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Moral Disorder and Other Stories by Margaret Atwood
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(Hardcover)
- Pub. Date: September 2006
- 240pp
- Sales Rank: 648,287
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: September 2006
- Publisher: Doubleday Publishing
- Format: Hardcover, 240pp
- Sales Rank: 648,287
- ISBN-13: 9780385503846
- ISBN: 0385503849
The Barnes & Noble Review
One of the silliest ideas about the uses of fiction is that it should offer lessons in how one should live. But sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, Margaret Atwood manages to cram so much spiky wisdom into her work that sometimes they do seem like a primer in the lives of intellectual women of the 20th century. The stories in Moral Disorder do not quite add up to a novel, nor are they explicitly linked. Some are told in first person; others in third. But taken together, they may comprise the life of one woman, with a husband named Tig and a difficult younger sister, offered up in slices from different decades. The collection begins with a couple in late middle age, juxtaposing the cozy breakfast table togetherness with the daily ritual of absorbing the bad news from the world. Atwood's woman -- called Nell in some of the stories -- grows up with conventional expectations in the '50s, genuinely fascinated with homemaking manuals and knitting a layette set for her much younger sister, for whom she will serve as a nearly surrogate parent. During the '60s and '70s, she is in turn an unmarried scholar, a step-parent, and a second wife living on a rural farm. Atwood's particular genius has always been a lack of squeamishness at showing how women can sabotage each other. This comes out especially well in a section on the "dumb bunnies" of classic literature, told from the viewpoint of a high school girl, and the character of Oona, the purportedly feminist, extremely high maintenance first wife of Nell's husband for whom Nell does several extraordinary favors. Atwood, of course, belongs nowhere near the self-help section, but her characters wrestle with the big problems of daily life with an intellectual intensity that feels nearly instructive. --Amy Benfer
More Reviews and RecommendationsSynopsis
Atwood triumphs with these dazzling, personal stories in her first collection since Wilderness Tips.
In these ten interrelated stories Atwood traces the course of a life and also the lives intertwined with it, while evoking the drama and the humor that color common experiences — the birth of a baby, divorce and remarriage, old age and death. With settings ranging from Toronto, northern Quebec, and rural Ontario, the stories begin in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe. Then the narrative goes back in time to the forties and moves chronologically forward toward the present.
By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, tragic, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, MORAL DISORDER displays Atwood’s celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage. This is vintage Atwood, writing at the height of her powers
The Washington Post - A. S. Byatt
Moral Disorder is a perfect title—apparently one from a novel abandoned by Atwood's husband, which fits. And the work, with its isolated tales, some in the first person, some in the third, is a perfect shape for contemplating life and death. It is like our memories: There are things that persist in refusing to be forgotten, are as clear as the day they happened, whereas all sorts of more apparently significant things vanish into dust or persist only in old newspapers and fashion magazines. A life, unlike a biography, does not unfold in a neat progression. Nor is it entirely incoherent. Each of these stories coheres round a defined patch of Nell's life, and each has its own cluster of brilliantly described and unforgettable things, which are as important as the people.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Accomplished in equal measure as a poet, novelist, and essayist, Margaret Atwood is as much a dazzling storyteller as she is a committed feminist. Her novels and stories educate as much as they entertain, but without ever veering into dogmatism.
More About the AuthorFact File
Name:
Margaret Atwood
Current Home:
Toronto, Ontario
Date of Birth:
November 18, 1939
Place of Birth:
Ottawa, Ontario
Education:
B.A., University of Toronto, 1961; M.A. Radcliffe, 1962; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1967
Awards:
Governor General's Award, 1986; Harvard University Centennial Medal, 1990; Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin, 2000
Biography
When Margaret Atwood announced to her friends that she wanted to be a writer, she was only 16 years old. It was Canada. It was the 1950s. No one knew what to think. Nonetheless, Atwood began her writing career as a poet. Published In 1964 while she was still a student at Harvard, her second poetry anthology, The Circle Game, was awarded the Governor General's Award, one of Canada's most esteemed literary prizes. Since then, Atwood has gone on to publish many more volumes of poetry (as well as literary criticism, essays, and short stories), but it is her novels for which she is best known.
