Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [9]
I finished the raisins, closed the book, wiped my sticky hands on my shorts. Now it was time for more knitting. Sometimes I forgot to wash my hands and got brown raisin stains on the white wool, but that could be corrected later. Ivory Soap was what Mrs. Splint always used; it was good to know such a thing. First I went down to the garden and broke off some pea vine and a handful of red flowers from the scarlet runner beans, for the centrepiece it was now my duty to arrange. The charm of my centrepiece would not however cancel out the shabbiness of our paper napkins: my mother insisted they be used at least twice, to avoid waste, and she wrote our initials on them in pencil. I could imagine what Mrs. Splint would think of this grubby practice.
How long did all of this go on? It seemed forever, but perhaps it was only a week or two. In due course my father returned; a few maple leaves turned orange, and then a few more; the loons gathered together, calling at night before their fall migration. Soon enough we went back to the city, and I could go to school again in the normal way.
I’d finished the layette, all except the one bootie that was the responsibility of my mother – would the baby have the foot of a swan? – and I wrapped it in white tissue paper and put it in a drawer. It was a bit lopsided and not entirely clean – the raisin smears lingered – but you couldn’t tell that when it was folded.
My baby sister was born in October, a couple of weeks before I turned twelve. She had all the right fingers and toes. I threaded the pink ribbon into the eyelets in the layette and sewed together the rosettes for the bonnet, and the baby came home from the hospital in the proper manner and style. My mother’s friends came over to visit, and admired my handiwork, or so it appeared. “You did all this?” they said. “Almost all,” I said modestly. I didn’t mention my mother’s failure to complete her own minor task.
My mother said she’d hardly had to lift a finger, I’d gone at the knitting just like a beaver. “What a good little worker,” said the friends; but I got the impression they thought it was funny.
The baby was cute, though in no time flat she outgrew my layette. But she didn’t sleep. As soon as you put her down she’d be wide awake and wailing: the clouds of anxiety that had surrounded her before she was born seemed to have entered into her, and she would wake up six or seven or eight or nine times a night, crying plaintively. This didn’t go away in a few months, as Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care said it would. If anything, it got worse.
From having been too fat, my mother now became too thin. She was gaunt from lack of sleep, her hair dull, her eyes bruised-looking, her shoulders hunched over. I did my homework lying on my back with my feet up on the baby’s crib, jiggling it and jiggling it so my mother could get some rest. Or I would come home from school and change the baby and bundle her up and take her out in her pram, or I would pace back and forth, pressing her warm, fragrant, wriggling flannelette body against my shoulder with one hand while holding a book up with the other, or I would take her into my room and rock her in my arms and sing to her. Singing was particularly effective. Oh my darling Nellie Gray, they have taken you away, and I’ll never see my darling any more, I would sing. Or else the “Coventry Carol” from junior choir:
Herod the King, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day,
His men of might, in his own sight,
All children young, to slay.
The tune was mournful, but it