Old Babes in the Wood

 

Old Babes in the Wood

By Margaret Atwood The New Yorker

“Pants or dead leaves?” Lizzie says.

“My guess is pants,” Nell says. The two of them stand on the dock in their age-inappropriate bathing suits and stare at the dark patch under the water.

An hour earlier, Nell was toasting her laundry on the dock, which was the best place to dry it: it had been the best place for seventy years. But she didn’t put rocks on top of her cotton yoga pants, though she ought to have known better, and then she went back up the hill to the house, through the sighing and rustling trees. The pants are lightweight, and they seem to have blown away. Logic dictates that they must be somewhere in the lake. Other pants she might have kissed goodbye, but she’s fond of these.

“I’ll go in,” she says.

“Maybe it’s not pants,” Lizzie says dubiously. Waterlogged leaves accumulate on the sandy, rocky lake bottom. Their older brother, Robbie, sometimes rakes them out as a courtesy to others, along with the tiny water weeds that grow if allowed, and puts the resulting sludge into a large zinc washtub, after which its fate is unknown to Nell. The rake and the tub are leaning against a tree, thus he must have done this recently. Though only on the other side of the dock. So it might still be leaves.

Nell sits on the edge of the dock, then gingerly eases herself down, conscious of possible splinters. She and splinters have a long history. Splinters in the bum are especially bad because you can’t see to pull them out.

Her feet hit sand. The water is up to her waist.

“Is it cold?” Lizzie asks. She knows the answer.

“It’s been colder.” This is always true. Did the two of them really once hurl themselves off the end of the dock into the freezing, heart-shocking water, laughing their heads off? Did they cannonball? They did.

Nell has a flash of Lizzie at a much younger age—younger even than the cannonballing—two or three. “A pider! A big pider!” she was saying. She couldn’t yet pronounce “spider.” Pider. Poon. Plash. Nell herself had been what, at that time? Fifteen. A seasoned babysitter. It won’t hurt you. See, it’s running away. Spiders are afraid of us. It’s hiding under the dock. But Lizzie was not reassured. She’s remained that way: beneath every bland surface there’s bound to be something with too many legs.

“Am I aimed right?” Nell asks. Her feet move tentatively, encountering soft tickles, oatmeal-textured gunk, sharp little stones, what feels like a stick. She’s up to her armpits now; she can’t see the dark patch because of the angle of reflection.

“More or less,” Lizzie says. She slaps at her bare legs: stable flies. There’s a technique to killing them—they take off backward, you have to sneak up with your hand—but it requires focus. “O.K., warmer. Warmer. A little to the right.”

“I see it,” Nell says. “Definitely pants.” She fishes around with the toes of her left foot and brings the pants up, dripping. She can still fish things up with her toes, it seems: a minor accomplishment, but not to be sneered at. Enjoy the moment, it won’t last, she comments to herself.

Tomorrow she might tackle the wide strips of gray paint, or stain, that have flaked off the dock and are lying on the lake bottom like sinister sci-fi fungus growths. It was Lizzie who painted the dock; it was Robbie who’d wanted it painted. He thought it would preserve the planks, keep them from rotting, so they wouldn’t have to rebuild the dock yet again. How many times have they done that? Three, four?

Wrong about the paint, or stain, as it turned out: the dock is peeling like a sunburn, and water gets under the remaining patches, softening the wood. Still, they may not have to rebuild the dock themselves; this one could last them out. The younger gen will have to do it, assuming they’re up to it.

That was the kind of thing their mother used to say about her clothing: “I don’t need another sweater. This one will last me out.” Nell had hated it at the time. Parents ought not to die; it’s inconsiderate.

Pants in hand, Nell wades back to the dock. She has a brief moment of wondering how she’s going to clamber back up. There’s a decaying makeshift step on the other side, made of two boards and covered with mossy growth, but it’s a death trap and ought to be removed. A sledgehammer would do it. But then there would be a couple of lethal rusty spike heads sticking out of the huge log the step is attached to. Someone will have to go at the step with a crowbar, but it won’t be Nell. All she needs is one of those spikes popping out suddenly and backward she’ll go, into the shallows, and brain herself on the annoying pointed white rock they keep meaning to dig out but haven’t got around to.

On second thought, better to hammer the rusty spikes in, not pull them out. Now who, exactly, is going to do that?

