Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

as if this is a scandalous thing to do.

I look at the picture up close. But I know it would be dangerous to keep it, so I throw it away. This is the right impulse, because now the three of them have stopped, they’re waiting for me to catch up to them. Anything I do, other than standing, other than walking, attracts their attention.

“What was that thing we saw you pick up?” says Cordelia.

“A paper.”

“What sort of a paper?”

“Just a paper. A Sunday school paper.”

“Why did you pick it up?”

Once I would have thought about this question, tried to answer it truthfully. Now I say, “I don’t know.”

This is the only answer I can give, to anything, that will not be ridiculed or questioned.

“What did you do with it?”

“I threw it away.”

“Don’t pick things up off the street,” says Cordelia. “They have germs.” She lets it go at that. I decide to do something dangerous, rebellious, perhaps even blasphemous. I can no longer pray to God so I will pray to the Virgin Mary instead. This decision makes me nervous, as if I’m about to steal. My heart beats harder, my hands feel cold. I feel I’m about to get caught. Kneeling seems called for. In the onion church we don’t kneel, but the Catholics are known for it. I kneel down beside my bed and put my hands together, like the children in Christmas cards, except that I’m wearing blue-striped flannelette pajamas and they always have white nightgowns on. I close my eyes and try to think about the Virgin Mary. I want her to help me or at least show me that she can hear me, but I don’t know what to say. I haven’t learned the words for her.

I try to picture what she would look like, if I met her on the street for instance: would she be wearing clothes like my mother’s, or that blue dress and crown, and if it was the blue dress would a crowd gather? Maybe they would think she was just someone out of a Christmas play; but not if she had her heart on the outside like that, stuck full of swords. I try to think what I would tell her. But she knows already: she knows how unhappy I am.

I pray harder and harder. My prayers are wordless, defiant, dry-eyed, desperate, without hope. Nothing happens. I squeeze my fists into my eyes until they hurt. For an instant I think I see a face, then a splash of blue, but now all I can see is the heart. There it is, bright red, rounded, with a dark light around it, a blackness like luminous velvet. Gold comes out from the center, then fades. It’s the heart all right. It looks like my red plastic purse.

Chapter 35

I t’s the middle of March. In the schoolroom windows the Easter tulips are beginning to bloom. There’s still snow on the ground, a dirty filigree, though the winter is losing its hardness and glitter. The sky thickens, sinks lower.

We walk home under the low thick sky that is gray and bulging with dampness. Moist soft flakes are falling out of it, piling up on roofs and branches, sliding off now and then to hit with a wet cottony thunk. There’s no wind and the sound is muffled by the snow.

It isn’t cold. I undo the ties on my blue knitted wool hat, let it flap loose on my head. Cordelia takes off her mittens and scoops up snowballs, throwing them at trees, at telephone poles, at random. It’s one of her friendly days; she puts her arm through my arm, her other arm through Grace’s, and we march along the street, singing We don’t stop for anybody. I sing this too. Together we hop and slide. Some of the euphoria I once felt in falling snow comes back to me; I want to open my mouth and let the snow fall into it. I allow myself to laugh, like the others, trying it out. My laughter is a performance, a grab at the ordinary.

Cordelia throws herself backward onto a blank front lawn, spreads her arms out in the snow, raises them above her head, draws them down to her sides, making a snow angel. The flakes fall onto her face, into her laughing mouth, melting, clinging to her eyebrows. She blinks, closing her eyes against the snow. For a moment she looks like someone I don’t know, a stranger, shining with unknown, good possibilities. Or else a victim of a traffic accident, flung onto the snow.

She opens her eyes and reaches up her hands, which are damp and reddened, and we pull her upward so she won’t disturb the image she’s made. The snow angel has feathery wings and a tiny pin head. Where her hands stopped, down near her sides, are the imprints of her fingers, like little claws. We’ve forgotten the time, it’s getting dark. We run along the street that leads to the wooden footbridge. Even Grace runs, lumpily, calling, “Wait up!” For once she is the one left behind. Cordelia reaches the hill first and runs down it. She tries to slide but the snow is too soft, not icy enough, and there are cinders and pieces of gravel in it. She falls down and rolls. We think she’s done it on purpose, the way she made the snow angel. We rush down upon her, exhilarated, breathless, laughing, just as she’s picking herself up.

We stop laughing, because now we can see that her fall was an accident, she didn’t do it on purpose. She likes everything she does to be done on purpose.

Carol says, “Did you hurt yourself?” Her voice is quavery, she’s frightened, already she can tell that this is serious. Cordelia doesn’t answer. Her face is hard again, her eyes baleful. Grace moves so that she’s beside Cordelia, slightly behind her. From there she smiles at me, her tight smile.

Cordelia says, to me, “Were you laughing?” I think she means, was I laughing at her because she fell down.

“No,” I say.

“She was,” says Grace neutrally. Carol shifts to the side of the path, away from me.

“I’m going to give you one more chance,” says Cordelia. “Were you laughing?”

“Yes,” I say, “but…”

“Just yes or no,” says Cordelia.

I say nothing. Cordelia glances over at Grace, as if looking for approval. She sighs, an exaggerated sigh, like a grown-up’s. “Lying again,” she says. “What are we going to do with you?”

We seem to have been standing there for a long time. It’s colder now. Cordelia reaches out and pulls off my knitted hat. She marches the rest of the way down the hill and onto the bridge and hesitates for a moment. Then she walks over to the railing and throws my hat down into the ravine. Then the white oval of her face turns up toward me. “Come here,” she says.

Nothing has changed, then. Time will go on, in the same way, endlessly. My laughter was unreal after all, merely a gasp for air.

I walk down to where Cordelia stands by the railing, the snow not crunching but giving way under my feet like cotton wool packing. It sounds like a cavity being filled, in a tooth, inside my head. Usually I’m afraid to go so near the edge of the bridge, but this time I’m not. I don’t feel anything as positive as fear.

“There’s your stupid hat,” says Cordelia; and there it is, far down, still blue against the white snow, even in the dimming light. “Why don’t you go down and get it?”

I look at her. She wants me to go down into the ravine where the bad men are, where we’re never supposed to go. It occurs to me that I may not. What will she do then?

I can see this idea gathering in Cordelia as well. Maybe she’s gone too far, hit, finally, some core of resistance in me. If I refuse to do what she says this time, who knows where my defiance will end? The two others have come down the hill and are watching, safely in the middle of the bridge.

“Go on then,” she says, more gently, as if she’s encouraging me, not ordering. “Then you’ll be forgiven.”

I don’t want to go down there. It’s forbidden and dangerous; also it’s dark and the hillside will be slippery, I might have trouble climbing up again. But there is my hat. If I go home without it, I’ll have to explain, I’ll have to tell. And if I refuse to go, what will Cordelia do next? She might get angry, she might never speak to me again. She might push me off the bridge. She’s never done anything like that before, never hit or pinched, but now that she’s thrown my hat over there’s no telling what she might do. I walk along to the end of the bridge. “When you’ve got it, count to a hundred,” says Cordelia. “Before coming up.” She doesn’t sound angry any more. She sounds like someone giving instructions for a game. I start down the steep hillside, holding on to branches and tree trunks. The path isn’t even a real path, it’s just a place worn by whoever goes up and down here: boys, men. Not girls. When I’m among the bare trees at the bottom I look up. The bridge railings are silhouetted against the sky. I can see the dark outlines of three heads, watching me.