Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

My brother is listening to Jack Benny too. As he listens, he stuffs the cheese squares into his mouth with his left hand, but his right hand holds a pencil, and this hand is never still. He hardly looks at the scrap pad on which he’s doodling, but once in a while he tears off a sheet and crumples it up. These crumpled notes land on the floor. When I gather them up to put them into the wastebasket after the show, I see that they’re covered with numbers, long lines of numbers and symbols that go on and on, like writing, like a letter in code.

My brother sometimes has friends over. They sit in his room with the chess table between them, not moving except for their hands, which lift, hover over the board, plunge down. Sometimes they grunt or say “Aha” or “Trade you” or “Got you back”; or they exchange new, obscure good-natured insults:

“You surd!” “You square root!” “You throwback!” The captured chess pieces, knights and pawns and bishops, line up on the outskirts of the board. Once in a while, to see how the game is going, I bring in glasses of milk and vanilla-chocolate pinwheel cookies which I’ve made out of the Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook. This is a form of showing-off on my part, but it doesn’t get much response. They grunt, drink the milk with their left hands, stuff in the cookies, their eyes never leaving the board. The bishops topple, the queen falls, the king is encircled. “Mate in two,” they say. A finger comes down, knocks over the king. “Best of five.” And they start again.

In the evenings my brother studies. Sometimes he does this in a curious way. He stands on his head, to improve the circulation to his brain, or he throws spitballs at the ceiling. The area around his ceiling light fixture is pimply with little wads of once-chewed paper. At other times he indulges in manic bouts of physical activity: he splits huge piles of kindling, much more than is needed, or goes running down in the ravine, wearing disgraceful baggy pants and a forest-green sweater even more unraveled than his maroon one, and frayed gray running shoes that look like the kind you see one of in vacant lots. He says he’s training for the marathon.

A lot of the time my brother doesn’t seem aware of me. He’s thinking about other things, solemn things that are important. He sits at the dinner table, his right hand moving, pinching a breadcrust into pellets, staring at the wall behind my mother’s head, on which there is a picture of three milkweed pods in a vase, while my father explains why the human race is doomed. This time it’s because we’ve discovered insulin. All the diabetics aren’t dying the way they used to, they’re living long enough so that they’re passing the diabetes on to their children. Soon, by the law of geometric progression, we’ll all be diabetics, and since insulin is made from cows’ stomachs the whole world will be covered with insulin-producing cows, the parts that aren’t covered with human beings, who are reproducing much too rapidly for their own good anyway. The cows burp methane gas. Far too much methane gas is entering the atmosphere already, it will choke out the oxygen and perhaps cause the entire earth to become a giant greenhouse. The polar seas will melt and New York will be under six feet of water, not to mention many another coastal city. Also we have to worry about deserts, and erosion. If we don’t get burped to death by the cows we’ll end up like the Sahara Desert, says my father cheerfully, finishing up the meatloaf. My father has nothing against diabetics, or cows either. He just likes following chains of thought to their logical conclusions. My mother says it’s coffee soufflé for dessert.

Once my brother would have been more interested in the fate of the human race. Now he says that if the sun went supernova it would be eight minutes before we’d see it. He’s taking the long-range view. Sooner or later we’re going to be a cinder anyway, he implies, so why worry about a few cows more or less? Although he still collects butterfly sightings, he’s moving farther and farther away from biology. In the larger picture, we’re just a little green scuzz on the surface, says my brother. My father eats his coffee soufflé, frowning a little. My mother tactfully pours him a cup of tea. I see that the future of the human race is a battleground, that Stephen has won a point and my father has lost one. Whoever cares the most will lose.

I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort. How spruce budworms could be essential to the war effort I have not yet figured out, but apparently they were. Maybe this is why he always drives so fast, maybe he’s heading for takeoff.

I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn’t have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things: everyone there could use an ax and a saw. He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the light of a kerosene lamp; he put himself through university by working in lumber camps and cleaning out rabbit hutches, and was so poor that he lived in a tent in the summers to save money. He used to play country fiddle at square dances and was twenty-two before he heard an orchestra. All this is known, but unimaginable. Also I wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

I harden my heart toward the fate of the human race, and calculate in my head how much money I’ll need to save to buy a new lamb’s-wool sweater. In Home Economics, which really means cooking and sewing, I’ve learned how to install a zipper and make a flat-fell seam, and now I make a lot of my clothes myself because it’s cheaper, although they don’t always turn out exactly like the picture on the front of the pattern. I get very little help from my mother on the fashion front, because whatever I wear she says it looks lovely, as long as it has no visible rents.

For advice I turn to Mrs. Finestein next door, for whom I baby-sit on weekends. “Blue is your color, honey,” she says. “Very gorgeous. And cerise. You’d look stunning in cerise.” Then she goes out for the evening with Mr. Finestein, her hair upswept, her mouth vivid, teetering in her tiny shoes with high heels, jingling with bracelets and dangly gold earrings, and I read The Little Engine That Could to Brian Finestein and tuck him into bed.

Sometimes Stephen and I still get stuck doing the dishes together, and then he remembers he’s my brother. I wash, he dries, and he asks me benign, avuncular, maddening questions, such as how do I like Grade Nine. He is in Grade Eleven, stairways and stairways above me; he doesn’t have to rub it in. But on some of these dish-drying nights he reverts to what I consider to be his true self. He tells me the nicknames of the teachers at his school, all of which are rude, such as The Armpit or The Human Stool. Or we invent new swearwords together, words that suggest an unspecific dirtiness. “Frut,” he says. I counter with “pronk,” which I tell him is a verb. We lean against the kitchen counter, doubled over with laughter, until our mother comes into the kitchen and says, “What are you two kids up to?”

Sometimes he decides that it’s his duty to educate me. He has a low opinion of most girls, it seems, and doesn’t want me turning into one of the ordinary kind. He doesn’t want me to be a pin-headed fuzzbrain. He thinks I’m in danger of becoming vain. In the mornings he stands outside the bathroom door and asks if I can bear to unstick myself from the mirror.