Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

“You coming out to play?” says Cordelia, on our way home from school.

“I have to help my mother,” I say.

“Again?” says Grace. “How come she does that so much? She never used to do it.” Grace has begun talking about me in the third person, like one grown-up to another, when Cordelia is there. I think of saying my mother is sick, but my mother is so obviously healthy I know I won’t get away with this.

“She thinks she’s too good for us,” says Cordelia. Then, to me: “Do you think you’re too good for us?”

“No,” I say. Thinking you are too good is bad.

“We’ll come and ask your mother if you can play,” says Cordelia, switching back to her concerned, friendly voice. “She won’t make you work all the time. It isn’t fair.”

And my mother smiles and says yes, as if she’s pleased that I’m so much in demand, and I am pried away from the muffin cups and the washing machine wringer, expelled into the outside air. On Sundays I go to the church with the onion on top of it, crammed into the Smeaths’ car with all the Smeaths, Mr. Smeath, Mrs. Smeath, Aunt Mildred, Grace’s younger sisters, whose nostrils in the winter season are forever plugged with yellowy-green snot. Mrs. Smeath seems pleased about this arrangement, but she is pleased with herself, for going out of her way, for displaying charity. She’s not especially pleased with me. I can tell this by the line between her eyebrows when she looks at me, although she smiles with her closed lips, and by the way she keeps asking whether I wouldn’t like to bring my brother next time, or my parents? I focus on her chest, on her single breast that goes all the way down to her waist, with her dark-red, black-spotted heart beating within it, gasping in out, in out, out of breath like a fish on shore, and shake my head, ashamed. My failure to produce these other members of my family tells against me.

I have memorized the names of all the books of the Bible, in order, and the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, and most of the Beatitudes. I’ve been getting ten out of ten on my Bible quizzes and my memory work, but I’m beginning to falter. In Sunday school we have to stand up and recite, out loud, in front of the others, and Grace watches me. She watches everything I do on Sundays, and reports on me, matter-of-factly, to Cordelia.

“She didn’t stand up straight in Sunday school yesterday.” Or: “She was a goody-goody.” I believe each of these comments: my shoulders sag, my spine crumples, I exude the wrong kind of goodness; I see myself shambling crookedly, I make an effort to stand straighter, my body rigid with anxiety. And it’s true that I got ten out of ten, again, and Grace only got nine. Is it wrong to be right? How right should I be, to be perfect? The next week I put five wrong answers, deliberately.

“She only got five out of ten on Bible,” Grace says on Monday.

“She’s getting stupider,” Cordelia says. “You aren’t really that stupid. You’ll have to try harder than that!”

Today is White Gift Sunday. We have all brought cans of food from home for the poor, wrapped up in white tissue paper. Mine are Habitant pea soup and Spam. I suspect they are the wrong things, but they’re what my mother had in the cupboard. The idea of white gifts bothers me: such hard gifts, made uniform, bleached of their identity and colors. They look dead. Inside those blank, sinister bundles of tissue paper piled up at the front of the church there could be anything. Grace and I sit on the wooden benches in the church basement, watching the illuminated slides on the wall, singing the words to the songs, while the piano plods onward in the darkness. Jesus bids us shine

With a pure, clear light,

Like a little candle

Burning in the night:

In this world is darkness;

So let us shine,

You in your small corner,

And I in mine.

I want to shine like a candle. I want to be good, to follow instructions, to do what Jesus bids. I want to believe you should love your neighbors as yourself and the Kingdom of God is within you. But all of this seems less and less possible.

In the darkness I can see a gleam of light, to the side. It’s not a candle: it’s light reflected back off Grace’s glasses, from the light on the wall. She knows the words by heart, she doesn’t have to look at the screen. She’s watching me.

After church I go with the Smeaths through the vacant Sunday streets to watch the trains shunting monotonously back and forth along their tracks, on the gray plain beside the flat lake. Then I go back to their house for Sunday dinner. This happens every Sunday now, it’s part of going to church; it would be very bad if I said no, to either thing.

I’ve learned the way things are done here. I climb the stairs past the rubber plant, not touching it, and go into the Smeaths’ bathroom and count off four squares of toilet paper and wash my hands afterward with the gritty black Smeath soap. I no longer have to be admonished, I bow my head automatically when Grace says, “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful, Amen.”

“Pork and beans the musical fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot,” says Mr. Smeath, grinning round the table. Mrs. Smeath and Aunt Mildred do not think this is funny. The little girls regard him solemnly. They both have glasses and white freckled skin and Sunday bows on the ends of their brown wiry braids, like Grace.

“Lloyd,” says Mrs. Smeath.

“Come on, it’s harmless,” Mr. Smeath says. He looks me in the eye. “Elaine thinks it’s funny. Don’t you, Elaine?”

I am trapped. What can I say? If I say no, it could be rudeness. If I say yes, I have sided with him, against Mrs. Smeath and Aunt Mildred and all three of the Smeath girls, including Grace. I feel myself turn hot, then cold. Mr. Smeath is grinning at me, a conspirator’s grin.

“I don’t know,” I say. The real answer is no, because I don’t in fact know what this joke means. But I can’t abandon Mr. Smeath, not entirely. He is a squat, balding, flabby man, but still a man. He does not judge me.

Grace repeats this incident to Cordelia, next morning, in the school bus, her voice a near whisper. “She said she didn’t know.”

“What sort of an answer was that?” Cordelia asks me sharply. “Either you think it’s funny or you don’t. Why did you say ”I don’t know‘?“

I tell the truth. “I don’t know what it means.”

“You don’t know what what means?”

“Musical fruit,” I say. “The more you toot.” I am now deeply embarrassed, because I don’t know. Not knowing is the worst thing I could have done.

Cordelia gives a hoot of contemptuous laughter. “You don’t know what that means?” she says. “What a stupe! It means fart. Beans make you fart. Everyone knows that.”

I am doubly mortified, because I didn’t know, and because Mr. Smeath said fart at the Sunday dinner table and enlisted me on his side, and I did not say no. It isn’t the word itself that makes me ashamed. I’m used to it, my brother and his friends say it all the time, when there are no adults listening. It’s the word at the Smeath dinner table, stronghold of righteousness.

But inwardly I do not recant. My loyalty to Mr. Smeath is similar to my loyalty to my brother: both are on the side of ox eyeballs, toe jam under the microscope, the outrageous, the subversive. Outrageous to whom, subversive of what? Of Grace and Mrs. Smeath, of tidy paper ladies pasted into scrapbooks. Cordelia ought to be on this side too. Sometimes she is, sometimes she isn’t. It’s hard to tell.

Chapter 24

I n the mornings the milk is frozen, the cream risen in icy, granular columns out of the bottle necks. Miss Lumley bends over my desk, her invisible navy-blue bloomers casting their desolating aura around her. On either side of her nose the skin hangs down, like the jowls of a bulldog; there’s a trace of dried spit in the corner of her mouth. “Your handwriting is deteriorating,” she says. I look at my page in dismay. She’s right: the letters are no longer round and beautiful, but spidery, frantic, and disfigured with blots of black rusty ink where I’ve pressed down too hard on the steel nib. “You must try harder.” I curl my fingers under. I think she’s looking at the ragged edges of skin. Everything she says, everything I do, is heard and seen by Carol and will be reported later.