Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [2]
But there’s been bad news before, and we got through it. That’s what people say, about things that happened before they were born, or while they were still thumb-sucking. I love this formulation: We got through it. It means dick shit when it’s about any event you personally weren’t there for, as if you’d joined some We club, pinned on some tacky plastic We badge, to qualify. Still, We got through it – that’s bracing. It conjures up a march or a procession, horses prancing, costumes tattered and muddied because of the siege or battle or enemy occupation or butchering of dragons or forty-year trek through the wilderness. There’d be a bearded leader hoisting his standard and pointing forward. The leader would have got the bad news early. He’d got it, he’d understood it, he’d known what to do. Attack from the flank! Go for the throat! Get the hell out of Egypt! That sort of thing.
“Where are you?” Tig calls up the stairs. “Coffee’s ready.”
“I’m here,” I call back down. We use this a lot, this walkie-talkie of air. Communication hasn’t failed us, not yet. Not yet is aspirated, like the h in honour. It’s the silent not yet. We don’t say it out loud.
These are the tenses that define us now: past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in the small window between them, the space we’ve only recently come to think of as still, and really it’s no smaller than anyone else’s window. True, there are little things going wrong with us – a knee here, an eye there – but so far just little things. We can still enjoy ourselves, as long as we focus on doing one item at a time. I can remember when I used to tease our daughter, back then, when she was an adolescent. I’d do it by pretending to be old. I’d bump into walls, drop cutlery, fake memory loss. Then we’d both laugh. It’s no longer such a joke.
Our now-dead cat, Drumlin, developed cat senility when she was seventeen. Drumlin – why did we call her that? The other cat, the one that died first, was Moraine. Once we thought it was amusing to name our cats after glacial-dump geological features, though the point of it escapes me now. Tig said that Drumlin ought to have been named Landfill Site, but he was the one whose job it was to empty her litter box.
It’s not likely we will have another cat. I used to think – I thought this quite calmly – that after Tig was gone (for men die first, don’t they?) I might get a cat again, for company. I no longer consider this an option. I’ll surely be half-blind by then, and a cat might run between my legs, and I’d trip over it and break my neck.
Poor Drumlin used to prowl the house at night, yowling in an unearthly fashion. Nothing gave her solace: she was looking for something she’d lost, though she didn’t know what it was. (Her mind, in point of fact, if cats can be said to have minds.) In the mornings we’d find small bites taken out of tomatoes, of pears: she’d forgotten she was a carnivore, she’d forgotten what it was she was supposed to eat. This has become my picture of my future self: wandering the house in the darkness, in my white nightdress, howling for what I can’t quite remember I’ve lost. It’s unbearable. I wake up in the night and reach out to make sure Tig is still there, still breathing. So far, so good.
The kitchen, when I get to it, smells like toast and coffee: not surprising, because that’s what Tig has been making. The smell wraps around me like a blanket, stays there while I eat the actual toast and drink the actual coffee. There, on the table, is the bad news.
“The refrigerator’s been making a noise,” I say. We don’t pay enough attention to our appliances. Neither of us do. Stuck on to the refrigerator is a photo of our daughter, taken several years ago; it beams down on us like the light from a receding star. She’s busy with her own life, elsewhere.
“Look at the paper,” says Tig.
There are pictures. Is bad