Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [85]
Then she became afraid to walk, although she never said so, and then she became angry at her own fear. Finally she became rebellious. She rebelled against all of it: the blindness, the restriction, the falling down, the injuries, the fear. She no longer wanted to have anything to do with these sources of misery, and so she retreated under the bedcovers. It was a way of changing the subject.
Nowadays she couldn’t walk even if she tried to: her muscles have become too weak. But her heart has always been strong, and it keeps her going. Soon she’ll be ninety-two.
I sit down on her right side, where her good ear is: she’s stone deaf in the other. The hearing in this good ear and her sense of touch are her last two contacts with the outside world. For a while we believed she could still smell; we’d bring bouquets – scented flowers only, roses and freesia and phlox and sweet peas – and shove them under her nose.
“There!” we would say. “Doesn’t that smell nice?”
She would say nothing. Throughout her life she lied less than most people, a great deal less: you might even say never. On occasions when a lie might have been called for, she would provide a silence. A mother of a different sort would have said, “Yes, that’s just lovely, thank you so much.” But she did not say that.
“You don’t smell anything at all, do you?” I said at last.
“No,” she said.
She’s curled up on her side with her eyes closed, but she isn’t asleep. The green wool blanket is pulled up to her chin. The tips of her fingers stick out: wizened fingers, almost entirely bone, closed into a little fist. Her hands have to be opened up and massaged, and that takes some doing because her fingers are clenched so tight. It’s as if she’s holding on to an invisible rope. It’s a rope on a ship, a rope on a cliff – some rope she absolutely has to cling on to, so she won’t fall overboard, so she can climb up.
She has her good ear against the pillow, shutting things out. I turn her head gently to the side so she can hear me.
“It’s me,” I say. Talking into her ear is like talking into the end of a long narrow tunnel that leads through darkness to a place I can’t really imagine. What does she do in there all day? All day, and all night. What does she think about? Is she bored, is she sad, what’s really going on? Her ear is the single link to a whole world of buried activity; it’s like a mushroom, a brief pale signal thrust up from under the ground to show that a large network of interconnected threads is still alive and flourishing down there.
“Do you know who I am?” I say to the ear. It even looks like a mushroom.
“Yes,” she says, and I know it’s true: as I’ve said, she doesn’t lie.
It’s my function on these occasions to tell her stories. The stories she most wants to hear are about herself, herself when younger; herself when much younger. She smiles at those; on occasion she might even join in. She’s no longer voluble, she can’t carry a plot, not all by herself, but she knows what’s happening, or what happened once, and she can manage a sentence or two. I’m hampered in my task because I can play back to her only the stories she once told me, which are limited in number. She likes the exciting stories best, or the ones that show her in a strong light – getting her own way against the odds – or the ones with fun in them.
“Do you remember the boys at the Lab?” I say.
“Yes,” she says. That means she really does remember them.
“Their names were Cam and Ray. They lived in a tent. There’s a photo of them with their feet sticking out. Do you remember those ones? That summer?”
She says she does.
It’s hard for me to picture what my mother was like at that time. No: it’s hard