Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [34]
The husbands were another matter. Any woman without a wedding ring on, no matter how dourly dressed, was free for a tryout in their books. Why did I never see them coming? But I didn’t, I didn’t edge away fast enough, and then there would be scuffles, in the kitchen perhaps where I’d be helpfully tidying up, or in the bedroom where the coats were piled, and then there would be outrage and hurt feelings, on everyone’s part, it seemed. The husbands got angry because I’d drawn attention to their furtive trial gropings, the wives because I’d led the husbands on. As for me, I was less outraged than astonished. How could these pudgy or rancid elderly men possibly think they had any sort of allure? (This kind of astonishment is a function of youth. I got over it later.)
These attitudes and encounters were the norm in the early years of my ramblings. But then things changed. At the time I’d set out, all women were expected to get married, and many of my friends had already done so. But by the end of this period – it was only eight years, not so long after all – a wave had swept through, changing the landscape completely. Miniskirts and bell-bottoms had made a brief appearance, to be replaced immediately by sandals and tie-dyed T-shirts. Beards had sprouted, communes had sprung up, thin girls with long straight hair and no brassieres were everywhere. Sexual jealousy was like using the wrong fork, marriage was a joke, and those already married found their once-solid unions crumbling like defective stucco. You were supposed to hang loose, to collect experiences, to be a rolling stone.
Isn’t that what I’d been doing, years before the widespread advent of facial hair and roach clips? But I felt myself too old, or possibly too solemn, for the love beads and pothead crowd. They lacked gravity. They wanted to live in the moment, but like frogs, not like wolves. They wanted to sit in the sun and blink. But I was raised in the age of strenuousness. Relaxation bored me. I thought I should be making my way in the world, wherever that was. I thought I should be getting somewhere – in my case, as things so often were, somewhere else.
During this period I lived in rooming houses, or in shared apartments, or in sublets. I had no furniture of my own: it would have slowed me down. I bought makeshift items at thrift stores in each new location and sold them when I left. I had no tableware. Now and then I’d indulge myself in a frill – a vulgar, colourful vase, a flea-market curio. I acquired a carved wooden hand holding a sort of chalice with the words Souvenir of Pitcairn Island on it. I splurged on a Thirties perfume bottle minus the stopper.
The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn’t fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst. I knew they were worthless clutter, but they made it into the tin trunk whenever I packed up again.
One year I got a job teaching grammar to freshmen at a university, which meant I could afford a real apartment, all to myself. The job was in Vancouver; the apartment was a top floor the family had built onto their bungalow for the purpose of renting it out. It had its own staircase, very steep and plain, with rubber runners and no banister or windows – more like a vertical tunnel than a staircase. It