsible umbrella.

“I’d like an orange,” she said. “They have them, across from the ticket office. I saw them when we came in. Did you find your bird?”

I
t must have taken Rob several minutes to notice that the sun was in her eyes. When he did notice, because she was squinting, he moved her sideways a little so she could see better. He felt the padded arms of the chair, where her thin bare arms were kept at rest by the leather straps, to make sure they were not overheated. She should have a hat, they were always being warned about sunburn. So far it had always been sunny during the day, though there had been a thunderstorm the night before. But no hat had been wheeled out with her.

“They forgot your hat,” he said to her. “That was stupid of them, wasn’t it?” Then he offered her another piece of the wooden puzzle, giving her time to consider it and to look also at the half-finished puzzle on the tray.

“This way?” he said. He watched her left hand for the slight movement towards him that would say
yes
. It was one of the few controlled movements she could make.

He also watched her eyes and face. She could move her eyes, though her head jerked around if she tried to swivel it too fast. But
she had little control of the muscles of her face, so he could never tell if she was trying to smile or whether the contortion of her mouth was caused by the spontaneous knotting and unknotting of her jumpy flesh, the body that would not respond to the enormous will he saw, or thought he saw, sealed up in her eyes like some small fierce animal captured in a metal net. She couldn’t get out! She was strapped into the wheelchair, prisoned in her cage of braces, trays, steel wheels, but only because she was strapped into her own body as into some bumpy, sickening carnival ride. Let out of her chair, she would thrash, topple, flail, hurtle through space. It was one of the worst cases they’d ever taken, Pam the physiotherapist had told him.