Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

“What?” says Cordelia, who has trouble remembering jokes even when she’s heard them.

“Well, well, well,” I say.

“Ha ha,” says Cordelia. Part of this ritual is mild derision, of other people’s jokes. Cordelia doodles on the table, using our spilled water. “Remember those holes I used to dig?” she says.

“What holes?” I say. I don’t remember any holes.

“Those holes in my backyard. Boy, did I want a hole out there. I started one, but the ground was too hard, it was full of rocks. So I dug another one. I used to work away at it after school, day after day. I got blisters on my hands from the shovel.” She smiles a pensive, reminiscent smile.

“What did you want it for?” I ask.

“I wanted to put a chair in it and sit down there. By myself.”

I laugh. “What for?”

“I don’t know. I guess I wanted someplace that was all mine, where nobody could bug me. When I was little, I used to sit on a chair in the front hall. I used to think that if I kept very still and out of the way and didn’t say anything, I would be safe.”

“Safe from what?” I say.

“Just safe,” she says. “When I was really little, I guess I used to get into trouble a lot, with Daddy. When he would lose his temper. You never knew when he was going to do it. ”Wipe that smirk off your face,“

he would say. I used to stand up to him.” She squashes out her cigarette, which has been smoldering in the ashtray. “You know, I hated moving to that house. I hated the kids at Queen Mary’s, and those boring things like skipping. I didn’t really have any good friends there, except for you.”

Cordelia’s face dissolves, re-forms: I can see her nine-year-old face taking shape beneath it. This happens in an eyeblink. It’s as if I’ve been standing outside in the dark and a shade has snapped up, over a lighted window, revealing the life that’s been going on inside in all its clarity and detail. There is that glimpse, during which I can see. And then not.

A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It’s as if I’ve been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I’ve heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There’s the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don’t know where these feelings have come from, what I’ve done.

I don’t want to know. Whatever it is, it’s nothing I need or want. I want to be here, in Tuesday, in May, sitting in the red-topped booth at Sunnysides, watching Cordelia as she delicately slurps the last of her milkshake up through the straws. She’s noticed nothing.

“I’ve got one,” I say. “Why did the unwashed chicken cross the road twice?”

“Why?” says Cordelia.

“Because it was a dirty double-crosser,” I say.

Cordelia rolls her eyes, like Perdie. “Very funny,” she says.

I close my eyes. In my head there’s a square of darkness, and of purple flowers.

Chapter 46

I begin to avoid Cordelia. I don’t know why.

I no longer arrange double dates with her. I tell her that the boy I’m going out with doesn’t have any suitable friends. I say I have to stay after school, which is true: I’m painting the decorations for the next dance, palm trees and girls in hula skirts.

Some days Cordelia waits for me, so I have to walk home with her anyway. She talks and talks as if there’s nothing wrong, and I say little; but then I’ve never said a lot anyway. After a while she’ll say, overly brightly, “But here I’ve been going on and on about me. What’s doing with you?” and I smile and say “Nothing much.” Sometimes she makes a joke of it and says, “But that’s enough about me. What do you think of me?” and I add to the joke by saying, “Nothing much.”

Cordelia is failing more and more tests. It doesn’t seem to bother her, or at any rate she doesn’t want to talk about it. I no longer help her with her homework, because I know she won’t pay attention even if I do. She has trouble concentrating on anything. Even when she’s just talking, on the way home, she changes the subject in the middle of a sentence so it’s hard to follow what she’s saying. She’s slipping up on the grooming, too, reverting to her old sloppy ways of years ago. She’s let her bleached strip grow out, so it’s disconcertingly two-toned. There are runs in her nylons, buttons popped off her blouses. Her lipstick doesn’t seem to fit her mouth.

It is decided that it would be best for Cordelia to change schools again, so she does. After this she phones me frequently, but then less frequently. She says we should get together soon. I never deny this, but I never set a time either. After a while I say, “I have to go now.”

Cordelia’s family moves to a different, larger house, in a ritzier neighborhood farther north. Some Dutch people move into her old house. They plant a lot of tulips. That seems to be the end of her. I write the final Grade Thirteen exams, subject after subject, day after day, sitting at a desk in the gymnasium. The leaves are fully out, the irises are in bloom, there’s a heat wave; the gymnasium heats up like an oven and we all sit in there, superheated, writing away, while the gymnasium exudes its smell of bygone athletes. The teachers police the aisles. Several girls faint. One boy keels over and is found afterward to have drunk a pitcher of tomato juice out of the refrigerator which was really Bloody Marys for his mother’s bridge club. As the bodies are carried out I scarcely look up from the page. I know I’ll do well in the two Biology exams. I can draw anything: the insides of crayfish ears, the human eye, frogs’ genitalia, the blossom of the snapdragon ( Antirrhinum majus ) in cross section. I know the difference between a raceme and a rhizome, I explicate photosynthesis, I can spell Scrofulariaciae. But in the middle of the Botany examination it comes to me, like a sudden epileptic fit, that I’m not going to be a biologist, as I have thought. I am going to be a painter. I look at the page, where the life cycle of the mushroom from spore to fruiting body is taking shape, and I know this with absolute certainty. My life has been changed, soundlessly, instantaneously. I continue my explication of tubers, bulbs, and legumes, as if nothing has happened.

One night, just after the exams have finished, the phone rings. It’s Cordelia. I realize I’ve been expecting this.

“I’d like to see you,” she says. I don’t want to see her, but I know I will. What I hear is not like but need.

The next afternoon I take the subway and then the bus, northward through the heated city, to where Cordelia now lives. I’ve never been up here before. The streets wind in and around, the houses are large, ponderous, Georgian, set off with weighty shrubbery. I see or think I see Cordelia’s face, pale and indistinct, behind the front window as I come up the walk. She opens the door before I have time to ring.

“Well, hi there,” she says. “Long time no see.” This is false heartiness and we both know it, because Cordelia is a wreck. Her hair is lusterless, the flesh of her face pasty. She’s gained a lot of weight, not solid-muscled weight, but limp weight, bloated and watery. She’s gone back to the too-vivid orange-red lipstick, which turns her yellowish. “I know,” she says. “I look like Haggis McBaggis.”

The house is cool inside. The front hall floor is white and black squares; there’s a graceful central staircase. A flower arrangement with gladioli sits on a polished table beside it. The house is silent, except for a clock chiming in the living room. Nobody else seems to be home. We don’t go into the living room but back past the stairs and through a door into the kitchen, where Cordelia makes me a cup of instant coffee. The kitchen is beautiful, perfectly arranged, pale-colored and peaceful. The refrigerator and stove are white. Some people now have colored refrigerators, pale-green or pink, but I don’t like these colors and I’m pleased that Cordelia’s mother doesn’t either. There’s a lined school notebook open on the kitchen table, which I recognize as the dining table from their other house with the two middle leaves taken out. That means they must have a new dining table. It appals me to discover that I want to see this new dining table more than I want to see Cordelia. Cordelia rummages in the fridge and brings out an opened package of store doughnuts. “I’ve been waiting for an excuse to eat the rest of these,” she says. But as soon as she’s taken her first bite she lights a cigarette.