Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

Breasts fascinate Cordelia, and fill her with scorn. Both of her older sisters have them by now. Perdie and Mirrie sit in their room with its twin beds and sprigged-muslin flounces, filing their nails, laughing softly; or they heat brown wax in little pots in the kitchen and take it upstairs to spread on their legs. They look into their mirrors, making sad faces—“I look like Haggis McBaggis! It’s the curse!” Their wastebaskets smell of decaying flowers.

They tell Cordelia there are some things she’s too young to understand, and then they tell these things to her anyway. Cordelia, her voice lowered, her eyes big, passes on the truth: the curse is when blood comes out between your legs. We don’t believe her. She produces evidence: a sanitary pad, filched from Perdie’s wastebasket. On it is a brown crust, like dried gravy. “That’s not blood,” Grace says with disgust, and she’s right, it’s nothing like when you cut your finger. Cordelia is indignant. But she can prove nothing.

I haven’t thought much about grown-up women’s bodies before. But now these bodies are revealed in their true, upsetting light: alien and bizarre, hairy, squashy, monstrous. We hang around outside the room where Perdie and Mirrie are peeling the wax off their legs while they utter yelps of pain, trying to see through the keyhole, giggling: they embarrass us, although we don’t know why. They know they’re being laughed at and come to the door to shoo us away. “Cordelia, why don’t you and your little friends bug off!” They smile a little ominously, as if they know already what is in store for us. “Just wait and see,”

they say.

This frightens us. Whatever has happened to them, bulging them, softening them, causing them to walk rather than run, as if there’s some invisible leash around their necks, holding them in check—whatever it is, it may happen to us too. We look surreptitiously at the breasts of women on the street, of our teachers; though not of our mothers, that would be too close for comfort. We examine our legs and underarms for sprouting hairs, our chests for swellings. But nothing is happening: so far we are safe. Cordelia turns to the back pages of the catalogue, where the pictures are in gray and black and there are crutches and trusses and prosthetic devices. “Breast pumps,” she says. “See this? It’s for pumping your titties up bigger, like a bicycle pump.” And we don’t know what to believe. We can’t ask our mothers. It’s hard to imagine them without clothes, to think of them as having bodies at all, under their dresses. There’s a great deal they don’t say. Between us and them is a gulf, an abyss, that goes down and down. It’s filled with wordlessness. They wrap up the garbage in several layers of newspaper and tie it with string, and even so it drips onto the freshly waxed floor. Their clotheslines are strung with underpants, nighties, socks, a display of soiled intimacy, which they have washed and rinsed, plunging their hands into the gray curdled water. They know about toilet brushes, about toilet seats, about germs. The world is dirty, no matter how much they clean, and we know they will not welcome our grubby little questions. So instead a long whisper runs among us, from child to child, gathering horror. Cordelia says that men have carrots, between their legs. They aren’t really carrots but something worse. They’re covered with hair. Seeds come out the end and get into women’s stomachs and grow into babies, whether you want it or not. Some men have their carrots pierced and rings set into them as if they are ears.

Cordelia’s unclear about how the seeds get out or what they’re like. She says they’re invisible, but I think this can’t be so. If there are seeds at all they must be more like bird seeds, or carrot seeds, long and fine. Also she can’t say how the carrot gets in, to plant the seeds. Belly buttons are the obvious choice, but there would have to be a cut, a tear. The whole story is questionable, and the idea that we ourselves could have been produced by such an act is an outrage. I think of beds, where all of this is supposed to take place: the twin beds at Carol’s house, always so tidy, the elegant canopy bed at Cordelia’s, the dark mahogany-colored bed in Grace’s house, heavily respectable with its crocheted spread and layers of woolen blankets. Such beds are a denial in themselves, a repudiation. I think of Carol’s wry-mouthed mother, of Mrs. Smeath with her hairpinned crown of graying braids. They would purse their lips, draw themselves up in a dignified manner. They would not permit it.

Grace says, “God makes babies,” in that final way of hers, which means there is nothing more to be discussed. She smiles her buttoned-up disdainful smile, and we are reassured. Better God than us. But there are doubts. I know, for instance, a lot of things. I know that carrot is not the right word. I’ve seen dragonflies and beetles, flying around, stuck together, one on the back of the other; I know it’s called mating. I know about ovipositors, for laying eggs, on leaves, on caterpillars, on the surface of the water; they’re right out on the page, clearly labeled, on the diagrams of insects my father corrects at home. I know about queen ants, and about the female praying mantises eating the males. None of this is much help. I think of Mr. and Mrs. Smeath, stark-naked, with Mr. Smeath stuck to the back of Mrs. Smeath. Such an image, even without the addition of flight, will not do. I could ask my brother. But, although we’ve examined scabs and toe jam under the microscope, although we aren’t worried by pickled ox eyes and gutted fish and whatever can be found under dead logs, putting this question to him would be indelicate, perhaps hurtful. I think of JUPITER scrolled on the sand in his angular script, by his extra, dextrous finger. In Cordelia’s version it will end up covered with hair. Maybe he doesn’t know.

Cordelia says boys put their tongues in your mouth when they kiss you. Not any boys we know, older ones. She says this the same way my brother says “slug juice” or “snot” when Carol’s around, and Carol does the same thing, the same wrinkle of the nose, the same wriggle. Grace says that Cordelia is being disgusting.

I think about the spit you sometimes see, downtown, on the sidewalk; or cow’s tongues in butcher’s shops. Why would they want to do such a thing, put their tongues in other people’s mouths? Just to be repulsive, of course. Just to see what you would do.

Chapter 18

I go up the cellar stairs, which have black rubber stair treads nailed onto them. Mrs. Smeath is standing at the kitchen sink in her bib apron. She’s finished her nap and now she’s upright, getting supper. She’s peeling potatoes; she often peels things. The peel falls from her large knuckly hands in a long pale spiral. The paring knife she uses is worn so thin its blade is barely more than a crescent moon sliver. The kitchen is steamy, and smells of marrow fat and stewing bones.

Mrs. Smeath turns and looks at me, a skinless potato in her left hand, the knife in her right. She smiles.

“Grace says your family don’t go to church,” she says. “Maybe you’d like to come with us. To our church.”

“Yes,” says Grace, who has come up the stairs behind me. And the idea is pleasing. I’ll have Grace all to myself on Sunday mornings, without Carol or Cordelia. Grace is still the desirable one, the one we all want.

When I tell my parents about this plan they become anxious. “Are you sure you really want to go?” my mother says. When she was young, she says, she had to go to church whether she liked it or not. Her father was very strict. She couldn’t whistle on Sundays. “Are you really sure?”

My father says he doesn’t believe in brainwashing children. When you’re grown up, then you can make up your own mind about religion, which has been responsible for a lot of wars and massacres in his opinion, as well as bigotry and intolerance. “Every educated person should know the Bible,” he says.