Moral Disorder

by Margaret Atwood

  The addition of Nell as a fixture in Tig’s life had been taken in stride by Oona – why not, since it had been partly her doing? She’d introduced Tig and Nell, she’d facilitated their – what would you call it? Their thing. “Tig and his harem,” she’d say. “Of course, Nell is very young.” Her expression said: young and dumb. The implication was that Nell would be temporary: Nell would leave Tig because he was too elderly, or Tig would leave Nell because she was too shallow. If the two of them wanted to fester away in that rented shack out in the sticks with the falling-down barn and the weeds – here Oona would smile and shrug – well, good luck to them. It would drive most people mad, herself included. In the meantime, the children enjoyed the country, at intervals, and Oona herself had more scope, the scope she’d always wanted.

  She would make use of this scope at the last minute. Something would come up – some chance of an outing with the current companion. Then she would phone Nell and issue instructions: when the children were to be picked up, when they were to be delivered back, what they should eat. Her tone was cordial, even faintly amused. What could Nell say, standing on the slanting floor in the drafty farm kitchen, but Yes and Yes?

  “Yes ma’am, is what she wants,” said Nell to her friends. “She treats me like the hired help.” That was Nell’s view, though she couldn’t get Tig to see it. Whenever it was a question of the children, Tig’s eyes glazed over and he turned into a kind of robot. So it was the best method – said Nell – just to bite her tongue and not say anything.

  Not that she had practised this method very rigorously. But she’d tried.

  “Such a good father,” said Lillie. “He wants the best for his children.”

  “I know,” said Nell.

  “A child – that comes first,” said Lillie.

  “I know,” said Nell. She did know, too, now that she had one herself. But all this had happened some years before.

  So that was the way things went, said Nell, for the first year or so. Then Nell and Tig had stopped renting and had bought a farm of their own, one that was less decrepit; though not much less, because they hadn’t had very much money.

  But Oona assumed there was a lot more money than there really was, Nell told Lillie. She demanded more from Tig – for the children – than she’d been getting. But if Tig had given her any more, said Nell, they wouldn’t have been able to meet their own mortgage payments. As it was, half their living expenses were being covered by Nell. More than half. Not that Nell held it against Tig. But two and two did not make five.

  Arithmetic made no difference to Oona. She began telling mutual acquaintances back in the city what an awful person Nell was, and how she had turned Tig into an awful person as well. Nell heard about these remarks, as Oona intended she should: people were never shy about repeating such things.

  Oona changed lawyers – Tig and Oona were drawing up the divorce settlement by then – and when the new lawyer couldn’t squeeze any more cash out of Tig, she changed lawyers again.

  “He didn’t have any more money,” said Nell. “What could he do? You can’t get blood from a stone.”

  “But you had it,” said Lillie.

  “Not really,” said Nell. “She wrote some pretty vicious letters to Tig. By that time she was acting as if he’d abandoned her – like some Victorian scoundrel. Tig wouldn’t say a bad word about her though, because of the kids.”

  “She was the mother,” said Lillie. “When it’s the mother and it’s boys, that’s the end of it.”

  “In a nutshell,” said Nell. Lillie looked puzzled, so she added, “Exactly.”

  Still, the new farm was no mansion, as the boys duly reported to Oona – there were rats, for one thing, and in the spring the dirt-floor cellar filled with water, and in the winter the wind blew right through the walls – so in time Oona calmed down somewhat. She went on vacations with the various companions, to semi-tropical locations, but though Tig hoped one of the companions would became a permanent installation, none did.

  Time passed, and Tig and Nell moved back into the city – into the row house in Chinatown, the one with the cockroaches, which wasn’t much of a threat to Oona. The boys were grown up by now; they were no longer living with Oona. Tig could make his own arrangements with them, he didn’t have to go through Oona. So that source of friction was removed. Nell felt lighter, and less muted.

  But then two things happened. Oona was forced to leave her large, convenient apartment and found herself in a series of unsatisfactory sublets, just at the point when she’d quit her latest job; and Tig and Nell moved to their new house, the house that she and Lillie were sitting in right now, having their tea.

