Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [31]
I could make myself cry even more by repeating the key words: love, alone, sad, over. I did it on purpose. After I’d finally finished crying, I put on my pyjamas and brushed my teeth, and covered my face with frozen Noxzema skin cream. Then I got into bed with Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Miss Bessie would be tackling it on Monday. It would be a full gallop for all of us, and I told myself I wanted to get a head start on it. In reality, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep: I needed some distraction from my fight with Bill, which otherwise would have replayed itself over and over while I changed the words we’d spoken into other words that gave me more of an advantage, and tried to figure out what our actual words had meant, and then cried some more.
It didn’t take me very much reading and skimming to discover that Tess had serious problems – much worse than mine. The most important thing in her life happened to her in the very first part of the book. She got taken advantage of, at night, in the woods, because she’d stupidly accepted a drive home with a jerk, and after that it was all downhill, one awful thing after another, turnips, dead babies, getting dumped by the man she loved, and then her tragic death at the end. (I peeked at the last three chapters.) Tess was evidently another of those unlucky pushovers, like the Last Duchess, and like Ophelia – we’d studied Hamlet earlier. These girls were all similar. They were too trusting, they found themselves in the hands of the wrong men, they weren’t up to things, they let themselves drift. They smiled too much. They were too eager to please. Then they got bumped off, one way or another. Nobody gave them any help.
Why did we have to study these hapless, annoying, dumb-bunny girls? I wondered. Who chose the books and poems that would be on the curriculum? What use would they be in our future lives? What exactly were we supposed to be learning from them? Maybe Bill was right. Maybe the whole thing was a waste of time.
Upstairs, my parents were sleeping peacefully; they knew nothing of doomed love, of words spoken in anger, of fated separation. They were ignorant of the darker side of life – of girls betrayed in forests, of girls falling into streams and singing till they drowned, of girls done away with for being too pleasant. All over the city, everyone was asleep, drifting on the vast blue sea of unconsciousness. Everyone except me.
Me, and Miss Bessie. Miss Bessie, too, must have been up late. I couldn’t imagine her doing anything as lax and unguarded as sleeping. Her eyes – not sarcastic eyes, I now realized, but merry eyes, the eyes of an elderly child, crinkled at the corners as if she were suppressing a joke or a quaint piece of wisdom – surely those eyes of hers never closed. Perhaps she was the one responsible for choosing our required reading material – she, and a group of others like her, all of a certain age, all with excellent suits, all with real stones in their lapel brooches, all with qualifications. They got together, they had secret meetings, they conferred, they cooked up our book list among them. They knew something we needed to know, but it was a complicated thing – not so much a thing as a pattern, like the clues in a detective story once you started connecting them together. These women – these teachers – had no direct method of conveying this thing to us, not in a way that would make us listen, because it was too tangled, it was too oblique. It was hidden within the stories.
I looked at my watch: three in the morning. I was so tired I was seeing double, but at the same time I was wide awake. I ought to have been brooding over Bill – didn’t he require more tears? Instead, in the bright place at the back of my head, there was an image of Miss Bessie. She was standing in a patch of sunlight, which twinkled off her brooch, the amber-and-gold one in the shape of a bee. She had