Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

I was frightened, but Jon started laughing. “What was that?” I said. “How the hell did she get in?”

“Through the door,” said Jon, still laughing. He untangled a piece of spaghetti from my hair and leaned over to kiss me. I knew this woman must have been a girfriend, or an ex-girlfriend, and I was furious with her. It didn’t occur to me that she might have reason. I hadn’t yet encountered the foreign hairpins left in the bathroom like territorial dog pee on snowy hydrants, the lipstick marks placed strategically on pillows. Jon knew how to cover his tracks, and when he didn’t cover them it was for a reason. It didn’t occur to me either that she must have had a key.

“She’s crazy,” I said. “She should be in a bin.”

I did not pity her at all. In a way I admired her. I admired her lack of compunction, the courage of her bad manners, the energy of simple rage. Throwing a bag of spaghetti had a simplicity to it, a recklessness, a careless grandeur. It got things over with. I was a long way, then, from being able to do anything like it myself.

Chapter 34

G race says grace. Mr. Smeath says, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,” and reaches for the baked beans. Mrs. Smeath says, “Lloyd.” Mr. Smeath says, “It’s harmless,” and shoots me a sideways grin. Aunt Mildred contracts her whiskery mouth. I chew away at the rubber plant Smeath food. Under cover of the tablecloth, I tear at my fingers. Sunday goes on.

After the stewed pineapple Grace wants me to come down into the cellar with her to play school. I do this, but I have to come up the stairs again to go to the bathroom. Grace has given me permission, the same way the teachers in school give you permission. As I come up the cellar stairs I can hear Aunt Mildred and Mrs. Smeath, who are in the kitchen doing the dishes.

“She’s exactly like a heathen,” says Aunt Mildred. Because she’s been a missionary in China, she’s an authority. “Nothing you’ve done has made a scrap of difference.”

“She’s learning her Bible, Grace tells me,” Mrs. Smeath says, and then I know it’s me they’re discussing. I stop on the top step, where I can see into the kitchen: the kitchen table where the dirty dishes are piled, the back edges of Mrs. Smeath and Aunt Mildred.

“They’ll learn all that,” says Aunt Mildred. “Till you’re blue in the face. But it’s all rote learning, it doesn’t sink in. The minute your back is turned they’ll go right back the way they were.”

The unfairness of this hits me like a kick. How can they say that, when I’ve won a special mention for my essay on Temperance, about drunken men having car accidents and freezing to death in snowstorms because the alcohol dilates their capillaries? I even know what capillaries are, I even spelled it right. I can recite whole psalms, whole chapters, I can sing all the colored-slide white-knight Sunday school songs without looking.

“What can you expect, with that family?” says Mrs. Smeath. She doesn’t go on to say what’s wrong with my family. “The other children sense it. They know.”

“You don’t think they’re being too hard on her?” says Aunt Mildred. Her voice is relishing. She wants to know how hard.

“It’s God’s punishment,” says Mrs. Smeath. “It serves her right.”

A hot wave moves through my body. This wave is shame, which I have felt before, but it is also hatred, which I have not, not in this pure form. It’s hatred with a particular shape, the shape of Mrs. Smeath’s one breast and no waist. It’s like a fleshy weed in my chest, white-stemmed and fat; like the stalk of a burdock, with its rank leaves and little green burrs, growing in the cat piss earth beside the path down to the bridge. A heavy, thick hatred.

I stand there on the top step, frozen with hate. What I hate is not Grace or even Cordelia. I can’t go as far as that. I hate Mrs. Smeath, because what I thought was a secret, something going on among girls, among children, is not one. It has been discussed before, and tolerated. Mrs. Smeath has known and approved. She has done nothing to stop it. She thinks it serves me right. She moves away from the sink and walks to the kitchen table for another stack of dirty plates, into my line of vision. I have a brief, intense image of Mrs. Smeath going through the flesh-colored wringer of my mother’s washing machine, legs first, bones cracking and flattening, skin and flesh squeezing up toward her head, which will pop in a minute like a huge balloon of blood. If my eyes could shoot out fatal rays like the ones in comic books I would incinerate her on the spot. She is right, I am a heathen. I cannot forgive.

