Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

“They rationed their toilet paper,” Cordelia says. “Four squares a time, even for Number Two. Did you know that?”

“No,” I say. But it seems to me that I did know it, once.

“Remember that black soap they had?” says Cordelia. “Remember? It smelled like tar.”

I know what we’re doing now: we’re making fun of the Smeath family. Cordelia remembers all kinds of things: the greying underwear dripping on the clothesline in the cellar, the kitchen paring knife that was worn right down to a sliver, the winter coats from the Eaton’s Catalogue. Simpsons is the right place to shop, according to Cordelia. That’s where we go now on Saturday mornings, bareheaded, jerking downtown stop by stop on the streetcar. And shopping from the Eaton’s Catalogue is much worse than shopping at Eaton’s.

“The Lump-lump Family!” Cordelia shouts into the snowy air. It’s cruel and appropriate; we snort with laughter, “What does the Lump-lump Family have for dinner? Plates of gristle!”

Now it’s a full-blown game. What color is their underwear? Grunt color. Why did Mrs. Lump-lump have a Band-Aid on her face? Cut herself shaving. Anything can be said about them, invented about them. They’re defenseless, they’re at our mercy. We picture the two adult Lump-lumps making love, but this is too much for us, it can’t be done, it’s too vomit-making. Vomit-making is a new word, from Perdie.

“What does Grace Lump-lump do for fun? Pops her pimples!” Cordelia laughs so hard she doubles over and almost falls down. “Stop, stop, you’ll make me pee,” she says. She says that Grace started to grow pimples in Grade Eight: by now they must have increased in number. This is not made up but true. We relish the thought.

The Smeaths in our rendition of them are charmless, miserly, heavy as dough, boring as white margarine, which we claim they eat for dessert. We ridicule their piety, their small economies, the size of their feet, their rubber plant, which sums them up. We speak of them in the present tense, as if we still know them. This for me is a deeply satisfying game. I can’t account for my own savagery; I don’t question why I’m enjoying it so much, or why Cordelia is playing it, insists on playing it, whips it to life again when it seems to be flagging. She looks at me sideways, as if estimating how far, how much farther I’ll go in what we both know, surely, is base treachery. I have a fleeting image of Grace once more, disappearing into her house through the front door, in her skirt with the straps, her pilly sweater. She was adored, by all of us. But she is not any more. And in Cordelia’s version, now, she never was. We run across the street in the falling snow, open the small wrought-iron gate in the cemetery fence, go in. We’ve never done this before.

This is the raw end of the cemetery. The trees are only saplings; they look even more temporary without their leaves. Much of the ground is untouched, but there are scars like giant claw marks, diggings, earthworks going on. The gravestones are few and recent: blockish oblongs of granite polished to a Presbyterian gloss, the letters cut plainly and without any attempt at prettiness. They remind me of men’s overcoats.

We walk among these gravestones, pointing out which ones—particularly gray, particularly oafish—the Lump-lump Family would choose to bury one another beneath. From here we can look through the chain-link fence and see the houses on the other side of the street. Grace Smeath’s is one of them. It’s strange and oddly pleasant to think that she might be inside it at this very moment, inside that ordinary-looking brick box with the white porch pillars, not knowing a thing about what we’ve just been saying about her. Mrs. Smeath might be in there, lying on the velvet chesterfield, the afghan spread over her; I remember this much. The rubber plant will be on the landing, not much bigger. Rubber plants grow slowly. We are bigger though, and the house looks small.

The cemetery stretches out before us, acres and acres. Now the ravine is on our left, with the new concrete bridge just visible. I have a quick memory of the old bridge, of the creek beneath it: under our feet the dead people must be dissolving, turning to water, cold and clear, flowing downhill. But I forget about this immediately. Nothing about the cemetery is frightening, I tell myself. It’s too pragmatic, too ugly, too neat. It’s only like a kitchen shelf, where you put things away. We walk for a while without speaking, not knowing where we’re going, or why. The trees are taller, the tombstones older. There are Celtic crosses now, and the occasional angel.

“How do we get out of here?” says Cordelia, laughing a little.

“If we keep going we’ll hit a road,” I say. “Isn’t that the traffic?”

“I need a ciggie-poo,” Cordelia says. We find a bench and sit down so Cordelia can free her hands for the cigarette, cupping it against the air, lighting it. She isn’t wearing gloves, or a scarf on her head. She has a tiny black and gold lighter.

“Look at all the little dead people houses,” she says.

“Mausoleums,” I say knowingly.

“The Lump-lump Family Mausoleum,” she says, giving the joke one last push.

“They wouldn’t have one,” I say. “Too ritzy.”

“Eaton,” Cordelia reads. “That must be the store, it’s the same lettering. The Eaton’s Catalogues are buried in there.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Catalogue,” I say.

“I wonder if they’re wearing foundation garments,” says Cordelia, inhaling. We’re trying for a return to our hilarity, but it isn’t working, I think of the Eatons, both of them or maybe more, tucked away for storage as if they’re fur coats or gold watches, in their private tomb, which is all the stranger for being shaped like a Greek temple. Where exactly are they, inside there? On biers? In cobwebby stone-lidded coffins, as in the horror comics? I think of their jewels, glinting in the dark—of course they would have jewels—and of their long dry hair. Your hair grows after you’re dead, also your fingernails. I don’t know how I know this.

“Mrs. Eaton is really a vampire, you know,” I say slowly. “She comes out at night. She’s dressed in a long white ballgown. That door creaks open and she comes out.”

“To drink the blood of Lump-lumps out too late,” says Cordelia hopefully, stubbing out her cigarette. I refuse to laugh. “No, seriously,” I say. “She does. I happen to know.”

Cordelia looks at me nervously. The snow is falling, it’s twilight, there’s nobody here but us. “Yeah?” she says, waiting for the joke.

“Yes,” I say. “We sometimes go together. Because I’m a vampire too.”

“You’re not,” says Cordelia, standing up, brushing off the snow. She’s smiling uncertainly.

“How do you know?” I say. “How do you know ?”

“You walk around in the daytime,” Cordelia says.

“That’s not me,” I say. “That’s my twin. You’ve never known, but I’m one of a twins. Identical ones, you can’t tell us apart by looking. Anyway it’s just the sun I have to avoid. On days like this it’s perfectly safe. I have a coffin full of earth where I sleep; it’s down in, down in”—I search for a likely place—“the cellar.”

“You’re being silly,” Cordelia says.

I stand up too. “Silly?” I say. I lower my voice. “I’m just telling you the truth. You’re my friend, I thought it was time you knew. I’m really dead. I’ve been dead for years.”

“You can stop playing that,” says Cordelia sharply. I’m surprised at how much pleasure this gives me, to know she’s so uneasy, to know I have this much power over her.

“Playing what?” I say. “I’m not playing. But you don’t have to worry. I won’t suck any of your blood. You’re my friend.”