Wilderness Tips

  "One of these days I'm going to kill that beast," says Eric. It's Marcia's belief that Eric would never do such a thing, because he is tender-hearted to a fault. Eric's view of himself is more savage.

  "You poor baby!" says Marcia, scooping up the cat, which is overweight. It's on a diet, but mooches in secret from the neighbours. Marcia sympathizes.

  "I just let the damn thing out. In, out, in, out. It can't make up its mind," says Eric.

  "It's confused," says Marcia. The cat has wriggled free of her. She measures coffee into the little espresso machine. If she were truly loyal to Eric she would give up coffee, too, to spare him the torture of watching her drink it. But then she would be asleep all the time.

  "It's picking up on the national mood," says Eric. "Yesterday it shat in the bathtub."

  "At least it didn't use the rug," says Marcia. She peels an envelope of moist cat kibble. The cat rubs up against her legs.

  "It would have if it had thought about it," says Eric. "Some grovelling hymn to George Bush." He's back on the editorial page.

  "What's he done now?" says Marcia, helping herself to Cheerios. Eric won't eat them because they're American. Ever since the Free Trade deal with the States went through he has refused to purchase anything from south of the border. They've been having a lot of root vegetables this winter: carrots, potatoes, beets. Eric says the pioneers did it, and, anyway, frozen orange juice is overrated. At lunches out, Marcia furtively eats avocados and hopes Eric won't smell them on her breath.

  "This is the Panama invasion," says Eric, distinguishing it from a multitude of other invasions. "You know how many they're up to this century? Down there? Forty-two."

  "That's a lot," says Marcia, in her mollifying voice.

  "They don't think of it as invading," says Eric. "They think of it as agriculture. Sort of like spraying for bugs."

  "Were you cold out there? Did you freeze your paws?" says Marcia, picking up the cat again, which has turned up its nose at the kibble. It gives a pig-like grunt. She's missing the children. Tomorrow they will be home for the holidays, they and their laundry. The children are hers, not hers and Eric's, though even they don't seem to notice this any more. Their real father has become a figment, somewhere in Florida. For Christmas he sends them oranges, which is about all Marcia ever hears of him.

  "It's a drug thing," says Eric. "They're going to arrest Noriega, and presto, ten thousand poverty-stricken junkies will be cured."

  "He hasn't behaved well," says Marcia.

  "That's not the point," says Eric.

  Marcia sighs. "I suppose this means you'll be picketing the American Consulate again," she says.

  "Me and a few assorted loonies, and five superannuated Trots," says Eric. "Same old bunch."

  "Dress up warm," says Marcia. "There's a wind-chill factor."

  "I'll wear my earmuffs," says Eric: this is his one concession to subzero weather. "Trots are a nuisance."

  "The Mounties think that you're one," says Marcia.

  "Oh, yeah, I forgot - and two Mounties disguised as bag ladies. Or else those jerks from Ca-Sissies. They might as well wear clown suits, they're so obvious."

  Ca-Sissies is Eric's name for CSIS, which really means Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Ca-Sissies taps his phone, or so Eric believes. He teases them: he'll phone up one of his pals and say words like "sabotage" and "bomb," just to activate the tapes. Eric says he's doing Ca-Sissies a favour: he's making them feel important. Marcia says it would interfere with her ever having an affair, because they might listen in and then blackmail her.

  Eric is not worried. "You have good taste," he says. "There's no one in this city worth having an affair with."

  Marcia knows that lack of worth has never stopped anyone in this regard. The reason she doesn't have affairs, or hasn't had any lately, is simple laziness. Too much energy is required; also, she no longer has the body for it, for the initial revelations and displays. She would not have an affair without doing something about her thighs, and buying appropriate underwear. In addition, she would not risk losing Eric. Eric can still surprise her, in many ways. She knows the general format of the schemes he's likely to come up with, but not the details. Surprise is worth a lot.

  "Love is blind," says Marcia. "Well, I'm off to the temple of free speech." She's glad he's going to picket. It means he's not too old for it, after all. She kisses him again, on the top of his rumpled, sticky head. "See you for dinner. What're we having?"

