Read Wilderness Tips for Free Online

mercy of other people’s words. “It was because of you. What they were saying about you. Darce was.”
    Ronette isn’t smiling any more. “Such as what?” she says.
    “Never mind,” says Donny. “You don’t want to know.”
    “I know anyhow,” Ronette says. “That shit.” She sounds resigned rather than angry. She stands up, puts both her hands behind her back. It takes Donny a moment to realize she’s untying her apron. When she’s got it off she takes him by the hand, pulls gently. He allows himself to be led around the hill of rock, out of sight of anything but the water. She sits down, lies down, smiles as she reaches up, arranges his hands. Her blue uniform unbuttons down the front. Donny can’t believe this is happening, to him, in full daylight. It’s like sleepwalking, it’s like running too fast, it’s like nothing else.
    “Want another coffee?” Joanne says. She nods to the waitress. Donny hasn’t heard her.
    “She was really nice to me,” he is saying. “Ronette. You know, when Mr. B. turfed me out. That meant a lot to me at the time.” He’s feeling guilty, because he never wrote her. He didn’t know where she lived, but he didn’t take any steps to find out. Also, he couldn’t keep himself from thinking:
They’re right. She’s a slut
. Part of him had been profoundly shocked by what she’d done. He hadn’t been ready for it.
    Joanne is looking at him with her mouth slightly open, as if he’s a talking dog, a talking stone. He fingers his beard nervously, wondering what he’s said wrong, or given away.
    Joanne has just seen the end of the story, or one end of one story. Or at least a missing piece. So that’s why Ronette wouldn’t tell: it was Donny. She’d been protecting him; or maybe she’d been protecting herself. A fourteen-year-old boy. Ludicrous.
    Ludicrous then, possible now. You can do anything now and it won’t cause a shock. Just a shrug. Everything is
cool
. A line has been drawn and on the other side of it is the past, both darker and more brightly intense than the present.
    She looks across the line and sees the nine waitresses in their bathing suits, in the clear blazing sunlight, laughing on the dock, herself among them; and off in the shadowy rustling bushes of the shoreline, sex lurking dangerously. It had been dangerous, then. It had been sin. Forbidden, secret, sullying.
Sick with desire
. Three dots had expressed it perfectly, because there had been no ordinary words for it.
    On the other hand there had been marriage, which meant wifely checked aprons, play-pens, a sugary safety.
    But nothing has turned out that way. Sex has been domesticated, stripped of the promised mystery, added to the category of the merely expected. It’s just what is done, mundane as hockey. It’s celibacy these days that would raise eyebrows.
    And what has become of Ronette, after all, left behind in the past, dappled by its chiaroscuro, stained and haloed by it, stuck with other people’s adjectives? What is she doing, now that everyone else is following in her footsteps? More practically: did she have the baby, or not? Keep it or not? Donny, sitting sweetly across the table from her, is in all probability the father of a ten-year-old child, and he knows nothing about it at all.
    Should she tell him? The melodrama tempts her, the idea of a revelation, a sensation, a neat ending.
    But it would not be an ending, it would only be the beginning of something else. In any case, the story itself seems to her outmoded. It’s an archaic story, a folk-tale, a mosaic artefact. It’s a story that would never happen now.

Hairball

    O n the thirteenth of November, day of unluck, month of the dead, Kat went into the Toronto General Hospital for an operation. It was for an ovarian cyst, a large one.
    Many women had them, the doctor told her. Nobody knew why. There wasn’t any way of finding out whether the thing was malignant, whether it contained, already, the spores of death. Not