Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [29]
If I was right, they were all three of them in cahoots – the Duke, the envoy, and the Count. The marriage was a trade-off: the Count would hand over the dowry and kiss the daughter goodbye, and would get social prestige in return, since Dukes rated higher than Counts. Once the Count’s daughter had reached the Duke’s palace – his palazzo, as Miss Bessie had told us it would have been called – she’d be all on her own. She couldn’t expect help from her father, or from anyone else either. I thought of her sitting in front of her mirror, practising her smiling. Too warm? Too cold? Too much upward curve at the edges? Not enough? In view of the hints from the envoy, she’d be totally certain her life depended on getting that smile down perfectly.
On Saturday night I made my way over to Bill’s, wearing my studying clothes: jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, with a loose man’s shirt over top. I went on my bicycle because Bill’s parents were out in their car, or so he’d told me on the phone, so he couldn’t pick me up.
Bill’s family lived in a small, square, newish yellow-brick two-storey house; rows and rows of identical houses had been built in that area just after the war. The main bedroom was over the garage; there was a tiny vestibule, then a hallway that ran past the doors to the living room and the dining room to the boxy little kitchen. At the back there was a stuffy, cramped room with a La-Z-Boy recliner and a sofa bed that pulled out for guests, and the TV set; that room was where we did our studying when we were at Bill’s. At my house, we did it at the dining table when my parents were home, and in the cellar when they weren’t.
I rang the doorbell, Bill opened the door right away – he must have been waiting for me – and I stepped into the vestibule and slipped off my running shoes. This was a rule at Bill’s house: shoes left at the door. Bill’s mother had a job – she worked at a hospital, though she wasn’t a nurse – but despite her job she kept the house spotless. It smelled of cleaning products – Javex bleach and lemon-oil furniture polish – with an undertone of mothballs. It was as if the whole house had been soaked in preservatives to keep it from ever changing, because change meant dirt. Bill and I never went into the living room, although I had looked into it. It had mole-coloured wall-to-wall carpeting and was crowded with varnished end tables, which in turn held an array of china figurines and crystal ashtrays, or were they bonbon dishes? The drapes were kept drawn to stop things from fading. There was no such roped-off, hushed, consecrated space in my own house.
Bill’s mother didn’t altogether approve of me. I’d learned about this kind of disapproval – the age-old disapproval of mothers toward any girl dabbling in their sons – from Chatelaine and Good Housekeeping (Your Mother-in-Law: Best Friend or Worst Enemy?), so I hadn’t been surprised by the chilliness of her smile. On the other hand, whenever I encountered her she’d go out of her way to thank me for helping Bill study what she called “his English.” It was a shame he had to study it – it wouldn’t be any use to him later in life, and he got so discouraged about it; why couldn’t he be allowed to focus on his strengths? – but since he did have to study it, better he should have a clever friend like me – she didn’t say “girlfriend” – to keep his nose to the grindstone.
We started our studying well enough, going over the possible questions, and the answers to them, in point form. But then Bill said you needed to take a break from the books once in a while, and he went and got us some ginger ale, and soon we were fumbling around on the sofa bed. We didn’t pull it out into a bed, however – only a cheap girl would have connived at such a thing, and also we were aware that Bill’s parents might return unexpectedly, as they had done before. This evening they didn’t return, but after a while we sat up anyway, and smoothed down our hair and did up our buttons, and went back to the studying.