Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [74]
“And Tig – what does he think?”
“Tig won’t discuss it.”
Lillie gave Nell a shrewd look. “What can you do?” she said.
Nell knew what she could do. She’d had a windfall, a little inheritance, not much, but enough. She’d stowed it away in the bank, in a safe investment. It sat there accusingly, and was not mentioned.
Lillie helped Nell find the house. The real-estate market was a white-hot feeding frenzy right then, properties were flipping so fast it made a person dizzy, said Lillie, so it wasn’t easy. Better Oona should have wanted a house when it was a buyers’ market, but life was life. Not only that, Oona had a list of requirements: no poor areas, she was terrified of being poor. Not too dark. Not too many stairs. A streetcar stop nearby. A store she could walk to. A garden.
At first Lillie drove Oona around, always with one of the boys; but as she reported back to Nell, it was no use. “She wants a castle,” she said. “The boys tell her such houses are too big. They are suffering, these boys, they want that their mother should be happy, they are good sons. But she wants big. She wants bigger than yours.”
“I can’t afford that,” said Nell.
Lillie shrugged. “I told her. But she doesn’t believe.”
After that it was Nell who went looking, with Lillie, in Lillie’s white car. Lillie drove crouched forward, as if skiing. In a couple of the narrower driveways they had trouble; Lillie ran over a hosta. Nell wondered about her eyesight. Nevertheless, they found something that fit the criteria, more or less: a two-storey semi-detached with a tiny back garden and a deck, and a glassed-in breakfast nook, and three small rooms upstairs.
The sellers, two youngish men, sat on the sofa and watched the potential buyers trampling up their stairs. They’d arranged some potted plants in front of the main window – a geranium, a couple of ailing begonias – but that was the only concession they’d made. They hadn’t even vacuumed. In such a market, why bother?
“Feh,” said Lillie in the cellar. “This junk will go. At least it’s dry. If a person was tall it would be a problem, but who’s tall? For doing the laundry, it’s not so bad. Upstairs, she can knock out a wall, put in a skylight, for one person it’s spacious, it could be charming, you know what I mean?”
Nell and Lillie rushed into the real-estate office and put in the offer just in time. Half a day longer and it would have gone, said Lillie. Oona would pay rent: that was the arrangement she wanted, said the boys. She didn’t want Nell supporting her. The rent wouldn’t be enough to cover everything, but Oona didn’t know that.
Nell and Oona were no longer on speaking terms; they hadn’t been for some time. The boys had been the go-betweens.
It had been hard on the boys, Nell knew that. She felt sorry for them. She even felt sorry for Oona, though it took some effort. She decided she herself was not a generous person at heart. Some of her flakier friends – those into crystals and so forth – would have told her that Oona was payback for a bad thing she’d done in a previous life. They’d have said being nice to Oona was a task she’d been given. That was one way of looking at it, thought Nell. The other way was that she was a doormat.
Nell closed the deal without telling Tig. When she did tell him, he said two things: You’re crazy. Thank you.
“You are a good person,” said Lillie. She sent two bowls of hard cookies, and two notes on her flowered notepaper: one to Nell and one to Oona.
For a short while all was tranquility. Nell felt virtuous, Oona felt safer and stopped complaining about the awfulness of Nell and Tig, Tig felt less worried, the boys felt free. Nell told her friends she’d made the right decision. She enjoyed their incredulity: after all the things Oona had said about Nell – that the friends knew Nell knew she’d said, because they themselves had been the messengers – Nell buys Oona a house? What kind of a saint did she think she was?
Things needed to be fixed: with a house there’s always fixing, as Lillie pointed