The New Yorker’s Holiday Present to you—a story (and quite a
good one, at that) that isn’t behind the paywall. This story reminds me
somewhat of the Alice Munro story, “
Axis,”
from earlier in the year, since it involves the passage of a long time after
youthful sex, and also deals with a geological formation that plays at least a
symbolic role in the story.
Here, sixty-something Verna is on an Arctic cruise, thinking
of getting back in the game after taking some time off following the death of
her fourth husband. She’s calculating and smart, and she knows she’s better
staying away from the married men. But she notices one, a “Bob,” and makes her
approach.
Although he doesn’t remember her, she remembers him quite well—he
raped her some 50 years earlier when she was 14. She’d been a sheltered girl up
until that point, but she became pregnant, had to give the child up, and never
recovered. She begins to plot her revenge . . .
Don’t read the
Q&A
with Margaret Atwood until you’ve read the story, but be sure and read it.
There isn’t much more to say about it beyond what Atwood says. And I won’t
discuss it further to avoid spoilers. (Usually in New Yorker stories that doesn’t
matter much, but it does in this one.)