Nell flings her sopping-wet pants onto the dock. Then, placing her feet carefully on the slippery logs of the underwater crib that holds the dock in place and gripping the nearest wooden tie-up cleat, she hoists herself up. You old ninny, you really shouldn’t be doing this, she tells herself. One of these days you’ll break your neck.

“Victory,” Lizzie says. “Let’s have tea.”

Having tea is sooner said than done. To begin with, they’re out of water, a problem they’ve anticipated by bringing a pail down the hill. Now they must wrestle with the hand pump. It’s creakier than ever this year, the flow of water is diminished, and there’s a pronounced iron tang, which probably means that the sand point far underground is clogging up or disintegrating. “Ask Robbie about sand point,” Lizzie has written on one of the numerous lists she and Nell are endlessly making and then either losing or throwing away.

The choices are: dig the thing up, a nightmare, or sink a new point, also a nightmare. They’ll end up with one of the sons, or grandsons, or two of them, being called upon to do the actual sledgehammering. No one can expect old biddies of the ages of Nell and Lizzie to do it themselves.

No one, that is, except the two of them. They’ll start, then they’ll injure themselves—the knees, the back, the ankles—and the younger gen will be forced to take over. They will do it wrong, of course. Of course! Tongue-biting will be in order from Lizzie and Nell. Or, better, they’ll say they have headaches so they won’t have to watch, then they’ll wander up to the cabin and read murder mysteries. Lizzie has the family’s accumulation of flyspecked and yellowing paperbacks arranged by author on a shelf in her room, ever since a large mouse nest was discovered behind its former location.

They take turns with the pump handle. Once they’ve got a pailful—or a half pail, because neither one of them is up to lugging a full pail, not anymore—they stagger up the steep hill, which is inset with tripping hazards in the form of steps made of flat rocks, switching the pail back and forth until they arrive at the top, breathing heavily. Heart-attack city, here I come, Nell thinks.

“Why the fuck did he have to put it at the top of this fucking hill?” Lizzie says. “He” changes its referent depending on what they’re talking about; right now, “he” is their father. “It” is the log cabin he built, with axes, crosscut saws, crowbars, drawknives, and other tools of Primitive Man.

“To discourage invaders,” Nell says. This is only partly a joke. Every time they see a boat trolling unpleasantly close to them—their sandy point is a known spot for pickerel—they have the same reaction: invaders!

They make it in through the screen door of the cabin, spilling only a little of the water. “We need to do something about the front steps,” Lizzie says. “They’re too high. Not to mention the back steps. We’ve got to get a railing. I don’t know what he was thinking.”

“He didn’t intend to get old,” Nell says.

“Yeah, that was a fucking surprise,” Lizzie says.

They all helped build the cabin, once upon a time. Their father did most of the work, naturally, but it was a family project, involving child labor. Now they’re more or less stuck with it.

Other people don’t live like this, Nell thinks. Other people’s cottages have generators. They have running water. They have gas barbecues. Why are we trapped in some kind of historical-reënactment TV show?

“Remember when we could do two pails?” Lizzie says. “Each?” That wasn’t so very long ago.

It’s too hot to have the woodstove on, so they heat the water on the ancient two-burner propane-cylinder camping stove. It’s rusting out around the intake pipe, but so far there have been no explosions. “New propane stove” is on the list. The kettle is aluminum, of a type that has surely been outlawed. Just looking at it gives Nell cancer, but an unspoken rule says that it must never be discarded. The cover will fit only if placed just right: Nell marked the position years ago, with two circles of pink nail polish, one on the lid, a corresponding one on the kettle itself, which must be stored upside down so that mice won’t make their way down the spout and starve to death and make a horrible smell, plus maggots. Learn by doing, Nell thinks. There have been enough dead mice and maggots in her life.

The tea in the lidded nineteen-forties enamelled roasting pan labelled “Tea” is practically sawdust; they keep meaning to throw it out. Lizzie has come prepared, with her own tea bags in a plastic ziplock. Bags are easier to discard than soggy tea leaves, even though everyone knows that tea bags are made from floor sweepings and mud. In the days of Tig, he and Nell had always used loose-leaf, which he bought at a little specialty shop run by a knowledgeable woman from India. Tig would have derided the tea bags.

The days of Tig. Over now.

