Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [18]
My parents persisted in their belief that I was particularly good with my sister – better than my brother, who did not take emotional outbursts seriously. They themselves certainly weren’t good with her, my mother told me. They wanted her to be happy – she was so bright, she had such potential – but she was so immature. They just didn’t know what to do. “Maybe we were too old to have another child,” my mother said. “We don’t understand these things. When I was that age, if you were unhappy you kept it to yourself.”
“She’s a teenager,” I said. “They’re all like that. It’s hormones.”
“You weren’t like that when you were a teenager,” said my mother hopefully.
“I was more furtive,” I said. I didn’t go on to say that she could hardly have any idea of what I’d been like then because she’d been in a coma most of the time. I’d done a lot of things she’d known nothing about, but I wasn’t going to reveal them now. “She’s right out in the open,” I said.
“She certainly is,” said my mother.
My parents had wanted me to come home because they had a chance to go to Europe – it was some sort of group trip, it wouldn’t cost much – and they had never been there. They wanted to see castles. They wanted to see Scotland, and the Eiffel Tower. They were like excited kids. But they were afraid to leave my sister on her own: she took things too hard, and she was going through a bad period. (“Over some boy,” said my mother, with slight contempt. As a young woman she’d have let herself be boiled in oil before admitting to a bad period over some boy. The thing then was to have lots of beaus, and to treat them all with smiling disdain.)
They’d only be gone for two weeks, said my father. A little more than that, said my mother, with a mixture of guilt and anxiety. Eighteen days. Twenty, counting the travel.
I didn’t see how I could deny them. They were getting old, or what I thought of as old. They were almost sixty. They might never have another chance to see a castle. So I said yes.
It was the summer – a Toronto summer, hot and humid. My parents had never bothered with air conditioning or fans – physical discomfort didn’t mean much to them – so the house got progressively warmer as the day advanced, and didn’t cool off until midnight. By this time my sister was living in my former bedroom, so I found myself in hers.
Our days fell into a strange pattern, or lack of pattern. We got up when we felt like it and went to bed at irregular hours. We ate our meals here and there around the house, and let the dirty dishes pile up on the kitchen counter before doing them. Sometimes we took our lunches down to the cellar, where it was cooler. We read detective stories and bought women’s magazines, which we leafed through in order to rearrange ourselves, though only in theory. I was too tired to do much of anything else; or not tired, sleepy. I’d fall asleep on the chesterfield in the middle of the day, sink down into cavernous dreams, then wake up groggily toward suppertime, feeling hungover. Ordinarily I never took naps.
Once in a while we’d make forays into the blazing-hot garden, to water it according to the meticulous instructions left by our parents – instructions we did not follow – or to yank out the more blatant weeds, the deadly nightshade vines, the burdocks, the sow thistles; or to snip fragments off the exuberant prickly-berry hedge, which was threatening to take over the entire side border. The phlox was in bloom, the dahlias, the zinnias: the colours were dizzying. We made an effort at mowing the lawn with the elderly push mower that had been around forever. We’d left it too long: the mower blades got clogged with crushed grass and clover.
“Maybe it’s time they entered the twentieth century and got a gas mower,” I said.
“I think we should mow the whole garden,” said my sister. “Flatten it right out.”
“Then it would all be lawn. More to mow. Let’s anyway trim the edges.”
“Why bother? It’s too much effort. I’m thirsty.”
“Okay. So am I.” And we’d go inside.
At unpredictable moments, I heard