Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

I look at this picture with dismay. It isn’t what I meant to draw. It’s unlike everyone else’s picture, it’s the wrong thing. Miss Stuart will be disappointed in me, she’ll tell me I have more between the ears than that. I can feel her standing behind me now, looking over my shoulder; I can smell her smell of hand lotion, and the other smell that is not tea. She moves around so I can see her, her bright blue wrinkly eyes looking at me over the top of her nurse’s mask.

For a moment she says nothing. Then she says, not harshly, “Why is your picture so darruk, my dear?”

“Because it’s night,” I say. This is an idiotic answer, I know that as soon as it’s out of my mouth. My voice is almost inaudible, even to me.

“I see,” she says. She doesn’t say I’ve drawn the wrong thing, or that surely there’s something else I do after school besides going to bed. She touches me on the shoulder, briefly, before continuing down the aisle. Her touch glows briefly, like a blown-out match.

In the schoolroom windows the paper hearts are blossoming. We make a huge Valentine’s Day postbox out of a cardboard box covered with pink crepe paper and red hearts with paper doily edging. Into the slot at the top we slip our valentines, cut from books of them you can buy at Woolworth’s, with special, single ones for the people we especially like.

On the day itself the whole afternoon is a party. Miss Stuart loves parties: She’s brought dozens of heart-shaped shortbread cookies she’s made herself, with pink icing and silver balls on them, and there are tiny cinnamon hearts and pastel hearts with messages on them, messages from some earlier era which is not ours. “Hubba Hubba,” they say. “She’s My Baby.” “Oh You Kid!”

Miss Stuart sits at her desk, supervising, while several girls open the box and deliver the valentines. On my desk the cards pile up. Most of them are from boys. I can tell this because of the sloppy writing, and because a lot of them aren’t signed. Others have only initials or Guess Who? Some have x’s and o’s. The cards from girls are all neatly signed, with their full names, so there will be no mistake about who gave what.

On the way home from school Carol giggles and shows off her cards from boys. I have more cards from boys than Carol has, more than Cordelia and Grace have collected in their Grade Six classroom. Only I know this. I’ve hidden the cards in my desk so they won’t be seen on the way home. When questioned I say I didn’t get many. I hug my knowledge, which is new but doesn’t surprise me: boys are my secret allies.

Carol is only ten and three quarters but she’s growing breasts. They aren’t very big, but the nipples are no longer flat, they’re pointed, and there’s a swelling behind them. It’s easy to see this because she sticks out her chest, she wears sweaters, pulling them down tightly so the breasts poke out. She complains about these breasts at recess: they hurt, she says. She says she will have to get a bra. Cordelia says, “Oh shut up about your stupid tits.” She’s older, but she doesn’t have any yet. Carol pinches her lips and cheeks to make them red. She finds a worn-down tube of lipstick in her mother’s wastepaper basket and hides it away, and takes it to school in her pocket. Using the tip of her little finger, she rubs some of it on her lips after school. She wipes it off with a Kleenex before we get to her house but she doesn’t do a good enough job.

We play upstairs in her room. When we go down to the kitchen for a glass of milk, her mother says,

“What’s that on your face, young lady?” Right in front of us she scrubs Carol’s face with the dirty dishcloth. “Don’t let me catch you doing such a cheap thing again! At your age, the idea!” Carol wriggles, cries and screams, abandoning herself. We watch, horrified and thrilled. “Just wait till your father gets home!” her mother says in a cold, furious voice. “Making a spectacle of yourself,” as if there’s something wrong in the mere act of being looked at. Then she remembers we’re still here. “Off you go!”

Two days later Carol says her father has given it to her good, with his belt, buckle end, right across the bare bum. She says she can hardly sit down. She sounds proud of this. She shows us, after school, up in her room: she pulls up her skirt, pulls down her underpants, and sure enough there are the marks, almost like scratch marks, not very red but there.

It’s difficult to match this evidence with Carol’s father, nice Mr. Campbell, who has a soft mustache and calls Grace Beautiful Brown Eyes and Cordelia Miss Lobelia. It’s strange to imagine him hitting anyone with a belt. But fathers and their ways are enigmatic. I know without being told, for instance, that Mr. Smeath lives a secret life of trains and escapes in his head. Cordelia’s father is charming to us on the rare occasions when he is seen, he makes wry jokes, his smile is like a billboard, but why is she afraid of him?

Because she is. All fathers except mine are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to them than meets the eye. And so we believe the belt.

Carol says she’s seen a wet spot on the sheet of her mother’s twin bed, in the morning, before the bed was made. We tiptoe into her parents’ room. The bed with its tufty chenille bedspread is so neatly made up we’re afraid to turn down the covers to look. Carol opens the drawer of her mother’s bedside table and we peer in. There’s a rubber thing like the top of a mushroom, and a tube of toothpaste that isn’t toothpaste. Carol says these things are to keep you from having babies. Nobody giggles, nobody scoffs. Instead we read the label. Somehow the red marks on Carol’s, bum have given her a credibility she lacked before.

Carol lies on top of her own bed, which has a white ruffled spread that matches the curtains. She’s pretending to be sick, with an unspecified illness. We’ve dampened a washcloth, draped it over her forehead, brought her a glass of water. Illness is now a game we play.

“Oh, I’m so sick, oh, I’m so sick,” Carol moans, twisting her body on the bed. “Nurse, do something!”

“We have to listen to her heart,” says Cordelia. She pulls up Carol’s sweater, then her undershirt. We’ve all been to the doctor, we know about the brusque humiliations involved. “This won’t hurt.” There are the breasts, puffy-looking, their nipples bluish, like veins on a forehead. “Feel her heart,” Cordelia says to me.

I don’t want to. I don’t want to touch that swollen, unnatural flesh. “Go on,” says Cordelia. “Do as you’re told.”

“She’s being disobedient,” says Grace.

I reach out my hand, place it on the left breast. It feels like a balloon half filled with water, or like lukewarm oatmeal porridge. Carol giggles. “Oh, your hand’s so cold!” Nausea grips me.

“Her heart, stupid,” says Cordelia. “I didn’t say her tit. Don’t you know the difference?”

An ambulance comes and my mother is carried out to it on a stretcher. I don’t see this, Stephen tells me about it. It was in the middle of the night when I was asleep, but Stephen has taken to getting up secretly and looking out of his bedroom window at the stars. He says you can see the stars much better when most of the lights in the city are off. He says that the way to wake up at night without using an alarm clock is to drink two glasses of water before you go to bed. Then you have to concentrate on the hour you want to wake up. This is what the Indians used to do.

So he was awake, and listened, and snuck across to the other side of the house to look out the window there, where he could see what was going on out on the street. He says there were flashing lights but no siren, so it’s no wonder I didn’t hear anything.