Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [30]
Bill couldn’t seem to focus. He grasped the list of opposite characteristics – that made sense to him. But then he said it was a shame, what that guy had done to the Duchess. She probably never even saw it coming, and then the smug little pervert had the nerve to brag about it, he’d stuck her picture up on the wall like a pin-up, most likely she was very good-looking as well, what a waste.
I said all of this was beside the point: the people marking the exam were not going to be interested in Bill’s personal opinions. What they’d want was an objective analysis of the poem, using evidence. The poem would be printed right on the exam paper – they didn’t expect him to have memorized it. All he had to do was read the question twice and make the accepted points – that stuff we’d been going over with Miss Bessie – and then find the lines in the poem that backed up those points, and then copy them down with quote marks around them.
Bill said yeah, he knew that, it’s just that it was such a useless way of spending time and energy – what was it for in the end, what was it supposed to prove? I said it would prove he was an attentive reader, and that was all they wanted to know.
I shouldn’t have said “attentive reader.” It reminded Bill of his most recent run-in with Miss Bessie, and her sarcasm. His face went pink.
He said it was all pretty useless, because being an attentive reader wouldn’t get him a job. I said it would, because that way he would pass the exam and he’d be able to go on. Anyway, I said, I didn’t make the rules, so why was he mad at me?
Bill said he wasn’t mad at me, he was mad at the goddamn Duke, for killing the Duchess. He ought to have been locked up or, better, hanged. So why was I defending him?
We’d had these kinds of stupid arguments before. They came out of nowhere, they went nowhere; during them each one of us would accuse the other of saying things that hadn’t been said.
“I was not defending him,” I said.
“Yeah. You were. She was a nice normal girl with a sick jerk for a husband, and you seem to think it was her own fault.”
I hadn’t said that, but it was partly true. Why did it make me angry to have Bill guess my feelings?
“She was a dumb bunny,” I said. “She should have been able to figure out that he didn’t like her smiling in that sucky way at every Tom, Dick, and Harry, and sunset, for heaven’s sakes.”
“She was just being friendly.”
“She was just being a simp.”
“She was not a simp. How was she supposed to know what he wanted? She couldn’t read his mind!”
“That’s what I mean,” I said in a bored voice. “She was dumb.”
“No, she wasn’t! He was a creep! He never let on about the smile thing. He never said a word to her. It says in the poem. All that about choosing never to stoop.”
“She was a half-wit.”
“At least she wasn’t a brainer and a show-off,” said Bill offensively.
I said the Duke would have preferred a brainer and a show-off to a dumb bunny – a disgusting dumb bunny – because he was cultivated and sophisticated, he appreciated works of art. Anyway, I wasn’t showing off, I was just trying to help him pass the exam.
“You think you’re so smart,” said Bill. “Thanks but no thanks. I don’t need any goddamn help, and specially not from you.”
“Okey-dokey,” I said. “If that’s what you want. Good luck.” I gathered my books up off the floor and strode down the hall, as quickly as I could in my sock feet, and put on my running shoes in the vestibule. Bill didn’t try to stop me. He stayed in the TV room. From the sounds coming out of it I knew he had turned on the TV.
I bicycled home in the dark. It was later than I’d thought. My parents were in bed with the lights out. I’d forgotten to take my key. I climbed up onto the garbage can beside the back door, twisted myself sideways, and slid into the house through the milk cupboard, a feat I’d performed many times before. Then I tiptoed downstairs and into my cellar room, where I burst into tears. Whatever temporary patching-up might take place, the era of Bill was now at an end. Bye-bye love, as in songs. All alone now. It was so sad. Why did