Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

I’ve begun to feel not gladness, but relief. My throat is no longer tight, I’ve stopped clenching my teeth, the skin on my feet has begun to grow back, my fingers have healed partially. I can walk without seeing how I look from the back, talk without hearing the way I sound. I go for long periods without saying anything at all. I can be free of words now, I can lapse back into wordlessness, I can sink back into the rhythms of transience as if into bed.

This summer we’re in a rented cabin on the north shore of Lake Superior. There are a few other cottages around, most of them empty; there are no other children. The lake is huge and cold and blue and treacherous. It can sink freighters, drown people. In a wind the waves roll in with the crash of oceans. Swimming in it doesn’t frighten me at all. I wade into the freezing water, watching my feet and then my legs go down into it, long and white and thinner than on land.

There’s a wide beach, and to one end of it a colony of boulders. I spend time among them. They’re rounded, like seals, only hard; they heat up in the sun, and stay warm in the evening when the air cools. I take pictures of them with my Brownie camera. I give them the names of cows. Above the beach, on the dunes, there are beach plants, fuzzy mulleins and vetch with its purple flowers and tiny bitter peapods, and grasses that will cut your legs; and behind that the forest, oak and moose maple and birch and poplar, with balsam and spruce among them. There’s poison ivy sometimes. It’s a secretive, watchful forest, though hard to get lost in, so close to the shore. Walking in the forest I find a dead raven. It’s bigger than they look alive. I poke it with a stick, turning it over, and see the maggots. It smells like rot, like rust, and, more strangely, like some sort of food I’ve eaten once but can’t remember. It’s black, but not like a color; more like a hole. Its beak is dingy, horn-colored, like old toenails. Its eyes are shriveled up.

I’ve seen dead animals before, dead frogs, dead rabbits, but this raven is deader. It looks at me with its shriveled-up eye. I could poke this stick right through it. No matter what I do to it, it won’t feel a thing. No one can get at it.

It’s hard to fish from the shore of this lake. There’s nowhere to stand, no dock. We aren’t allowed out in a boat by ourselves because of the currents; anyway we have no boat. Stephen is doing other things. He makes a collection of the boat funnels from the lake freighters, checking them through binoculars. He sets up chess problems and works them out, or splits kindling, or goes for long walks by himself with a butterfly book. He isn’t interested in catching the butterflies and mounting them on a board with pins; he just wants to see them, identify them, count them. He writes them down in a list at the back of the book. I like looking at the pictures of butterflies in his book. My favorite is the luna moth, huge and pale green, with crescents on the wings. My brother finds one of these, and shows it to me. “Don’t touch it,” he says.

“Or the dust will come off its wings, and then it can’t fly.”

But I don’t play chess with him. I don’t start my own list of boat funnels or butterflies. I’m ceasing to be interested in games I can’t win.

Along the edges of the forest, where there’s open sunlight, there are chokecherry trees. The red chokecherries ripen and turn translucent. They’re so sour they dry up the inside of your mouth. I pick them into a lard pail, then sort out the dead twigs and leaves, and my mother makes jelly from them, boiling them up, straining the pits out through a cloth jelly bag, adding sugar. She pours the jelly into hot jars, capping them with paraffin wax. I count the beautiful red jars. I helped make them. They look poisonous.

As if I’ve been given permission I begin to dream. My dreams are brightly colored and without sound. I dream that the dead raven is alive, only it looks the same, it still looks dead. It hops around and flaps its decaying wings and I wake up, my heart beating fast.

I dream I’m putting on my winter clothes, in Toronto, but my dress doesn’t fit. I pull it on over my head and struggle to get my arms into the sleeves. I’m walking along the street and parts of my body are sticking out through the dress, parts of my bare skin. I am ashamed.

I dream that my blue cat’s eye is shining in the sky like the sun, or like the pictures of planets in our book on the solar system. But instead of being warm, it’s cold. It starts to move nearer, but it doesn’t get any bigger. It’s falling down out of the sky, straight toward my head, brilliant and glassy. It hits me, passes right into me, but without hurting, except that it’s cold. The cold wakes me up. My blankets are on the floor.

I dream that the wooden bridge over the ravine is falling apart. I’m standing on it, the boards crack and separate, the bridge sways. I walk along what’s left, clinging to the railing, but I can’t get onto the hill where the other people are standing because the bridge isn’t attached to anything. My mother is on the hill, but she’s talking to the other people.

I dream I’m picking the chokecherries off the chokecherry tree and putting them into the lard pail. Only they aren’t chokecherries. They’re deadly nightshade berries, translucent, brilliantly red. They’re filled with blood, like the bodies of blackflies. As I touch them they burst, and the blood runs over my hands. None of my dreams is about Cordelia.

Our father plays touch tag with us on the beach in the evenings, running lumberingly like a bear, laughing at the same time, wuff wuff wuff. Pennies and dimes fall out of his pockets into the sand. The lake boats go slowly by in the distance, their smoke trailing behind them, the sun sets to the left, pink and tranquil. I look in the mirror over the washbasin: my face is brown and rounder. My mother smiles at me, in the little kitchen with the woodstove, and hugs me with one arm. She thinks I am happy. Some nights we have marshmallows, for a treat.

Six – Cat’s Eye

Chapter 28

S impsons Basement used to be bargain clothes and wrenches. Now it’s resplendent. There are pyramids of imported chocolates, an ice cream counter, aisles and aisles of fancy cookies and canned gourmet food, ticking away like little clocks toward the obsolescence dates stamped on their packages. There’s even an espresso counter. It’s all very world-class down here, where I used to buy cheap nighties in high school with my tiny clothes allowance, on sale at that and a size too large. I’m overwhelmed by all the chocolates. Just looking at them reminds me of Christmas and the sticky feeling after eating too many, the surfeit and glut.

I sit at the espresso counter and have a cappuccino, to deal with the inertia that’s come over me at the sight of so much sugar-coated self-indulgence. The espresso counter is either fake or real dark-green marble; it has a cute canopy over it, someone’s idea of Italy, and little swivel stools. The view from here is the shoe repair counter, which is not very world-class but is reassuring to me. People still get their shoes repaired, despite all this chocolate, they don’t just toss them out at the first hint of wear. I think about the shoes of my childhood, the brown Oxfords scuffed at the toes, half-soled, new-heeled, the falling-apart grubby white running shoes, the brown sandals with two buckles that you wore with socks. Most shoes were brown. They went with the pot roast done in the pressure cooker along with the limp carrots and the flaccid potatoes and the onions with their slippery layers. The pressure cooker had a whistle-shaped thing on the top. If you forgot to pay attention to it the lid would blow off like a bomb, and the carrots and potatoes would be hurled to the ceiling, where they’d stick like mush. This happened to my mother once. Luckily she was not in the kitchen at the time and was not scalded. When she saw what had happened she did not swear. She laughed, and said, “Wouldn’t that take the gold-plated gingerbread.”