Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [33]
I was not an orphan, I told myself; I was not nearly enough of an orphan. I needed to be more of one, so I could eat food that was bad for me, stay up all night, wear unflattering clothes, and hang out with unsuitable companions, without the anxious running commentary this behaviour would call forth inside my head. Why are you living in this dump? What are you doing with your time? Why are you with that creep? Why can’t you accomplish anything? Get enough sleep! You’ll ruin your health! Wear less black!
None of these were things my parents would have said out loud – they knew better – but I believed in thought rays. These rays were shooting out from my parents’ craniums, directly into mine. It was like radio waves. The farther away from home I got, the weaker the rays they were silently beaming at me would become. So I had to put a lot of distance between us.
Set against my desire for fecklessness was an opposite and more shameful desire. I’d never got over the Grade Two reader, the one featuring a father who went to a job every day and drove a car, a mother who wore an apron and did baking, two children – boy and girl – and a cat and a dog, all living in a white house with frilly window curtains. Though no house I’d ever lived in possessed such curtains, they seemed foreordained. They weren’t a goal, they weren’t something I’d have to strive for: these curtains would simply materialize in my life because they were destined. My future would not be complete – no, it would not be normal – unless it contained window curtains like these, and everything that went with them. This image was tucked away in a corner of my suitcase, like an emergency wardrobe item: nothing I wanted to wear at the moment, but worse come to worst, I could take it out, shake out the wrinkles, and step into it.
I couldn’t keep up my transient existence forever. I would have to end up with someone, sometime, someplace. Wouldn’t I?
But what if I missed a turn somewhere – missed my own future? That would be frighteningly easy to do. I’d make one hesitation or one departure too many and then I’d have run out of choices; I’d be standing all alone, like the cheese in the children’s song about the farmer taking a wife. Hi-ho, the derry-o, the cheese stands alone, they used to sing about this cheese, and everyone would clap hands over its head and make fun of it.
Even I had made fun of the solitary cheese during that game. Now I was ashamed of myself. Why should being alone – in and of itself – be such a matter for derision? But it was. The alone – the loners – were not to be trusted. They were strange and twisted. Most likely they were psychopaths. They might have a few murdered corpses stowed away in their freezers. They didn’t love anyone, and nobody loved them either.
In my more rebellious moments I asked myself why I should care about being shut out of the Noah’s ark of coupledom – in effect a glorified zoo, with locks on the bars and fodder dished out at set intervals. I wouldn’t allow myself to be tempted; I’d keep my distance; I’d stay lean and wolflike, and skirt the edges. I would be a creature of the night, in a trench coat with the collar turned up, pacing between streetlights, my heels making an impressively hollow and echoing sound, casting a long shadow before me, having serious thoughts about topics of importance.
Still, I was haunted by a poem I’d read at the age of twenty, written by a well-known poet much older than myself. This poem claimed that all intellectual women had pimples on their bums. It was an absurd generalization, I realized; nevertheless I worried about it. The frilly curtains I was destined to obtain and the pimply bum I was doomed to develop did not go together. Yet neither one had happened, so far.
Meanwhile I had to earn a living. In those times you could