  Eric thinks for a moment. "Turnips," he says.

  "Oh good," says Marcia. "We haven't had those for a while."

  Marcia puts on her cardigan and her heavy black wool winter coat - not fur, Eric is against fur these days, although Marcia has pointed out that fur is the native way of life and is also biodegradable. She barely gets away with the sheepskin slippers: luckily, their vibrant colour makes them look fake. She adds her boots, her scarf, her lined gloves, and her white wool hat. Thus padded, she takes a breath, clenches all her flesh together, and heads through the door, into the winter. The cat shoots out between her legs and immediately thinks better of it. Marcia lets it back in.

  This is the coldest December in a hundred years. At night it hits thirty below; car tires are square in the morning, frostbite cases crowd the hospitals. Eric says it's the greenhouse effect. Marcia is puzzled by this: she thought the greenhouse effect was supposed to make it warmer, not colder. "Freak weather," Eric says tersely.

  There's ice all over the steps; there has been for days. Marcia has suggested that the mailman may slip on it and sue them, but Eric refuses to use salt: he's in pursuit of some new product that Canadian Tire never seems to have in stock. Marcia holds on to the railing and takes tiny steps downward and wonders if she's getting osteoporosis. She could fall; she could shatter like a dropped plate, like an egg. These are the sorts of possibilities that never occur to Eric. Only large catastrophes concern him.

  The sidewalk has been chiselled free of ice, or at least a sort of trail has been made in it, suitable for single file. Marcia makes her way along this, towards the subway station. When she comes out onto Bloor Street it's less treacherous underfoot, but gustier. She breaks into a slow, lumbering trot and reaches the Bathurst station wheezing.

  Three of the city's homeless are staked out inside the door. All are young men; two of them are Native Indians, one isn't. The one that isn't puts the twist on Marcia for some change. He says he just wants to eat, which seems to Marcia a modest enough wish: she knows a lot of people who want a good deal more. He is pallid and stubble-faced, and he doesn't meet her eyes. To him she's just a sort of broken pay phone, the kind you can shake to make extra quarters come out.

  The two Indians watch without much expression. They look fed up. They've had it with this city, they've had it with suicide as an option, they've had it with the twentieth century. Or so Marcia supposes. She doesn't blame them: the twentieth century has not been a raving success.

  At the newsstand she buys a chocolate bar and a True Woman magazine, the first Canadian-made but bad for you, the second an outright Yankeeland betrayal. But she's entitled: she gets enough virtuous eating and reality principle in the rest of her life, so for half an hour she'll play hooky and wreck her blood sugar and read escapist trash. She squashes onto the train with the other wool-swaddled passengers and is adroit enough to get a seat, where she thumbs through the holiday fashions and the diet of the month, licking chocolate from her fingers. Then she settles into a piece entitled, with misplaced assurance, "What Men Really Think." It's all about sex, of course. Marcia has news for them: the sum total of what men really think is quite a lot bigger than that.

  She changes trains, gets off at Union, slogs up the stairs to street level. There's an escalator, but looking at all those slender bodies has made her worried. Eric thinks she has nice thighs; but then Eric leads a sheltered life.

  There are underground mazes downtown, underground shopping malls, underground tunnels that can get you from one build
ing to another. You could spend the whole winter underground, without ever going outside. But Marcia feels a moral obligation to deal with winter instead of merely avoiding it. Also, she has a lot of difficulty locating herself on the "You Are Here" diagrams placed at intervals to help out those lacking in orientation skills. She prefers to be aboveground, where there are street signs.

  Just recently she got thoroughly lost down there; the only good thing that happened was that she discovered a store called The Tacki Shoppe, which sold pink flamingo eggs and joke books about sex in middle age, and bottles of sugar pills labelled Screwital. It also sold small pieces of the Berlin Wall, each in its own little box, with a certificate of authenticity included. They cost $12.95. She bought a piece to put in Eric's stocking: they still keep up the habit of jokes in their stockings, from when the children were younger. She is not sure Eric will find this gift funny; more likely, he will make some remark about the trivialization of history. But the children will be interested. The truth is that Marcia secretly wants this piece of the Wall for herself. It's a souvenir for her, not of a place - she has never been to Berlin - but of a time. This is from the Christmas the Wall came tumbling down, she will say in later years; to her grandchildren, she hopes. Then she will try to remember what year it was.

