Moral Disorder

by Margaret Atwood

  Lizzie had been born when Nell was eleven. She’d been an anxious baby and then an anxious child and then an anxious teenager, but now she was twenty-three. Nell hoped the anxiety would begin to wear off soon.

  It was her anxiety that caused Lizzie to pick away at the men, peeling them down through their callous and blemished outer layers to get at their pristine cores – at the good, kind hearts she believed were hidden inside them somewhere, like truffles or oil wells. The men didn’t seem to relish the process of being peeled, not in the long run. But no one could stop Lizzie from doing it. This would go on until some other man would come along, and then the former man would be archived.

  Lizzie and Nell had the same noses. They both bit their fingers. Other than that, there were differences. Nell looked the age she was, but Lizzie could have been mistaken for a fourteen-year-old. She was thin, delicate-looking, with big eyes the colour of blue-green hydrangeas. Hydrangeas were a flower she favoured; she had a list of other favourite flowers. She liked the ones with small petals.

  She thought Nell and Tig should plant some hydrangeas at the farm. She had other planting suggestions as well.

  Lizzie loved the farm. Certain of its aspects enraptured her – the apple blossoms, the wild plum trees along the fencelines, the swallows dipping over the pond. One beautiful day, Nell and Lizzie were sitting outside the back door making ice cream. The inner ice cream canister was turned by electricity; they’d run an extension cord into the house. The outer canister was packed with chipped ice and rock salt. Some of the cats were watching from a distance: they knew there was cream involved. Howl had been over to investigate but had been alarmed by the whirring noise the machine was making and had backed away, whimpering.

  As for Gladys, she was keeping an eye on them from the other side of the barnyard fence. She lived inside the barnyard now, because Nell had decided the sheep and cows would be company for her. After a short period of terrorizing the sheep by stampeding them around the barnyard, teeth bared, tail fully erect, she’d turned them into a herd of what she must have decided were dwarfish, woolly horses, and now bossed them around. They in turn had accepted her as a giant balding sheep, and followed her everywhere. She dealt with the cows and their lumbering attempts to monopolize the food supply by sneaking up on them and biting them; Nell had even witnessed a kick. These activities and the chance they gave her to express herself had improved her frame of mind immeasurably. She was now quite perky, like a housebound drudge recently widowed and in the process of discovering the pleasures of nail polish, hair salons, and bingo. Her diet was a thing of the past, Nell having been proven too feeble to enforce it.

  “Isn’t this normal?” said Nell, meaning the ice cream, the cats, the dog, Gladys looking over the fence – the whole bucolic scene. What she meant was domestic.

  “This air’s so great,” said Lizzie, breathing in. “You should stay here forever. You shouldn’t even bother going in to the city. When are you going to get rid of that rusty old machinery?”

  “It’s lawn sculpture. That would suit them,” said Nell. “They’d never have to see me again.”

  “They’ll get over it,” said Lizzie. “Anyway they live in the Middle Ages. Is it a harrow?”

  “They might like Gladys,” said Nell hopefully.

  “Gladys is beside the point,” said Lizzie.

  Nell thought about that. “Not to herself,” she said. “I think it’s actually a disker. The other one’s a drag harrow.”

  “They wouldn’t like Howl,” said Lizzie. “He’s too craven for them. What you need is a rusty old car.”

  “We’ve got one, we’re driving it,” said Nell. “He’s mentally deficient. I can see their point though. Everything’s different now. They aren’t used to it.”

  “That’s their problem,” said Lizzie, who despite her fragility could be tough when it came to other people, and especially other people who were doing wounding things to Nell.

  When Lizzie and Nell spoke together, they often left out the middle terms of thought sequences because they knew the other one would fill them in. Them meant their parents, in whose books – outdated, prudish books, according to Lizzie – only cheap, trashy women did things like living with married men.

  Lizzie was the messenger. She took it as her mission to assure their parents that Nell was not dying of any fatal disease, and to report to Nell that it was not yet time for the parents to meet Tig, of whom Lizzie approved, with reservations. First the parents would have to enter the twentieth century. Lizzie herself would be the judge of when that had happened.

