Summary
Part II, Chapter 9
The narrator is nervous about being on the island, since it is not safe and the others do not realize they are in danger. She tries to think of ways to keep them safe, trying to keep busy and preserve a sense of order to conceal her fears. Outside with Joe, she scans the land for signs of her father but there are none.
Anna asks her that afternoon if she is on the pill and she says no; both women had issues with it. The narrator thinks of how it was almost possible to have love without fear and sex without risk but not anymore. She shudders at memories of giving birth and how chemical and foreign it was. She cannot remember why her husband was not with her at the time. Anna seems to want to talk but she keeps weeding. The men come back and David wants to get footage for his film.
That evening they play bridge. When they go to bed, the narrator hears Anna and David having sex and thinks, listening to her orgasm, “It’s like death… the bad part isn’t the thing itself but being a witness” (82).
Chapter 10
It is the second day of the week and her father has not appeared. She feels stretched, anxious. She wants to get them off the island to prevent the others from this knowledge. They already seem restless, with little to amuse them.
Looking at Joe, the narrator realizes she should have gotten out of the relationship earlier, and that it was unfair for her to stay with him.
She invites the others to go pick blueberries with her after lunch, so they take the canoes around the stone point into the archipelago of islands. They pass the herons’ island and arrive at the one with the blueberry bushes.
While picking blueberries, Joe tells the narrator they ought to get married. For a second she wants to laugh. He has never even asked her if she loves him. She asks why and says they are living together anyway and do not need a certificate for that. He says they might as well. She refuses and he grows upset; it would be easier if he was angry, but he is just sad. She admits she was married before and had a baby and does not want to go through that again. She knows she is saying she “tried and failed, I’m inoculated, exempt, classified as wounded” (87). He says it would be different with them, ignoring the part about the baby.
The narrator remembers her wedding at the post office. Her husband had kissed her but she felt cold and her legs were shaking. He talked to her like she was an invalid. She asked angrily why he was doing this because he was going to ruin it, then, when she saw how miserable he was, said she was not good enough for him.
Back at the house, it is too hot to eat inside because of the oven, so they enjoy the blueberry pie outside. David comments that this is the life and they ought to start a colony up here if only they could kick out the American pigs. Anna sighs that it’s a copout and he won’t do it.
The narrator goes inside to look for more magazines like the ten-year-old Macleans’s and National Geographic. In David and Anna’s room, she finds family scrapbooks and flips through her brother’s, which is full of explosions and soldiers. She finds hers, looking for something she can find that resembles herself. It is full of ladies and models. Another older one is full of Easter eggs and rabbits. Unlike her brother’s, it has no monsters or wars of heroism. Disappointed in herself, she decides she was a “hedonistic child… and quite stodgy also” (91). She takes the scrapbooks and puts them in her room.
Chapter 11
Joe is still upset with the narrator and ignores her. David makes dumb jokes about his behavior.
The narrator goes outside to feed the jays. They will not fly down to eat from her hand, and she remembers her mother said people frightened them.
Paul shows up in his boat with a huge amount of vegetables from his garden. He also brings another man, Bill Malmstrom, who compliments the place. She distrusts him. He says he is from the Detroit branch of the Wildlife Protection Association of America and he wants to buy the property to open a retreat lodge where members could meditate and observe nature. He says he has taken the liberty of coming up here before and looking around. When she asks if he would change anything he says no, other than a septic tank and a power generator.
The narrator says it is not for sale right now; if her father was dead he might be okay with it but what if he wasn’t? Plus, she does not know where the deeds and title are. Malmstrom gives her a card and thanks her.
The narrator takes Paul to the paltry garden, knowing she has to reciprocate. She confides in him that her father is alive, that he left her a note, but Paul is skeptical.
Back with her friends, she tells them of the offer. David darkly suggests that the Americans want this land because it will be strategically important during the imminent war. He talks of the American trying to take over and the ways the National Movement guerillas will fight back.
David asks what she said and she said she refused, and he calls her a good girl and says her heart, and the rest of her, is in the right place. After dinner, Anna glumly tells the narrator she thinks David is a schmuck and she must think he is hot for her with his comments about her ass. The narrator is bewildered and says no, that she thought he was teasing. Anna says he was doing that to Anna on purpose, and he screws women and then tells her about it. The narrator asks why and Anna replies that he says he is being honest and when she gets mad he calls her jealous and uptight, and that jealousy is from the bourgeoisie. She angrily says that “theorizing…is cover-up bullshit garbage” (99).
The narrator wishes Anna hadn’t said anything; she wanted to think they had a good marriage. But it was thoughtful of her, and she herself would not have warned Anna in advance.
Chapter 12
David makes a joke and the narrator does not laugh. He notes that Joe is out of sorts and asks why she does not laugh at his jokes. She does not reply and he awkwardly leaves.
Now that the others are occupied she decides to look for a will or deed or property title. Maybe, though, the CIA got rid of him to get the land? That might be why Malmstrom came. She also wonders if the papers might be in a bank and then she would never get them, or perhaps he burned them.
She peers at the drawings again, which seem to suggest total derangement. But then she finds a letter from an academic thanking her father for the photographs, tracings, and map. It seems the drawings were of indigenous rock paintings. Her hypotheses “crumbled like sand” (103)—apparently he was only making copies, not originals. She presses her eyes hard to get blackness, then violent color. The secret had never been a secret. She realizes she has proof of sanity and now probably of death.