  “She can’t stand it,” said Nell. “She thinks we’re living in a palace. We were just lucky, we bought and sold at the right times, but she thinks we’re rolling in cash. It’s driving her up the wall.”

  “You can see it,” said Lillie. “This happens. But she is a grown-up. Some have, some don’t have.”

  “Yes,” said Nell. “But also she’s not well.”

  Oona’s illness had been creeping up on her for years. She’d put on a lot of weight, and as she’d gained flesh she’d lost substance. Also she’d lost her nerve. The assurance that had carried her through was evaporating: she’d become hesitant, insecure. She was afraid of things. She didn’t want to go out of the house, or into any kind of tunnel, such as the subway.

  Oona had been to doctor after doctor: none of them could cast any light on her condition. It might be this, it might be that. Every once in a while she’d collapse – right on the sidewalk, the latest time – and then she’d be carted off to the hospital and given yet another medication that didn’t work. Right now she was in a place with noisy neighbours who shouted and threw parties at night; in the mornings, needles would be found on the lawn. It was difficult and squalid, and frightening to Oona. That Oona could be so genuinely frightened was a new concept for Nell.

  Tig said that if he had the money he would buy Oona a house to live in, for the sake of the boys. He said it into the air, not looking at Nell. He said that the boys were very worried.

  Tig in his turn was worried about the boys, leaving Nell to be worried about Tig.

  “They are good boys,” said Lillie, who’d met them. “Such nice manners. They want to help their mother.”

  “I know,” said Nell. “Oona and the boys both think she’d be better off in her own house, without any other tenants. It would be quieter. But she can’t afford it.”

  “And Tig – what does he think?”

  “Tig won’t discuss it.”

  Lillie gave Nell a shrewd look. “What can you do?” she said.

  Nell knew what she could do. She’d had a windfall, a little inheritance, not much, but enough. She’d stowed it away in the bank, in a safe investment. It sat there accusingly, and was not mentioned.

  Lillie helped Nell find the house. The real-estate market was a white-hot feeding frenzy right then, properties were flipping so fast it made a person dizzy, said Lillie, so it wasn’t easy. Better Oona should have wanted a house when it was a buyers’ market, but life was life. Not only that, Oona had a list of requirements: no poor areas, she was terrified of being poor. Not too dark. Not too many stairs. A streetcar stop nearby. A store she could walk to. A garden.

  At first Lillie drove Oona around, always with one of the boys; but as she reported back to Nell, it was no use. “She wants a castle,” she said. “The boys tell her such houses are too big. They are suffering, these boys, they want that their mother should be happy, they are good sons. But she wants big. She wants bigger than yours.”

  “I can’t afford that,” said Nell.

  Lillie shrugged. “I told her. But she doesn’t believe.”

  After that it was Nell who went looking, with Lillie, in Lillie’s white car. Lillie drove crouched forward, as if skiing. In a couple of the narrower driveways they had trouble; Lillie ran over a hosta. Nell wondered about her eyesight. Nevertheless, they fou
nd something that fit the criteria, more or less: a two-storey semi-detached with a tiny back garden and a deck, and a glassed-in breakfast nook, and three small rooms upstairs.

  The sellers, two youngish men, sat on the sofa and watched the potential buyers trampling up their stairs. They’d arranged some potted plants in front of the main window – a geranium, a couple of ailing begonias – but that was the only concession they’d made. They hadn’t even vacuumed. In such a market, why bother?

  “Feh,” said Lillie in the cellar. “This junk will go. At least it’s dry. If a person was tall it would be a problem, but who’s tall? For doing the laundry, it’s not so bad. Upstairs, she can knock out a wall, put in a skylight, for one person it’s spacious, it could be charming, you know what I mean?”

  Nell and Lillie rushed into the real-estate office and put in the offer just in time. Half a day longer and it would have gone, said Lillie. Oona would pay rent: that was the arrangement she wanted, said the boys. She didn’t want Nell supporting her. The rent wouldn’t be enough to cover everything, but Oona didn’t know that.