High up on the wall, above the woodstove, hangs the flat oblong griddle that Nell and Tig bought at a farm auction forty-odd years ago, and on which jovial sourdough pancake fryings often took place, Tig doing the flipping, back when largesse and riotous living and growing children had been the order of the day. Coming up! Who’s next? She can’t look directly at this griddle—she glances up at it, then glances away—but she always knows it’s there.

My heart is broken, Nell thinks. But in our family we don’t say, “My heart is broken.” We say, “Are there any cookies?” One must eat. One must keep busy. One must distract oneself. But why? What for? For whom?

“Are there any cookies?” she manages to croak out.

“No,” Lizzie says. “But there’s chocolate. Let’s have some.” She knows that Nell’s heart is broken; she doesn’t need to be told.

They take their cups of tea and their treat—two squares of chocolate each, salted almond—and sit at the table that’s out on the little screened porch. Lizzie has brought the current list so they can update it.

“We can scratch off ‘Boots and Shoes,’ ” Lizzie says.

They spent the previous day going through the plastic bags hanging from nails in Robbie’s old bedroom. Each contained an ancient pair of shoes and a mouse nest. The mice liked nesting in shoes; they filled them with chewed-up bark and wood and fabric threads they’d filched from the doorway curtains and anything else that suited their purposes. A mouse had once tried to pull out some of Lizzie’s hair during the night.

The mice had their babies inside the hung-up shoes and pooped into the bottoms of the plastic bags, when they weren’t pooping on the kitchen counter or around the sink in the washroom, leaving tiny black seeds everywhere. Lizzie and Nell habitually set a trap for them, which consisted of a tall swing-top garbage pail with a blob of peanut butter strategically placed on the cover. In theory, the mouse leaps onto the cover to get the peanut butter and falls into the pail. Usually it works, though sometimes the peanut butter is gone in the morning and there is no mouse. The trapped mice make a sound like popcorn as they jump up, hitting the top of the container. Nell and Lizzie always put some raisins in the pail and a paper towel for them to hide under, and in the mornings they canoe the mice across the lake—they’d come back otherwise, they’d seek out their nest smell—and release them on the far shore.

Robbie is more severe. He uses mousetraps. Nell and Lizzie believe that this practice is detrimental to owls, as owls prefer to hunt live mice, but they don’t say this, because Robbie would laugh at them.

Yesterday Nell and Lizzie lined up the mouse-nest shoes, plus a rubber boot with an epic nest in it, and took pictures on their phones, and sent the pictures to Robbie: Can we throw these out? He replied that they should leave all footgear until he himself came up; he would then decide what should be saved. Fair enough, they said, but no more hanging shoes in plastic bags: mouse nesting was a crime of opportunity and must be discouraged.

“Write ‘Snap-Top Container for Robbie’s Shoes’ on the list,” Nell says. Lizzie does so. Lists procreate; they give rise to other lists. Nell wonders if there’s a special therapy for excessive list-making. But if the two of them don’t make lists, how will they remember what they need? Anyway, they like crossing things off. It makes them feel that they are getting somewhere.

After supper, which is pasta—“Write ‘More Pasta,’ ” Nell says—they walk out to the sandy point, where they’ve set up two camping chairs, the folding kind with a mesh pocket in one arm to put a beer can in. One of the chairs has a hole in it, eaten by mice, but it’s not a major hole. Anything you don’t actually fall through is not a major hole. The chairs face northwest; Nell and Lizzie sit in them every evening and watch the sunset. It’s the best way of predicting the next day’s weather, better than the radio or the different Web sites on their phones. That plus the barometer, though the barometer isn’t much help because it almost always says “Change.”

“It’s a little too peach,” Lizzie says.

“At least it’s not yellow.” Yellow and gray are the worst. Pink and red are the best. Peach can go either way.

They stay out there as the clouds fade from peach to rose, and then to a truly alarming shade of red, like a forest fire in the distance.

Sure enough, when they make it back to the cabin, a trip they can both do in the dusk, which is just as well because they forgot the flashlight, the barometer has moved up slightly, from the “a” to the “n” in “Change.”

“No hurricane tomorrow,” Lizzie says.

“Hallelujah!” Nell says. “We won’t go to Oz in a tornado.”

There actually was a tornado here, in the days of Tig. It was only a little one, though it snapped off some tree trunks just like matchsticks. When was that?

