Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [17]
“What did you do to her?” my mother would say when she got back from her shopping excursion. My sister would still be in the front hall closet, weeping, afraid to come out. I’d be sitting at the dining-room table, placidly doing my homework.
“Nothing. We were playing Monster. She wanted to.”
“You know how impressionable she is.”
I’d shrug and smile. I could scarcely be blamed for being obliging.
Why did I behave this way? I didn’t know. My excuse – even, on some level, to myself – was that I was simply giving in to an urgent demand, a demand made by my little sister. I was humouring her. I was indulging her. Of more interest to me now is why my sister made the demand, again and again. Did she believe she’d finally be able to face down my monster self, deal with it on her own terms? Did she hope that I would finally – at last – transform myself, on cue, into who I was really supposed to be?
Why did you like the monster game?” I say to her.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Drop dead, Fred, the light was red. Do you want lunch before Mum, or after?”
“If we have it before, we’ll get depressed with no treat to look forward to. On the other hand I’m starving.”
“So am I. Let’s go to Satay on the Road.”
“Or we could go to Small Talk. They have good soup.”
“I make a lot of soup at home. I need some of that peanut sauce. Should I dye my hair red? I’m getting a lot of grey.”
“It looks good,” I say. “It looks distinguished.”
“But what about red?”
“Why not?” I say. “If you like. I could never handle red, but you can.”
“It’s bizarre, because we’re both yellow/orange, according to the colour charts.”
“I know. You can do lime green too. It makes me look bloodless. You used to agitate and agitate for that monster game and then shut yourself up in the front hall closet as soon as it began.”
“I remember that. I remember that feeling of being completely terrified. Warm wool, vacuum cleaner smell, terror.”
“But you kept on wanting to do it. Did you think you could make it come out differently?”
“It’s like saying, ‘Tomorrow morning I’m going to get up early and work out.’ And then the time comes and you just can’t.”
“Mother used to think it was her fault,” I say.
“What, me hiding in the coat closet?”
“Oh … and other stuff,” I say. “The whole picture. Remember when you were going through that total honesty period?”
“I’ve stopped?”
“Well, no. I never went in for it, myself – total honesty. I preferred lying.”
“Oh, you never lied much.”
I duck that one. “Anyway, you were halfway through high school when you really got going on the honesty. You were going to tell Mum and Dad about drugs, and skipping school, and kids your age having sex, because you thought Mum and Dad led a protected life and were too repressed.”
“Well, they did and they were,” she says. “I did tell them about some of it. I told them about taking LSD.”
“What did they say?”
“Dad pretended he hadn’t heard. Mum said, ‘What was it like?’ ”
“I didn’t know you took LSD.”
“I only took it once,” she says. “It wasn’t that great. It was like a really long car trip. I kept wondering when it would end.”
“That’s what happened to me too,” I say.
When my sister was sixteen and I was twenty-eight, my parents called me home. This had never happened before: it was in the nature of an SOS. They were becoming increasingly desperate: my sister had added anger to her repertoire of emotions. She still cried a lot, but she cried from fury as well as from despair. Or she’d go into thick, silent rages that were like a dense black fog descending over everyone. I’d witnessed these at family Christmas dinners – events