Atwood's first foray into fiction was 1966's The Edible Woman, an arresting story about a woman who stops eating because she feels her life is consuming her. Grabbing the attention of critics, who applauded its startlingly original premise, the novel explored feminist themes Atwood has revisited time and time again during her long, prolific literary career. She is famous for strong, compelling female protagonists -- from the breast cancer survivor in Bodily Harm to the rueful artist in Cat's Eye to the fatefully intertwined sisters in her Booker Prize-winning novel The Blind Asassin.
Perhaps Atwood's most legendary character is Offred, the tragic "breeder" in what is arguably her most famous book, 1985's The Handmaid's Tale. Part fable, part science fiction, and part dystopian nightmare, this novel presented a harrowing vision of women's lives in an oppressive futuristic society. The Washington Post compared it (favorably) to George Orwell's iconic 1984.
As if her status as a multi-award-winning, triple-threat writer (fiction, poetry, and essays) were not enough, Atwood has also produced several children's books, including Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995) and Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003) -- delicious alliterative delights that introduce a wealth of new vocabulary to young readers.
Feature Interview
An interview with Margaret Atwood Most of your previous novels have female protagonists. Was it a conscious decision to have a male protagonist for Oryx and Crake, or did Snowman simply present himself to you?
Snowman did present himself to me, yes, dirty bedsheet and all. For this novel, a woman would have been less possible. Or let's say that the story would have been quite different. If we are writers, we all have multiple selves. Also, I've known a lot of male people in my life, so I had a lot to draw on.
When The Handmaid's Tale was published, Contemporary Authors listed your religion as "Pessimistic Pantheist," which you defined as the belief that "God is everywhere, but losing." Is this still an accurate description of your spiritual philosophy?
I expect you don't have the foggiest what I meant in the first place. On bad days, neither do I. But let's argue it through.
Biblical version, see Genesis: God created the heaven and the earth -- out of nothing, we presume. Or else: out of God, since there was nothing else around that God could use as substance.
Big Bang theory: says much the same, without using the word "God." That is: once there was nothing, or else "a singularity." Then Poof. Big Bang. Result: the universe.
So since the universe can't be made of anything else, it must be made of singularity-stuff, or God-stuff -- whatever term you wish to employ. Whether this God-stuff was a thought form such as a series of mathematical formulae, an energy form, or some sort of extremely condensed cosmic plasma, is open to discussion.
Therefore everything has "God" in it.
The forms of "God", both inorganic and organic, have since multiplied exceedingly. You might say that each new combination of atoms, molecules, amino acids, and DNA is a different expression of "God." Therefore each time we terminate a species, "God" becomes more limited.
The human race is terminating species at an alarming rate. It is thereby diminishing God, or the expressions of God.
If I were the Biblical God I would be very annoyed. He made the thing and saw that it was good. And now people are scribbling all over the artwork.
It is noteworthy that the covenant made by God after the flood was not just with Noah, but with every living thing. I assume that the "God's Gardeners" organization in Oryx and Crake used this kind of insight as a cornerstone of their theology.
Is that any clearer?
You grew up among biologists; the "boys at the lab" mentioned in the novel's acknowledgements are the grad students and post-docs who worked with your father at his forest-insect research station on northern Quebec. Does being a novelist make you an anomaly in your family? Is writing fiction much different from doing science?
My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way. My father was a great reader, of fiction, poetry, history -- a lot of biologists are. It is of course a "life science." So I wouldn't say I was an anomaly in the family. We all did both. We were omnivores. (I read then -- and still read -- everything, including cereal packages. No factoid too trivial!)
The family itself was an anomaly, but that's another story. I do have an aunt who writes children's stories. I was not exactly isolated and misunderstood. I was probably egged on, at least by some. I don't think they were expecting the results, but then, neither was I.
Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth. The experiments of science should be replicable, and those of literature should not be (why write the same book twice)?
Please don't make the mistake of thinking that Oryx and Crake is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it's neutral.
The driving force in the world today is the human heart -- that is, human emotions. (Yeats, Blake -- every poet, come to think of it -- has always told us that.) Our tools have become very powerful. Hate, not bombs, destroys cities. Desire, not bricks, rebuilds them. Do we as a species have the emotional maturity and the wisdom to use our powerful tools well? Hands up, all who think the answer is Yes. Thank you, sir. Would you like to buy a gold brick?