Once it’s truly dark, Nell puts on her headlamp and takes a flashlight and shuffles her way to the dock. She used to walk around at night without lighting—she could see in the dark—but night vision is one of the things that go. She doesn’t want to hurtle down the hill, crippling herself on the pieces of geology that serve as steps or were stashed here and there by her father for some arcane purpose, forgotten now; nor does she want to step on any small toads. These come out at night and hop around, bent on adventures of their own, and are slippery when squashed.

She’s going to the dock to view the stars, out over the lake, with no treetops obscuring them. It’s a clear night, no moon yet, and the constellations have a depth and brilliance you’d never be able to see in the city.

Tig used to do this. He’d go down to the dock to brush his teeth and stargaze. “Amazing!” he would say. He had a great capacity for being amazed; the stars gave him such joy. There may be some falling stars: it’s August, the time of the Perseids, which always coincided with Tig’s birthday. Nell would make him a cake in the woodstove oven—scorching it on the top sometimes, but that part could be scraped off—and decorate it with cedar cones and tufts of club moss and whatever else she could find. There might even be a few strawberries, left over from the patch that had grown in what used to be the garden.

She makes it to the bottom of the hill without mishap, an achievement. But, once she’s on the dock, she can’t follow through. She’s not feeling any amazement or joy, only grief and more grief. The old griddle hanging on the wall above the stove is one thing—easy enough for the gaze to avoid it—but the stars? Will she never be able to look at the stars again?

No stars, not for you, not ever, she mourns. And in the next breath: Don’t be so fucking maudlin.

She hauls herself back up the hill, guided by the light that has now come on inside the cabin. She half expects to see Tig in the evening lamplight, uttering whoops of enthusiasm over whatever he might be reading. Not half. Less than half. Is he fading?

In the olden times, which are numerous, Nell and Lizzie and Robbie used kerosene lamps, which had to be treated with the utmost caution—the wicks or mantles were prone to flare up or carbonize—but the modern age has taken its toll and now they have a marine battery, recharged by a solar panel during the day, into which they plug an electric lamp. By the light of this lamp, Nell and Lizzie set out to do a jigsaw puzzle. It’s one they did before, thousands of years ago—a wetland with a lot of bulrushes and waterbirds and vine-infested vegetation—and, as they work on it, Nell begins to remember its fiendish intricacies: the root clumps, the patches of sky and cloud, the deceptive spikes of purple flowers.

It’s best to solve the edges first, and they do make some headway. But there are two edge pieces missing—has somebody lost them? Some member of the younger gen, invading Lizzie’s hoard of sacrosanct jigsaw puzzles? “How irritating,” they mutter to each other, though Lizzie discovers one of the keystone pieces stuck to her arm.

They give up on the puzzle, eventually—the underground clumps of roots are too daunting, after all—and Lizzie reads out loud. It’s a Conan Doyle mystery story, though not a Sherlock Holmes one, about a train that’s diverted off its tracks and into an abandoned mine by a master criminal, in order to destroy a witness and his bodyguard.

While Lizzie reads, Nell deletes photos from her computer. Many of them are pictures of Tig, taken in the last year, when they were making a valiant effort to do the things Tig wanted to do, before— Before what was not said. Nor did they know the exact timing. But they both knew that this year they were moving through with at least a minimum amount of grace was quite soon before. They didn’t think it would be two years. Nor was it.

The photos Nell is throwing out are of Tig. In them he looks lost, or empty, or sad—Tig on the wane. She doesn’t want to remember him looking like that, or being like that. She keeps only the smiling ones: when he was pretending that nothing was wrong, that he was still his usual self. He did pull that off a lot of the time. What an effort it must have cost him. Still, they managed to squeeze in some happiness, from hour to hour.

She throws out photos until Lizzie reaches the end of the story, where the megalomaniac criminal who planned the disappearance of the train is crowing over his perfect crime: the two doomed men, stuck on a train hurtling into an abyss, their faces looking aghast out the open train windows, as they watch their fate approach, the yawning blackness of the mine’s mouth, the precipitous drop, the plunge into oblivion. Nell is afraid this story will give her nightmares; it’s the kind of thing that does. She’s never liked heights or cliff edges.

The dream she has that night isn’t a nightmare, however. Tig is in it, but he isn’t empty and sad. Instead, he’s quietly amused. It’s a spy story of some kind, though a leisurely one; a Russian named Polly Poliakov is involved, but he isn’t a woman, so his name shouldn’t be Polly.

