Moral Disorder Page 3

  All of these things were available to the house with no servant. Then came the servant chapter. Here too Mrs. Splint was fastidious, and solidly informative. (You could tell she was Mrs. Splint; she was married, though without sloppy consequences, unlike my mother.) “One can transform an untidy, inexperienced girl into a well-groomed, professional servant if one is patient and kind and fair,” she told me. Transform was the word I seized on. Did I want to transform, or to be transformed? Was I to be the kind homemaker, or the formerly untidy maid? I hardly knew.

  There were two photographs of the maid, one in daytime dress, with white shoes and stockings and a white muslin apron – what was muslin? – and the other in an afternoon tea and dinner outfit, with black stockings and organdy collar and cuffs. Her expression in both pictures was the same: a gentle little half-smile, a straight-ahead, frank, but reserved gaze, as if she was waiting for instructions. There were faint dark circles under her eyes. I couldn’t tell whether she looked amiable, or put-upon, or merely stupefied. She’d be the one to get blamed if there was a spot on the tablecloth or a piece of silver less than gleaming. All the same, I envied her. She was already transformed, and had no more decisions to make.

  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 put her right to sleep.

  When I wasn’t doing those things, I had to clean the bathroom or do the dishes.

  My sister turned one, I became thirteen; now I was in high school. She turned two, I became fourteen. My girlfriends at school – some of them were fifteen already – were loitering on the way home, talking to boys. Some of them went to the movies, where they picked up boys from other schools; others did the same at skating rinks. They exchanged views on which boys were real dolls and which were pills, they went to drive-ins on double dates with their new steadies and ate popcorn and rolled around in the back seats of cars, they tried on strapless dresses, they attended dances where, drowning in swoony music and the blue light of darkened gymnasiums, they shuffled around mashed up against their partners, they necked on the couch in their rec rooms with the TV on.

  I listened to the descriptions of all this at lunch hour, but I couldn’t join in. I avoided the boys who approached me: somehow I had to turn away, I had to go home and look after the baby, who was still not sleeping. My mother dragged around the house as if she was ill, or starving. She’d been to the doctor about the baby’s sleeplessness, but he’d been no help. All he said was, “You’ve got one of those.”

  From being worried, I now became surly. I escaped from the dinner table every night as soon as I could, I shut myself in my room and answered questions from my parents with grudging monosyllables. When I wasn’t doing homework or chores or baby-tending I would lie on my bed with my head hanging over the edge, holding up a mirror to see what I looked like upside down.

  One evening I was standing behind my mother. I must have been waiting for her to get out of the bathroom so I could try out something or other on myself, a different shampoo most likely. She was bending over the laundry hamper, hauling out the dirty clothes. The baby started to cry. “Could you go and put her to sleep?” she said, as she had done so often. Ordinary, I would trudge off, soothe, sing, rock.

  “Why should I?” I said. “She’s not my baby. I didn’t have her. You did.” I’d never said anything this rude to her. Even as the words were coming out of my mouth I knew I’d gone too far, though all I’d done was spoken the truth, or part of it.

  My mother stood up and whirled around, all in one movement, and slapped me hard across the face. She’d never done that before, or anything remotely like it. I didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything. We were both shocked by ourselves, and also by each other.

  I ought to have felt hurt, and I did. But I also felt set free, as if released from an enchantment. I was no longer compelled to do service. On the outside, I would still be helpful – I wouldn’t be able to change that about myself. But another, more secret life spread out before me, unrolling like dark fabric. I too would soon go to the drive-in theatres, I too would eat popcorn. Already in spirit I was off and running – to the movies, to the skating rinks, to the swooning blue-lit dances, and to all sorts of other seductive and tawdry and frightening pleasures I could not yet begin to imagine.

  The Headless Horseman

  For Halloween that year – the year my sister was two – I dressed up as the Headless Horseman. Before, I’d only ever been ghosts and fat ladies, both of which were easy: all you needed was a sheet and a lot of talcum powder, or a dress and a hat and some padding. But this year would be the last one I’d ever be able to disguise myself, or so I believed. I was getting too old for i
t – I was almost finished with being thirteen – and so I felt the urge to make a special effort.