You've mentioned the fact that while you were writing about fictional catastrophes in Oryx and Crake, a real one occurred on September 11. Did that experience cause you to change the storyline in any way?
No, I didn't change the plot. I was too far along for that. But I almost abandoned the book. Real life was getting creepily too close to my inventions - not so much the Twin Towers as the anthrax scare. That turned out to be limited in extent, but only because of the limitations of the agent used.
It's an old plot, of course - poisoning the wells. As for blowing things up, the Anarchists were at it for fifty years in the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries. Joseph Conrad has a novel about it (The Secret Agent). So does Michael Ondaatje (In the Skin of a Lion). And the Resistance in World War Two devoted itself to such things. The main object of these kinds of actions is to sow panic and dismay.
Though the book's premise is serious, you included many wordplays and moments of deadpan humour. Was this difficult to achieve, or did it arrive naturally during the storytelling process?
My relatives are all from Nova Scotia. That's sort of like being from Maine. The deadpan humour, the scepticism about human motives, and the tendency to tell straight-faced lies for fun, to see if you can get the listener to believe them.
The French have an expression: "Anglo-Saxon humour." It isn't the same as wit. It's dark; it's when something is funny and awful at the same time. "Gallows humour" is called that partly because highwaymen about to be hanged were much admired if they could crack a joke in the face of death.
When things are really dismal, you can laugh or you can cave in completely. Jimmy tries to laugh, though some of the time he's pretty out of control, as most of us would be in his position. But if you can laugh, you're still alive. You haven't given up yet.
Author interview courtesy of Random House, Inc.
The Barnes & Noble Review
One of the silliest ideas about the uses of fiction is that it should offer lessons in how one should live. But sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, Margaret Atwood manages to cram so much spiky wisdom into her work that sometimes they do seem like a primer in the lives of intellectual women of the 20th century. The stories in Moral Disorder do not quite add up to a novel, nor are they explicitly linked. Some are told in first person; others in third. But taken together, they may comprise the life of one woman, with a husband named Tig and a difficult younger sister, offered up in slices from different decades. The collection begins with a couple in late middle age, juxtaposing the cozy breakfast table togetherness with the daily ritual of absorbing the bad news from the world. Atwood's woman -- called Nell in some of the stories -- grows up with conventional expectations in the '50s, genuinely fascinated with homemaking manuals and knitting a layette set for her much younger sister, for whom she will serve as a nearly surrogate parent. During the '60s and '70s, she is in turn an unmarried scholar, a step-parent, and a second wife living on a rural farm. Atwood's particular genius has always been a lack of squeamishness at showing how women can sabotage each other. This comes out especially well in a section on the "dumb bunnies" of classic literature, told from the viewpoint of a high school girl, and the character of Oona, the purportedly feminist, extremely high maintenance first wife of Nell's husband for whom Nell does several extraordinary favors. Atwood, of course, belongs nowhere near the self-help section, but her characters wrestle with the big problems of daily life with an intellectual intensity that feels nearly instructive. --Amy Benfer
From the Publisher
Atwood triumphs with these dazzling, personal stories in her first collection since Wilderness Tips.
In these ten interrelated stories Atwood traces the course of a life and also the lives intertwined with it, while evoking the drama and the humour that colour common experiences — the birth of a baby, divorce and remarriage, old age and death. With settings ranging from Toronto, northern Quebec, and rural Ontario, the stories begin in the present, as a couple no longer young situate themselves in a larger world no longer safe. Then the narrative goes back in time to the forties and moves chronologically forward toward the present.
In “The Art of Cooking and Serving,” the twelve-year-old narrator does her best to accommodate the arrival of a baby sister. After she boldly declares her independence, we follow the narrator into young adulthood and then through a complex relationship. In “The Entities,” the story of two women haunted by the past unfolds. The magnificent last two stories reveal the heartbreaking old age of parents but circle back again to childhood, to complete the cycle.
By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, tragic, earthy, shocking, and deeply personal, Moral Disorder displays Atwood’s celebrated storytelling gifts and unmistakable style to their best advantage. This is vintage Atwood, writing at the height of her powers.
From the Hardcover edition.
