Moral Disorder Read online

  “Oh, you never lied much.”

  I duck that one. “Anyway, you were halfway through high school when you really got going on the honesty. You were going to tell Mum and Dad about drugs, and skipping school, and kids your age having sex, because you thought Mum and Dad led a protected life and were too repressed.”

  “Well, they did and they were,” she says. “I did tell them about some of it. I told them about taking LSD.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Dad pretended he hadn’t heard. Mum said, ‘What was it like?’ ”

  “I didn’t know you took LSD.”

  “I only took it once,” she says. “It wasn’t that great. It was like a really long car trip. I kept wondering when it would end.”

  “That’s what happened to me too,” I say.

  When my sister was sixteen and I was twenty-eight, my parents called me home. This had never happened before: it was in the nature of an SOS. They were becoming increasingly desperate: my sister had added anger to her repertoire of emotions. She still cried a lot, but she cried from fury as well as from despair. Or she’d go into thick, silent rages that were like a dense black fog descending over everyone. I’d witnessed these at family Christmas dinners – events I now tried to avoid as much as possible.

  My parents persisted in their belief that I was particularly good with my sister – better than my brother, who did not take emotional outbursts seriously. They themselves certainly weren’t good with her, my mother told me. They wanted her to be happy – she was so bright, she had such potential – but she was so immature. They just didn’t know what to do. “Maybe we were too old to have another child,” my mother said. “We don’t understand these things. When I was that age, if you were unhappy you kept it to yourself.”

  “She’s a teenager,” I said. “They’re all like that. It’s hormones.”

  “You weren’t like that when you were a teenager,” said my mother hopefully.

  “I was more furtive,” I said. I didn’t go on to say that she could hardly have any idea of what I’d been like then because she’d been in a coma most of the time. I’d done a lot of things she’d known nothing about, but I wasn’t going to reveal them now. “She’s right out in the open,” I said.

  “She certainly is,” said my mother.

  My parents had wanted me to come home because they had a chance to go to Europe – it was some sort of group trip, it wouldn’t cost much – and they had never been there. They wanted to see castles. They wanted to see Scotland, and the Eiffel Tower. They were like excited kids. But they were afraid to leave my sister on her own: she took things too hard, and she was going through a bad period. (“Over some boy,” said my mother, with slight contempt. As a young woman she’d have let herself be boiled in oil before admitting to a bad period over some boy. The thing then was to have lots of beaus, and to treat them all with smiling disdain.)

  They’d only be gone for two weeks, said my father. A little more than that, said my mother, with a mixture of guilt and anxiety. Eighteen days. Twenty, counting the travel.

  I didn’t see how I could deny them. They were getting old, or what I thought of as old. They were almost sixty. They might never have another chance to see a castle. So I said yes.

  It was the summer – a Toronto summer, hot and humid. My parents had never bothered with air conditioning or fans – physical discomfort didn’t mean much to them – so the house got progressively warmer as the day advanced, and didn’t cool off until midnight. By this time my sister was living in my former bedroom, so I found myself in hers.

  Our days fell into a strange pattern, or lack of pattern. We got up when we felt like it and went to bed at irregular hours. We ate our meals here and there around the house, and let the dirty dishes pile up on the kitchen counter before doing them. Sometimes we took our lunches down to the cellar, where it was cooler. We read detective stories and bought women’s magazines, which we leafed through in order to rearrange ourselves, though only in theory. I was too tired to do much of anything else; or not tired, sleepy. I’d fall asleep on the chesterfield in the middle of the day, sink down into cavernous dreams, then wake up groggily toward suppertime, feeling hungover. Ordinarily I never took naps.

  Once in a while we’d make forays into the blazing-hot garden, to water it according to the meticulous instructions left by our parents – instructions we did not follow – or to yank out the more blatant weeds, the deadly nightshade vines, the burdocks, the sow thistles; or to snip fragments off the exuberant prickly-berry hedge, which was threatening to take over the entire side border. The phlox was in bloom, the dahlias, the zinnias: the colours were dizzying. We made an effort at mowing the lawn with the elderly push mower that had been around forever. We’d left it too long: the mower blades got clogged with crushed grass and clover.

