Moral Disorder Read online

  But sleeping mothers hear the cries of their own children, we’ve been told. They can’t help it. Studies have been done. My mother was no exception: she’d hear the little voice calling to her across the blankness of sleep, she’d half wake, then stumble into my sister’s room, soothe her mechanically, bring her drinks of water, tuck her in again, then go back to bed and fall asleep, only to be wakened once more and then once more and then once more. She’d grown thinner and thinner in the last four years, her skin pale, her hair brittle and greying, her eyes unnaturally large.

  In actuality, she’d caught a disease of the thyroid from the hamster we’d foisted on my sister as a pet in the vain hope that the sound of it creaking round and around on its exercise wheel at night would be calming to her. It was this disease that accounted for my mother’s scrawniness and staring eyes: once diagnosed, it was easily cured. But that detail tended to get sidelined during the later recountings of this story, both by my mother and by me. The fairy child, the changeling who didn’t follow the convenient patterns of other children, who sucked up its mother’s energy in an uncanny and nocturnal manner – this is a theme with more inherent interest to it than a hamster-transmitted thyroid disease.

  My sister did look a little like a fairy changeling. She was tiny, with blond braids and big blue eyes, and a rabbity way of nibbling on her lower lip as if to keep it from trembling. Her approach to life was tentative. New foods made her nervous, new people, new experiences: she stood at the edge of them, extended a finger, touched gingerly, then more often than not turned away. No was a word she learned early. At children’s parties she was reluctant to join in the games; birthday cake made her throw up. She was particularly apprehensive about doors, and about who might come through them.

  Thus it was probably a bad idea of my father’s to pretend to be a bear, a game that had been a great success with his two older children. My sister was fascinated by this game as well, but her interest took a different form. She didn’t understand that the bear game was supposed to be fun – that it was an excuse for laughing, shrieking, and running away. Instead, she wanted to observe the bear without being spotted by it herself. This was the reason she’d snipped two holes at eye level in my mother’s floor-to-ceiling drapes. She’d go in behind the drapes and peek out through the holes, waiting in a state of paralyzed terror for my father to come home. Would he be a bear, or would he be a father? And even if he looked like a father, would he turn into a bear without warning? She could never be sure.

  My mother was not delighted when she discovered the holes cut in her drapes. They were lined drapes; my mother had pleated and hemmed them herself, not because she liked sewing but because it was a good deal cheaper that way. But there was nothing to be done. With a child like that, punishment was beside the point: the poor little thing was in a constant state of suffering anyway, over one thing or another. Her reactions were always in excess of the occasion for them. What was to be done? What was to be done, in particular, about the waking up at night? Surely it wasn’t normal. My sister was carted off to see the doctor, who was no help. “She’ll grow out of it,” was all he would say. He didn’t say when.

  Because of her sensitivity, or perhaps because my mother was so worn down, my sister was allowed to get away with things I would never have been allowed to do, or so I felt. She spent most mealtimes underneath the table instead of on a chair drawn up to it, and while down there she tied people’s shoelaces together.

  Remember the shoelace thing?” I say to her. “We never knew exactly why you did that.”

  “I hated sitting at the dinner table,” she says. “It was so boring for me. I didn’t really have a brother and a sister. I was more like an only child, except with two mothers and two fathers. Two and two, and then me.”

  “But why the shoelaces?”

  “Who knows? Maybe it was a joke.”

  “You weren’t very joke-prone at that age.”

  “I wanted the two of you to like me. I wanted to be funny.”

  “You are funny! We do like you!”

  “I know, but that was then. You didn’t pay much attention to me. You always talked about grown-up things.”

  “That’s hardly fair,” I say. “I spent a lot of time with you.”

  “You had to,” she says. “They made you do it.”

  “They had this idea that I was good with you,” I say. “That’s what they used to say: ‘You’re always so good with her.’ ”

  “Way to go, Fred, you moron!” says my sister. “Did you see that? Nobody ever signals. Yeah, well, it let them off the hook.”

  “I made you those moss gardens,” I say defensively. These had been a special thing for her: I put them together in the sandbox, with moss for the trees and bushes, picket fences made of sticks, wet sand houses trimmed with pebbles. Paths paved with flower petals. She’d watch, enraptured: her face would brighten, she’d become very quiet, as if listening. The real garden had that effect on her too. It was at its height then. She’d stand among the irises and poppies, stock-still, as if enchanted. “Moss gardens,” I say. “And gardens with little shells in them – you loved them. I made those too.”

  “Not at the dinner table, though,” she says. “It’s okay, the light’s green, you can go! And then after dinner you used to shut me out of your room.”

  “I had to study. I couldn’t play with you all the time.”

  “You just didn’t want me messing up your stuff. Anyway you weren’t always studying. You were reading Perry Mason books and trying on lipstick. And then you left, when I was eight. You abandoned me.”

  “Nine,” I say. “I didn’t abandon you. I was twenty-one! I left home and got a job. That’s what people do.”

  “It’s no left turn before six, Fred, you creep! I wish I had a camera. The thing is,” says my sister, “I couldn’t figure out who you were supposed to be.”