  It’s fun for her to be the judge, thought Nell. She’s been on the judged end enough times. She probably has discussions with them about me. Me and my bad behaviour. Now I’m the problem child, for a change.

  “How’s Claude?” she said. Claude was Lizzie’s current man. He’d been away a lot, on trips, and had been offhand about his dates of return. He was away right now, and a week overdue.

  “There’s something wrong with my digestive system,” said Lizzie. What she meant was, I am feeling very anxious, because of Claude. “I think I have irritable bowel syndrome. I have to see a doctor about it.”

  “He just needs to grow up,” said Nell.

  “I mean, he might be dead or something,” said Lizzie. “He doesn’t get that part.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Tig, coming around the corner of the house. “Is the ice cream ready?”

  “You,” said Nell.

  Lizzie came up the next weekend. “What about your irritable bowel syndrome?” Nell asked her.

  “The doctor couldn’t find anything,” Lizzie said. “He referred me to a shrink. He thinks it’s psychological.”

  Nell didn’t think this was a totally bad idea. Maybe the shrink could do something about the anxiety, the crises, the troubles with men. Help Lizzie get some perspective.

  “Are you going to go?” she asked. “To the shrink?”

  “I’ve already been,” said Lizzie.

  A few weeks later, Lizzie came up again. She didn’t say much and seemed preoccupied. It was hard to wake her in the mornings. She was tired at lot of the time.

  “The shrink’s put me on a pill,” she said. “It’s supposed to help the anxiety.”

  “And has it?” said Nell.

  “I’m not sure,” said Lizzie.

  She hadn’t been to see their parents lately, she said. She hadn’t got around to it. She no longer seemed to care what the parents thought of Nell and her immoral lifestyle, a subject that had once been of much interest to her.

  Claude had departed, possibly for good. Lizzie expressed anger with him, but in a curiously detached way. There was no new man on the scene. She didn’t seem to care about that, either. She appeared to have shelved the plans she’d had – just a few weeks earlier – for going back to school in the fall. She’d been quite excited about it then, and hopeful. It was going to be a whole new chapter.

  Nell was concerned, but decided to wait and see.

  The weekend after that Lizzie was back again. She was walking stiffly and drooling a little. Her face lacked expression. She said she felt weak. Also she’d quit her temporary job, which had been in a sportswear store.

  “There’s something really wrong with Lizzie,” Nell said to Tig. She wondered if some malign influence in the back parlour – the same influence that had wreaked such havoc with the incubating chicks – was affecting Lizzie. The neighbourhood farmers had let it drop, almost casually, that the farmhouse was haunted: that was why it had been on the market for so long before Tig and Nell had bought it, as everyone with any sense had always known.

  Nell didn’t entirely believe in this haunting phenomenon and had seen no direct evidence of it. Still, Howl the dog wouldn’t go into that room, and sometimes barked at it. But this in itself proved nothing, as his phobias were numerous. Mrs. Roblin from up the road said some kids had once stolen a marble tombstone from the cemetery and used it for making pull taffy
in that house, which had been a bad idea: the ghost might have got in that way. Mrs. Roblin was considered to be an authority on such matters: she always took care never to have thirteen to dinner, and was said to be able to smell blood on the stairs whenever there was to be a violent death – a car crash, a lightning strike, a tractor rolling over and squashing its driver.

  Mrs. Roblin had told Nell to leave a meal on the table overnight, to let the ghost know it was welcome. (Nell, feeling foolish, had actually done this, in the middle of the previous winter, during a blizzard, when things had got a little too dark and foreboding. A slice of ham and some mashed potatoes were what she thought such a spirit might like. But Howl had snuck in somehow and eaten this food offering, and tipped over the glass of milk Nell had placed beside it, so leaving out the meal might not have accomplished much.)

  Could the rumoured haunting entity have got into Lizzie? But such a thought was ridiculous. Anyway, now that it was summer, the house did not seem very haunted after all.

  “It must be the pills,” said Tig.

  Neither of them knew much about pills. Nell decided to phone the shrink, whose name was Dr. Hobbs. She left a message with the secretary. After a few days, Dr. Hobbs phoned back.

