Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [15]
“Remember the cut velvet?” my sister says. We’re in her car again, going to see our mother again. We prefer to do it together. The rundown house with its flaking paint, the tangle of weeds that used to be the garden, our shrivelled mother – we can deal with these better together. We both have soggy raisin-studded muffins in paper bags and takeout coffees in evil Styrofoam cups: we buy ourselves snacks and bribes, we need to be bolstered up.
“She should never have let us have that,” I say. “She should have saved it.”
The cut velvet was an evening gown, black, white, and silver in colour, dating from the 1930s. Why had our mother given it to us? Why had she cast away such a treasure, as if abdicating from her former life – her life as a young woman who’d enjoyed herself and had adventures? We’d each admired this gown in turn; we’d each ruined it in the course of our admiration.
“We wouldn’t have done that,” I say. “Wasted it.”
“No. We wouldn’t. We’d have been selfish. Just throw the garbage in the back seat, I keep it strewn with trash back there to deter burglars.”
“I wouldn’t call it selfish, as such,” I say.
“Not that they’d want to steal this rust bucket. Hoarding, then. We’re going to be those old ladies they find in houses full of stacks of newspapers and pickle jars and cat-food tins.”
“I’m not. I have no interest in the cat-food tins.”
“Old age is the pits,” says my sister. “I kept a piece of it.”
“You did?”
“And that skirt of yours with the big red roses – I kept some of that. And a bit of your blue brocade formal. I thought it was so glamorous! I thought everything you did was glamorous. Fred, you asshole! Did you see how she cut me off?”
“What about the pink tulle?”
“I think Mum used it for dusters.”
“No great loss,” I say. “It looked like a cake.”
“I thought it was great – I was going to have one just like it when I grew up. But by the time I got to high school, no one went to formal dances any more.”
My sister and Leonie played decorous games together in which life was agreeable, people were gentle and fastidious, and time was divided into predictable routines. They adored miniatures: tiny glass vases with midget flowers in them, eensy-teensy cups and spoons, minute boxes – anything small and dainty. Stuffed-bunny tea parties and doll-dressing absorbed them. All the stranger, then, that they found the Headless Horseman’s head in the trunk room, and got it down from the boot shelf, and adopted it.
There it would be, eyes crossed, mouth drooling blood, set in its place between the flop-eared white bunny and the rubber-skinned Sparkle Plenty doll that had led a far riskier and more disreputable life when it had been mine. The head looked out of place but comfortable: everything was done to make it feel at home. A table napkin would be tucked around its neck stump, and it would be served cups of water tea and imaginary cookies just as if it had a body. Better still, it answered when spoken to – it said, “Thank you very much” and “Could I have another cookie, please” and replied to the white bunny and the Sparkle Plenty doll when they asked it if it was having a good time. Sometimes it was made to nod. When the party had been too tiring for it, it was put to sleep in the dolls’ bed, with a crocheted quilt pulled up over its receding chin.
Once, I discovered it propped up on my sister’s pillow, its neck wrapped in one of our mother’s best linen dishtowels. Cookie fragments on dolls’ plates were laid out around it, mixed with berries from the prickly-berry hedge, like offerings made to appease an idol. It was wearing a chaplet woven of carrot fronds and marigolds that my sister and Leonie had picked in the garden. The flowers were wilted, the garland was lopsided; the effect was astonishingly depraved, as if a debauched Roman emperor had arrived on the scene and had hacked off his own body in a maiden’s chamber