As if she can feel my stare she turns and sees me. Our eyes meet: she knows I’ve heard. But she doesn’t flinch, she isn’t embarrassed or apologetic. She gives me that smug smile, with the lips closed over the teeth. What she says is not to me but to Aunt Mildred. “Little pitchers have big ears.”

Her bad heart floats in her body like an eye, an evil eye, it sees me. We sit on the wooden bench in the church basement, in the dark, watching the wall. Light glints from Grace’s glassy eyes as she watches me sideways.

God sees the little sparrow fall,

It meets His tender view;

If God so loves the little bird,

I know He loves me too.

The picture is of a dead bird in an enormous hand, with a shaft of light coming down onto it. I am moving my lips, but I’m not singing. I am losing confidence in God. Mrs. Smeath has God all sewed up, she knows what things are his punishments. He’s on her side, and it’s a side from which I’m excluded.

I consider Jesus, who is supposed to love me. But he isn’t showing any sign of it, and I don’t think he can be of much help. Against Mrs. Smeath and God he can do nothing, because God is bigger. God is not Our Father at all. My image of him now is of something huge, hard, inexorable, faceless and moving forward as if on tracks. God is a sort of engine.

I decide not to pray to God any more. When it’s time for the Lord’s Prayer I stand in silence, moving my lips only.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. I refuse to say this. If it means I will have to forgive Mrs. Smeath or else go to Hell when I die, I’m ready to go. Jesus must have known how hard it is to forgive, that was why he put this in. He was always putting in things that were impossible to do really, such as giving away all your money.

“You weren’t praying,” Grace says to me in a whisper.

My stomach goes cold. Which is worse, to contradict her or to admit? Either way there will be penalties.

“Yes I was,” I say.

“You weren’t. I heard you.”

I say nothing.

“You lied,” says Grace, pleased, forgetting to whisper.

I still say nothing.

“You should ask God to forgive you,” Grace says. “That’s what I do, every night.”

I sit in the dark, attacking my fingers. I think about Grace asking God to forgive her. But for what? God only forgives you if you’re sorry, and she never gives a sign of being sorry. She never thinks she’s done anything wrong.

Grace and Cordelia and Carol are up ahead, I am a block behind. They aren’t letting me walk with them today because I have been insolent, but they don’t want me too far behind either. I am walking along, in time to the music, Keep happy with the Happy Gang, my head empty except for these words. I walk head down, scanning the sidewalk, the gutters, for silver cigarette papers, although I no longer collect them as I did long ago. I know that nothing I could make with them would be worthwhile. I see a piece of paper with a colored picture on it. I pick it up. I know what the picture is: it’s the Virgin Mary. The paper is from Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Our Lady of Perpetual Hell. The Virgin Mary is wearing a long blue robe, no feet at all visible below the hem, a white cloth over her head and a crown on top of that, and a yellow halo with light rays coming out of it like nails. She’s smiling sadly in a disappointed way; her hands are outstretched as if in welcome, and her heart is on the outside of her chest, with seven swords stuck into it. Or they look like swords. The heart is large, red and tidy, like a satin heart pincushion, or a valentine. Under the picture is printed: The Seven Sorrows. The Virgin Mary is in some of our Sunday school papers, but never with a crown, never with a pincushion heart, never all by herself. She is always more or less in the background. Not much fuss is made over her except at Christ mas, and even then Baby Jesus is a lot more important. When Mrs. Smeath and Aunt Mildred speak of Catholics, as they have been known to do at the Sunday dinner table, it’s always with contempt. Catholics pray to statues and drink real wine at Communion, instead of grape juice. “They worship the Pope,” is what the Smeaths say; or else, “They worship the Virgin Mary,”