Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

In this she is wrong. I overhear Marjorie and Babs discussing it in an oblique way: “Listen, kid, it’s one way to pass the course,” is what they say. “Wish I could do it just by flipping on my back.” “Don’t you wish! Those days are long gone, eh?” And they laugh in a comfortable way, as if what is going on is nothing at all, or funny.

I don’t think this love affair is at all funny. Love affair is how I think of it; I can’t detach the word affair from the word love, although which of them loves the other is not clear. I decide that it’s Mr. Hrbik who loves Susie. Or he doesn’t really love her: he’s besotted by her. I like this word besotted, suggestive as it is of sogginess, soppiness, flies drunk on syrup. Susie herself is incapable of love, she’s too shallow. I think of her as the conscious one, the one in control: she’s toying with him, in a hard, lacquered way straight out of forties movie posters. Hard as nails, and I even know what color of nails: Fire and Ice. This, despite her easily hurt look, her ingratiating ways. She throws off guilt like a sweet aroma, and Mr. Hrbik staggers besotted toward his fate.

After she realizes the people in the class know—Babs and Marjorie have a way of conveying their knowledge—Susie becomes bolder. She starts referring to Mr. Hrbik by his first name, and popping him into sentences: Josef thinks, Josef says. She always knows where he is. Sometimes he is in Montreal for the weekend, where they have much better restaurants and decent wines. She’s definite about this, although she’s never been there. She throws out inside tidbits of information about him: he was married in Hungary, but his wife didn’t come with him and now he’s divorced. He has two daughters whose pictures he keeps in his wallet. It kills him to be separated from them—“It just kills him,” she says softly, her eyes misting.

Marjorie and Babs gobble this up. Already she’s losing her floozie status with them, she’s entering the outskirts of domesticity. They egg her on: “Listen, I don’t blame you! I think he’s just cute as a button!”

“I could eat him up! But that would be robbing the cradle, eh?” In the washroom the two of them sit side by side in separate cubicles, talking over the noise of gushing pee, while I stand in front of the mirror, listening in. “I just hope he knows what he’s doing. A nice kid like her.” What they mean is that he should marry her. Or perhaps they mean that he should marry her if she gets pregnant. That would be the decent thing.

The painters, on the other hand, turn rough on her. “Jeez, will you shut up about Josef! You’d think the sun shines out of his ass!” But she can’t shut up. She resorts to craven, apologetic giggling, which annoys them further, and me also. I’ve seen that saturated, brimming look before. I feel that Mr. Hrbik needs protecting, or even rescuing. I don’t yet know that a man can be admirable in many ways but a jerk in others. Also I haven’t yet learned that chivalry in men is idiocy in women: men can get out of a rescue a lot more easily, once they get into it.

Chapter 52

I am still living at home, which is humiliating; but why should I pay extra to live in a dormitory, when the university is in the same city? This is my father’s view, and the reasonable one. Little does he know it isn’t a dormitory I have in mind, but a crumbling walk-up above a bakery or cigar store, with streetcars rumbling by outside and the ceilings covered with egg cartons painted black. But I no longer sleep in my childhood room with the vanilla-colored light fixture and the window curtains. I’ve retreated to the cellar, claiming I can study better. Down there in a dim storage room adjacent to the furnace I’ve set up a realm of ersatz squalor. From the cupboardful of old camping equipment I’ve excavated one of the army surplus cots and a lumpy khaki sleeping bag, short-circuiting my mother’s plans to move my bed down to the cellar so I can have a proper mattress. On the walls I’ve taped theater posters, from local productions—Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Sartre’s No Exit —with deliberate fingerprints and inkstain-black lettering on them, and shadowy figures that look as if they’ve run in the wash; also several of my careful drawings of feet. My mother thinks the theater posters are gloomy, and doesn’t understand the feet at all: feet should have a body. I narrow my eyes at her, knowing better.

As for my father, he thinks my talent for drawing is impressive, but wasted. It would have been better applied to cross sections of stems and the cells of algae. For him I am a botanist manqué. His view of life has darkened since Mr. Banerji returned to India. There is some obscurity around this: it is not talked of much. My mother says he was homesick, and hints at a nervous breakdown, but there was more to it than that. “They wouldn’t promote him,” says my father. There’s a lot behind they (not we

), and wouldn’t (not didn’t ). “He wasn’t properly appreciated.” I think I know what this means. My father’s view of human nature has always been bleak, but scientists were excluded from it, and now they aren’t. He feels betrayed.

My parents’ footsteps pace back and forth above my head; the sounds of the household, the Mixmaster and the telephone and the distant news, filter down to me as if in illness. I emerge, blinking, for meals and sit in stupor and demi-silence, picking at my chicken fricassee and mashed potatoes, while my mother comments on my lack of appetite and pallor and my father tells me useful and interesting things as if I am still young. Do I realize that nitrogen fertilizers are destroying fish fife by fostering an overgrowth of algae?

Have I heard of the new disease which will turn us all into deformed cretins unless the paper companies are forced to stop dumping mercury into the rivers? I do not realize, I have not heard.

“Are you getting enough sleep, dear?” says my mother.

“Yes,” I say untruthfully.

My father has noticed an ad in the paper, for an atomic radiation monster insect movie. “As you know,”

he says, “those giant grasshoppers could never actually exist. At that size their respiratory systems would collapse.”

I do not know.

In April, while I’m studying for exams and before the buds come out, my brother Stephen gets arrested. This happens the way it would.

Stephen has not been here as he should have been to help me out at the dinner table, he hasn’t been home all year. Instead he’s running around loose in the world. He’s studying Astrophysics at a university in California, having finished his undergraduate degree in two years instead of four. Now he is doing graduate work.

I have no clear picture of California, having never been there, but I think of it as sunny, and warm all the time. The sky is a vibrant aniline blue, the trees a preternatural green. I populate it with tanned, handsome men in sunglasses and sports shirts with palm trees on them, and with real palm trees, and with blond, long-legged women, also tanned, with white convertibles.

Among these sunglassed, fashionable people my brother is an anomaly. After he left his boys’ school he reverted to his old, unkempt ways, and goes around in his moccasins and his sweaters with the worn-through elbows. He doesn’t get a haircut unless reminded, and who is there to remind him? He walks among the palm trees, oblivious, whistling, his head sheathed in a halo of invisible numbers. What do the Californians make of him? They think he is a kind of tramp.

On this particular day he takes his binoculars and his butterfly book and heads out into the countryside on his secondhand bicycle, to look for Californian butterflies. He comes to a promising field, descends, locks up the bike: he is prudent enough within limits. He heads into the field, which must have tall grass in it and some smallish bushes. He sees two exotic Californian butterflies and starts in pursuit of them, pausing to scan them with his binoculars; but at this distance he can’t identify them, and every time he moves forward they take off.