  My sister had a friend who was a lot like her – another quiet, shy, anxious, big-eyed fairy child, dark where my sister was fair, but with the same china fragility. Leonie was her name. They both insisted on wearing flouncy skirts instead of jeans, they both chose The Twelve Dancing Princesses as their favourite story. They longed to have me doll them up in outfits improvised from the dress-up box: I’d pin up their hair and put lipstick on them and let them wear my clip-on earrings. Then they’d prance around solemnly in my high-heeled shoes, holding up their too-long play skirts, keeping their red mouths prim.

  “Remember the cut velvet?” my sister says. We’re in her car again, going to see our mother again. We prefer to do it together. The rundown house with its flaking paint, the tangle of weeds that used to be the garden, our shrivelled mother – we can deal with these better together. We both have soggy raisin-studded muffins in paper bags and takeout coffees in evil Styrofoam cups: we buy ourselves snacks and bribes, we need to be bolstered up.

  “She should never have let us have that,” I say. “She should have saved it.”

  The cut velvet was an evening gown, black, white, and silver in colour, dating from the 1930s. Why had our mother given it to us? Why had she cast away such a treasure, as if abdicating from her former life – her life as a young woman who’d enjoyed herself and had adventures? We’d each admired this gown in turn; we’d each ruined it in the course of our admiration.

  “We wouldn’t have done that,” I say. “Wasted it.”

  “No. We wouldn’t. We’d have been selfish. Just throw the garbage in the back seat, I keep it strewn with trash back there to deter burglars.”

  “I wouldn’t call it selfish, as such,” I say.

  “Not that they’d want to steal this rust bucket. Hoarding, then. We’re going to be those old ladies they find in houses full of stacks of newspapers and pickle jars and cat-food tins.”

  “I’m not. I have no interest in the cat-food tins.”

  “Old age is the pits,” says my sister. “I kept a piece of it.”

  “You did?”

  “And that ski
rt of yours with the big red roses – I kept some of that. And a bit of your blue brocade formal. I thought it was so glamorous! I thought everything you did was glamorous. Fred, you asshole! Did you see how she cut me off?”

  “What about the pink tulle?”

  “I think Mum used it for dusters.”

  “No great loss,” I say. “It looked like a cake.”

  “I thought it was great – I was going to have one just like it when I grew up. But by the time I got to high school, no one went to formal dances any more.”

  My sister and Leonie played decorous games together in which life was agreeable, people were gentle and fastidious, and time was divided into predictable routines. They adored miniatures: tiny glass vases with midget flowers in them, eensy-teensy cups and spoons, minute boxes – anything small and dainty. Stuffed-bunny tea parties and doll-dressing absorbed them. All the stranger, then, that they found the Headless Horseman’s head in the trunk room, and got it down from the boot shelf, and adopted it.

  There it would be, eyes crossed, mouth drooling blood, set in its place between the flop-eared white bunny and the rubber-skinned Sparkle Plenty doll that had led a far riskier and more disreputable life when it had been mine. The head looked out of place but comfortable: everything was done to make it feel at home. A table napkin would be tucked around its neck stump, and it would be served cups of water tea and imaginary cookies just as if it had a body. Better still, it answered when spoken to – it said, “Thank you very much” and “Could I have another cookie, please” and replied to the white bunny and the Sparkle Plenty doll when they asked it if it was having a good time. Sometimes it was made to nod. When the party had been too tiring for it, it was put to sleep in the dolls’ bed, with a crocheted quilt pulled up over its receding chin.

  Once, I discovered it propped up on my sister’s pillow, its neck wrapped in one of our mother’s best linen dishtowels. Cookie fragments on dolls’ plates were laid out around it, mixed with berries from the prickly-berry hedge, like offerings made to appease an idol. It was wearing a chaplet woven of carrot fronds and marigolds that my sister and Leonie had picked in the garden. The flowers were wilted, the garland was lopsided; the effect was astonishingly depraved, as if a debauched Roman emperor had arrived on the scene and had hacked off his own body in a maiden’s chamber as the ultimate sexual thrill.

  “Why do you like it so much?” I asked my sister and Leonie. I still took some interest in the head: it was, after all, my creature, though I’d been so young – it seemed to me now – when I’d made it. I regarded it critically: the thing was really unconvincing. The nose and chin were way too small, the skull too square, the hair too black. I should have done a better job.

  They gazed up at me with distrust. “We don’t like him,” said my sister.

  “We’re taking care of him,” said Leonie.

  “He’s sick,” said my sister. “We’re the nurses.”

  “We’re making him feel better,” said Leonie.

  “Does he have a name?” I asked.

  The two little girls looked at each other. “His name is Bob,” said Leonie.

  This struck me as funny. I tried not to laugh: my sister was affronted when I laughed at anything to do with her. “Bob the Head?” I said. “That’s his name?”

  “You’re not supposed to laugh at him,” said my sister in an injured tone.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Because it’s not his fault,” she said.

  “What’s not?”

  “That he’s got no, got no …”

  “Got no body?” I said.

  “Yes,” said my sister in a stricken voice. “It’s not his fault! It’s only the way he is!” By this time the tears were trickling down her cheeks.