  Halloween was my best holiday. Why did I like it so much? Perhaps because I could take time off from being myself, or from the impersonation of myself I was finding it increasingly expedient, but also increasingly burdensome, to perform in public.

  I got the Headless Horseman idea from a story we’d read in school. In the story, the Headless Horseman was a grisly legend and also a joke, and that was the effect I was aiming for. I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I’d studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn’t yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

  I had an image of how the Headless Horseman was supposed to look. He was said to ride around at night with nothing on top of his shoulders but a neck, his head held in one arm, the eyes fixing the horrified viewer in a ghastly glare. I made the head out of papier mâché, using strips of newspaper soaked in a flour-and-water paste I cooked myself, as per the instructions in The Rainy Day Book of Hobbies. Earlier in my life – long ago, at least two years ago – I’d had a wistful desire to make all the things suggested in this book: animals twisted out of pipe cleaners, balsa-wood boats that would whiz around when you dropped cooking oil into a hole in the middle, and a tractor thing put together out of an empty thread spool, two matchsticks, and a rubber band; but somehow I could never find the right materials in our house. Cooking up paste glue was simple, however: all you needed was flour and water. Then you simmered and stirred until the paste was translucent. The lumps didn’t matter, you could squeeze them out later. The glue got quite hard when it was dry, and I realized the next morning that I should have filled the pot with water after using it. My mother always said, “A good cook does her own dishes.” But then, I reflected, glue was not real cooking.

  The head came out too square. I squashed it at the top to make it more like a head, then left it down by the furnace to dry. The drying took longer than I’d planned, and during the process the nose shrank and the head began to smell funny. I could see that I should have spent more time on the chin, but it was too late to add on to it. When the head was dry enough, at least on the outside, I painted it what I hoped was a flesh colour – a wishy-washy bathrobe pink – and then I painted two very white eyeballs with black pupils. The eyes came out a little crossed, but it couldn’t be helped: I didn’t want to make the eyeballs grey by fooling around with the black pupils on the damp white paint. I added dark circles under the eyes, and black eyebrows, and black enamel hair that appeared to have been slicked down with brilliantine. I painted a red mouth, with a trickle of shiny enamel blood coming down from one corner. I’d taken care to put a neck stub on the bottom of the head, and I painted this red – for where the head had been severed – with a white circle in the middle of the bottom part, for the neck bone.

  The body of the Horseman took some thought. I made a cape out of a piece of black fabric left over from a now-obsolete puppet stage of mine, gathering it at the neck end – designed to sit on top of my head – and sewing buttons down the front, and cutting two inconspicuous holes at eye level so I’d be able to see out. I borrowed my mother’s jodhpurs and riding boots, left over from before she was married – she hadn’t ridden a horse since her wedding day, she was in the habit of saying, proudly or regretfully. Probably it was both. But I didn’t pay much attention to my mother’s tone of voice, then: I had to tune it out in order to charge full speed ahead with what I myself was doing.

  The riding boots were too big, but I made up for that with hockey socks. I safety-pinned the jodhpurs around the waist to keep them from falling down. I got hold of some black winter gloves, and improvised a horse whip out of a stick and a piece of leather I’d scrounged from the box of archery materials. Archery had once been popular with my father, and then with my brother; but my father had given it up, and the box had been abandoned in the trunk room in the cellar, now that my brother had to study so much.

  I tried on the entire outfit in front of my mirror, with the head held in the crook of my arm. I could scarcely see myself through the eyeholes, but the dark shape looming in the glass, with two sinister eyeballs staring out balefully from somewhere near the elbow, looked pretty good to me.

  On the night itself I groped my way out the door and joined my best friend of the moment, whose name was Annie. Annie had done herself up as Raggedy Ann, complete with a wig of red wool braids. We’d taken flashlights, but Annie had to hold my arm to guide me through the darker patches of the night, which were numerous in the badly lit suburb we were traversing. I should have made the eyeholes bigger.

  We went from door to door, shouting, “Shell out! Shell out!” and collecting popcorn balls and candy apples and licorice twists, and the Halloween toffees wrapped in orange and black waxed paper with designs of pumpkins and bats on them of which I was especially fond. I loved the sensation of prowling abroad in the darkness – of being unseen, unknown, potentially terrifying, though all the time retaining, underneath, my own harmless, mundane, and dutiful self.