Tig isn’t an action hero in this dream—he’s just there—but Polly Poliakov doesn’t seem to care about Tig’s presence. He’s very anxious, this Polly. There’s something that Nell urgently needs to know, but he has no luck at all explaining what it is. As for Nell, she’s happy that Tig’s in the dream; that’s what she’s mostly focussed on. He smiles at her as if enjoying a joke they’re sharing. See? It’s all right. It’s even funny. It’s idiotic how reassured she feels, once she wakes up.

The next day, after they’ve found the last missing piece of jigsaw on the floor, after they’ve had breakfast and relocated the night’s trove of mice, chewed-up paper towel, gnawed raisins, and mouse poop to a hospitable decaying log, and while they’re making a pretense of going for a swim—“I’ve changed my mind,” Lizzie says—Nell whacks one of her toes on the pointed white rock under the water. Of course she does. She was bound to injure herself sooner or later; it’s part of the grieving process. Barring bloodletting and clothes-rending and ashes on the head, a person in mourning has to undergo a mutilation of some kind.

Has she cracked a toe bone, or is it only a bruise? It’s not a major toe; she can still more or less walk. With a pirate Band-Aid decorated with skulls and crossbones left over from a layer of children—hers? Robbie’s? grandkids?—she tapes the offended toe to its neighbor, as instructed via her cell phone. Not much else to be done, according to the Web sites.

“ ‘Dig up white rock,’ ” Lizzie adds to their list. Her idea is that they will wait until autumn, when the water is lower, or else spring, when it may be lower still, and then go at it in a sort of exorcism, with shovels and pitchforks and the inevitable crowbars. The vampire white rock must go!

How many times have they made such a plan? Many.

The week proceeds. They wend their way through time as if through a labyrinth, or that is what Nell feels; Lizzie, possibly not so much. Nell’s injury is good for a few distracting conversations. They both examine the victimized toe with interest: how blue, how purple, will it become? Such observations of the wounded body are cheering: you don’t get bruises or pain unless you’re still alive.

“Or mosquito bites,” Lizzie says. They both know from their murder books that mosquitoes ignore dead people.

You have been mistaken in the time of death, mon ami. How so? There were no mosquito bites upon the corpse. Ah! Then that means . . . but surely not! I tell you it must be, my friend. The evidence is before us, it cannot be disputed.

“Small mercies,” Nell says. “You don’t have to be dead and itchy.”

“I’ll take Option B,” Lizzie says.

Others have been through this particular time labyrinth before them. The whole cabin is strewn with little ambushes in the form of the written word. In the kitchen, “Put No Fat Down Sinks”: this in their mother’s handwriting. The cookbook always kept up here has tiny remarks in pencil, also by their mother: “Good!!” Or: “More salt.” Not exactly the wisdom of the ages, but solid, practical advice. “When feeling down in the dumps”—What, exactly, were these dumps? Who still knows?—“go for a brisk walk!” This isn’t written; it just hovers in the air, in their mother’s voice. An echo.

I can’t go for a brisk walk, Nell tells her mother silently. My toe, remember? You can’t fix everything, she wants to add, but her mother is well aware of that. Sitting in the hospital while he was possibly dying—“he” again referring to Nell’s father, once of the axes, once of the crosscut saws, once of the crowbars—her mother said, “I won’t cry, because if I start I’ll never be able to stop.”

The day before Nell and Lizzie are due to leave for the city, Nell comes across a note written by Tig, long ago, when the two of them installed mosquito nets over the beds as a communal service. The mosquitoes can be thick as fur on the outsides of the screens, especially in June; they can squeeze through the tiniest cracks. Once inside, they whine. Even if you’ve got repellent on, they can ruin your night.

“Large mosquito netting: At the end of the bug season the large netting should be packed in this bag. The wooden frame, once collapsed, is inserted in the inner compartment of the green bag—Thanks.”

What green bag? she wonders. Probably it got mildew and someone discarded it. In any case, no one had ever followed these instructions of Tig’s; the mosquito netting is merely left in place and tied into a bundle when not in use.

She smooths out the piece of paper carefully and stores it away in her bag. It’s a message, left by Tig for her to find. Magical thinking, she knows that perfectly well, but she indulges in it, anyway, because it’s comforting. She’ll take this piece of paper back to the city, but what will she do with it there? What does one ever do with these cryptic messages from the dead? ♦