Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [69]
The Entities
Lillie was a real-estate agent, though she was hardly the image of one. There was nothing sharp-edged or chic or brisk about her, and she was twenty years older than the oldest real-estate agent that she herself had met. Her car – a white car, a Ford sedan, always impeccably clean – was not a recent model. She drove it cautiously, peering over the top of the steering wheel like someone in a tank turret.
She was getting plump, and her feet were beginning to hurt; she wheezed a little going up and down stairs. Despite these hindrances, she went up and down the stairs of every house she showed. “Feh,” she’d say, sidestepping down to the basement. “Don’t look, it’s just their laundry. The furnace – you can get new. You’ll redo the wiring, we’ll get a couple thousand off the price minimum, at least it’s dry.” She’d clamber up the stairs to the attic, pausing to breathe, and to inspect the cracks in the plaster. “You’ll put in a skylight, you’ll knock out the walls, listen, it’ll be a space. Don’t look in there, it’s junk. The wallpaper – it’s only wallpaper, you know what I mean?”
She’d say, “The way some peoples live – like pigs! These are not nice peoples. But you’ll make it new – a different house, you wouldn’t recognize it!” She believed this – that with a little effort and a lot of faith a pig pen could be transformed into something wonderful, or at least something habitable. Something a lot better than it had been before.
She specialized in smaller houses on neglected streets, downtown – old Victorian row houses or dark, narrow semi-detached brick boxes, owned by Portuguese families who’d stuck wrought-iron porch railings onto them, and before that by Russians or Hungarians, and before that by who knows? These neighbourhoods were stopovers – people lived in them right after they got off the boat, before they made good and moved on. That was the way it had been once. Now, young couples were seeking out such places – such cheap places. Artistic people were seeking them out.
Such people – Lillie said pipples – such people needed someone to take them by the hand, help them buy at a decent price, because they weren’t practical, they didn’t know from furnaces, the sellers would take advantage. Lillie would haggle the price down even though it made her own commission smaller, because what was money? When the deal was signed she’d present the young artists with a celebration gift, a bowl filled with cookies she’d made herself – hard, beige, European cookies – and then she would follow the transformation of the house as the artistic youngsters set to work. These people had such energy, they had their own ideas; it was a joy to watch them ripping off the dour wallpaper and doing away with the mildew and the lingering smells and stains of the past and then building something else – a studio, they would always need such a thing, if there was a garage they’d use that – and then painting the walls, not the colours she herself would have chosen, often a little startling, but she liked surprises of a certain kind. Good surprises. “You never know,” she’d say. Such a pleasure.
Not that she herself would have taken on a house like that. Such houses were too cramped, too dim, too old. She had a modern house, farther north, with big light-filled windows and a collection of pastel-tinted china figurines, and a wide driveway.
Lillie had come to the real-estate business late in life. Long ago she’d been a young girl, and then she’d married, a fine man, and then she’d had a baby; all of that was in another time, on the other side of the ocean. But after that came the Nazis, and she’d been put into a camp and her husband had been put