Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning. But it pleases me somehow to cut out all these imperfect women, with their forehead wrinkles that show how worried they are, and fix them into my scrapbook. At noon there’s the Happy Gang, on the radio, knocking at the door.

Knock knock knock.

Who’s there?

It’s the Happy Gang!

Well, come ON IN.!

Keep happy in the Happy Gang way,

Keep healthy, hope you re feeling okay,

Cause if you’re happy, and healthy,

The heck with being wealthy,

So he happy with the Happy Gang!

The Happy Gang fills me with anxiety. What happens to you if you aren’t happy and healthy? They don’t say. They themselves are always happy, or say they are; but I can’t believe anyone can be always happy. So they must be lying some of the time. But when? How much of their fake-sounding laughter is really fake?

A little later there’s the Dominion Observatory Official Time Signal: first a series of outer space beeps, then silence, then a long dash. The long dash means one o’clock. Time is passing; in the silence before the long dash the future is taking shape. I turn my head into the pillow. I don’t want to hear it.

Chapter 27

T he winter melts, leaving a grubby scum of cinders, wet paper, soggy old leaves. A huge pile of topsoil appears in our backyard, then a pile of rolled-up squares of grass. My parents, in muddy boots and earth-stained pants, lay them over our mud like bathroom tiles. They pull out couch grass and dandelions, plant green onions and a row of lettuce. Cats appear from nowhere, scratching and squatting in the soft, newly planted earth, and my father throws clumps of dug-up dandelions at them. “Dad-ratted cats,” he says.

The buds turn yellow, the skipping ropes come out. We stand in Grace’s driveway, beside her dark pink crab apple tree. I turn the rope, Carol turns the other end, Grace and Cordelia skip. We look like girls playing.

We chant:

Not last night but the night before

Twenty-four robbers come to my back door

And this is what they said…to…me!

Lady turn around, turn around, turn around,

Lady touch the ground, touch the ground, touch the ground;

Lady show your shoe, show your shoe, show your shoe,

Lady, lady, twenty-four skiddoo!

Grace, skipping in the middle, turns around, touches the driveway, kicks up one foot sedately, smiling her little smile. She rarely trips.

This chant is menacing to me. It hints at an obscure dirtiness. Something is not understood: the robbers and their strange commands, the lady and her gyrations, the tricks she’s compelled to perform, like a trained dog. And what does “twenty-four skiddoo” mean, at the end of it? Is she scooted out the door of her house while the robbers remain inside, free to take anything they like, break anything, do whatever they want? Or is it the end of her altogether? I see her dangling from the crab apple tree, the skipping rope noosed around her neck. I am not sorry for her.

The sun shines, the marbles return, from wherever they’ve been all winter. The voices of the children rise in the schoolyard: purie, purie, bowlie, bowlie, two for one. They sound to me like ghosts, or like animals caught in a trap: thin wails of exhausted pain.

We cross the wooden bridge on the way home from school. I am walking behind the others. Through the broken boards I can see the ground below. I remember my brother burying his jar full of puries, of waterbabies and cat’s eyes, a long time ago, down there somewhere under the bridge. The jar is still there in the earth, shining in the dark, in secret. I think about myself going down there alone despite the sinister unseen men, digging up the treasure, having all that mystery in my hands. I could never find the jar, because I don’t have the map. But I like to think about things the others know nothing about. I retrieve my blue cat’s eye from where it’s been lying all winter in the corner of my bureau drawer. I examine it, holding it up so the sunlight burns through it. The eye part of it, inside its crystal sphere, is so blue, so pure. It’s like something frozen in the ice. I take it to school with me, in my pocket, but I don’t set it up to be shot at. I hold on to it, rolling it between my fingers.

“What’s that in your pocket?” says Cordelia.

“Nothing,” I say. “It’s only a marble.”

It’s marble season; everyone has marbles in their pockets. Cordelia lets it pass. She doesn’t know what power this cat’s eye has, to protect me. Sometimes when I have it with me I can see the way it sees. I can see people moving like bright animated dolls, their mouths opening and closing but no real words coming out. I can look at their shapes and sizes, their colors, without feeling anything else about them. I am alive in my eyes only.

We stay in the city later than we’ve ever stayed before. We stay until school ends for the summer and the daylight lasts past bedtime and wet heat descends over the streets like a steaming blanket. I drink grape Freshie, which does not taste like grapes but like something you might use to kill insects, and wonder when we’re going to leave for the north. I tell myself it will be never, so I won’t be disappointed. But despite my cat’s eye I know I can’t stand to be here in this place much longer. I will burst inward. I’ve read in the National Geographic about deepsea diving and why you have to wear a thick metal suit or the invisible pressure of the heavy undersea water will crush you like mud in a fist, until you implode. This is the word: implode. It has a dull final sound to it, like a lead door closing. I sit in the car, packed into the back seat like a parcel. Grace and Cordelia and Carol are standing among the apple trees, watching. I hunch down, avoiding them. I don’t want to pretend, to undergo goodbyes. As the car moves away they wave.

We drive north. Toronto is behind us, a smear of brownish air on the horizon, like smoke from a distant burning. Only now do I turn and look.

The leaves get smaller and yellower, folding back toward the bud, and the air crisps. I see a raven by the side of the road, picking at a porcupine that’s been run over by a car, its quills like a huge burr, its guts pink and scrambled like eggs. I see the northern granite rock rising straight up out of the ground with the road cut through it. I see a raggedy lake with dead trees stuck into the marsh around the edges. A sawdust burner, a fire tower.

Three Indians stand beside the road. They aren’t selling anything, no baskets and it’s too early for blueberries. They just stand there as if they’ve been doing it for a long time. They’re familiar to me but only as scenery. Do they see me as I stare at them out of the car window? Probably not. I’m a blur to them, one more face in a car that doesn’t stop. I have no claim on them, or on any of this. I sit in the back seat of the car that smells of gasoline and cheese, waiting for my parents, who are buying groceries. The car is beside a wooden general store, saggy and weathered gray, stuck together by the signs nailed all over the outside of it: BLACK CAT CIGARETTES, PLAYERS, COCA-COLA. This isn’t even a village, just a wide place in the highway, beside a bridge beside a river. Once I would have wanted to know the river’s name. Stephen stands on the bridge, dropping pieces of wood upstream, timing how long it takes them to come out the other side, calculating the rate of flow. The blackflies are out. Some of them are in the car, crawling up the window, jumping, crawling up again. I watch them do this: I can see their hunched backs, their abdomens like little black-red bulbs. I squash them against the glass, leaving red smears of my own blood.