  “Maybe it’s time they entered the twentieth century and got a gas mower,” I said.

  “I think we should mow the whole garden,” said my sister. “Flatten it right out.”

  “Then it would all be lawn. More to mow. Let’s anyway trim the edges.”

  “Why bother? It’s too much effort. I’m thirsty.”

  “Okay. So am I.” And we’d go inside.

  At unpredictable moments, I heard many instalments about a boy called Dave, who played the drums and was unobtainable. It was always the same story: my sister loved Dave, Dave didn’t love her. Maybe he’d loved her once, or had begun to, but then something had happened. She didn’t know what. Her life was ruined. She could never possibly ever be happy again. Nobody loved her.

  “He sounds like a drip,” I said.

  “He’s not a drip! It was so great once!”

  “I’m just going by what you told me. I didn’t hear about any great parts. Anyway, if he’s not interested, he’s not interested.”

  “You’re always so fucking logical!” My sister had taken up swearing at a much earlier age than I had, and was fluent in it.

  “I’m not, really,” I said. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”

  “You used everything up. You used up all the good parts,” said my sister. “There was nothing left over for me.”

  This was deep water. “What do you mean?” I said carefully. “What exactly did I use up?”

  My sister was wiping tears from her eyes. She had to think a little, pick something out from the overflowing pool of sadness. “Dancing,” she said. “You used up dancing.”

  “You can’t use up dancing,” I said. “Dancing is something you do. You can do whatever you want.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Yes, you really can. It’s not me stopping you.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be on this planet,” said my sister grimly. “Maybe I should never have been born.”

  I felt as if I were groping through brambles in a night so dark I couldn’t see my own hands. At my wit’s end had been, before this, merely an expression, but now it described a concrete reality: I could see my wits unrolling like a ball of string, length after length of wits being played out, each length failing to hold fast, breaking off as if rotten, until finally the end of the string would be reached, and what then? How many days were left for me to fill – for me to fill responsibly – before the real parents would come back and take over, and I could escape to my life?

  Maybe they would never come back. Maybe I would have to stay here forever. Maybe both of us would have to stay here forever, trapped in our present ages, never getting any older, while the garden grew up like a forest and the prickly-berry bush swelled to the size of a tree, blotting the light from the windows.

  In a state of near-panic I suggested to my sister that we should go on an excursion. An adventure. We would go to the town of Kitchener, on the Greyhound bus. It was only about an hour. Kitchener had some lovely old houses in it; we would take pictures of them with my camera. I’d been taking a lot of pictures of architecture around that time – nineteenth-century Ontario buildings. It was an
interest of mine, I said, not lying very much. Oddly enough, my sister agreed to this plan. I’d been expecting her to refuse it: too complicated, too much effort, why bother?

  We set off the next day supplied with oranges and digestive biscuits, and made it to the bus station without incident, and sat through the bus trip in relative calm. Then we ambled around in Kitchener, looking at things. I took pictures of houses. We bought sandwiches. We went to the park and watched the swans.

  While we were in the park, an older woman said to us, “Are you twins?”

  “Yes,” said my sister. “We are!” Then she laughed and said, “No, we’re not. We’re only sisters.”

  “Well, you look like twins,” said the woman.

  We were the same height. We had the same noses. We were wearing similar clothes. I could see how the woman might have thought that, supposing she was a little nearsighted. The idea alarmed me: before that moment, I’d viewed the two of us in terms of our differences. Now I saw that we were more alike than I’d imagined. I had more layers on, more layers of gauze; that was all.

  My sister’s mood had changed. Now she was almost euphoric. “Look at the swans,” she said. “They’re so, they’re so …”

  “Swanlike,” I said. I felt almost giddy. The afternoon sun was golden on the pond where the swans floated; a mellow haze suffused the air. Suffused, I thought. That was how I felt. Maybe our parents were right: perhaps I alone had the magic key, the one that would open the locked door and free my sister from the dungeon that appeared to be enclosing her.

