Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

“So,” she says. “What are you up to these days?” It’s her too-bright voice, the one she used to use on boys. Right now it frightens me.

“Oh, just the usual,” I say. “You know. Finishing exams.” We look at each other. Things are bad for her, that much is clear. I don’t know whether she wants me to ignore this or not. “What about you?” I say.

“I have a tutor,” she says. “I’m supposed to be studying. For summer courses.” We both know without mentioning it that she must have failed her year, despite the new school. She must have failed badly. Unless she passes whatever subjects she failed, at the next set of exams or sometime or other, she’ll be locked out of university forever.

“Is the tutor nice?” I say, as if I’m asking about a new dress.

“I guess so,” says Cordelia. “Her name is Miss Dingle. It really is. She blinks all the time, she has watery eyes. She lives in this squalid apartment. She has salmon-colored lingerie, I see it hanging over the shower curtain rod in her squalid bathroom. I can always get her off the subject by asking about her health.”

“Off what subject?” I ask.

“Oh, any subject,” says Cordelia. “Physics, Latin. Any of it.” She sounds a little ashamed of herself, but proud and excited too. It’s like the time when she used to pinch things. This is her accomplishment these days: deluding the tutor. “I don’t know why they all think I spend the days studying,” she says. “I sleep a lot. Or else I drink coffee and smoke and listen to records. Sometimes I have a little nip out of Daddy’s whisky decanter. I fill it up with water. He hasn’t found out!”

“But, Cordelia,” I say. “You have to do something !”

“Why?” she says, with a little of her old belligerence. She isn’t only joking. And I have no reason to give her. I can’t say, “Because everyone does.” I can’t even say, “You have to earn a living,” because she obviously doesn’t, she’s here in this large house and she isn’t earning a living at all. She could just go on like this, like a woman from old-fashioned times, a maiden aunt, some aging perennial girl who never leaves home. It isn’t likely that her parents would kick her out. So I say, “You’ll get bored.”

Cordelia laughs, too loudly. “So what if I study?” she says. “I pass my exams. I go to university. I learn it all. I turn into Miss Dingle. No thanks.”

“Don’t be a cretin,” I say. “Who says you have to be Miss Dingle?”

“Maybe I am a cretin,” she says. “I can’t concentrate on that stuff, I can hardly look at the page, it all turns into little black dots.”

“Maybe you could go to secretarial school,” I say. I feel like a traitor as soon as I’ve said it. She knows what we both think of girls who would go to secretarial school, with their spidery plucked eyebrows and pink nylon blouses.

“Thanks a bundle.” There’s a pause. “But let’s not talk about all that,” she says, returning to her ultrabright voice. “Let’s talk about fun things. Remember that cabbage? The bouncy one?”

“Yes,” I say. It occurs to me that she could be pregnant, or that she might have been. It’s natural to wonder that about girls who drop out of school. But I decide this is unlikely.

“I was so mortified,” she says. “Remember when we used to go downtown and take our pictures at Union Station? We thought we were so sharp!”

“Right before the subway was built,” I say.

“We used to throw snowballs at old ladies. We used to sing those silly songs.”

“Leprosy,” I say.

“Part of your heart,” she says. “We thought we were the cat’s ass. I see kids that age now and I think: Brats! ”

She’s looking back on that time as if it was her golden age; or maybe it seems that way to her because it’s better than now. But I don’t want her to remember any more. I want to protect myself from any further, darker memories of hers, get myself out of here gracefully before something embarrassing happens. She’s balanced on the edge of an artificial hilarity that could topple over at any moment into its opposite, into tears and desperation. I don’t want to see her crumple up like that, because I have nothing to offer her in the way of solace.

I harden toward her. She’s acting like a jerk. She doesn’t have to stay locked into place, into this mournful, drawn-out, low-grade misery. She has all kinds of choices and possibilities, and the only thing that’s keeping her away from them is lack of willpower. Smarten up, I want to tell her. Pull up your socks.

I say I have to get back, that I’m going out later. This isn’t true and she suspects it. Although she’s a mess, her instinct for social fraud has sharpened. “Of course,” she says. “That’s entirely understandable.”

It’s her distant, grown-up voice.

Now that I’m hurrying, making a show of bustle, it strikes me that one of my reasons for escape is that I don’t want to meet her mother coming back, from wherever she’s been. Her mother would look at me with reproach, as if I am responsible for Cordelia in her present shape, as if she’s disappointed, not in Cordelia, but in me. Why should I have to undergo such a look, for something that is not my fault?

“Goodbye, Cordelia,” I say in the front hall. I squeeze her arm briefly, move back before she can kiss me on the cheek. Kissing on the cheek is what they do in her family. I know she has expected something from me, some connection to her old life, or to herself. I know I have failed to provide it. I am dismayed by myself, by my cruelty and indifference, my lack of kindness. But also I feel relief.

“Call you soon,” I say. I’m lying, but she chooses not to acknowledge this.

“That would be nice,” she says, shielding us both with politeness.

I go down the walk toward the street, turn to look back. There’s her face again, a blurred reflection of a moon, behind the front window.

Ten – Life Drawing

Chapter 47

T here are several diseases of the memory. Forgetfulness of nouns, for instance, or of numbers. Or there are more complex amnesias. With one, you can lose your entire past; you start afresh, learning how to tie your shoelaces, how to eat with a fork, how to read and sing. You are introduced to your relatives, your oldest friends, as if you’ve never met them before; you get a second chance with them, better than forgiveness because you can begin innocent. With another form, you keep the distant past but lose the present. You can’t remember what happened five minutes ago. When someone you’ve known all your life goes out of the room and then comes back in, you greet them as if they’ve been gone for twenty years; you weep and weep, with joy and relief, as if at a reunion with the dead. I sometimes wonder which of these will afflict me, later; because I know one of them will. For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

I sit in the harsh ultrablack of the Quasi, drinking red wine, staring out the window. On the other side of the glass, Cordelia drifts past; then melts and reassembles, changing into someone else. Another mistaken identity.

Why did they name her that? Hang that weight around her neck. Heart of the moon, jewel of the sea, depending on which foreign language you’re using. The third sister, the only honest one. The stubborn one, the rejected one, the one who was not heard. If she’d been called Jane, would things have been different?

My own mother named me after her best friend, as women did in those days. Elaine, which I once found too plaintive. I wanted something more definite, a monosyllable: Dot or Pat, like a foot set down. Nothing you could make a mistake about; nothing watery. But my name has solidified around me, with time. I think of it as tough but pliable now, like a well-worn glove.