Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [25]
I must, I must, I must develop my bust!
I better, I better, or I’ll never wear a sweater!
while moving their bent arms back and forth like a cartoon chicken’s. Although in truth the catcalling didn’t happen very much, there was always the fear that it would. To yell back at the boys was brazen, to ignore them was supposed to be dignified, though it didn’t feel dignified, it felt degrading. Merely to have breasts was degrading. But not to have any at all would have been worse.
“Stand up straight, shoulders back, don’t slouch,” our Physical Education teacher used to bark at us during volleyball practice, centuries ago, in that very same gym where we would soon be writing the finals. But what did she know? She herself was flat-chested, and anyway very old. Forty at least.
Breasts were one thing: they were in front, where you could have some control over them. Then there were bums, which were behind, and out of sight, and thus more lawless. Apart from loosely gathered skirts, nothing much could be done about them.
Hey! Hey! Swing and sway!! Get a load of that wiggle!
Walking beside me across the football field was Bill, who wasn’t the sort of boy who would roam around in a pack, shouting things about girls’ breasts; or I didn’t think he was. He was more serious than that, he had better things to do, he wanted to go places. He wanted to climb the ladder. As my official boyfriend, he walked me partway home every day, except on Fridays when he began his weekend job at a grocery store in the other direction. Fridays after school, Saturdays until three – he was saving the money for university, because his parents couldn’t afford it, or wouldn’t spare it. Neither of them had gone on and they’d managed fine without. That was their attitude, according to Bill, but he didn’t seem to hold it against them.
Several months earlier, Bill had replaced my last boyfriend, who’d replaced the one before that. The process of replacement was delicate – it called for diplomacy, and nuance, and the willpower to resist answering the phone – but at a certain stage it had to be done. That stage came after the earlier, permissible stages had been gone through – the first date, the first tentative holding of hands, the arm around the shoulders in the movie, the slow, gelatinous dancing, the breathy fumbling around in parked cars, the advances and counterattacks of hands, the war of zippers and buttons. After a while, a stalemate would be reached: neither side would know what was supposed to come next. To go forward was unthinkable, to go back impossible. This period was characterized by listlessness, by squabbling and making up, by an inability to decide which movie we wanted to see, and – on my part – by the reading of novels that ended badly, over which I would weep. That was when the boyfriend had to be traded in and a fresh one obtained.
It wasn’t that I mourned over the boys individually so much as that I hated to have things finish. I didn’t want any phase of my life to be gone forever, to be over and done with. I preferred beginnings to endings in books, as well – it was exciting not to know what was lying in store for me on the unread pages – but, perversely, I couldn’t resist sneaking a look at the final chapter of any book I was reading.
As a boyfriend, Bill wasn’t following – could not follow – the standard cycle. Behind us were the Saturday-night