  Nell and Oona were no longer on speaking terms; they hadn’t been for some time. The boys had been the go-betweens.

  It had been hard on the boys, Nell knew that. She felt sorry for them. She even felt sorry for Oona, though it took some effort. She decided she herself was not a generous person at heart. Some of her flakier friends – those into crystals and so forth – would have told her that Oona was payback for a bad thing she’d done in a previous life. They’d have said being nice to Oona was a task she’d been given. That was one way of looking at it, thought Nell. The other way was that she was a doormat.

  Nell closed the deal without telling Tig. When she did tell him, he said two things: You’re crazy. Thank you.

  “You are a good person,” said Lillie. She sent two bowls of hard cookies, and two notes on her flowered notepaper: one to Nell and one to Oona.

  For a short while all was tranquility. Nell felt virtuous, Oona felt safer and stopped complaining about the awfulness of Nell and Tig, Tig felt less worried, the boys felt free. Nell told her friends she’d made the right decision. She enjoyed their incredulity: after all the things Oona had said about Nell – that the friends knew Nell knew she’d said, because they themselves had been the messengers – Nell buys Oona a house? What kind of a saint did she think she was?

  Things needed to be fixed: with a house there’s always fixing, as Lillie pointed out. There was the front porch, there was the air conditioning, there was the painting – the boys helped with that. There was the roof; you didn’t get a roof done for nothing. But Oona had excellent taste, she’d always had it, and this was one of her powers that hadn’t deserted her. Once she’d got her furniture arranged, you wouldn’t have known the place. “She’s made it like new,” Lillie reported to Nell; for, like everyone else, Oona had taken a shine to Lillie, and had had her over to tea.

  But the state of equilibrium did not last. Oona’s health had improved at first, but now it was on the downturn. Her legs were shaky; she had trouble going up and down the stairs; she no longer felt she could walk to the corner store. The big containers for plants she’d put out on the deck were too much to water. She heard sounds at night – most likely just raccoons, though, as Lillie said, with sounds you never knew – and they frightened her. The boys put in an alarm system, but it went off once by mistake and that frightened Oona even more, so they took it out.

  Maybe all this fear was her medications, said the boys. She was on a new pill, or two, or three. She didn’t want to take these pills, she thought they were making her worse. In addition to that, she was convinced that she’d end up as a derelict on the street – that she’d use up her savings, that she’d run out of money, and that Nell – who was in effect her landlady – would kick her out.

  “I would never do that,” said Nell. But Oona thought she would.

  Underneath Oona’s expressions of fear was a wish that Nell would reduce or cancel the rent she was paying. One of the boys hinted at this. But Nell was running as fast as she could, financially speaking. In addition to that, she felt pushed too far. I’ve bent enough, she thought. One more bend and I’ll snap.

  The boys wanted Oona to move into an apartment – an affordable one, with an elevator. Oona couldn’t decide; she couldn’t climb stairs, but on the other hand elevators were constricting, like tunnels. She was working herself into a state, said the boys. She complained of insomnia. But after using up several real-estate agents and pursuing many possibilities that didn’t work out, they finally found something suitable. It was a one-bedroom, small but manageable; it would be safer; it would not be too much for Oona to handle. Oona reluctantly agreed. She didn’t want to move, but she didn’t want to stay where she was either.

  Nell called Lillie in to sell the house.

  “With furniture, it’s always better,” said Lillie. “A person can see possibilities. And this furniture is charming.” She wanted to hold an Open House, and Oona at last agreed to that. One of the boys would be there to help; the other would take her out for the day so she wouldn’t have to deal with the crowds of prospective buyers. Lillie would deal with them.

  As for Nell and Tig, they went to Europe – to Venice. They’d never been, they’d always wanted to go. With the money about to be freed up by the sale of the house – Oona’s house, everyone now called it – they could afford the trip.

