Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [86]
I can even remember some of her songs, or parts of them:
Blow, blow, sweet and low, wind of the western sea;
Come from the something or other ta tum,
Over the something or other ta tum,
Blow him again to me,
While my little ones, while my pretty ones, sleep …
I used to think she was singing from happiness, but in reality she must have been singing to put us to sleep. Sometimes I wouldn’t go to sleep, though I would pretend to. Then I would raise myself up stealthily on the pillow and peer through a knothole in the wall. I liked to watch my parents when they didn’t know I was doing it. “I’m keeping an eye on them,” my mother would say, of boiling eggs or baking biscuits, or even of us, her children. Simply being watched, then, had a protective effect, and so I kept an eye on my parents. It made them safe.
My older brother was restless; he had projects, he wanted to be up and doing, he had things to saw and hammer. He needed glasses of water, and then he’d want to know what time it was and how long it would be until morning. My mother must have sung her songs out of mild desperation, hoping to fence off a small portion of the evening for herself. If she succeeded, she would sit at the table with the kerosene lamp on, playing cribbage with my father.
On some evenings he wasn’t there. He’d be working late at the Lab and would come back in the dusk, or he’d be away on collecting trips for weeks at a time. Then she’d be alone. She would spend the evenings reading, while the owls hooted outside and the loons mourned. Or she’d write letters to her distant parents and sisters, describing the weather and the events of the week, though nothing about her feelings. I know this because I myself received similar letters from her, once I’d grown up and moved away.
Or she’d write in her diary. Why did she bother with these diaries? She and her sister made a bonfire of their diaries the night before their double wedding, and it was a custom she kept up throughout her life. Why set words down, just to destroy them? Maybe she saved the diaries until Christmas so she could put the main happenings of the year into her Christmas messages. Then, on New Year’s, she might have erased the old year and started again. She burned letters too.
I never asked her about her reason for doing this. She would only have said, “Less clutter,” which would have been part of the truth – she liked to clear the decks, as she put it – but not all of it.
I can remember what the back of her head looked like while she was writing, silhouetted against the soft light of the lamp; her hair, the slope of her shoulders. But not her face.
Her legs, though – I have a clear image of those, in grey flannel slacks, but only at one time of day: late afternoon, with the sun low in the sky, the light coming in yellow shafts down through the trees and glinting off the water. At that hour we would walk along the hillside overlooking the lake to where there was an unusual object. It was a small cement plinth, painted red. It was only a lot-line marker, but at the time it seemed charged with non-human powers, like an altar.
This was where we would wait for our father to come back from the Lab. We would sit on the warm rock, where there was a patch of reindeer moss, brittle in dry weather, soft after rain, and listen for the sound of the motorboat – for this we would have to keep very quiet – and I would lean against my mother’s grey flannel legs. Also her leather boots. Possibly I remember the intricacies of these boots – their creases, their laces – better than I remember her