Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [67]
What would it be like if the baby arrived and Lizzie was still like this? How could she manage?
By now it was September. Nell tried to get Lizzie to help her with the preserving, but it was no use: Lizzie was too tired. Nell set a bowl of red currants in front of her and asked her to pick off the stems – that wouldn’t be too hard – but Lizzie couldn’t seem to manage it. She sat at the table, gazing into space, with her pathetic little mound of picked-over currants shoved to one side.
“He doesn’t like me,” she said. “The doctor.”
“Why wouldn’t he like you?” said Nell.
“Because I’m not getting better,” said Lizzie.
Tig had been doing some research of his own. “This guy isn’t making any sense,” he said. “Those pills won’t kill you if you aren’t schizophrenic – how could they? You’d have a lot of corpses to explain.”
“But why would he tell us that?” said Nell.
“Because he’s a fraud,” said Tig.
“I think we need a second opinion,” said Nell.
The new doctor they found was an expert in antipsychotic drugs. “Lizzie shouldn’t have been put on this,” she told Nell. “I’m taking her off it.” The stiffness, the trembling, the weakness – all those were by no means the symptoms of a disease. They were produced by the drug itself, and once the stuff was out of Lizzie’s system they would go away.
Not only that, Lizzie should never have been allowed to drive a car while so heavily medicated, said the new doctor. Her life had been in danger every minute she’d been behind the wheel.
“If I ever met that creep on the street I’d shoot him,” Nell said to Tig. “If I had a gun.”
“Lucky you don’t know what he looks like,” said Tig.
“I bet he thought we were hillbillies,” said Nell. “Because we live on a farm. I bet he thought he could tell us any old thing, and we’d believe it.” Which had in fact been the case, they had believed it. “He must’ve thought we were dumb as a sack of hammers. I wonder if he believed any of it himself? If so, he’s a lunatic!”
“Hillbillies?” said Tig. “Where did you dig up that word? Though we’ve got the farm machinery for it!” Then they both started to laugh, and hugged each other, and Nell told him about the baby, and it was all fine.
Nell felt tremendous relief at the new turn of events – she wouldn’t have to look after a drooling, shambling Lizzie for the rest of her life – but she also felt a shiver of fear. Lizzie would not go back to being the way she was before Dr. Hobbs got hold of her: her interlude as a zombie would have changed her. She would now be someone else, someone as yet unknown. Also, Nell was well aware that Lizzie would consider her own actions a betrayal. And Lizzie would be right – they were a betrayal. If Nell had been the supposed schizophrenic, Lizzie wouldn’t have put up with Dr. Hobbs and his toxic gobbledegook for two seconds.
“Why didn’t you tell me what he thought?” Lizzie said to Nell, once she was no longer tranquilized. Now, instead, she was furious. “You should have asked me! I could have told you I wasn’t a schizophrenic!”
Useless for Nell to say that once you think someone’s unhinged you don’t trust their word, especially on the subject of their own mental health. So she didn’t say it.
“He told me you had word salad,” Nell said weakly.
“He told you I had what?”
“He said you didn’t make sense.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake! I talked to him the same way I talk to you!” said Lizzie. “We skip the middles of sentences, you know that. He just had trouble following me. He couldn’t get from A to C! I had to spell things out for him. He was just plain, ordinary stupid!”
“He must have been having a nervous breakdown, or something,” said Nell. “To be so – so unprofessional.” And malevolent, she felt like adding. It was Tig’s opinion that Dr. Hobbs had been doing secret drug experiments for the CIA, an idea that had seemed far-fetched, at the time.
“Well, he’s fucked up my life,” said Lizzie grimly. “I’ve lost a big chunk of it. What an asshole!”
“Not that much,” said Nell