Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

“Right,” I said. Then, because I knew I should, “Why don’t we get together?”

“I can’t go out,” Cordelia said, in the same slowed-down voice. “You’ll have to come here.”

And so I am here.

Cordelia comes through a door at the far end of the room, walking carefully, as if balancing, or lame. But she is not lame. Behind her is another woman, with the optimistic, false, toothy smile of a paid attendant. It takes me a moment to recognize Cordelia, because she doesn’t look at all the same. Or rather she doesn’t look the way she did when I last saw her, in her wide cotton skirt and barbaric bracelet, elegant and confident. She is in an earlier phase, or a later one: the soft green tweeds and tailored blouses of her good-taste background, which now appear matronly on her, because she has put on weight. Or has she?

Flesh has been added, but it has slid down, toward the middle of her body, like mud sliding down a hill. The long bones have risen to the surface of her face, the skin tugged downward on them as if by irresistible gravitational pull. I can see how she’ll be when she’s old. Someone has done her hair. Not her. She would never make it in tight little waves like that. Cordelia stands uncertainly, squinting a little, head poking forward and swinging imperceptibly from side to side, the way an elephant’s does, or some slow, bewildered animal. “Cordelia,” I say, standing up.

“There’s your friend,” says the woman, smiling relent lessly. She takes Cordelia by the arm and gives a small tug, to start her in the right direction. “There you are,” I say, falling already into the trap of addressing her like a child. I come forward, give her an awkward kiss. I find to my surprise that I’m glad to see her.

“Better late than never,” Cordelia says, with the same hesitation, the thickness in her voice I’ve heard over the phone. The woman steers her to the chair across from mine, settles her down into it with a little push, as if she’s elderly, and stubborn.

Suddenly I’m outraged. No one has a right to treat Cordelia this way. I scowl at the woman, who says,

“How nice of you to come! Cordelia enjoys a visit, don’t you, Cordelia?”

“You can take me out,” Cordelia says. She looks up at the woman, for approval.

“Yes, that’s right,” says the woman. “For tea or something. If you promise to bring her back, that is!”

She gives a cheery laugh, as if this is a joke.

I take Cordelia out. The Dorothy Lyndwick Rest Home is in High Park, a suburb where I’ve never been before and don’t know my way around, but there’s a corner café a few blocks along. Cordelia knows it, and her way there. I don’t know whether I should take her arm or not, and so I don’t; I walk along beside her, watchful at crossings as if she’s blind, slowing my pace to hers.

“I don’t have any money,” says Cordelia. “They won’t let me have any. They even get my cigarettes for me.”

“That’s all right,” I say.

We ease into a booth, order coffee and two toasted Danishes. I give the order: I don’t want the waitress staring. Cordelia fumbles, produces a cigarette. Her hand, lighting it, is shaky. “Great flaming blue-headed balls of Jesus,” she says, making an effort with the syllables. “It’s good to be out of there.”

She tries a laugh, and I laugh with her, feeling culpable and accused. I should ask her things: what has she been doing, for these years we’ve skipped? What about her acting, what became of that? Did she get married, have children? What exactly has been going on, to bring her where she is? But all of this is beside the point. It’s detachable, it’s been added on. The main thing is Cordelia, the fact of her now.

“What the shit have they got you on?” I say.

“Some sort of tranquilizers,” she says. “I hate them. They make me drool.”

“What for?” I say. “How did you end up in that nuthatch anyway? You aren’t any crazier than I am.”

Cordelia looks at me, blowing out smoke. “Things weren’t working out very well,” she says after a while.

“So?” I say.

“So. I tried pills.”

“Oh, Cordelia.” Something goes through me with a slice, like watching a child fall, mouth down on rock.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It just came over me. I was tired,” she says.

There is no point telling her she shouldn’t have done such a thing, I do what I’d do in high school: I ask for the details. “So did you conk out?”

“Yes,” she said. “I checked into a hotel, to do it. But they figured it out—the manager or someone. I had to get my stomach pumped. That was revolting. Vomit-making, you could say.”

She does what would be a laugh, except that her face is so rigid. I think I may cry. At the same time I’m angry with her, though I don’t know why. It’s as if Cordelia has placed herself beyond me, out of my reach, where I can’t get at her. She has let go of her idea of herself. She is lost.

“Elaine,” she says, “get me out.”

“What?” I say, brought up short.

“Help me get out of there. You don’t know what it’s like. You have no privacy.” This is the closest to pleading she’s ever come.

A phrase comes to me, a remnant left over from boys, from Saturday afternoons, reading the comics: Pick on somebody your own size. “How could I do that?” I say.

“Visit me tomorrow and we’ll go in a taxi.” She sees me hesitate. “Or just lend me the money. That’s all you have to do. I can hide the pills in the morning, I won’t take them. Then I’ll be all right. I know it’s those pills that’re keeping me like this. Just twenty-five dollars is all I need.”

“I don’t have a lot of money with me,” I say, which is true enough, but an evasion. “They’d catch you. They’d know you were off the pills. They could tell.”

“I can fool them any day,” Cordelia says, with a flicker of her old cunning. Of course, I think, she’s an actress. Or was. She can counterfeit anything. “Anyway, those doctors are so dumb. They ask all these questions, they believe anything I tell them, they write it all down.”

There are doctors, then. More than one. “Cordelia, how can I take the responsibility? I haven’t even talked, I haven’t talked to anyone.”

“They’re all assholes,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with me. You know, you said yourself.” There’s a frantic child in there, behind that locked, sagging face.

I have an image of spiriting Cordelia away, rescuing her. I could do it, or something like it; but then where would she end up? Hiding out in our apartment, sleeping on an improvised bed like the draft dodgers, a refugee, a displaced person, smoking up the kitchen with Jon wondering who the hell she is and why she’s there. Things are uneven between us as it is; I’m not sure I can afford Cordelia. She’d be one more sin of mine, to be chalked up to the account he’s keeping in his head. Also I am not feeling totally glued together myself.

And there’s Sarah to think of. Would she take to this Auntie Cordelia? How is Cordelia with small children? And exactly how sick in the head is she, anyway? How long before I’d come back and find her out cold on the bathroom floor, or worse? In the middle of a bright red sunset. Jon’s work table is an arsenal, there are little saws lying around, little chisels. Maybe it would just be melodrama, a skin-deep slash or two, her old theatricality; though perhaps theatrical people are not less risky, but more. In the interests of the role they’ll sacrifice anything.

“I can’t, Cordelia,” I say gently. But I don’t feel gentle toward her. I am seething, with a fury I can neither explain nor express. How dare you ask me? I want to twist her arm, rub her face in the snow. The waitress brings the bill. “Are you sufficiently sophonsified?” I say to Cordelia, trying for lightness, and a change of subject. But Cordelia has never been stupid.