  Leonie gave me an indignant stare; she picked up the head and hugged it. “You shouldn’t be so mean,” she told me.

  “I know,” I said. “You’re right. I shouldn’t be so mean.” But I had to go into my room and close the door, because I had to either laugh or choke.

  Yet at other times the two of them demanded meanness from me. They’d pester me ceaselessly because they wanted me to play a game called Monster. I was supposed to be the monster – stalking around the house and out into the yard, legs and arms stiff like a zombie’s, calling in a toneless voice, “Where are you? Where are you?” while they held hands and ran away from me, and hid behind the shrubs or the furniture, twittering with fright. When I got home from school they’d be waiting; they’d turn their delicate little pansy-eyed faces up to me and plead, “Be a monster! Be a monster!” Their appetite for my monstrousness was boundless; as long as the two of them were together, holding hands, they could tough it out, they could escape, they could defy me.

  Sometimes my sister would be alone when I got home. By “alone,” I mean without Leonie, for of course my mother would be there. Not for long, however: she’d grab the opening provided by my arrival and be off like a shot, heading for the grocery store or some other equally spurious destination, leaving me as impromptu babysitter. Really she wanted the open road; she wanted speed and exercise, and her own thoughts. She wanted to be free of us – all of us – if only for an hour. But I didn’t recognize that then.

  “Okay,” I’d say. “I have to do my homework. You can play over there. Why don’t you have a dolly tea party?” But no sooner would I have settled myself with my books than my sister would start up.

  “Be a monster! Be a monster!” she would say.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea. Leonie isn’t here. You’ll cry.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Yes, you will. You always do.”

  “I won’t this time. Please! Please!”

  “All right,” I’d say, though I was quite sure how it would end. “I’ll count to ten. Then I’m coming to get you.” I said this last in my flat monster voice. By the time I’d reached ten, my sister would already have shut herself into the front hall closet with the winter coats and the vacuum cleaner, and would be calling in a muffled voice, “The game’s over! The game’s over!”

  “All right,” I would say in a reasonable but still eerie tone. “The game’s over. You can come out now.”

  “No! You’re still being a monster!”

  “I’m not a monster. I’m only your sister. It’s safe to come out.”

  “Stop it! Stop it! Stop the game!”

  “Stop what? There isn’t any game.”

  “Stop it! Stop it!”

  I shouldn’t have done that. A sister pretending to be a monster, or a monster pretending to be a sister? It was too much for her to decipher. Small children have trouble with ill-defined borders, and my sister had more trouble than most. I knew perfectly well, even while I was speaking in my duplicitous voice, what the results would be: sobbing and hysteria and then, many hours later, nightmares. In the middle of the night, screams of terror would issue from my sister’s bedroom; my mother would be dragged from unconsciousness, hoisting herself grimly out of bed, shuffling across the hall to mollify and soothe, while I slept through it all, conked out like a slug drowning in beer, evading the fallout from my crimes.

  “What did you do to her?” my mother would say when she got back from her shopping excursion. My sister would still be in the front hall closet, weeping, afraid to come out. I’d be sitting at the dining-room table, placidly doing my homework.

  “Nothing. We were playing Monster. She wanted to.”

  “You know how impressionable she is.”

  I’d shrug and smile. I could scarcely be blamed for being obliging.

  Why did I behave this way? I didn’t know. My excuse – even, on some level, to myself – was that I was simply giving in to an urgent demand, a demand made by my little sister. I was humouring her. I was indulging her. Of more interest to me now is why my sister made the demand, again and again. Did she believe she’d finally be able to face down my monster self, deal with it on her own terms? Did she hope that I would finally –
at last – transform myself, on cue, into who I was really supposed to be?

  Why did you like the monster game?” I say to her.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Drop dead, Fred, the light was red. Do you want lunch before Mum, or after?”

  “If we have it before, we’ll get depressed with no treat to look forward to. On the other hand I’m starving.”

  “So am I. Let’s go to Satay on the Road.”

  “Or we could go to Small Talk. They have good soup.”

  “I make a lot of soup at home. I need some of that peanut sauce. Should I dye my hair red? I’m getting a lot of grey.”

  “It looks good,” I say. “It looks distinguished.”

  “But what about red?”

  “Why not?” I say. “If you like. I could never handle red, but you can.”

  “It’s bizarre, because we’re both yellow/orange, according to the colour charts.”

  “I know. You can do lime green too. It makes me look bloodless. You used to agitate and agitate for that monster game and then shut yourself up in the front hall closet as soon as it began.”

  “I remember that. I remember that feeling of being completely terrified. Warm wool, vacuum cleaner smell, terror.”

  “But you kept on wanting to do it. Did you think you could make it come out differently?”

  “It’s like saying, ‘Tomorrow morning I’m going to get up early and work out.’ And then the time comes and you just can’t.”

  “Mother used to think it was her fault,” I say.

  “What, me hiding in the coat closet?”

  “Oh … and other stuff,” I say. “The whole picture. Remember when you were going through that total honesty period?”

  “I’ve stopped?”

  “Well, no. I never went in for it, myself – total honesty. I preferred lying.”