Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

“There are no limits to human greed,” says my father.

“Indeed, sir?” says Mr. Banerji, as my father goes on to say that he’s heard some son of a gun is working on an experiment to breed a turkey with four drumsticks, instead of two drumsticks and two wings, because there’s more meat on a drumstick.

“How would such a creature walk, sir?” asks Mr. Banerji, and my father, approving, says, “Well may you ask.” He tells Mr. Banerji that some darn fool scientists are working on a square tomato, which will supposedly pack more easily into crates than the round variety.

“All the flavor will be sacrificed, of course,” he says. “They care nothing for flavor. They bred a naked chicken, thinking they’d get more eggs by utilizing the energy saved from feather production, but the thing shivered so much they had to double-heat the coop, so it cost more in the end.”

“Fooling with Nature, sir,” says Mr. Banerji. I know already that this is the right response. Investigating Nature is one thing and so is defending yourself against it, within limits, but fooling with it is quite another. Mr. Banerji says he hears there is now a naked cat available, he’s read about it in a magazine, though he himself does not see the point of it at all. This is the most he has said so far. My brother asks if there are any poisonous snakes in India, and Mr. Banerji, now much more at ease, begins to enumerate them. My mother smiles, because this is going better than she thought it would. Poisonous snakes are fine with her, even at the dinner table, as long as they make people happy. My father has eaten everything on his plate and is dig ging for more stuffing in the cavity of the turkey, which resembles a trussed, headless baby. It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird. I’m eating a wing. It’s the wing of a tame turkey, the stupidest bird in the world, so stupid it can’t even fly any more. I am eating lost flight.

Chapter 25

A fter Christmas I’m offered a job. The job is wheeling Brian Finestein around the block in his baby carriage after school, for an hour or a little longer if it isn’t too cold, one day a week. For this I get twenty-five cents, which is a lot of money.

The Finesteins live in the house beside ours, the big house that was built suddenly where the mud mountain used to be. Mrs. Finestein is short for a woman, plump, with dark curly hair and lovely white teeth. These show often, as she laughs a lot, wrinkling up her nose like a puppy as she does it, shaking her head, which makes her gold earrings twinkle. I’m not sure, but I think these earrings actually go through little holes in her ears, unlike any earrings I have ever seen. I ring the doorbell and Mrs. Finestein opens the door. “My little lifesaver,” she says. I wait in the vestibule, my winter boots dripping onto the spread newspapers. Mrs. Finestein, wearing a flowered pink housecoat and slippers with high heels and real fur, bustles upstairs to get Brian. The vestibule smells of Brian’s ammonia-soaked diapers, which are in a pail waiting to be collected by the diaper company. I’m intrigued by the idea that someone else can come and take away your laundry. Mrs. Finestein always has a bowl of oranges out, on a table up a few steps from the vestibule; no one else leaves oranges lying around like that when it isn’t Christmas. There’s a gold-colored candlestick like a tree behind the bowl. These things—the sickly sweet baby shit smell of the festering diapers, the bowl of oranges and the gold tree—blend in my mind into an image of ultrasophistication.

Mrs. Finestein clops down the stairs carrying Brian, who is zipped into a blue bunny suit with ears. She gives him a big kiss on his cheek, joggles him up and down, tucks him into the carriage, snaps up the waterproof carriage cover. “There, Bry-Bry,” she says. “Now Mummy can hear herself think.” She laughs, wrinkles her nose, shakes her gold earrings. Her skin is rounded out, milky-smelling. She’s not like any mother I’ve ever seen.

I wheel Brian out into the cold air and we start off around the block, over the crunchy snow which is spread with cinders from people’s furnaces and dotted here and there with frozen horse buns. I can’t figure out how Brian would ever be able to interfere with Mrs. Finestein’s thinking, because he never cries. Also he never laughs. He never makes any noises at all, nor does he go to sleep. He just lies there in his carriage, gazing solemnly up at me with his round blue eyes as his button of a nose gets redder and redder. I make no attempt to entertain him. But I like him: he’s silent, but also uncritical. When I think it’s time I wheel him back, and Mrs. Finestein says, “Don’t tell me it’s five o’clock already!” I ask her to give me nickels instead of a quarter, because it looks like more. She laughs a lot at that, but she does it. I keep all my money in an old tin tea caddy with a picture of the desert on it, palm trees and camels. I like taking it out and spreading it over my bed. Instead of counting it, I arrange it by the year that’s stamped on each piece of money: 1935, 1942, 1945. Every coin has a King’s head on it, cut off neatly at the neck, but the Kings are different. The ones from before I was born have beards, but the ones now don’t, because it’s King George, the one at the back of the classroom. It gives me an odd comfort to sort this money into piles of cut-off heads.

Brian and I wheel around the block, around the block again. It’s hard for me to tell when it’s an hour because I don’t have a watch. Cordelia and Grace come around the corner up ahead, with Carol trailing. They see me, walk over.

“What rhymes with Elaine?” Cordelia asks me. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Elaine is a pain.”

Carol peers into the baby carriage. “Look at the bunny ears,” she says. “What’s his name?” Her voice is wistful. I see Brian in a new light. It isn’t everyone who’s allowed to wheel a baby.

“Brian,” I say. “Brian Finestein.”

“Finestein is a Jewish name,” says Grace.

I don’t know what Jewish is. I’ve seen the word Jew, the Bible is full of that word, but I didn’t know there were any live, real ones, especially next door to me.

“Jews are kikes,” says Carol, glancing at Cordelia for approval.

“Don’t be vulgar,” says Cordelia, in her adult voice. “Kike is not a word we use.”

I ask my mother what Jewish is. She says it’s a different kind of religion. Mr. Banerji is a different kind of religion as well, though not Jewish. There are many different kinds. As for the Jews, Hitler killed a great many of them, during the war.

“Why?” I say.

“He was demented,” says my father. “A megalomaniac.” Neither of these words is much help.

“A bad person,” says my mother.

I wheel Brian over the cindery snow, easing him around the potholes. He goggles up at me, his nose red, his tiny mouth unsmiling. Brian has a new dimension: he is a Jew. There is something extra and a little heroic about him; not even the blue ears of his bunny suit can detract from that. Jewish goes with the diapers, the oranges in the bowl, Mrs. Finestein’s gold earrings and her possibly real ear holes, but also with ancient, important matters. You wouldn’t expect to see a Jew every day. Cordelia and Grace and Carol are beside me. “How’s the little baby today?” asks Cordelia.

“He’s fine,” I say guardedly.

“I didn’t mean him, I meant you,” says Cordelia.

“Can I have a turn?” asks Carol.

“I can’t,” I tell her. If she does it wrong, if she upsets Brian Finestein into a snowbank, it will be my fault.

“Who wants an old Jew baby anyway,” she says.