Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [88]
Another view: this time she’s nose to nose with a horse, holding the bridle. Underneath is written: Dick and “Me.” The stories about the horses are popular with her now, I can tell them over and over. The names of the horses were Dick and Nell. Nell was easily spooked, and got the bit between her teeth, and ran away with my mother, and she slipped out of the saddle and might have been dragged to death, and then I would never have been born. But this didn’t happen because she held on – like grim death, as she used to say.
“Do you remember Dick?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember Nell?”
“Nell?”
“She ran away with you. You held on like grim death, remember?”
Now she’s smiling. In there – at the end of the long dark tunnel that divides her from us – she’s off again on that wild gallop, over meadows, through orchards of apple trees in bloom, clinging to the reins and the pommel for dear life, her heart going a mile a minute with terrified joy. Can she smell the apple blossoms, in there where she is? Can she feel the air against her face as she rushes through it?
“Never leave the barn door open,” her father told her. “If the horse bolts, it’ll head home to the barn and you could get crushed against the door frame going through.” And look, she paid attention, she didn’t leave the door open, because Nell draws to a standstill in front of the barn, quivering and sweating and foaming at the mouth, eyes rolling. My mother unclenches herself, lets go of the reins, descends. Both of them calm down. A happy ending.
My mother loves happy endings. Earlier in her life – earlier in my life – any story that didn’t have such an ending was shelved by her as quickly as possible. I try not to repeat any of the sad stories. But there are some stories with no endings, or none I’ve been told, and when I come across them in the invisible file of stories I haul around with me and produce during my visits, my curiosity gets the better of me and I pester her because I want to know what happened. She holds out, though. She’s not telling.
People she loves – people her own age – a lot of those people have died. Most of them have died. Hardly any of them are left. She wants to know about each death as it happens, but then she won’t mention those people again. She’s got them safe, inside her head somewhere, in a form she prefers. She’s got them back in the layer of time where they belong.
Here she is again, in winter clothing – a cloche hat, a coat with a turned-up fur collar, the flapper style: “Me,” Eating a Doughnut. Some girlfriend must have taken that, during her college years. She earned those years, she worked for them, she saved up. The Depression was in full spate, so it couldn’t have been easy. She chose a college far away from her home so she wouldn’t be watched over and restricted by her father, who’d thought she was too frivolous to go to an institution of higher learning anyway. Then she was relentlessly homesick. This did not prevent her from speed skating.
There’s a gap of several years, and now she’s getting married. The wedding group is arranged on the front porch of the big white house, decorated with garlands made by her sister, the youngest of the three. That sister cried throughout the event. The second sister is part of the wedding, because she’s getting married at the same time. My father in a short back-and-sides haircut stands with feet apart, bracing himself; he has a thoughtful appearance. Aunts and uncles and parents and brothers and sisters cluster together. They look solemn. It’s 1935.
At this point