  The conversation was very disturbing.

  Dr. Hobbs said that Lizzie was a schizophrenic, and that he had therefore put her on an antipsychotic drug. That would control the symptoms of her mental illness, which were many. He himself would see her once a week, though she would have to call ahead to set the time, as he was very busy and he would have to make a special effort to fit her in. Lizzie could drive into the city for these sessions, which would deal with her inability to adjust to real life. Meanwhile, said Dr. Hobbs, Lizzie would be incapable of holding down a job, going to school, or functioning independently. She would have to live with Nell and Tig.

  Why not with Nell’s parents? Nell asked, once she had caught her breath.

  “It’s her preference to live with you,” said Dr. Hobbs.

  Nell knew nothing about schizophrenia. Lizzie hadn’t ever seemed crazy to Nell, just sometimes very sorrowful and despondent, but maybe that was because Nell was used to her. She remembered that she and Lizzie had some odd uncles, so it might be genetic. But then, everyone had odd uncles. Or a lot of people did.

  “How do you know Lizzie’s a schizophrenic?” Nell said. She wanted to sit down – she felt sick to her stomach – but the telephone was on the wall and the cord was too short.

  Dr. Hobbs laughed in a condescending way. I’m the professional, his tone said. “It’s the word salad,” he said.

  “What is word salad?” said Nell.

  “She doesn’t make any sense when she talks,” said the doctor. Nell had never noticed this.

  “Are you sure?” she said.

  “Sure about what?” said Dr. Hobbs.

  “That she’s – what you say she is.”

  The doctor laughed again. “If she wasn’t a schizophrenic, these drugs she’s on would kill her,” he said. He then said that Nell should not say anything to Lizzie about the diagnosis. That was a delicate matter, and needed to be handled with care.

  Nell called him back the next week. She had trouble getting through – she left several messages – but she persisted, because Lizzie’s state was becoming more and more alarming. “What about the way she’s walking?” she asked. Lizzie’s hands were beginning to shake, she’d noticed. Dr. Hobbs said that the stiffness and the drooling and shaking were symptoms of Lizzie’s disease – all schizophrenics had those symptoms. Lizzie was just the age at which this disease manifested itself. A person could seem perfectly normal, and then in their late teens or early twenties, out came the schizophrenia, like some malignant blossom.

  “How long is this going to go on?” said Nell.

  “The rest of her life,” said Dr. Hobbs.

  Nell felt cold all over. Though Lizzie’d had some bad times in the past, Nell had never suspected anything like this.

  She discussed the situation with Tig after Lizzie had gone to bed. How would he feel, being saddled with a mad relative?

  “We’ll cope,” he said. “Maybe she’ll snap out of it.” Nell felt so grateful to him she almost wept.

  There were a lot of other things Nell needed to know over the next few months. How could Lizzie be trusted with driving a car – Tig’s old Chevy – back and forth to the city, with her body so stiff and her hands shaking like that? But Dr. Hobbs – whose tone was becoming more and more hostile, as if he felt Nell was pestering him – said that was fine, Lizzie was perfectly capable of driving.

  He also said he hadn’t told Lizzie the truth about her condition yet because she wasn’t ready for that news. She was hallucinating about some man called Claude, he said; she was convinced Claude was dead. Also she’d been suicidal when she’d come to him. But he could guarantee that she wouldn’t commit suicide any time soon.

  “Why not?” said Nell. She’d thought that I’m going to kill myself was a figure of speech for Lizzie, as it was for her. Now it appeared she’d been wrong; nevertheless she felt preternaturally calm. She was getting used to these fragments of nightmare that kept coming at her out of the mouth of Dr. Hobbs.

  But Dr. Hobbs appeared to be confused about who she was: he seemed to think that she and Tig were Lizzie’s parents. Nell carefully explained the actual relationship, but every time she spoke with him she had to remind him about it.

  Meanwhile, Lizzie’s real parents – Nell’s parents – had gone into shock. But they were talking to Nell again, or at least her mother was. “I don’t know what to do,” she would say. It was a plea – Don’t send her back here! It was as if Lizzie had committed some shameful, unmentionable act – something in between a social gaffe and a crime.