There does seem to be something unaccounted for, however. The notes and numbers seem to be a location code—a system, a game for her. She recognizes the name of White Birch Lake and tries to decipher other points on the key. It seemed like a treasure map. She decides she will suggest a trip that can be disguised as a fishing trip.
Anna comes inside from sunbathing and asks what is wrong with Joe. The narrator replies he wants them to get married and she does not want to.
She realizes she feels nothing, and has not for some time. Maybe she has been like that her whole life, and her neck has closed over and shut her into her head. Anna suggests she go down and talk to Joe, and she reluctantly agrees, seeing that Anna thinks she is not showing enough conciliation or expiation.
She heads to the dock where Joe is sitting on the edge, and asks what is wrong. He replies that she knows, and that she is screwing around with him. He appears vulnerable, and she chides herself for not being more careful with him. He asks her if she loves him because that is the only thing that matters. She admits she wants to, and does in a way. When she says it is the truth, he spits out that she thinks his work is crap and he is a loser and not worth it. She says no but knows he needs more. She tells him to come back up to the cabin.
She thinks it is not her father’s death that concerns her but her own. She takes a scrapbook out to see when the change happened for her by looking at her former faces. She looks at all the ancestors and labels, starting from the oldest and moving to her brother and then her. She sees herself age. She is in a lot of photos, “shut in behind the paper; or not me but the missing part of me” (108). There are no hints, though; she does not know when it happened but at some point she allowed herself to be cut in two. She is like a woman sawn apart in a crate for a magic show. One half is locked away and it is that only one that can live, and she is the wrong half, the terminal half.
Chapter 13
In the morning, she and Joe talk calmly, deciding who will move out. She knows he does not love her; it is an idea of himself he loved and he wanted someone—anyone—to join him.
They head out for their trip, stopping for lunch on a jagged island in a wide part of the lake. They find a heap of trash and the narrator picks it up. David tells a story and when Anna mentions something about women, he tells her to leave out the women’s liberation stuff. The narrator says she thinks men should be superior and Anna says disgustedly that she is brainwashed. David jokes with Anna in a sexist manner and she looks at him like “he is a brain-damaged child” (113) but smiles nonetheless.
They see Americans boating past them and David starts yelling “Pigs!” at them but they only smile and wave, thinking he is greeting them.
The wind is strong but they make it to the portage place. They hear a chainsaw and see two men in yellow helmets; they must be surveyors from the paper company or the government. They are the advance guard; the hill at her cabin would “become an eroding sand island surrounded by dead trees” (114). The men look at them indifferently.
They gather all the things to begin the portage process. The others have not done it and it is laborious. Suddenly the narrator smells something, then turns to see a dead blue heron hanging upside down by a rope, its wings fallen open and its eye looking at the narrator.
Analysis
Part II begins with the group settling into their week on the island. The narrator is concerned that her father might reappear, and, as the drawings seem to be infallible evidence of his insanity, might hurt the others.
Another discomfiting situation for her is Joe’s proposal of marriage. She does not know if she loves him, and asserts several times in the text that she is different from other people, especially other women. She muses, “marriage was like playing Monopoly or doing crossword puzzles, either your mind worked that way, like Anna’s, or it didn’t; and I’d proved mine didn’t” (87).
She suspects something is wrong with her: “I’m not sure when I began to suspect the truth, about myself… Part of it arrived swift as flags, as mushrooms, unfurling and sudden growth, but it was there in me, the evidence, only needing to be deciphered” (75). She admits “I didn’t feel much of anything, I hadn’t for a long time” (106). She decides to delve further into her childhood to figure out why she is the way she is, why she has the break in her palm lines that Anna identified. She looks through the scrapbooks “for something I could recognize as myself” (91) but there is nothing problematic. Similarly, in her mother’s photo albums of her and her brother’s childhoods, she finds no “hints or facts, I didn’t know when it had happened. I must have been all right then; but after that I’d allowed myself to be cut in two” (108-09). There are no answers for her yet.
A major problem is that her theory about her father’s madness, which seemed to make sense to her, comes crashing down when she discovers the drawings were only of indigenous rock paintings, not his own wild scrawlings. But, not far enough in her quest, she is not willing to let him go or make any referendum about herself, and after a moment of discombobulation, “I began to arrange” (104). Her mind fixates on the notes and numbers and map, deeming them a “puzzle he’d left for me to solve” (104), “a system, a game” (104), a “treasure map” (105). This leads her to search the island for the paintings, hoping they will reveal some fundamental truth about her father and/or herself.
Arnold and Cathy Davidson posit that “all along there are hints that her task has more dimensions than she originally anticipated — that she, for example, should see her father for what he was instead of merely looking for him.” Her willingness to accept his sanity begins her path toward really seeing him, but she has much more work to do. Roberta Rubenstein notes that “Though the narrator of Surfacing expects that she must pass through the proverbial hell and purgatory before reaching her destination, the reader gradually learns that the hell is, in fact, behind her; not new suffering but acceptance and assimilation of her previous suffering is the path towards wholeness.” In the next section, the crumbling of all of the “truths” the narrator told herself (and the reader) initiates her “surfacing,” the text’s metaphor for emerging from the depths of the psyche and attaining a wholeness of self.
