Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [13]
By that time we had a second phone in the house so I could talk with my boyfriends, or go through what passed for talking, without exasperating my father too much – he thought phone conversations should be short, and should convey information. The door to the trunk room was right beside the phone. I liked to keep that door closed while I was talking; otherwise I could see the head staring out at me through the gloom, blood dribbling from the corner of its mouth. With its sleek black hair and minimal chin, it looked like a comic-book waiter who’d got into a fight. At the same time it seemed malignantly attentive, as if it was taking in every word I said and putting a sour construction on my motives.
After its period of retreat in the trunk room, the head migrated into my sister’s dress-up box. By now, I was fifteen and my sister was four. She was still an anxious child – if anything, she was more anxious than ever. She didn’t sleep through the night – she’d wake up five or six or seven or nine or ten or eleven times, according to my mother. Although I had the room right next to hers, I never heard her plaintive calls and frightened wailing. I slept through it all as if drugged.
But sleeping mothers hear the cries of their own children, we’ve been told. They can’t help it. Studies have been done. My mother was no exception: she’d hear the little voice calling to her across the blankness of sleep, she’d half wake, then stumble into my sister’s room, soothe her mechanically, bring her drinks of water, tuck her in again, then go back to bed and fall asleep, only to be wakened once more and then once more and then once more. She’d grown thinner and thinner in the last four years, her skin pale, her hair brittle and greying, her eyes unnaturally large.
In actuality, she’d caught a disease of the thyroid from the hamster we’d foisted on my sister as a pet in the vain hope that the sound of it creaking round and around on its exercise wheel at night would be calming to her. It was this disease that accounted for my mother’s scrawniness and staring eyes: once diagnosed, it was easily cured. But that detail tended to get sidelined during the later recountings of this story, both by my mother and by me. The fairy child, the changeling who didn’t follow the convenient patterns of other children, who sucked up its mother’s energy in an uncanny and nocturnal manner – this is a theme with more inherent interest to it than a hamster-transmitted thyroid disease.
My sister did look a little like a fairy changeling. She was tiny, with blond braids and big blue eyes, and a rabbity way of nibbling on her lower lip as if to keep it from trembling. Her approach to life was tentative. New foods made her nervous, new people, new experiences: she stood at the edge of them, extended a finger, touched gingerly, then more often than not turned away. No was a word she learned early. At children’s parties she was reluctant to join in the games; birthday cake made her throw up. She was particularly apprehensive about doors, and about who might come through them.
Thus it was probably a bad idea of my father’s to pretend to be a bear, a game that had been a great success with his two older children. My sister was fascinated by this game as well, but her interest took a different form. She didn’t understand that the bear game was supposed to be fun – that it was an excuse for laughing, shrieking, and running away. Instead, she wanted to observe the bear without being spotted by