Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

“Don’t be a brat,” says Cordelia.

“In a minute,” I say, “we’re going to be locked in.” It strikes both of us that this may be the truth. We run along the roadway, gasping and laughing, and find a large gateway, which is luckily still open. Beyond it is Yonge Street, lined with rush-hour traffic.

Cordelia wants to point out Lump-lump Family cars, but I’m tired of this. I have a denser, more malevolent little triumph to finger: energy has passed between us, and I am stronger.

Chapter 43

N ow I’m in Grade Eleven, and as tall as many other girls, which is not very tall. I have a charcoal-gray pencil skirt that’s hard to walk in despite the kick pleat, and a bat wing sweater, a red one with modulated gray horizontal stripes across it. I have a wide black elastic cinch belt with an imitation gold clasp buckle, and flat ballerina shoes of velveteen that scuff as I walk and bulge out at the sides. I have a shortie coat to go with the pencil skirt. This is the look: boxy and flared at the top, with a long skinny stem of thighs and legs coming out the bottom. I have a mean mouth.

I have such a mean mouth that I become known for it. I don’t use it unless provoked, but then I open my mean mouth and short, devastating comments come out of it. I hardly have to think them up, they’re just there suddenly, like thought balloons with light bulbs in them. “Don’t be a pain” and “Takes one to know one” are standard repartee among girls, but I go much farther than that. I’m willing to say pain in the ass, which skirts good taste, and to go in for crushing inventions, such as The Walking Pimple and The Before Part of an Arrid Armpit Ad. If any girl calls me a brain, I say, “Better a brain than a pin-headed moron like you.” “Use much hair grease?” I will say, or “Suck much?” I know where the weak spots are.

“Suck” is an especially satisfying word, especially annihilating. Boys say it mostly, to one another; it suggests thumbs and babies. I haven’t yet considered what else might be sucked, or under what circumstances.

Girls at school learn to look out for my mean mouth and avoid it. I walk the halls surrounded by an aura of potential verbal danger, and am treated with caution, which suits me fine. Strangely enough, my mean behavior doesn’t result in fewer friends, but, on the surface, more. The girls are afraid of me but they know where it’s safest: beside me, half a step behind. “Elaine is a riot,” they say, without conviction. Some of them are already collecting china and housewares, and have Hope Chests. For this kind of thing I feel amused disdain. And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.

I don’t have occasion to use my mean mouth on boys, since they don’t say provoking things to me. Except for Stephen, of course. These days we trade verbal meannesses as a kind of game, like badminton. Got you. Got you back. I can usually silence him with, “Where’d you get that haircut?

Lawnmowerville?” He’s sensitive about the haircut. Or, when he’s all spiffed up in his private school gray flannels and jacket: “Hey, you look like a Simpsons Rep.” Simpsons Reps are sucky kids who appear in high school yearbooks wearing blazers with crests on the pockets, looking clean-cut, and advertising Simpsons.

My father says, “Your sharp tongue will get you in trouble some day, young lady.” Young lady is a sign that I’ve gone too daringly close to some edge or other, but although it silences me for the moment it doesn’t tone me down. I’ve come to enjoy the risk, the sensation of vertigo when I realize that I’ve shot right over the border of the socially acceptable, that I’m walking on thin ice, on empty air. The person I use my mean mouth on the most is Cordelia. She doesn’t even have to provoke me, I use her as target practice. We sit on the hill overlooking the football field, wearing our jeans, which are only allowed at school on the days of football games. We have our overlong pant cuffs pinned up with blanket pins, the latest thing. The cheerleaders leap around in their mid-thigh skirts, waving their paper pom-poms; they don’t look long-legged and golden, like the cheerleaders at the back of Life magazine, but ill-assorted, dumpy, and dark. However I still envy their calves. The football team jogs on. Cordelia says, “That Gregory! What a hunk,” and I say, “Of cheese.” Cordelia gives me a hurt look. “I think he’s a doll.” “If you like them covered with corn oil,” I say. When she says it’s a bad idea to sit down on the high school toilet seats without wiping them off first because you might get a disease, I say, “Who told you that? Your Mummie?”

I make fun of her favorite singers. “Love, love, love,” I say. “They’re always moaning.” I have developed a searing contempt for gushiness and schmaltz. Frank Sinatra is The Singing Marshmallow, Betty Hutton is The Human Grindstone. Anyway, these people are out of date, they are sentimental mushballs. The real truth is to be found in rock and roll: “Hearts Made of Stone” is more like it. Sometimes Cordelia can think of things to say back, but sometimes she can’t. She says, “That’s cruel.”

Or she sticks her tongue in the side of her mouth and changes the subject. Or she lights a cigarette. I sit in History class, doodling on the side of the page. We are taking the Second World War. The teacher is an enthusiast, he’s hopping around at the front of the room, waving his arms and his pointer. He’s a short man with an unruly strand of hair and a limp, who may have been in the war himself, or so rumor goes. On the board he’s drawn a large map of Europe, in white, with yellow dotted lines for the borders between countries. Hitler’s armies invade, by means of pink chalk arrows. Now it’s the Anschluss, and now Poland falls, and now France. I draw tulips and trees, putting a line for the ground and including the root systems in every case. Submarines appear in the English Channel, in green. I draw the face of the girl sitting across the aisle from me. The Blitz is on, bombs drift down through the air like sinister silver angels, London is disintegrating block by block, house by house, mantelpieces, chimneys, double beds hand-carved and passed down through the generations blasted into burning splinters, history reduced to shards. “It was the end of an era,” says the teacher. It’s hard for us to understand, he says, but nothing will ever be the same again. He is deeply moved by this, you can tell, it’s embarrassing. The same as what? I think.

It’s incredible to me that I myself was alive when all those chalk things were going on, all those statistical deaths. I was alive when women wore those ridiculous clothes with the big shoulder pads and the nipped-in waists, with peplums over their bums like backward aprons. I draw a woman with wide shoulders and a picture hat. I draw my own hand. Hands are the hardest. It’s difficult to keep them from looking like clumps of sausages.

I go out with boys. This is not part of a conscious plan, it just happens. My relationships with boys are effortless, which means that I put very little effort into them. It’s girls I feel awkward with, it’s girls I feel I have to defend myself against; not boys. I sit in my bedroom picking the pilly fuzzballs off my lambswool sweaters and the phone will ring. It will be a boy. I take the sweater into the hall, where the phone is, and sit on the hall chair with the receiver cradled between my ear and shoulder and continue to pick off the fuzzballs, while a long conversation goes on that is mostly silence.

Boys by nature require these silences; they must not be startled by too many words, spoken too quickly. What they actually say is not that important. The important parts exist in the silences between the words. I know what we’re both looking for, which is escape. They want to escape from adults and other boys, I want to escape from adults and other girls. We’re looking for desert islands, momentary, unreal, but there.