  “It was great to come here,” she said. Her face was radiant.

  But the next day she was more unhappy than ever. And after that it got worse. Whatever magic I thought I might have – or that everyone thought I might have – proved useless. The good times became fewer, the bad times worse. They became worse and worse, for years and years. Nobody knew why.

  My sister sits on the bottom step of my stairs, biting her fingers and crying. This doesn’t happen once, but many times. “I should just leave,” she says. “I should just check out. I’m useless here. It’s too much effort.” She means: getting through time.

  “You’ve had fun,” I say. “Haven’t you? There’s lots of things you like.”

  “That was a while ago,” she says. “It’s not enough. I’m tired of playing the game. This is the wrong place for me to be.”

  She doesn’t mean my house. She means her body. She means the planet Earth. I can see the same thing she’s seeing: it’s a cliff edge, it’s a bridge with a steep drop, it’s the end. That’s what she’s wants: The End. Like the end of a story.

  “You aren’t useless, you shouldn’t leave!” I say. “You’ll feel better tomorrow!” But it’s like calling across a wide field to a person on the other side. She can’t hear me. Already she’s turning away, looking down, looking down over, preparing for dark flight.

  She’ll be lost. I will lose her. I’m not close enough to stop her.

  “That would be a terrible thing to do,” I say.

  “There’s no other door,” she says. “Don’t worry. You’re really strong. You’ll handle it.”

  We turn a corner and then another, pass a willow tree and then a weeping mulberry, pull into the driveway of our mother’s house. “Look at Fred,” says my sister. “Parked right in the middle of the street. If I was a snowplow, I’d plow him right into the prickly-berry hedge.”

  “That’s the spirit,” I say. We clamber out of the car, which is getting harder for me to do. Something happens to the knees. I stand, one hand on the car, stretching myself, surveying the ruined garden. “I need to tackle that yew tree,” I say. “I forgot my pruners. There’s deadly nightshade vine all through it.”

  “Why bother?” says my sister in full honesty mode. “Mum can’t see it.”

  “I can,” I say. “Other people can. She used to be so proud of that garden.”

  “You worry too much about other people. Was I a really horrible child?”

  “Not at all,” I say. “You were very cute. You had big blue eyes and little blond braids.”

  “According to the stories I whined a lot.”

  “It wasn’t whining,” I say. “You had a sensitive nervous system. You had an enhanced reaction to reality.”

  “In other words, I whined a lot.”

  “You wanted the world to be better than it was,” I say.

  “No, that was you. You wanted that. I just wanted it to be better than it was for me.”

  I sidestep that. “You were very affectionate,” I say. “You appreciated things. You appreciated them more than other people. You practically went into trances of rapture.”

  “But I’m all right now,” she says. “Thank God for pharmaceuticals.”

  “Yes,” I say. “You’re all right now.”

  She takes a pill every day, for a chemical imbalance she was born with. That was it, all along. That was what made the bad times for her. Not my monstrousness at all.

  I believe that, most of the time.

  Now we’re at the door. The persistence of material objects is becoming an amazement to me. It’s the same door – the one I used to go in through, out through, year after year, in my daily clothing or in various outfits and disguises, not thinking at all that I would one day be standing in front of this very same door with my grey-haired little sister. But all doors used regularly are doors to the afterlife.

  “I lost track of that head,” I say. “The Headless Horseman head. Remember when it lived in the trunk room? Remember all those boots, and the archery supplies?”

  “Vaguely,” says my sister.

  “We’ll have to go through that stuff, you know. When the time comes. We’ll have to sort it out.”

  “I’m not looking forward to it,” says my sister.

  “Where did it go, in the end? That head? Did you get rid of it?”

  “Oh, it’s still down there somewhere,” says my sister.

  My Last Duchess

  That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,’ ” said Miss Bessie.