  More and more, she is squirrelling away bits of time - a photo here, a letter there; she wishes she had saved more of the children's baby clothes, more of their toys. Last month, when Eric took an old shirt that dated from their first year together and cut it up for dishcloths, she saved the buttons. No doubt, after the Berlin Wall fragment has been fingered and exclaimed over on Christmas morning, it will end up in this magpie cache of hers.

  The wind is worse here, tunnelling between the glassy high-rise office buildings. After a block of walking into it, bent over and holding her ears, Marcia takes a taxi.

  The paper Marcia writes for is housed in a bland, square, glass-walled, windowless building, put up at some time in the seventies, when airlessness was all the rage. Despite its uninformative exterior, Marcia finds this building sinister, but that may be because she knows what goes on inside it.

  The paper is called, somewhat grandiosely, The World. It is a national institution of sorts, and, like many other national institutions these days, it is falling apart. Eric says that The World has aided the national disintegration in other areas, such as Free Trade, so why should it be exempt itself? Marcia says that, even so, it is a shame. The World stood for something once, or so she likes to believe. It had integrity, or at least more integrity than it does now. You could trust it to have principles, to attempt fairness. Now the best you can say of it is that it has a fine tradition behind it, and has seen better days.

  Better in some ways, worse in others. For instance, by cutting its staff and tailoring itself for the business community, it is now making more money. It has recently been placed under new management, which includes the editor, a man called Ian Emmiry. Ian Emmiry was promoted suddenly, over the heads of his elders and seniors, while the unsuspecting former editor was on vacation. This event was staged like a military coup in one of the hotter, seedier nations. It was almost like having a chauffeur promoted to general as the result of some hidden affiliation or pay-off, and has been resented as much.

  The journalists who have been there a long time refer to Ian Emmiry as Ian the Terrible, but not in front of the incoming bunch: Ian the Terrible has his spies. There are fewer and fewer of the older journalists and more and more of the newer ones, hand-picked by Ian for their ability to nod. A slow transformation is going on, a slow purge. Even the comic strips at the back have been gutted: for instance, "Rex Morgan, M.D.," with its wooden-faced doctor and its impossibly cheerful and sexless nurse, is no longer to be found. Marcia misses it. It was such a soothing way to start the day, because nothing in it ever changed. It was an antidote to news.

  Marcia wanders through the newsroom in search of a free computer. There are no more typewriters, no more clatter, not much of the casual hanging around, the loitering and chit-chat that Marcia links with the old sound of the news being pounded out, drilled out as if from rock. Everything is computers now: Ian the Terrible has seen to that. He is big on systems. The journalists, the new breed, are crouched in front of their computers at their open-plan desks, cooking up the news; they look like pieceworkers in a garment factory.

  Marcia does not have her own desk here, because she's not on staff: she's a columnist on contract. So, as Ian said (placing a well-kept hand on her shoulder, his eyes like little zinc nails), she might as well work at home. He would like her to have a computer there, where she would be safely quarantined; he would like her to beam in her columns by modem. Barring that, he would like her to drop her copy off and have it keyboarded into the system by someone else. He suspects her of seditious tendencies. But Marcia has assured him, smiling, that Eric will not allow a computer in the house - he's such a Luddite, but what can you do! - and that she would never expect anyone else to deal with her messy copy. Who could read her handwritten alterations? she has said, diffidently. No, she really has to type the column into the system herself, she tells Ian. She does not say "keyboard," and Ian notices this hold-out. Maybe he grits his teeth. It's hard to tell: he has the kind of teeth that appear to be permanently gritted.

  Marcia could have a computer at home if she liked. Also, she could bring in clean copy. But she wants to come down here. She wants to see what's going on. She wants the gossip.

