Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

My father paces the living room, jingling his keys and small change in his pockets. He’s impatient, he can’t help hearing these monosyllables, these murmurs, these silences. He walks into the hall and makes snipping motions with his fingers, meaning I’m to cut it short. “I have to go now,” I say. The boy makes a sound like air coming out of an inner tube. I understand it.

I know things about boys. I know what goes on in their heads, about girls and women, things they can’t admit to other boys, or to anyone. They’re fearful about their own bodies, shy about what they say, afraid of being laughed at. I know what kind of talk goes on among them as they horse around in the locker room, sneak cigarettes behind the field house. Stunned broad, dog, bag and bitch are words they apply to girls, as well as worse words. I don’t hold these words against them. I know these words are another version of pickled ox eyes and snot eating, they’re prove-it words boys need to exchange, to show they are strong and not to be taken in. The words don’t necessarily mean they don’t like real girls, or one real girl. Sometimes real girls are an alternative to these words and sometimes they’re an incarnation of them, and sometimes they’re just background noise.

I don’t think any of these words apply to me. They apply to other girls, girls who walk along the high school halls in ignorance of them, swinging their hair, swaying their little hips as if they think they’re seductive, talking too loudly and carelessly to one another, fooling nobody; or else acting pastel, blank, daisy-fresh. And all the time these clouds of silent words surround them, stunned broad, dog, bag and bitch, pointing at them, reducing them, cutting them down to size so they can be handled. The trick with these silent words is to walk in the spaces between them, turn sideways in your head, evade. Like walking through walls.

This is what I know about boys in general. None of it has to do with individual boys by themselves, the boys I go out with. These boys are usually older than I am, although they aren’t the kind with greasy ducktails and a lot of leather, they’re nicer than that. When I go out with them I’m supposed to be home on time. If I’m not, my father has long conversations with me in which he explains that being home on time is like being on time for a train. If I were to be late for a train, I would miss the train, wouldn’t I?

“But this house isn’t a train,” I say. “It’s not going anywhere.” My father is exasperated; he jingles his keys in his pocket. “That’s not the point,” he says.

What my mother says is, “We worry.” “What about?” I say. There’s nothing to worry about, as far as I can see.

My parents are a liability in this as in other matters. They won’t buy a television, like everyone else, because my father says it turns you into a cretin and emits harmful radiation and subliminal messages as well. When the boys come to pick me up, my father emerges from the cellar wearing his old gray felt hat and carrying a hammer or a saw, and grips their hands in his bear paw handshake. He assesses them with his shrewd, twinkly, ironic little eyes and calls them “sir,” as if they’re his graduate students. My mother goes into her nice lady act and says almost nothing. Or else she tells me I look sweet, right in front of the boys.

In the spring they appear around the corner of the house in their baggy gardening pants, smudged with mud, to see me off. They drag the boys out to the backyard, where there is now a large pile of cement blocks accumulated by my father for some future contingency. They want the boys to see their display of irises, as if these boys are old ladies; and the boys have to say something about the irises, although irises are the last thing on their minds. Or else my father attempts to engage them in improving conversation about current topics, or asks them if they’ve read this book or that one, pulling books from the bookshelves while the boys shift on their feet. “Your father’s a card,” the boys say uneasily, later. My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out humiliating things that can neither be anticipated nor controlled. I sign and make the best of it. I feel I’m older than they are, much older. I feel ancient.

What I do with the boys is nothing to worry about. It’s normal. We go to movies, where we sit in the smoking section and neck, or we go to drive-ins and eat popcorn and neck there as well. There are rules for necking, which we observe: approach, push away, approach, push away. Garter belts are going too far and so are brassieres. No zippers. The boys mouths taste of cigarettes and salt, their skin smells like Old Spice after-shave. We go to dances and twirl around during the rock numbers, or shuffle in the blue light, surrounded by the shuffling of the other couples. After formal dances we go to someone’s house or to the St. Charles Restaurant, and after that we neck, though not for long because the time has usually run out. For formal dances I have dresses which I sew myself because I can’t afford to buy them. They have layers of tulle and are propped up underneath with crinolines, and I worry about the hooks coming unfastened. I have shoes in matching satin or silver straps, I have earrings which pinch like hell. For these dances the boys send corsages, which I press afterward and keep in my bureau drawer: squashed carnations and brown-edged rosebuds, wads of dead vegetation, like a collection of floral shrunken heads.

My brother Stephen treats these boys with scorn. As far as he’s concerned they are dimwits and unworthy of my serious consideration. He laughs at them behind their backs and makes fun of their names. They are not George but Georgie-Porgie, not Roger but Rover. He makes bets as to how long each one will last. “Three months for him,” he’ll say, after seeing the boy for the first time; or, “When are you going to throw him over?”

I don’t dislike my brother for this. I expect it of him, because he’s partly right. I don’t feel about these boys the way girls do in true romance comic books. I don’t sit around wondering when they’ll call. I like them but I don’t fall in love with them. None of the teenage magazine descriptions of girls moping, one tear on each cheek like pearl earrings, applies to me. So partly the boys are not a serious matter. But at the same time they are.

The serious part is their bodies. I sit in the hall with the cradled telephone, and what I hear is their bodies. I don’t listen much to the words but to the silences, and in the silences these bodies re-create themselves, are created by me, take form. When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that. Let me have that. What power they have over me is held through the eyes, and when I’m tired of them it’s an exhaustion partly physical, but also partly visual.

Only some of this has to do with sex; although some of it does. Some of the boys have cars, but others do not, and with them I go on buses, on streetcars, on the newly opened Toronto subway that is clean and uneventful and looks like a long pastel-tiled bathroom. These boys walk me home, we walk the long way around. The air smells of lilac or mown grass or burning leaves, depending on the season. We walk over the new cement footbridge, with the willow trees arching overhead, the sound of running water from the creek beneath. We stand in the dim light coming from the lampposts on the bridge and lean back against the railing, their arms around me and mine around them. We lift each other’s clothing, run our hands over each other’s backbones, and I feel the backbone tensed and strung to breaking. I feel the length of the whole body, I touch the face, amazed. The faces of the boys change so much, they soften, open up, they ache. The body is pure energy, solidified light.