  It was time for such a trip, Nell thought. The two of them needed to extract themselves from the slow grey whirlpool that swirled around Oona.

  Lillie manoeuvred her white car into the driveway, parked, levered herself out. She went up the front steps, one at a time: her feet were hurting more and more. She rang the doorbell. Oona was supposed to be there to let her in so she could check everything out, get ready for the Open House, but nobody answered.

  As Lillie stood on the front porch wondering what to do, the sons drove up. They too rang the bell. Then one of them – the elder – scaled the fence and climbed down via the plant containers, and looked in through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the glassed-in breakfast nook. Oona was lying on the floor.

  The son kicked in the glass, cutting a vein in his leg. Oona was dead. The doctor later said she’d been dead for several hours. She’d had a stroke. A cup of tea was still on the kitchen table. The son, holding his leg and trailing blood, hobbled to the front door and let in the others. An ambulance was called; the elder son lay on the floor with his leg in the air and the younger one tried to staunch the blood with tea towels. Lillie sat on the sofa in the living room, white as a sheet and trembling. “I have never seen such a terrible thing,” she said, over and over.

  Which, to Nell, when all of this was reported to her later, was the first sign that something was seriously wrong with Lillie, because this was not the most terrible thing that Lillie had ever seen. Not by a long shot.

  The Open House was cancelled, of course. You couldn’t sell a house with so much blood on the floor. But later – weeks later, once the furniture had been cleared out – Lillie tried again. Her heart wasn’t in it, though, Nell realized. She lacked her old enthusiasm, her conviction that better could come out of worse. Not only that, she was afraid of the house itself.

  “The house is dark,” she told Nell. “Nobody wants to live in such dark.” She suggested that the bushes could be pruned.

  Nell and Tig went over to the house. It wasn’t dark. If anything, it was a bit too bright: bright could mean hot, in summer. Nevertheless they lopped off some branches.

  “The cellar – it’s full of water,” said Lillie on the phone. She was upset. Tig drove over immediately. “The cellar’s dry as a bone,” he told Nell.

  Nell had Lillie over to tea. The daffodils were in bloom; Lillie gazed out the window at them. “What do you call those?” she said.

  “Lillie,” said Nell, “you don’t have to sell the house. Someone else can do it.”

  “I want to do it, for you,” sa
id Lillie. “You’ve had troubles.”

  “You think the house is dark,” said Nell.

  “I have never seen such a terrible thing,” said Lillie. “Terrible. There was such blood.”

  “It wasn’t Oona’s blood,” said Nell.

  “It was blood,” said Lillie.

  “You think Oona’s still in there,” said Nell.

  “You understand everything,” said Lillie.

  “I can take care of it,” said Nell. “I know people who do these things.”

  “You are a good person,” said Lillie, and Nell realized that Lillie was giving up, she was handing over. She was refusing to be the one who would understand, the one who would take care of everything. Nell would have to do that now, for Lillie.

  Nell called her feng shui friend, who found her an expert in crystals and purification. There was a fee: cash would be preferable, said the friend. “Fine,” said Nell. “Don’t tell her anything about Oona or dying. I want this to be a clean read.” Was Oona still in the house? Was she hindering the sale out of vengeance? Nell didn’t think so. She couldn’t imagine Oona doing anything so banal. But then, both of them had been guilty of equivalent banalities. The first wife, the second wife – they could have been typecast.

  Tig drove Nell over to the house, but stayed outside in the car. He wasn’t going to have anything to do with this. Nell let herself in with her key, and then she let in the crystal person, whose name was Susan. Susan was not a wispy sort of woman; instead she was athletic-looking, businesslike, matter-of-fact. She took the envelope with her cash payment and tucked it into her purse. “We’ll start with the top floor,” she said.

  Susan went over the house – into every room, down into the cellar, out onto the deck. In each area she stood still, with her head tilted to one side. Finally, she went into the kitchen.

  “There’s nobody in the house now,” she said, “but right here there’s a channel where the entities come and go.” She pointed to the breakfast nook.