Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [32]
Very soon I would be a last-year’s student. I would be gone from Miss Bessie’s world, and she would be gone from mine. Both of us would be in the past, both of us over and done with – me from her point of view, her from mine. Sitting in my present-day desk there would be another, younger student, who would be poked and prodded and herded relentlessly through the prescribed texts, as I had been. The first line of a poem is very important, class, Miss Bessie would say. It sets the tone. Let us proceed.
Meanwhile, I myself would be inside the dark tunnel. I’d be going on. I’d be finding things out. I’d be all on my own.
The Other Place
For a long time I wandered aimlessly. It felt like a long time. It didn’t feel aimless, however, or not in any carefree way: I was being driven by necessity, by fate, like the characters in the more melodramatic novels I’d read in high school who would rush out into thunderstorms and lurk around on moors. Like them I had to keep moving. I couldn’t help it.
I had an image of myself trudging along a dusty or lumpy or ice-covered road, carrying a little bundle on a stick, like the hobos in comic books. But that was much too droll. More like a mysterious traveller, striding inexorably forward, entering each new town like a portent, then vanishing without a trace, mission accomplished.
In reality I had no mission, and I did not trudge or stride. I went on the train, or – a treat at that time – on an airplane.
I would welcome each new dislocation, unpack my few belongings with alacrity and even joy, then set out to explore the neighbourhood or district or city and learn its ways; but soon enough I’d begin to imagine what I’d become if I stayed in that place forever. Here, a stringy-haired intellectual, pasty-faced, humourless, and morbid; there, a self-satisfied matron, shut up in a cage of a house that would not be recognized as a cage until it was too late.
Too late for what? To get out, to move on. Yet at the same time I longed for security. It was a similar story with men. Each one was a possibility that quickly became an impossibility. As soon as there were two toothbrushes – no, as soon as I could even picture two toothbrushes, side by side on the bathroom counter in trapped, stagnant, limp-bristled companionship – I would have to leave. My books would go into cardboard boxes and be shipped by bus, some getting lost on the way; my clothes and my towel – I did have a towel – would go into my small tin trunk. I hummed while I packed. Yet every time I began packing, it would feel like leaving home: my humming would alternate with fits of tearful nostalgia about the place I was doing the packing in, but that I hadn’t even vacated yet.
As for my real home, the one I’d grown up in, I seldom thought about it, or not in any detail. I was dimly aware that I was a worry to my parents, but I resented their worry. I was doing fine. I was supporting myself. Every once in a while, an inner window would pop open and I would glimpse my parents, far away and very small, rushing through their daily activities as in a sped-up film: doing the dishes in a blur of soapy hands and cutlery, throwing themselves into bouts of maniacal gardening, making trips to their summer place with the car whizzing along as if jet-propelled; then doing the dishes there, then the gardening frenzy there, then back again, then into bed, then up with the dawn, round and round. They were immersed in mundane affairs, they were not contemplating any higher truths. I’d feel superior to them. Then I