Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

I’m a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good.

I know too much to be good. I know myself.

I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.

Chapter 29

W e come back in September. In the north the nights are cold and the leaves are beginning to turn, but the city is still hot, still damp. It’s astonishingly noisy and stinks of gasoline and the tar of melting roads. The air inside our house is stale and flat, air that’s been locked up in the heat all summer. The water’s rusty at first, coming out of the taps. I take a bath in the reddish lukewarm water. Already my body is stiffening, emptying itself of feeling. The future is closing on me like a door.

Cordelia has been waiting for me. I know this as soon as I see her standing at the school bus stop. Before the summer she would alternate between kindness and malice, with periods of indifference; but now she’s harsher, more relentless. It’s as if she’s driven by the urge to see how far she can go. She’s backing me toward an edge, like the edge of a cliff: one step back, another step, and I’ll be over and falling.

Carol and I are in Grade Five now. We have a new teacher, Miss Stuart. She’s Scottish and has an accent. “Now gerruls,” she says. She has a little bunch of dried heather stuck into a jelly jar on her desk, and a miniature of Bonnie Prince Charlie who was ruined by the English and whose last name is the same as her own, and a bottle of hand lotion in her desk drawer. She cooks this hand lotion herself. In the afternoons she makes herself a cup of tea, which does not smell entirely like tea but of something else she puts into it, out of a small silver bottle. She has bluish-white hair, beautifully waved, and wears rustling, silky mauve dresses with a lace-edged handkerchief tucked into the sleeve. She often has a nurse’s white gauze mask over her nose and mouth because she’s allergic to chalk dust. This doesn’t stop her from throwing the blackboard brushes at boys who aren’t paying attention. Although she throws underhand and not hard, she never misses. After she hits the boy he has to bring the blackboard brush back to her. The boys don’t seem to resent this habit of hers; they take it as a mark of distinction to get hit.

Everyone loves Miss Stuart. Carol says we are lucky to be in her class. I would love her too, if I had the energy. But I am too numb, too enthralled.

I keep my cat’s eye in my pocket, where I can hold on to it. It rests in my hand, valuable as a jewel, looking out through bone and cloth with its impartial gaze. With the help of its power I retreat back into my eyes. Up ahead of me are Cordelia, Grace, and Carol. I look at their shapes as they walk, the way shadow moves from one leg to another, the blocks of color, a red square of cardigan, a blue triangle of skirt. They’re like puppets up ahead, small and clear. I could see them or not, at will. I reach the path to the bridge, start down, past the nightshade vines with their red berries, past the undulating leaves, the lurking cats. The three of them are already on the bridge but they’ve stopped, they’re waiting for me. I look at the ovals of their faces, the outline of hair around each one. Their faces are like moldy eggs. My feet move down the hill.

I think about becoming invisible. I think about eating the deadly nightshade berries from the bushes beside the path. I think about drinking the Javex out of the skull and crossbones bottle in the laundry room, about jumping off the bridge, smashing down there like a pumpkin, half of an eye, half of a grin. I would come apart like that, I would be dead, like the dead people.

I don’t want to do these things, I’m afraid of them. But I think about Cordelia telling me to do them, not in her scornful voice, in her kind one. I hear her kind voice inside my head. Do it. Come on. I would be doing these things to please her.

I consider telling my brother, asking him for help. But tell him what exactly? I have no black eyes, no bloody noses to report: Cordelia does nothing physical. If it was boys, chasing or teasing, he would know what to do, but I don’t suffer from boys in this way. Against girls and their indirectness, their whisperings, he would be helpless.

Also I’m ashamed. I’m afraid he’ll laugh at me, he’ll despise me for being, a sissy about a bunch of girls, for making a fuss about nothing.

I’m in the kitchen, greasing muffin tins for my mother. I see the patterns the grease leaves on the metal, I see the moons of my nails, the raggedy flesh. My fingers go around and around. My mother makes the batter for the muffins, measuring the salt, sifting the flour. The sifter sounds dry, like sandpaper. “You don’t have to play with them,” my mother says. “There must be other little girls you can play with instead.”

I look at her. Misery washes over me like a slow wind. What has she noticed, what has she guessed, what is she about to do? She might tell their mothers. This would be the worst thing she could do. Also I can’t imagine it. My mother is not like the other mothers, she doesn’t fit in with the idea of them. She does not inhabit the house, the way the other mothers do; she’s airy and hard to pin down. The others don’t go skating on the neighborhood rink, or walk in the ravine by themselves. They seem to me grown-up in a way that my own mother is not. I think of Carol’s mother in her twin set, her skeptical smile, Cordelia’s with her glasses on a chain and her vagueness, Grace’s and her hairpins and drooping apron. My mother will turn up on their doorsteps, wearing slacks, carrying a bouquet of weeds, incongruous. They won’t believe her.

“When I was little and the kids called names, we used to say, ”Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me,“” she says. Her arm goes vigorously around, mixing, efficient and strong.

“They don’t call me names,” I say. “They’re my friends.” I believe this.

“You have to learn to stand up for yourself,” says my mother. “Don’t let them push you around. Don’t be spineless. You have to have more backbone.” She dollops the batter into the tins. I think of sardines and their backbones. You can eat their backbones. The bones crumble between your teeth; one touch and they fall apart. This must be what my own backbone is like: hardly there at all. What is happening to me is my own fault, for not having more backbone.

My mother sets down the bowl and puts her arms around me. “I wish I knew what to do,” she says. This is a confession. Now I know what I’ve been suspecting: as far as this thing is concerned, she is powerless.

I know that muffins have to be baked right away, right after they’ve been ladled out, or they’ll be flat and ruined. I can’t afford the distraction of comfort. If I give in to it, what little backbone I have left will crumble away to nothing.

I pull away from her. “They need to go into the oven,” I say.

Chapter 30

C ordelia brings a mirror to school. It’s a pocket mirror, the small plain oblong kind without any rim. She takes it out of her pocket and holds the mirror up in front of me and says, “Look at yourself! Just look!”

Her voice is disgusted, fed up, as if my face, all by itself, has been up to something, has gone too far. I look into the mirror but I don’t see anything out of the ordinary. It’s just my face, with the dark blotches on the lips where I’ve bitten off the skin.

My parents have bridge parties. They push the furniture in the living room to the walls and unfold two metal bridge tables and eight bridge chairs. In the middle of each table there are two china dishes, one with salted nuts, the other with mixed candies. These candies are called “bridge mixture.” There are also two ashtrays on each table.