  Marcia's column appears in the section of the paper that still calls itself "Lifestyles," although surely it will have to think up some new heading soon. "Lifestyles" was the eighties; the nineties are coming, and already steps are being taken to differentiate the decades. Summings-up clutter the papers, radio and television are droning earnestly on about what the eighties meant and what the nineties will mean. People are already talking about a seventies revival, which puzzles Marcia. What is there to revive? The seventies were the sixties until they became the eighties. There were no seventies, really. Or maybe she missed out on them, because that was when the children were small.

  Her column, which is read by some men as well as by many women, is about issues. Social issues, problems that may come up: caring for the aged at home, breast-feeding in public, bulimia in the workplace. She interviews people, she writes from the particular to the general; she believes, in what she considers to be an old-fashioned, romantic way, that life is something that happens to individuals, despite the current emphasis on statistics and trends. Lately things have taken a grimmer turn in Marcia's column: there's been more about such things as malnutrition in kindergartens, wife-beating, overcrowding in prisons, child abuse. How to behave if you have a friend with AIDS. Homeless people who ask for hand-outs at the entrances to subway stations.

  Ian does not like this new slant of Marcia's; he doesn't like her bad news. Businessmen don't want to read about this stuff, about people who can't work the system. Or so Ian says. She's heard this through the grapevine. He has called her style "hysterical." He thinks she's too soppy. Probably she is too soppy. Her days at The World are probably numbered.

  As she opens a new file on the computer, Ian himself appears. He has on a new suit, a grey one. He looks laminated.

  "We got some mail on that column of yours," he says. "The one about free needles for junkies."

  "Oh," says Marcia. "Hate mail?"

  "Most of it," says Ian. He's pleased by this. "A lot of people don't think taxpayers' money should be spent on drugs."

  "It's not drugs," says Marcia irritably, "it's public health." Even to herself she sounds like a child talking back. In Ian's mind another little black mark has just gone on her chart. Up yours, she thinks, smiling brightly. One of these days she'll say something like that out loud, and then there will be trouble.

  Marcia wonders what will happen if she gets fired. Something else may turn up for her; then again, she's getting older, and it may not. She might have to freelance again, or, worse, ghos
t-write. Usually it's politicians who want the stories of their lives graven in stone for the benefit of future ages, or at least these are the ones who are willing to pay. She did that sort of thing when she was younger and more desperate, before she got the column, but she isn't sure she has the stamina for it any more. She's bitten her tongue enough for one lifetime. She isn't sure she still has the knack of lying.

  Luckily, she and Eric have the mortgage on their house almost paid off, and the children are within a few years of finishing university. Eric makes some money on his own, of course. He writes engorged and thunderous books of popular history, about things like the fur trade and the War of 1812, in which he denounces almost everybody. His former colleagues, the academic historians, cross the street to avoid him, partly because they may remember the faculty meetings and conferences at which he also denounced everybody, before he resigned, but partly because they disapprove of him. He does not partake of their measured vocabularies. His books sell well, much better than theirs, and they find that annoying.

  But, even with the royalties from Eric's books, there will not be enough money. Also, Eric is slowing down. It has come to him lately that these books have not changed the course of history, and he is running out of steam. Even his denunciations, even his pranks, are rooted in a growing despair. His despair is not focused on any one thing; it's general, like the increasingly bad city air. He doesn't say much about it, but Marcia knows it's there. Every day she fights against it, and breathes it in.

  Sometimes he talks about moving - to some other country, somewhere with more self-respect, or somewhere warmer. Or just somewhere else. But where? And how could they afford it?

  Marcia will have to bestir herself. She will have to cut corners. She will have to beg - in some way, somehow. She will have to compromise.

  Marcia has almost finished typing her column into the computer when her friend Gus drifts by. He says hello to attract her attention, raises his hand in a glass-lifting motion, signals her with a finger: one o'clock. It's an invitation to lunch, and Marcia nods. This charade goes with their shared, only half-humorous pretence that the walls have ears and that it's dangerous for them to be seen too openly together.