The Washington Post - A. S. Byatt
Moral Disorder is a perfect title—apparently one from a novel abandoned by Atwood's husband, which fits. And the work, with its isolated tales, some in the first person, some in the third, is a perfect shape for contemplating life and death. It is like our memories: There are things that persist in refusing to be forgotten, are as clear as the day they happened, whereas all sorts of more apparently significant things vanish into dust or persist only in old newspapers and fashion magazines. A life, unlike a biography, does not unfold in a neat progression. Nor is it entirely incoherent. Each of these stories coheres round a defined patch of Nell's life, and each has its own cluster of brilliantly described and unforgettable things, which are as important as the people.
The New York Times - Alice Truax
One doubts that Atwood herself believes in happy endings because an ending, by its very nature, can't be happy. Inevitable extinction is the private apocalypse we all face. Perhaps that's why in this collection, dedicated to her family, Atwood too has left a trail of breadcrumbs in the forest—"for anyone who might be following, trying to find her." But it isn't these clues that hold us in thrall, or even the particulars of the woman who scattered them; it's the ferocious, fecund intelligence that invented that forest and everything in it—including its wild dogs. Even as Atwood reminds us that her bad news is also our own, the tremendous imaginative power of her fiction allows us to believe that anything is possible.
Publishers Weekly
An intriguing patchwork of poignant episodes, Atwood's latest set of stories (after The Tent) chronicles 60 years of a Canadian family, from postwar Toronto to a farm in the present. The opening piece of this novel-in-stories is set in the present and introduces Tig and Nell, married, elderly and facing an uncertain future in a world that has become foreign and hostile. From there, the book casts back to an 11-year-old Nell excitedly knitting garments for her as yet unborn sister, Lizzie, and continues to trace her adolescence and young adulthood; Nell rebels against the stern conventions of her mother's Toronto household, only to rush back home at 28 to help her family deal with Lizzie's schizophrenia. After carving out a "medium-sized niche" as a freelance book editor, Nell meets Oona, a writer, who is bored with her marriage to Tig. Oona has been searching for someone to fill "the position of second wife," and she introduces Nell to Tig. Later in life, Nell takes care of her once vital but now ravaged-by-age parents. Though the episodic approach has its disjointed moments, Atwood provides a memorable mosaic of domestic pain and the surface tension of a troubled family. (Sept. 19) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
This collection of 11 interconnected short stories opens as a Canadian woman named Nell and her longtime partner, Gilbert (known as Tig), face aging together into an uncertain future. Subsequent tales go back into Nell's childhood-spent partly in the Canadian wilderness with her entomologist father-and proceeds through her adolescence and academic career, culminating in a series of teaching and editing positions. The stories also move through North American cities and lovers and Nell's relationship with Tig, his two adolescent sons, and their life on a farm. "White Horse" is a strong and evocative account of Nell's relationship with younger sister Lizzie, who is schizophrenic, and with Gladys, a white horse rescued from neglect. The final three tales, "The Entities," "The Labrador Fiasco," and "The Boys at the Lab," bring us full circle to the themes of aging and death, as witnessed by caretakers. In these reflective selections, Atwood, one of North America's most prominent and prolific authors (e.g., The Handmaid's Tale, the Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin) turns inward, as autobiographical as she has been to date. The result is alternatively humorous and heart-wrenching, occasionally sardonic and always brutally honest in the depiction of our often contorted relationships with one another, with nature, and with ourselves. Demand will be high. Recommended for all fiction and literature collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/06.]-Jenn B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll.-Northeast Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The stages of a woman's life and loves are presented in 11 elegantly linked episodes, in the Booker-winning Canadian author's latest collection. Atwood (The Tent, Jan. 2006, etc.) mingles omniscient with first-person narrative, moving backward and forward in time through nearly seven decades, to portray her (initially unnamed) sentient protagonist, a freelance journalist and sometime teacher whose eventual commitment to writing seems born of the secrets and evasions into which a lifetime of relationships and responsibilities propels her. We first meet her (in "The Bad News") as an elderly woman who lives with her longtime companion, Gilbert (nicknamed "Tig"), in a menacing imagined future shaped by environmental and political catastrophes and further imperiled by approaching "barbarians." Next, scenes from her childhood disclose complex feelings toward her somewhat distant mother and the younger sister (Lizzie) she's obliged to help raise, and-while garbed for Halloween as "The Headless Horseman"-resentment of Lizzie's increasingly irrational fears and mood swings. The agonies of being a sensitive teen and a socially challenged "brain" are beautifully captured in "My Last Duchess." Then, Nell (finally named, when Atwood shifts into omniscient narration) finds something less than happiness when the aforementioned Tig leaves his flamboyant, demanding wife Oona for her, and Nell's energies are subsumed for years in caring for him, his two sons, the infuriating Oona and, once again, her unstable, possibly schizophrenic sibling. The final stories are concerned with her aging parents' last days and the legacy of photographs, stories and memories that comprise her family's inchoate history andpoint the way toward a fulfillment perhaps implicit in the jumble of false starts and unresolved commitments that her life has hitherto been. Crisp prose, vivid detail and imagery and a rich awareness of the unity of human generations, people and animals, and Nell's own exterior and inmost selves, make this one of Atwood's most accessible and engaging works yet.
