Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [19]
“He sounds like a drip,” I said.
“He’s not a drip! It was so great once!”
“I’m just going by what you told me. I didn’t hear about any great parts. Anyway, if he’s not interested, he’s not interested.”
“You’re always so fucking logical!” My sister had taken up swearing at a much earlier age than I had, and was fluent in it.
“I’m not, really,” I said. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
“You used everything up. You used up all the good parts,” said my sister. “There was nothing left over for me.”
This was deep water. “What do you mean?” I said carefully. “What exactly did I use up?”
My sister was wiping tears from her eyes. She had to think a little, pick something out from the overflowing pool of sadness. “Dancing,” she said. “You used up dancing.”
“You can’t use up dancing,” I said. “Dancing is something you do. You can do whatever you want.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Yes, you really can. It’s not me stopping you.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t be on this planet,” said my sister grimly. “Maybe I should never have been born.”
I felt as if I were groping through brambles in a night so dark I couldn’t see my own hands. At my wit’s end had been, before this, merely an expression, but now it described a concrete reality: I could see my wits unrolling like a ball of string, length after length of wits being played out, each length failing to hold fast, breaking off as if rotten, until finally the end of the string would be reached, and what then? How many days were left for me to fill – for me to fill responsibly – before the real parents would come back and take over, and I could escape to my life?
Maybe they would never come back. Maybe I would have to stay here forever. Maybe both of us would have to stay here forever, trapped in our present ages, never getting any older, while the garden grew up like a forest and the prickly-berry bush swelled to the size of a tree, blotting the light from the windows.
In a state of near-panic I suggested to my sister that we should go on an excursion. An adventure. We would go to the town of Kitchener, on the Greyhound bus. It was only about an hour. Kitchener had some lovely old houses in it; we would take pictures of them with my camera. I’d been taking a lot of pictures of architecture around that time – nineteenth-century Ontario buildings. It was an interest of mine, I said, not lying very much. Oddly enough, my sister agreed to this plan. I’d been expecting her to refuse it: too complicated, too much effort, why bother?
We set off the next day supplied with oranges and digestive biscuits, and made it to the bus station without incident, and sat through the bus trip in relative calm. Then we ambled around in Kitchener, looking at things. I took pictures of houses. We bought sandwiches. We went to the park and watched the swans.
While we were in the park, an older woman said to us, “Are you twins?”
“Yes,” said my sister. “We are!” Then she laughed and said, “No, we’re not. We’re only sisters.”
“Well, you look like twins,” said the woman.
We were the same height. We had the same noses. We were wearing similar clothes. I could see how the woman might have thought that, supposing she was a little nearsighted. The idea alarmed me: before that moment, I’d viewed the two of us in terms of our differences. Now I saw that we were more alike than I’d imagined. I had more layers on, more layers of gauze; that was all.
My sister’s mood had changed. Now she was almost euphoric. “Look at the swans,” she said. “They’re so, they’re so …”
“Swanlike,” I said. I felt almost giddy. The afternoon sun was golden on the pond where the swans floated; a mellow haze suffused the air. Suffused, I thought. That was how I felt. Maybe our parents were right: perhaps