Margaret Atwood’s Dancing Girls, “Training” #MARM2024

MARM 2024 PLANS

Launch (November 1)
Dancing Girls, “Training” (November 5)
Old Babes in the Wood, “My Evil Mother” (November 7)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 10)
Dancing Girls, “Lives of the Poets” (November 12)
Old Babes in the Wood, “The Dead Interview” (November 14)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 18)
Margaret Atwood’s 84^th Birthday (November 18)
Dancing Girls, “Dancing Girls” (November 19)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Impatient Griselda” (November 21)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 24)
Dancing Girls, “Giving Birth” (November 26)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Bad Teeth” (November 28)
Wrap-Up (November 30)

Last summer, I finally watched “Crip Camp” on Netflix, inspired by the fact that both my mother and Mr. BIP’s youngest found work in summer camps like this: it’s the world in which “Training” is set too, in an era where several of the kids are “polio cases”.

As a kid, I loved the whole concept of summer camps, although I’m sure I would have been just as comfortable there as I would have been in boarding school (i.e. not at all).

Every summer I pounced on the weekly TV listings to see if this was the week that “Lil Darlings” would air, and I studied the old-fashioned stories about camps (like Carolyn Haywood’s story of two brothers who attended) and paperbacks like Yours Til Niagara Falls, Abby and Hail, Hail Camp Timberwood (by Jane O’Connor and Ellen Conford) like there’d be a test.

But in “Training”, nothing Rob knew  about summer camp seems to fit with his experience working with these kids. The story opens as he’s assembling a jigsaw puzzle that pictures a pair of giraffes with Jordan, whom the physiotherapist described as one of the worst “cases” she’s ever seen.

“Cases” of what we’re not sure, but Jordan is in a wheelchair and communicates ‘yes’ with a gesture of one hand. Rob admits that what he imagines in her gaze might be misunderstood, even wholly imagined.

He is concerned with trying to authentically respond to her; he seems to be the genuine sort who wants to do a good job, but more specifically he wants Jordan to have a good experience at camp. When she gestures “yes” in response to his asking if she’s bored with the puzzle, he returns the jigsaw to the counsellor who signs-out the games like library books, and Rob sets up a game of checkers instead.

Rob “played red” last game, so it’s Jordan’s turn to play it this time. (The counsellor is surprised they’re not bored of the game, so clearly they’ve played often.)

Rob makes his play and then he points at each of Jordan’s tokens until she signals “yes”. When their Games session ends, he notes the tokens’ positions, to reset for their next session.

Atwood never inhabits Jordan’s perspective in this story; she leaves her to her own mind. The story’s focus from the start is Rob, but Atwood also affords the possibility that there is much to be said for Jordan—who for all that the rest of her body restricts her, has the capacity to strategise in this game—but Jordan’s perspective remains unarticulated.

Rob’s ideas about Jordan, what she might want and what she might not want, are one way to read this story. (He decides, for instance, that she would like the experience of being on the grass, which is why I’ve counted this story as my Bingo square for Green, because he also mentions surgical greens.)

But another way to read it is the focus on how Rob’s family has defined his capabilities, the restricted options available for his future. They want him to be a doctor, and that’s that.

Both parents disapprove of the elements of his personality that disincline him from medical school (he faints at the sight of blood). It’s clear that neither approves of his way of being in the world, but it’s his mother’s criticism that lodges most firmly in his psyche. She tells everyone he’s too “sensitive” and he recognises the broader, sweeping judgement therein.

“She trusted the others to make their own way, but she didn’t trust him, and secretly Rob agreed with her estimate. He knew he could never be a doctor, although he felt he wanted to. He wanted to be good at baseball too, but he wasn’t, and all he could see ahead for himself at Medical School was catastrophe.”

Jordan’s experience of camp (at least from what we observe) is not catastrophic, but there is occasion to wonder just what happens when someone else thinks that they know what will define someone else’s happiness. And how his parents’ refusal to allow Rob to simply be himself has coloured his whole experience of the world.

Readers see just how much is going on in Rob’s mind in this story, but it’s also possible to read it as a story about camp and one’s first job, about the difference between fumbling in the dark and the stories that get told about that fumbling (hints of “Lil Darlings” after all), and the denouement is unexpectedly moving. (Catch a hint of it here, if you aren’t spoiler-phobic, and there are plenty of similar and more-recent videos like it.)

P.S. This new MARM Bingo is for my own amusement, but feel free to play along, whether as-is or by adding your own fields. You should be able to copy the image and resize (even in Word).