Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

(There is of course the specter of pregnancy. You can’t get a diaphragm unless you’re married, rubbers are sold under the counter and only to men. There are those girls who went too far in back seats and got knocked up and dropped out of high school, or had strange, never-explained accidents. There are jocular terms for it: up the spout, bun in the oven. But such washroom notions have nothing to do with Josef and his experienced mauve bedroom. They also have nothing to do with me, wrapped as I am in dense minor-key enchantment. But I make little checkmarks on my pocket calendar, all the same.) On the days when I have time off, when I’m not seeing Josef, I try to paint. Sometimes I draw with colored pencils. What I draw is the furniture in the apartment: the overstuffed sofa from the Sally Ann strewn with shed clothing, the bulbous lamp lent by a roommate’s mother, the kitchen stool. More often I don’t have the energy, and end up reading murder mysteries in the bathtub. Josef won’t tell me about the war, or about how he got out of Hungary during the revolution. He says these things are too disturbing for him and he wants only to forget them. He says there are many ways to die and some are less pleasant than others. He says I am lucky I will never have to know things like this.

“This country has no heroes,” he says. “You should keep it that way.” He tells me I am untouched. This is the way he wants me, he says. When he says these things he runs his hands over my skin as if he’s erasing me, rubbing me smooth.

But he tells me his dreams. He’s very interested in these dreams, and they are in fact like no dreams I can remember hearing about. There are red velvet curtains in them, red velvet sofas, red velvet rooms. There are white silk ropes in them, with tassels on the ends; there’s a lot of attention to fabrics. There are decaying teacups.

He dreams of a woman wrapped up in cellophane, even over her face, and of another walking along the railing of a balcony dressed in a white shroud, and of another lying facedown in the bathtub. When he tells me these dreams, he doesn’t look at me exactly; it’s as if he’s looking at a point several inches inside my head. I don’t know how to respond, so I smile weakly. I’m a little jealous of these women in his dreams: none of them are me. Josef sighs and pats my hand. “You are so young,” he says. There is nothing that can be said in reply to this, although I don’t feel young. Right now I feel ancient, and overworked and too warm. The constant odor of breasting chicken is taking away my appetite. It’s late July, the Toronto humidity hangs like swamp gas over the city, and the air-conditioning at the Swiss Chalet broke down today. There were complaints. Someone upset a platter of quarters with buns and dipping sauce onto the kitchen floor, causing skids. The chef called me a stupid bitch.

“I have no country,” says Josef mournfully. He touches my cheek tenderly, gazing into my eyes. “You are my country now.”

I eat another tinned, inauthentic snail. It strikes me with no warning that I am miserable.

Chapter 54

C ordelia has run away from home. This is not how she puts it. She’s tracked me down through my mother. I meet her for coffee, during my afternoon break, not at the Swiss Chalet. I could get the coffee free, but by now I want to be out of there as much as possible, away from the sickly back-room odor of raw poultry, the rows of naked chickens like dead babies, the mushed-up, lukewarm, dog dish debris of customers’ meals. So instead we are in Murray‘s, down the street in the Park Plaza Hotel. It’s medium clean, and although there’s no air-conditioning there are ceiling fans. At least here I don’t know what goes on in the kitchen. Cordelia is thinner now, almost gaunt. The cheekbones of her long face are visible, her gray-green eyes are big in her face. Around each one of them is drawn a green line. She is tanned, her lips an understated orangey-pink. Her arms are angular, her neck elegant; her hair is pulled back like a ballerina’s. She’s wearing black stockings although it’s summer, and sandals, although the sandals are not dainty women’s summer sandals, but thick-soled and artistic, with primitive peasant buckles. Also a scoop-neck short-sleeved black jersey top that shows off her breasts, a full cotton skirt of a dull blue-green with abstract black swirls and squares on it, a wide black belt. She has on two heavy rings, one with a turquoise, and chunky square earrings, and a silver bracelet: Mexican silver. You would not say beautiful about her, but you would stare, as I am, doing: for the first time in her life she looks distinguished. We greeted each other on sight with the outstretched hands, the demi-hugs, the cries of surprise and delight that women are supposed to make who haven’t seen each other for a while. Now I slump in Murray‘s, drinking wishy-washy coffee, while Cordelia talks and I wonder why I have agreed to this. I am at a disadvantage: I’m in my crumpled, gravy-spotted Swiss Chalet uniform, my armpits are sweaty, my feet hurt, my hair in this humidity is unruly and dank and curling like singed wool. There are dark circles under my eyes, because last night was one of Josef’s nights.

Cordelia on the other hand is showing herself off to me. She wants me to see what has become of her, since her days of sloth and overeating and failure. She has reinvented herself. She’s cool as a cucumber, and brimming with casual news.

What she is doing is working at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. She is a bit-part player. “ Very minor things,” she says, waving her bracelet and rings dismissively, which means less minor than she says.

“You know. Spear carrying, though of course I don’t carry spears.” She laughs, and lights a cigarette. I wonder if Cordelia has ever eaten snails, decide she is most likely on familiar terms with them; a depressing thought.

The Stratford Shakespearean Festival is quite famous by now. It was started several years ago in the town of Stratford, which has an Avon River running through it, and swans of both colors. I have read all this in magazines. People go there on the train, in buses, or in cars with picnic baskets; sometimes they stay all weekend and see three or four Shakespeare plays, one after the other. At first this festival was held in a big tent, like a circus. But now there is a real building, a strange, modern building, circular in shape. “So you have to project to three sides. It’s such a strain on the voice,” Cordelia says with a deprecating smile, as if she is projecting and straining her voice all in the line of work. She is like someone making herself up as she goes along. She’s improvising.

“What do your parents think?” I say. This has been on my own mind lately: what parents think. Her face closes down for a moment. “They’re pleased I’m doing something,” she says.

“What about Perdie and Mirrie?”

“You know Perdie,” she says tightly. “Always the little put-downs. But that’s enough about me. What do you think of me?” This is an old joke of hers, and I laugh. “Seriously, what are you up to these days?”

It’s the tone I remember: polite but not too interested. “Since the last time I saw you.”

I remember this last time with guilt. “Oh, nothing much,” I say. “Going to school. You know.” Right now it does look like nothing much. What have I really done all year? A smattering of art history, messing around with charcoal. There’s nothing to show. There’s Josef, but he’s not exactly an accomplishment and I decide not to mention him.

“School!” says Cordelia. “Was I glad to see the end of school. God, what boredom.” Stratford is only on in the summers, though. She will have to think of something else for the winter. Maybe the Earle Grey Players, going around to high schools. Maybe she will be ready for that. She got the job at Stratford with the help of one of the Earle Grey cousins, who remembered her from her bedsheet days at Burnham. “People who know people,” she says. She is one of Prospero’s attendant spirits in The Tempest, and has to wear a body stocking, with a gauzy costume over top, sprinkled with dried leaves and spangles. “Obscene,” she says. She’s also a mariner in the first scene; she can get away with this because of her height. She’s a court lady in Richard III, and she’s the chief nun in Measure for Measure. In this one she actually speaks some lines. She recites for me, in a honey-colored Englishy voice: