Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

When I get up in the morning my father is in the kitchen frying bacon. He knows how to do this, though he never does it in the city, only over campfires. In my parents’ bedroom there’s a pile of crumpled sheets on the floor, and the blankets are folded up on a chair; on the mattress there’s a huge oval splotch of blood. But when I come home from school the sheets are gone and the bed is made up, and there is nothing more to be seen.

My father says there has been an accident. But how can you have an accident lying in bed asleep?

Stephen says it was a baby, a baby that came out too soon. I don’t believe him: women who are going to have babies have big fat stomachs, and my mother didn’t have one.

My mother comes back from the hospital and is weaker. She has to rest. No one is used to this, she isn’t used to it herself. She resists it, getting up as usual, putting her hand on the wall or on the edges of the furniture as she walks, standing hunched over at the kitchen sink, a cardigan over her shoulders. In the middle of something she’s doing she has to go and lie down. Her skin is pale and dry. She looks as if she’s listening to a sound, outside the house perhaps, but there is no sound. Sometimes I have to repeat things twice before she hears me. It’s as if she’s gone off somewhere else, leaving me behind; or forgotten I am there.

All of this is more frightening, even, than the splotch of blood. Our father tells us to help out more, which means that he’s frightened as well.

After she gets better I find a small knitted sock, pastel green, in my mother’s sewing basket. I wonder why she would have knitted only one sock. She doesn’t like knitting, so maybe she knitted one and then got tired of it.

I dream that Mrs. Finestein from next door and Mr. Banerji are my real parents. I dream that my mother has had a baby, one of a set of twins. The baby is gray. I don’t know where the other twin is.

I dream that our house has burned down. Nothing of it remains; blackened stumps dot the place where it’s been, as if there has been a forest fire. A huge mountain of mud rises beside it. My parents are dead but also alive. They’re lying side by side, in their summer clothes, and sinking down through the earth, which is hard but transparent, like ice. They look up at me sorrowfully as they recede.

Chapter 32

I t’s Saturday afternoon. We’re going down to the building, to something called a Conversat. I don’t know what a Conversat is but I’m relieved to be going to the building, where there are mice and snakes and experiments and no girls. My father asked if I wanted to bring a friend. I said no. My brother is bringing Danny, whose nose runs all the time, who wears knitted vests in diamond patterns, who has a stamp collection. They sit in the back seat—my brother no longer gets carsick—and talk in pig Latin.

“Or-yay ose-nay is-ay unning-ray.”

“O-say ut-whay? Awnt-way oo-tay eat-ay ome-say?”

“Um-yay um-yay.”

I know that some of this, at least on Danny’s part, is for my benefit. He has confused me with other girls, girls who wriggle and shriek. Once I would have replied with something equally disgusting, but I have lost interest in such things as eating snot. I look out the car window, pretending not to hear. The Conversat turns out to be sort of like a museum. The Zoology Department is throwing itself open to the public, to give people a crack at Science and improve their minds. This is what my father said, grinning the way he does when he’s partly joking. He said people’s minds could use some improving. My mother said she doesn’t think her mind is capable of further improvement, so she’s going grocery shopping instead.

There are a lot of people at the Conversat. There isn’t that much to do for entertainment on the weekends in Toronto. The building has a festive air: its usual smells of Dustbane and furniture polish and mouse droppings and snakes mingle with other smells, of winter clothing, cigarette smoke, and women’s perfume. Streamers of colored paper are taped to the walls, with arrows of construction paper at intervals, along the halls and up and down the stairs and into the different rooms, to show the way. Each room has its own displays, grouped according to what you are supposed to learn. In the first room there are chicken embryos at various stages of development, from a red dot to a big-headed, bulgy-eyed, pin-feathered chick, looking not fluffy and cute the way they do on Easter cards, but slimy, its claws curled under, its eyelids a slit open, showing a crescent of agate-blue eye. The embryos have been pickled; the scent of formaldehyde is very strong. In another display there’s a jar of twins, real dead identical human twins with their placenta attached, gray-skinned, floating in something that looks like dishwater. Their veins and arteries have been injected with colored rubber, blue for the veins, purple for the arteries, so we can see that their blood systems are connected. There’s a human brain in a bottle, like a giant flabby gray walnut. I can’t believe there is such a thing inside my head. In another room there’s a table where you can get your fingerprints taken, so you can see they aren’t the same as anyone else’s. There’s a large piece of Bristol board with enlarged photographs of people’s fingerprints pinned up on it. My brother and Danny and I all get our fingerprints taken. Danny and my brother have made light of the chickens and the twins—“Awnt-way any-nay icken-chay or-fay upper-say?” “Ow-hay about-way ome-say ewed-stay in-tway?”—but they weren’t in any hurry to stay in that room. Their enthusiasm for the fingerprints is boisterous. They make fingerprints in the centers of each other’s foreheads with their inky fingers, saying, “The Mark of the Black Hand!” in loud, ominous voices, until our father passes nearby and tells them to pipe down. Beautiful Mr. Banerji from India is with him. He smiles nervously at me and says, “How are you, miss?” He always calls me “miss.” Among all these winter-white faces he looks darker than usual; his teeth shine and shine. In the same room with the fingerprints they’re handing out pieces of paper; you’re supposed to taste them and say whether they taste bitter, like peach pits, or sour, like lemons. This proves that some things are inherited. There’s also a mirror where you can do tongue exercises, to see if you can roll your tongue up at the sides or into a cloverleaf shape. Some people can’t do either. Danny and my brother hog the mirror and make gruesome faces by sticking their thumbs into the sides of their mouths and pulling the edges of their eyelids down so that the red shows.

Some of the Conversat is less interesting, with too much writing, and some of it is only charts on the wall or looking through microscopes, which we can do whenever we want to anyway. It’s crowded as we shuffle along the halls, following the paper streamers, baby-blue and yellow, in our winter overshoes. We haven’t taken our coats off. It’s very warm. The clanking radiators are going full-blast, and the air is filling with other people’s breath.

We come to a room where there’s a cut-open turtle. It’s in a white enamel tray, like the ones in butcher shops. The turtle is alive; or it’s dead, but its heart is alive. This turtle is an experiment to show how the heart of a reptile can keep on going after the rest of it is dead.

The turtle’s bottom shell has a hole sawed into it. The turtle is on its back so you can see down into it, right to the heart, which is beating away slowly, glistening dark red down there in its cave, wincing like the end of a touched worm, lengthening again, wincing. It’s like a hand, clenching and unclenching. It’s like an eye.

They’ve attached a wire to the heart, which runs to a loudspeaker, so you can hear the heart beating throughout the entire room, agonizingly slow, like an old man walking up stairs. I can’t tell if the heart is going to make it to the next beat, or not. There’s a footstep, a pause, then a crackling like the kind of static on the radio that my brother says comes from outer space, then another pulse, a gasp of air sucked in. Life is flowing out of the turtle, I can hear it over the loudspeaker. Soon the turtle will be empty of life. I don’t want to stay in this room but there’s a lineup, in front of me and behind. All of the people are grown-ups; I’ve lost sight of Danny and my brother. I’m hemmed in by tweed coats, my eyes as high as their second buttons. I hear another sound, coming over the sound of the heart like an approaching wind: a rustling, like poplar leaves, only smaller, drier. There’s black around the edges of my eyes and it closes in. What I see is like the entrance to a tunnel, rushing away from me; or I am rushing away from it, away from that spot of daylight. After that I’m looking at a lot of overshoes, and the floorboards, stretching into the distance, at eye level. My head hurts.