Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

clothes, you’d be covered with blood and delirious in a day. I can’t accept it though, he knew too much, he was too careful.
    I give David the machete, I don’t know what shape the trail will be in, we may have to brush it out; Joe carries the hatchet. Before we start I coat their wrists and ankles with bug spray, and my own also. I used to be immune to mosquitoes, I’d been bitten so much, but I’ve lost it: on my legs and body are several itchy pink bumps from last night. The sound of love in the north, a kiss, a slap.
    It’s overcast, lowhanging cloud; there’s a slight wind from the southeast, it may rain later or it may miss us, the weather here comes in pockets, like oil. We go in through the neck-high grass mixed with wild raspberry canes between the garden and the lake, past the burn heap and the compost heap. I should have unearthed the garbage, to see how recent it is; there’s a pit also, where the burned tin cans are smashed flat and buried, that could be excavated. My father viewed as an archeological problem.
    We’re on the trail inside the forest; the first part is fairly open, though now and then we pass gigantic stumps, level and saw-cut, remnants of the trees that were here before the district was logged out. The trees will never be allowed to grow that tall again, they’re killed as soon as they’re valuable, big trees are scarce as whales.
    The forest thickens and I watch for the blazes, still visible after fourteen years; the trees they’re cut on have grown swollen edges around the wounds, scar tissue.
    We begin to climb and my husband catches up with me again, making one of the brief appearances, framed memories he specializes in: crystal clear image enclosed by a blank wall. He’s writing his own initials on a fence, graceful scrolls to show me how, lettering was one of the things he taught. There are other initials on the fence but he’s making his bigger, leaving his mark. I can’t identify the date or place, it was a city, before we were married; I lean beside him, admiring the fall of winter sunlight over his cheekbone and the engraved nose, noble and sloped like a Roman coin profile; that was when everything he did was perfect. On his hand is a leather glove. He said he loved me, the magic word, it was supposed to make everything light up, I’ll never trust that word again.
    My bitterness about him surprises me: I was what’s known as the offending party, the one who left, he didn’t do anything to me. He wanted a child, that’s normal, he wanted us to be married.
    In the morning while we were doing the dishes I decided to ask Anna. She was wiping a plate, humming snatches of The Big Rock Candy Mountain under her breath. “How do you manage it?” I said.
    She stopped humming. “Manage what?”
    “Being married. How do you keep it together?”
    She glanced at me quickly as though she was suspicious. “We tell a lot of jokes.”
    “No but really,” I said. If there was a secret trick I wanted to learn it.
    She talked to me then, or not to me exactly but to an invisible microphone suspended above her head: people’s voices go radio when they give advice. She said you just had to make an emotional commitment, it was like skiing, you couldn’t see in advance what would happen but you had to let go. Let go of what, I wanted to ask her; I was measuring myself against what she was saying. Maybe that was why I failed, because I didn’t know what I had to let go of. For me it hadn’t been like skiing, it was more like jumping off a cliff. That was the feeling I had all the time I was married; in the air, going down, waiting for the smash at the bottom.
    “How come it didn’t work out, with you?” Anna said.
    “I don’t know,” I said, “I guess I was too young.”
    She nodded sympathetically. “You’re lucky you didn’t have kids though.”
    “Yes,” I said. She doesn’t have any herself; if she did she couldn’t have said that to me. I’ve never told her about