Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [10]
When I wasn’t doing those things, I had to clean the bathroom or do the dishes.
My sister turned one, I became thirteen; now I was in high school. She turned two, I became fourteen. My girlfriends at school – some of them were fifteen already – were loitering on the way home, talking to boys. Some of them went to the movies, where they picked up boys from other schools; others did the same at skating rinks. They exchanged views on which boys were real dolls and which were pills, they went to drive-ins on double dates with their new steadies and ate popcorn and rolled around in the back seats of cars, they tried on strapless dresses, they attended dances where, drowning in swoony music and the blue light of darkened gymnasiums, they shuffled around mashed up against their partners, they necked on the couch in their rec rooms with the TV on.
I listened to the descriptions of all this at lunch hour, but I couldn’t join in. I avoided the boys who approached me: somehow I had to turn away, I had to go home and look after the baby, who was still not sleeping. My mother dragged around the house as if she was ill, or starving. She’d been to the doctor about the baby’s sleeplessness, but he’d been no help. All he said was, “You’ve got one of those.”
From being worried, I now became surly. I escaped from the dinner table every night as soon as I could, I shut myself in my room and answered questions from my parents with grudging monosyllables. When I wasn’t doing homework or chores or baby-tending I would lie on my bed with my head hanging over the edge, holding up a mirror to see what I looked like upside down.
One evening I was standing behind my mother. I must have been waiting for her to get out of the bathroom so I could try out something or other on myself, a different shampoo most likely. She was bending over the laundry hamper, hauling out the dirty clothes. The baby started to cry. “Could you go and put her to sleep?” she said, as she had done so often. Ordinary, I would trudge off, soothe, sing, rock.
“Why should I?” I said. “She’s not my baby. I didn’t have her. You did.” I’d never said anything this rude to her. Even as the words were coming out of my mouth I knew I’d gone too far, though all I’d done was spoken the truth, or part of it.
My mother stood up and whirled around, all in one movement, and slapped me hard across the face. She’d never done that before, or anything remotely like it. I didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything. We were both shocked by ourselves, and also by each other.
I ought to have felt hurt, and I did. But I also felt set free, as if released from an enchantment. I was no longer compelled to do service. On the outside, I would still be helpful – I wouldn’t be able to change that about myself. But another, more secret life spread out before me, unrolling like dark fabric. I too would soon go to the drive-in theatres, I too would eat popcorn. Already in spirit I was off and running – to the movies, to the skating rinks, to the swooning blue-lit dances, and to all sorts of other seductive and tawdry and frightening pleasures I could not yet begin to imagine.
The Headless Horseman
For Halloween that year – the year my sister was two – I dressed up as the Headless Horseman. Before, I’d only ever been ghosts and fat ladies, both of which were easy: all you needed was a sheet and a lot of talcum powder, or a dress and a hat and some padding. But this year would be the last one I’d ever be able to disguise myself, or so I believed. I was getting too old for it – I was almost finished with being thirteen – and so I felt the urge to make a special effort.
Halloween was my best holiday. Why did I like it so much? Perhaps because I could take time off from being myself, or from the impersonation of myself I was finding it increasingly expedient, but also increasingly burdensome, to perform in public.
I got the Headless Horseman idea from a story we’d read in school. In the story, the Headless Horseman was a grisly legend and also a joke, and that was the effect