Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [20]
“It was great to come here,” she said. Her face was radiant.
But the next day she was more unhappy than ever. And after that it got worse. Whatever magic I thought I might have – or that everyone thought I might have – proved useless. The good times became fewer, the bad times worse. They became worse and worse, for years and years. Nobody knew why.
My sister sits on the bottom step of my stairs, biting her fingers and crying. This doesn’t happen once, but many times. “I should just leave,” she says. “I should just check out. I’m useless here. It’s too much effort.” She means: getting through time.
“You’ve had fun,” I say. “Haven’t you? There’s lots of things you like.”
“That was a while ago,” she says. “It’s not enough. I’m tired of playing the game. This is the wrong place for me to be.”
She doesn’t mean my house. She means her body. She means the planet Earth. I can see the same thing she’s seeing: it’s a cliff edge, it’s a bridge with a steep drop, it’s the end. That’s what she’s wants: The End. Like the end of a story.
“You aren’t useless, you shouldn’t leave!” I say. “You’ll feel better tomorrow!” But it’s like calling across a wide field to a person on the other side. She can’t hear me. Already she’s turning away, looking down, looking down over, preparing for dark flight.
She’ll be lost. I will lose her. I’m not close enough to stop her.
“That would be a terrible thing to do,” I say.
“There’s no other door,” she says. “Don’t worry. You’re really strong. You’ll handle it.”
We turn a corner and then another, pass a willow tree and then a weeping mulberry, pull into the driveway of our mother’s house. “Look at Fred,” says my sister. “Parked right in the middle of the street. If I was a snowplow, I’d plow him right into the prickly-berry hedge.”
“That’s the spirit,” I say. We clamber out of the car, which is getting harder for me to do. Something happens to the knees. I stand, one hand on the car, stretching myself, surveying the ruined garden. “I need to tackle that yew tree,” I say. “I forgot my pruners. There’s deadly nightshade vine all through it.”
“Why bother?” says my sister in full honesty mode. “Mum can’t see it.”
“I can,” I say. “Other people can. She used to be so proud of that garden.”
“You worry too much about other people. Was I a really horrible child?”
“Not at all,” I say. “You were very cute. You had big blue eyes and little blond braids.”
“According to the stories I whined a lot.”
“It wasn’t whining,” I say. “You had a sensitive nervous system. You had an enhanced reaction to reality.”
“In other words, I whined a lot.”
“You wanted the world to be better than it was,” I say.
“No, that was you. You wanted that. I just wanted it to be better than it was for me.”
I sidestep that. “You were very affectionate,” I say. “You appreciated things. You appreciated them more than other people. You practically went into trances of rapture.”
“But I’m all right now,” she says. “Thank God for pharmaceuticals.”
“Yes,” I say. “You’re all right now.”
She takes a pill every day, for a chemical imbalance she was born with. That was it, all along. That was what made the bad times for her. Not my monstrousness at all.
I believe that, most of the time.
Now we’re at the door. The persistence of material objects is becoming an amazement to me. It’s the same door – the one I used to go in through, out through, year after year, in my daily clothing or in various outfits and disguises, not thinking at all that I would one day be standing in front of this very same door with my grey-haired little sister. But all doors used regularly are doors to the afterlife.
“I lost track of that head,” I say. “The Headless Horseman head. Remember when it lived in the trunk room? Remember all those boots, and the archery supplies?”
“Vaguely,” says my sister.
“We’ll have to go through that stuff, you know. When the time comes. We’ll have to sort it out.”
“I’m not looking forward