  No one would have called her Miss Bessie to her face, but that was her name among us. It was far more respectful than our names for some of the other teachers: the Gorilla, the Crip, the Hippo. “Now, class. What does that single word, last, tell us right away?”

  The windows of our brand-new schoolroom were high enough so we couldn’t see anything out of them except the sky. Today the sky was a hazy blue, a warm, drowsy colour. I wasn’t looking at it, but there it was, at the edge of eyesight, huge and featureless and soothing, rolling on and on like the sea. One of the window panels was open and some flies had come in. They were buzzing around, bumbling against the glass, trying to get out. I could hear them, but I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t risk turning my head. I was supposed to be thinking about last.

  Last, last, last. Last was so close to lost. Last Duchess. Duchess was an insinuating rustle, a whispering: taffeta brushing over a floor. On a day like this it was hard to resist dozing off, drifting down into reverie or half-sleep. It was afternoon, it was May, the trees outside were flowering, pollen was eddying everywhere. The classroom was too hot; it was filled with a vibration, the vibration of its newness – the blond wood of its curved, modern metal-framed desks, the greenness of its blackboards, the faint humming of its fluorescent lights, which seemed to hum even when they were turned off. But despite this newness there was an old smell in the room, an ancient, fermenting smell: an invisible steam was rising all around, oily, salty, given off by twenty-five adolescent bodies stewing gently in the humid springtime air.

  Last Duchess. There had to be more than one, then. A whole bunch of Duchesses, all in a row like a chorus line. No: it was last as in last year. The Duchess was back there in the past – gone, over with, left behind.

  Quite frequently Miss Bessie didn’t wait for anyone to stick up a hand: it could be a long wait, as being too quick to blurt stuff out was ridiculous in our eyes. We didn’t want to make fools
of ourselves by getting a thing wrong, or else – sometimes equally foolish – by getting it right. Miss Bessie was well aware of that, so nine times out of ten she simply answered her own questions. “Last Duchess tells us,” she said, “that this Duchess is no longer the wife of the Duke. It also implies that there may be a next Duchess. The first line of a poem is very important, class. It sets the tone. Let us proceed.”

  Miss Bessie was sitting on top of her desk, as usual. She had good legs, not only for a woman of her age but for any woman, and she wore beautiful shoes – not the kind of shoes we ourselves would have worn, not penny loafers or saddle shoes or velveteen flats or stiletto heels for dancing, but we could tell they were in good taste and well taken care of. No spot or smear of dirt was ever to be seen on those softly gleaming shoes of Miss Bessie’s.

  Each pair of shoes went with its own outfit, and here too Miss Bessie was exceptional. The female teachers at our school wore tailored suits to do their teaching in. It was a kind of uniform – a skirt, straight or gored or pleated, a matching jacket, a blouse underneath, white or cream-coloured, often with a floppy bow tied at the neckline, and a brooch on the left-hand lapel – but Miss Bessie’s suits had an elegance the others could not match. Her blouses were not cheesy, limp nylon but had a sheen and solidity to them, her brooches looked as if their semi-precious stones were real: her best one was amber and gold, in the shape of a bee. Her hair wasn’t grey but silver, and expertly waved; her cheekbones were prominent, her jaw firm, her eyes piercing; her nose, discreetly powdered, was aquiline, a word we had learned from her.

  We pitied the other female teachers in our school – hopeless, ill-groomed drudges, overwrought and easily distracted, shackled to a thankless task, namely teaching us – but we did not pity Miss Bessie.

  It wasn’t only her no-nonsense professional appearance the boys in the class respected: it was the fact that she had an M.A. Those two letters were a qualification: they stood for something important, like M.D. So the boys respected that, but they also respected the tight leash on which she kept them. “Richard, do you have something amusing to say? If so, be so kind as to say it to all of us.” “David, that observation is beneath you. You can do better than that. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp.” “Robert, was that a flimsy attempt at wit?” Sarcastic was the word we used, about such remarks. But Miss Bessie was never sarcastic about honest blunders. She was patient with those.