Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [44]
The young girls themselves, as well as the wives in escape mode, signalled their open-mindedness by their clothing. They wore overalls and glasses with big round frames, or else folkloric ankle-length skirts and thick-soled sandals; they had long straight picture-book hair or curly ethnic mops or very short crops; they ringed their eyes in black and had pale pink lipstick, or else they used no makeup at all. “Love is love,” they would say, with a smiling but doctrinaire manner that Nell found self-righteous. Love is love. It sounded very simple. But in practical terms, what did it mean?
Nell liked to know the rules, whatever the game: she was a stickler for rules. As a child she’d separated her food into piles: meat here, mashed potatoes there, peas fenced into a special area reserved for peas, according to a strict plan of her own. One pile could not be eaten before the one already started had been consumed: that was the rule. She didn’t even cheat herself at Solitaire, which she’d spent quite a lot of time playing over the years.
As for social interactions, she had learned only the old rules, the ones in force up to the explosive moment – it seemed like a moment – when all games had changed at once and earlier structures had fallen apart and everyone had begun pretending that the very notion of rules was obsolete. By the former rules, you did not steal other women’s husbands, just for instance. But there was no such thing as husband-stealing now, it appeared; instead there were just different folks doing their own thing and making alternate life choices.
Nell had spent the period of upheaval feeling bewildered and disoriented and out of her depth. To have confessed to such a thing, however, would have been to attract contempt. She’d felt alone in her reaction, and had kept her mouth shut, and had left literary parties early so as not to have to struggle with bearded men in hallways and fend off stoned individuals of either sex in gardens lit with Japanese paper lanterns and listen to their slurred but angry pronouncements on her uptight mode of being.
Her affairs – affairs, another obsolete word – her relationships before this moment had at least had plots. They’d had beginnings and middles and ends, marked by scenes of various kinds – in bars, in restaurants, in coffee shops, and even – when things had got extreme – on sidewalks. Despite the necessary pain, and the tears shed – usually by herself – there had been something satisfying, though not enjoyable, about such scenes: after them Nell had frequently felt congratulations were in order, as if parts had been played as written and unspecified duties discharged.
There had been entrances and exits then, not just the vague wanderings in and out of rooms and the mumblings and slouchings and shrugs that had replaced social life. Emotions with recognizable words attached to them had been involved: jealousy, despair, love, treachery, hate, fault, the whole antique shop. But to have a vocabulary of any size was now a disadvantage, among the young and those who purported to be young.
Oona and Tig were older than Nell. They had not discarded the old rules completely, they still went in for talking. Shortly after the Wife of Bath episode, Oona invited Nell to dinner – one of the convivial roast beef dinners Oona and Tig were apparently famous for. Nell went off to the dinner in good faith, hoping that there would be chairs around a proper dining table, instead of the agglomerations