Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

“The Jews killed Christ,” says Grace primly. “It’s in the Bible.”

But Jews don’t interest Cordelia much. She has other things on her mind. “If a man who catches fish is a fisher, what’s a man who catches bugs?” she says.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“You are so stupid,” says Cordelia. “That’s what your father is, right? Go on. Figure it out. It’s really simple.”

“A bugger,” I say.

“Is that what you think of your own father?” Cordelia says. “He’s an entomologist, stupid. You should be ashamed. You should have your mouth washed out with soap.”

I know that bugger is a dirty word, but I don’t know why. Nevertheless I have betrayed, I have been betrayed. “I nave to go,” I say. Wheeling Brian back to Mrs. Finestein’s, I cry silently, while Brian watches me, expressionless. “Goodbye, Brian,” I whisper to him.

I tell Mrs. Finestein that I can’t do the job any more because I have too much schoolwork. I can’t tell her the real reason: that in some obscure way Brian is not safe with me. I have images of Brian headfirst in a snowbank; Brian hurtling in his carriage down the icy hill by the side of the bridge, straight toward the creek full of dead people; Brian tossed into the air, his bunny ears flung upwards in terror. I have only a limited ability to say no.

“Honey, that’s all right,” she says, looking into my raw, watery eyes. She puts her arm around me and gives me a hue and an extra nickel. No one has ever called me honey before this. I go home, knowing I have failed her, and also myself. Bugger, I think to myself. I say it over and over until it disappears into its own syllables. Erbug, erbug. It’s a word with no meaning, like kike, but it reeks of ill will, it has power. What have I done to my father?

I take all of Mrs. Finestein’s King’s-head nickels and spend them at the store on the way home from school. I buy licorice whips, jelly beans, many-layered blackballs with the seed in the middle, packages of fizzy sherbet you suck up through a straw. I dole them out equally, these offerings, these atonements, into the waiting hands of my friends. In the moment just before giving, I am loved.

Chapter 26

I t’s Saturday. Nothing has happened all morning. Icicles form on the eaves trough above the south window, dripping in the sunlight with a steady sound like a leak. My mother is baking in the kitchen, my father and brother are elsewhere. I eat my lunch alone, watching the icicles. The lunch is crackers and orange cheese and a glass of milk, and a bowl of alphabet soup. My mother thinks of alphabet soup as a cheerful treat for children. The alphabet soup has letters floating in it, white letters: capital A’s and O’s and S’s and R’s, the occasional X or Z. When I was younger I would fish the letters out and spell things with them on the edge of the plate, or eat my name, letter by letter. Now I just eat the soup, taking no particular interest. The soup is orangey-red and has a flavor, but the letters themselves taste like nothing.

The telephone rings. It’s Grace. “You want to come out and play?” she says, in her neutral voice that is at the same time blank and unsoft, like glazed paper. I know Cordelia is standing beside her. If I say no, I will be accused of something. If I say yes, I will have to do it. I say yes.

“We’ll come and get you,” Grace says.

My stomach feels dull and heavy, as if it’s full of earth. I put on my snowsuit and boots, my knitted hat and mittens. I tell my mother I’m going out to play. “Don’t get chilled,” she says. The sun on the snow is blinding. There’s a crust of ice over the drifts, where the top layer of snow has melted and then refrozen. My boots make clean-edged footprints through the crust. There’s no one around. I walk through the white glare, toward Grace’s house. The air is wavery, filled with light, overfilled; I can hear the pressure of it against my eyes. I feel translucent, like a hand held over a flashlight or the pictures of jellyfish I’ve seen in magazines, floating in the sea like watery flesh balloons. At the end of the street I can see the three of them, very dark, walking toward me. Their coats look almost black. Even their faces when they come closer look too dark, as if they’re in shadow. Cordelia says, “We said we would come and get you. We didn’t say you could come here.”

I say nothing.

Grace says, “She should answer when we talk to her.”

Cordelia says, “What’s the matter, are you deaf?”

Their voices sound far away. I turn aside and throw up onto a snowbank. I didn’t mean to do it and didn’t know I was going to. I feel sick to my stomach every morning, I’m used to that, but this is the real thing, alphabet soup mixed with shards of chewed-up cheese, amazingly red and orange against the white of the snow, with here and there a ruined letter.

Cordelia doesn’t say anything. Grace says, “You better go home.” Carol, behind them, sounds as if she’s going to cry. She says, “It’s on her face.” I walk back toward my house, smelling the vomit on the front of my snow-suit, tasting it in my nose and throat. It feels like bits of carrot. I lie in bed with the scrub pail beside me, floating lightly on waves of fever. I throw up several times, until nothing but a little green juice comes out. My mother says, “I suppose we’ll all get it,” and she’s right. During the night I can hear hurrying footsteps and retching and the toilet flushing. I feel safe, small, wrapped in my illness as if in cotton wool.

I begin to be sick more often. Sometimes my mother looks into my mouth with a flashlight and feels my forehead and takes my temperature and sends me to school, but sometimes I’m allowed to stay home. On these days I feel relief, as if I’ve been running for a long time and have reached a place where I can rest, not forever but for a while. Having a fever is pleasant, vacant. I enjoy the coolness of things, the flat ginger ale I’m given to drink, the delicacy of taste, afterward.

I lie in bed, propped up on pillows, a glass of water on a chair beside me, listening to the faraway sounds coming from my mother: the eggbeater, the vacuum cleaner, music from the radio, the lakeshore sound of the floor polisher. Winter sunlight slants in through the window, between the half-drawn curtains. I now have curtains. I look at the ceiling light fixture, opaque yellowish glass with the shadows of two or three dead flies caught inside it showing through as if through cloudy jelly. Or I look at the doorknob. Sometimes I cut things out of magazines and paste them into a scrapbook with LePage’s mucilage, from the bottle that looks like a chess bishop. I cut out pictures of women, from Good Housekeeping, The Ladies’ Home Journal, Chatelaine. If I don’t like their faces I cut off the heads and glue other heads on. These women have dresses with puffed sleeves and full skirts, and white aprons that tie very tightly around their waists. They put germ killers onto germs, in toilet bowls; they polish windows, or clean their spotty complexions with bars of soap, or shampoo their oily hair; they get rid of their unwanted odors, rub hand lotion onto their rough wrinkly hands, hug rolls of toilet paper against their cheeks. Other pictures show women doing things they aren’t supposed to do. Some of them gossip too much, some are sloppy, others bossy. Some of them knit too much. “Walking, riding, standing, sitting, Where she goes, there goes her knitting,” says one. The picture shows a woman knitting on a streetcar, with the ends of her knitting needles poking into the people beside her and her ball of wool unrolling down the aisle. Some of the women have a Watchbird beside them, a red and black bird like a child’s drawing, with big eyes and stick feet. “This is a Watchbird watching a Busybody,” it says. “This is a Watchbird watching YOU.”