  Then Nell’s mother would ask plaintively, “When is she going to get better?” As if Nell had any special insights.

  “I’m sure the doctor knows what’s right,” Nell would say. She still believed that anyone with a medical degree must know what he was talking about. She needed to believe that: she put some effort into it. “You should come up to the farm and see my horse,” she added. “You like horses. Her name is Gladys. You could go for a ride.” But her mother was too distressed by Lizzie’s plight.

  Nell herself hadn’t been riding Gladys much, because she was pregnant. She didn’t want to be thrown off a horse and lose the baby, as happened in novels. She hadn’t yet shared her knowledge with Tig, however.

  What would it be like if the baby arrived and Lizzie was still like this? How could she manage?

  By now it was September. Nell tried to get Lizzie to help her with the preserving, but it was no use: Lizzie was too tired. Nell set a bowl of red currants in front of her and asked her to pick off the stems – that wouldn’t be too hard – but Lizzie couldn’t seem to manage it. She sat at the table, gazing into space, with her pathetic little mound of picked-over currants shoved to one side.

  “He doesn’t like me,” she said. “The doctor.”

  “Why wouldn’t he like you?” said Nell.

  “Because I’m not getting better,” said Lizzie.

  Tig had been doing some research of his own. “This guy isn’t making any sense,” he said. “Those pills won’t kill you if you aren’t schizophrenic – how could they? You’d have a lot of corpses to explain.”

  “But why would he tell us that?” said Nell.

  “Because he’s a fraud,” said Tig.

  “I think we need a second opinion,” said Nell.

  The new doctor they found was an expert in antipsychotic drugs. “Lizzie shouldn’t have been put on this,” she told Nell. “I’m taking her off it.” The stiffness, the trembling, the weakness – all those were by no means the symptoms of a disease. They were produced by the drug itself, and once the stuff was out of Lizzie’s system they would go away.

  Not only that, Lizzie should never have been allowed to drive a car while so heavily medicated, said the new doctor. Her life
had been in danger every minute she’d been behind the wheel.

  “If I ever met that creep on the street I’d shoot him,” Nell said to Tig. “If I had a gun.”

  “Lucky you don’t know what he looks like,” said Tig.

  “I bet he thought we were hillbillies,” said Nell. “Because we live on a farm. I bet he thought he could tell us any old thing, and we’d believe it.” Which had in fact been the case, they had believed it. “He must’ve thought we were dumb as a sack of hammers. I wonder if he believed any of it himself? If so, he’s a lunatic!”

  “Hillbillies?” said Tig. “Where did you dig up that word? Though we’ve got the farm machinery for it!” Then they both started to laugh, and hugged each other, and Nell told him about the baby, and it was all fine.

  Nell felt tremendous relief at the new turn of events – she wouldn’t have to look after a drooling, shambling Lizzie for the rest of her life – but she also felt a shiver of fear. Lizzie would not go back to being the way she was before Dr. Hobbs got hold of her: her interlude as a zombie would have changed her. She would now be someone else, someone as yet unknown. Also, Nell was well aware that Lizzie would consider her own actions a betrayal. And Lizzie would be right – they were a betrayal. If Nell had been the supposed schizophrenic, Lizzie wouldn’t have put up with Dr. Hobbs and his toxic gobbledegook for two seconds.

  “Why didn’t you tell me what he thought?” Lizzie said to Nell, once she was no longer tranquilized. Now, instead, she was furious. “You should have asked me! I could have told you I wasn’t a schizophrenic!”

  Useless for Nell to say that once you think someone’s unhinged you don’t trust their word, especially on the subject of their own mental health. So she didn’t say it.

  “He told me you had word salad,” Nell said weakly.

  “He told you I had what?”

  “He said you didn’t make sense.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake! I talked to him the same way I talk to you!” said Lizzie. “We skip the middles of sentences, you know that. He just had trouble following me. He couldn’t get from A to C! I had to spell things out for him. He was just plain, ordinary stupid!”