Product Details
- Pub. Date: September 2006
- Publisher: Doubleday Publishing
- Format: Hardcover, 240pp
- Sales Rank: 648,287
- ISBN-13: 9780385503846
- ISBN: 0385503849
Reading Group Guide
1. Discuss the form and structure of the book. How was your reading affected by the fact that Moral Disorder is neither a novel nor a collection of freestanding stories? What freedoms does this form provide both the author and the reader? What was the impact of the shift in point of view from first person to third person? In what way did these shifts correspond to the shifts in Nell's life?
2. A starred review of Moral Disorder appearing in Kirkus Reviews describes Nell as “a freelance journalist and sometime teacher whose eventual commitment to writing seems born of the secrets and evasions into which a lifetime of relationships and responsibilities propels her.” What is your understanding of Nell's impulse as a writer? In what way does being a writer shape her approach to the world around her?
3. How did you first interpret Tig's news that “they just killed the leader of the interim governing council” in “The Bad News” [p. 1]? How did you respond to the narrator's frustrated musings on Tig's words and on the violent history of the world?
4. Why does the narrator find Sarah Field Splint's domestic ideals so appealing in “The Art of Cooking and Serving”? How does she feel about the maid shown in the photographs, both in daytime dress and more formal afternoon attire? When you were a teenager, where did you look for role models and fantasies about your future?
5. What accounts for the sisters' tremendous differences in “The Headless Horseman”? How did their mother address these differences? How did their perceptions of her, and of each other, change throughout theirlifetimes?
6. In “My Last Duchess,” what personal woes do the narrator and her boyfriend project onto the poem? Obtain a copy of this Robert Browning classic and read it as a group. Whose interpretation do you favor? Was the duchess a victim, or a tart? Would the count have been concerned about his daughter's fate?
7. What does the narrator want from a home and a city in “The Other Place”? How is she changed by her encounters with Owen?
8. How would you characterize Oona, who is introduced in “Monopoly”? As “governess,” should Nell have let the boys win at games? How did she adapt to the other new worlds to which Tig introduced her?
9. What meaning did you ascribe to the title of the featured story, “Moral Disorder”? Did you think of disorder in terms of disarray, or in terms of a malfunction or medical condition? In the title story, what morality, if any, does Nell find in nature, from the profusion of crops to the demise of the lamb in the ending? How does the title apply to the collection as a whole?
10. Do Lizzie and Gladys share common ground in “White Horse”? What allows Lizzie to become freed from misdiagnosis and saved from attempted suicide? Why couldn't Gladys be rescued?
11. What was the real reason Nell felt compelled to house Oona in “The Entities”? In the closing lines of this story Atwood writes, “In the end, we'll all become stories. Or else we'll become entities. Maybe it's the same” [p. 188]. What entities have you left behind in various houses?
12. In “The Labrador Fiasco,” the story of the doomed explorers sets an ominous tone as the narrator's father copes with life after a stroke. She concludes the story by saying he is right to doubt her skill. What universal emotions are captured here, as parents reach the point of needing their children to become their guides?
13. In “The Boys at the Lab,” we are told that the narrator's mother only allows happy endings. How would you characterize the ending of her story? What is the significance of the book's closing image—the memory of the aristocratic Indian venturing into raw wilderness?
14. Compare Moral Disorder to the Atwood fiction you have read previously. Are there traces of her signature themes, such as dystopia or violated trusts, in these stories? What new territory does this collection chart?
Read an Excerpt
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 fixingthe 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 head 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.
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.
From the Hardcover edition.
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