Moral Disorder - Softcover

Atwood, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844080331 ISBN 13: 9781844080335

Publisher: Virago, 2010

Synopsis

Short stories by perennial Nobel short-listed author Margaret Atwood.

About this title

About the Author:

MARGARET ATWOOD’s books have been published in over thirty-five countries. She is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid's Tale, her novels include Cat's Eye—shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; and her most recent, Oryx and Crake—shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2003. She lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

THE HEADLESS HORSEMANFor 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 it — 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, f...

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1844080331
• ISBN 13: 9781844080335
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272