  There was a full moon, I think; there ought to have been one. The air was crisp; there were fallen leaves; jack-o-lanterns burned on the porches, giving off the exciting odour of singed pumpkin. Everything was as I’d imagined it beforehand, though already I felt it slipping away from me. I was too old, that was the problem. Halloween was for little children. I’d grown beyond it, I was looking down on it from my balloon. Now that I’d arrived at the moment I’d planned for, I couldn’t remember why I’d gone to all that trouble.

  I was disappointed, too, at the response of the adults who answered the doors. Everyone knew who my friend Annie was portraying – “Raggedy Annie!” they cried with delight, they even got the pun – but to me they said, “And who are you supposed to be?” My cape had a muffling effect, so I often had to repeat the answer twice. “The Headless Horseman.” “The headless what?” Then, “What’s that you’re holding?” they would go on to say. “It’s the head. Of the Headless Horseman.” “Oh yes, I see.” The head would then be admired, though in the overdone way adults had of admiring a thing when they secretly thought it was inept and laughable. It didn’t occur to me that if I’d wanted my costume to be understood immediately I should have chosen something more obvious.

  However, there was one member of the audience who’d been suitably impressed. It was my little sister, who hadn’t yet gone to bed when I’d made my way through the living room en route to the door. She’d taken one look at the shambling black torso and the big boots and the shiny-haired, frowning, bodiless head, and had begun to scream. She’d screamed and screamed, and hadn’t been reassured when I’d lifted up the cape to show that it was really only me underneath. If anything, that had made it worse.

  Do you remember the head?” I ask my sister. We’re in her rackety car, driving over to see our mother, who is now very old, and bedridden, and blind.

  My sister doesn’t ask, “What head?” She knows what head. “It looked like a pimp,” she says. “With that greaser hair.” Then she says, “Smart move, Fred.” She talks out loud to other, inferior drivers when she’s driving, a thing she does adroitly. All of the other drivers are named Fred, even the women.

  “How do you know what a pimp looks like?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “A dead pimp, then,” I say.

  “Not completely dead. The eyes followed you around the room like those 3-D Jesuses.”

  “They couldn’t have. They were sort of crossed.”

  “They did, though. I was afraid of it.”

  “You played with it, later,” I say. “When you were older. You used to make it talk.”

 
“I was afraid of it anyway,” she says. “That’s right, Fred, take the whole road.”

  “Maybe I warped you in childhood,” I say.

  “Something did,” she says, and laughs.

  For a while after that Halloween, the head lived in the trunk room, which contained not only two steamer trunks filled with things of my mother’s from her previous life – tea cloths she’d embroidered for her trousseau, long kid gloves she’d saved – but also a number of empty suitcases, and the metal box of fly-tying equipment, and the archery materials, and an assortment of miscellaneous items I used to rummage through and pilfer. The head was on an upper shelf, the one with the battered skates and the leather boots – my father’s, also my mother’s. Foot, foot, foot, foot, head, foot, foot, foot – if you weren’t ready for this arrangement and happened to glance up at it, the effect could be disconcerting.

  By that time we had a second phone in the house so I could talk with my boyfriends, or go through what passed for talking, without exasperating my father too much – he thought phone conversations should be short, and should convey information. The door to the trunk room was right beside the phone. I liked to keep that door closed while I was talking; otherwise I could see the head staring out at me through the gloom, blood dribbling from the corner of its mouth. With its sleek black hair and minimal chin, it looked like a comic-book waiter who’d got into a fight. At the same time it seemed malignantly attentive, as if it was taking in every word I said and putting a sour construction on my motives.

  After its period of retreat in the trunk room, the head migrated into my sister’s dress-up box. By now, I was fifteen and my sister was four. She was still an anxious child – if anything, she was more anxious than ever. She didn’t sleep through the night – she’d wake up five or six or seven or nine or ten or eleven times, according to my mother. Although I had the room right next to hers, I never heard her plaintive calls and frightened wailing. I slept through it all as if drugged.