Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

As for the girls, my girls at any rate, they seem to have been born with some kind of protective coating, some immunity I lacked. They look you in the eye, level and measuring, they sit at the kitchen table and the air around lights up with their lucidity. They are sane, or so I like to think. My saving graces. They amaze me, they always have. When they were little I felt I had to protect them from certain things about myself, the fear, the messier parts of the marriages, the days of nothing. I didn’t want to pass anything on to them, anything of mine they would be better off without. At those times I would lie on the floor in the dark, with the curtains drawn and the door closed. I would say, Mummy has a headache. Mummy’s working. But they didn’t seem to need that protection, they seemed to take everything in, look at it straight, accept everything. “Mummy’s in there lying on the floor. She’ll be fine tomorrow,” I heard Sarah tell Anne when one was ten and the other was four. And so I was fine. Such faith, like the faith in sunrise or the phases of the moon, sustained me. It must be this sort of thing that keeps God going.

Who knows what they’ll make of me later on, who knows what they’ve already made of me? I would like them to be the happy end of my story. But of course they are not the end of their own. Someone comes up behind me, a sudden voice out of thin air. She startles me. “May I help you?” It’s a saleslady, an older woman this time. Middle-aged. My age, I then think, discouraged. Mine and Cordelia’s.

I’m standing among the plaid dresses, fingering a sleeve. God knows how long I’ve been doing it. Have I been talking out loud? My throat feels tight and my feet hurt. But whatever else may be in store for me, I do not intend to slide off my trolley tracks in the middle of Simpsons Girlswear.

“The food hall,” I say.

She smiles gently. She is tired, and I am a disappointment to her, I don’t want any plaid. “Oh, you need to be right downstairs,” she says, “in the cellar.” Kindly, she directs me.

Chapter 22

T he black door opens. I’m sitting in the mouse-dropping and formaldehyde smell of the building, on the window ledge, with the heat from the radiator going up my legs, watching out the window as the fairies and gnomes and snowballs below me slog through the drizzle to the tune of “Jingle Bells” played by a brass band. The fairies look foreshortened, damaged, streaked by the dust and rain on the window glass; my breath makes a foggy circle. My brother isn’t here, he’s too old for it. This is what he said. I have the whole window ledge to myself.

On the window ledge beside mine, Cordelia and Grace and Carol are sitting, jammed in together, whispering and giggling. I have to sit on a window ledge by myself because they aren’t speaking to me. It’s something I said wrong, but I don’t know what it is because they won’t tell me. Cordelia says it will be better for me to think back over everything I’ve said today and try to pick out the wrong thing. That way I will learn not to say such a thing again. When I’ve guessed the right answer, then they will speak to me again. All of this is for my own good, because they are my best friends and they want to help me improve. So this is what I’m thinking about as the pipe band goes past in sodden fur hats, and the drum majorettes with their bare wet legs and red smiles and dripping hair: what did I say wrong? I can’t remember having said anything different from what I would ordinarily say. My father walks into the room, wearing his white lab coat. He’s working in another part of the building, but he’s come to check on us. “Enjoying the parade, girls?” he says.

“Oh yes, thank you,” Carol says, and giggles. Grace says, “Yes, thank you.” I say nothing. Cordelia gets down off her windowsill and slides up onto mine, sitting close beside me.

“We’re enjoying it extremely, thank you very much,” she says in her voice for adults. My parents think she has beautiful manners. She puts an arm around me, gives me a little squeeze, a squeeze of complicity, of instruction. Everything will be all right as long as I sit still, say nothing, reveal nothing. I will be saved then, I will be acceptable once more. I smile, tremulous with relief, with gratitude. But as soon as my father is out of the room Cordelia turns to face me. Her expression is sad rather than angry. She shakes her head. “How could you?” she says. “How could you be so impolite? You didn’t even answer him. You know what this means, don’t you? I’m afraid you’ll have to be punished. What do you have to say for yourself?” And I have nothing to say.

I’m standing outside the closed door of Cordelia’s room. Cordelia, Grace, and Carol are inside. They’re having a meeting. The meeting is about me. I am just not measuring up, although they are giving me every chance. I will have to do better. But better at what?

Perdie and Mirrie come up the stairs, along the hall, in their armor of being older. I long to be as old as they are. They’re the only people who have any real power over Cordelia, that I can see. I think of them as my allies; or I think they would be my allies if they only knew. Knew what? Even to myself I am mute.

“Hello, Elaine,” they say. Now they say, “What’s the little game today? Hide-and-seek?”

“I can’t tell,” I answer. They smile at me, condescending and kind, and head toward their room, to do their toenails and talk about older things.

I lean against the wall. From behind the door comes the indistinct murmur of voices, of laughter, exclusive and luxurious. Cordelia’s Mummie drifts by, humming to herself. She’s wearing her painting smock. There’s a smudge of apple-green on her cheek. She smiles at me, the smile of an angel, benign but remote. “Hello, dear,” she says. “You tell Cordelia there’s a cookie for you girls, in the tin.”

“You can come in now,” says the voice of Cordelia from inside the room. I look at the closed door, at the doorknob, at my own hand moving up, as if it’s no longer a part of me. This is how it goes. It’s the kind of thing girls of this age do to one another, or did then, but I’d had no practice in it. As my daughters approached this age, the age of nine, I watched them anxiously. I scrutinized their fingers for bites, their feet, the ends of their hair. I asked them leading questions: “Is everything all right, are your friends all right?” And they looked at me as if they had no idea what I was talking about, why I was so anxious. I thought they’d give themselves away somehow: nightmares, moping. But there was nothing I could see, which may only have meant they were good at deception, as good as I was. When their friends arrived at our house to play, I scanned their faces for signs of hypocrisy. Standing in the kitchen, I listened to their voices in the other room. I thought I would be able to tell. Or maybe it was worse. Maybe my daughters were doing this sort of thing themselves, to someone else. That would account for their blandness, the absence of bitten fingers, their level blue-eyed gaze.

Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence, but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

It turns colder and colder. I lie with my knees up, as close to my body as I can get them. I’m peeling the skin off my feet; I can do it without looking, by touch. I worry about what I’ve said today, the expression on my face, how I walk, what I wear, because all of these things need improvement. I am not normal, I am not like other girls. Cordelia tells me so, but she will help me. Grace and Carol will help me too. It will take hard work and a long time.