Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

“In the middle of the night?” the doctor says.

“I often work at night,” I say.

Jon backs me up. He’s just as scared as I am. He tied my wrist up in a tea towel and drove me to the hospital. I leaked through the towel, onto the front seat.

“Sarah,” I said, remembering her.

“She’s downstairs,” Jon said. Downstairs is the landlady, a middle-aged Italian widow.

“What did you tell her?” I asked.

“I said it was your appendix,” Jon said. I laughed a little. “What the hell got into you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You’ll have to get this car cleaned.” I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful.

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk to someone?” the doctor in Emergency says.

“I’m fine now,” I say. The last thing I want to do is talking. I know what he means by someone: a shrink. Someone who will tell me I’m nuts. I know what kind of people hear voices: people who drink too much, who fry their brains with drugs, who slip off the rails. I feel entirely steady, I’m not even anxious any more. I’ve already decided what I will do, afterward, tomorrow. I’ll wear my arm in a sling and say I broke my wrist. So I don’t have to tell him, or Jon, or anyone else, about the voice. I know it wasn’t really there. Also I know I heard it.

It wasn’t a frightening voice, in itself. Not menacing but excited, as if proposing an escapade, a prank, a treat. Something treasured, and secret. The voice of a nine-year-old child.

Chapter 66

T he snow has melted, leaving a dirty filigree, the wind is blowing around the grit left over from winter, the crocuses are pushing up through the mud of the desolate smashed-down lawns. If I stay here I will die. It’s the city I need to leave as much as Jon, I think. It’s the city that’s killing me. It will kill me suddenly. I’ll be walking along the street, thinking of nothing in particular, and all at once I will turn sideways and dive off the curb, to be smashed by a speeding car. I will topple in front of a subway train without warning, I’ll plunge from a bridge without intention. All I will hear will be that small voice, inviting and conspiratorial, gleeful, urging me over. I know I’m capable of such a thing. (Worse: although I’m afraid of this idea and ashamed of it, and although in the daytime I find it melodramatic and ludicrous and refuse to believe in it, I also cherish it. It’s like the secret bottle stashed away by alcoholics: I may have no desire to use it, right now, but I feel more secure knowing it’s there. It’s a fallback, it’s a vice, it’s an exit. It’s a weapon.)

At night I sit beside Sarah’s crib, watching the flutter of her eyelids as she dreams, listening to her breathe. She will be left alone. Or not alone, because she will have Jon. Motherless. This is unthinkable. I turn on the lights in the living room. I know I must start packing, but I don’t know what to take. Clothes, toys for Sarah, her furry rabbit. It seems too difficult, so I go to bed. Jon is already in there, turned toward the wall. We have gone through a pretence of truce and reformation, straight into deadlock. I don’t wake him up.

In the morning, after he leaves, I bundle Sarah into the stroller and take some of my grant money out of the bank. I don’t know where to go. All I can think of is away. I buy us tickets to Vancouver, which has the advantage of being warm, or so I suppose. I stuff our things into duffel bags, which I’ve bought at Army Surplus.

I want Jon to come back and stop me, because now that I’m in motion I can’t believe I’m actually doing this. But he doesn’t come.

I leave a note, I make a sandwich: peanut butter. I cut it in two and give half to Sarah, and a glass of milk. I call a taxi. We sit at the kitchen table with our coats on, eating our sandwiches and drinking our milk, and waiting.

This is when Jon comes back. I keep eating.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he says.

“Vancouver,” I say.

He sits down at the table, stares at me. He looks as if he hasn’t slept for weeks, although he’s been sleeping a lot, oversleeping. “I can’t stop you,” he says. It’s a statement of fact, not a maneuver: he will let us go without a fight. He too is exhausted.

“I think that’s the taxi,” I say. “I’ll write.”

I’m good at leaving. The trick is to close yourself off. Don’t hear, don’t see. Don’t look back. We don’t have a sleeper, because I need to save the money. I sit up all night, Sarah sprawled and snuffling in my lap. She’s done some crying, but she’s too young to realize what I’ve done, what we’re doing. The other passengers extend themselves into the aisles; baggage expands, smoke drifts in the stale air, food wrappings clog the washrooms. There’s a card game going on up at the front of the car, with beer.

The train runs northwest, through hundreds of miles of scraggy forests and granite outcrops, hundreds of small blue anonymous lakes edged with swamp and bulrushes and dead spruce, old snow in the shadows. I peer out through the glass of the train window, which is streaked with ram and dust, and there is the landscape of my early childhood, smudged and scentless and untouchable and moving backward. At long intervals the train crosses a road, gravel or thin and paved, with a white line down the middle. This looks like emptiness and silence, but to me it is not empty, not silent. Instead it’s filled with echoes. Home , I think. But it’s nowhere I can go back to.

It’s worse than I thought it would be, and also better.

Some days I think I’m crazy to have done this; other times that it’s the sanest move I’ve made in years. It’s cheaper in Vancouver. After a short spell in a Holiday Inn, I find a house I can rent, on the rise behind Kitsilano Beach, one of those toytown houses that are bigger inside than they look. It has a view of the bay, and the mountains across it, and, in the summer, endless light. I find a coop preschool for Sarah. For a time I live on grant money. I freelance a little, then get a part-time job refinishing furniture for an antique dealer. I like this, because it’s mindless and the furniture can’t talk. I am thirsty for silence. I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over. I think maybe I should go to see a shrink, because that is the accepted thing, now, for people who are not in balance, and I am not. Finally I do go. The shrink is a man, a nice man. He wants me to talk about everything that happened to me before I was six, nothing after. Once you are six, he implies, you are cast in bronze. What comes after is not important.

I have a good memory. I tell him about the war.

I tell him about the Exacto knife and the wrist, but not about the voice. I don’t want him to think I’m a loony. I want him to think well of me.

I tell him about nothing.

He asks if I have orgasms. I say that isn’t the problem.

He thinks I am hiding things.

After a while I stop going.

Gradually I grow back, into my hands. I take to getting up early in the morning, before Sarah is awake, to paint. I find I have a minor, ambiguous reputation, from the show in Toronto, and I am invited to parties. At first there is a resentful edge, because I am from what is known as back east, which is supposed to confer unfair advantages; but after a time I’ve been here long enough so I can pass, and after that I can do the resentful act myself, to easterners, and get away with it. I’m also invited to take part in several group showings, mostly by women: they’ve heard about the ink throwing, read the snotty reviews, all of which render me legitimate, although from the east. Women artists of many kinds, women of many kinds are in ferment here, they are boiling with the pressured energy of explosive forces confined in a small space, and with the fervor of all religious movements in their early, purist stages. It is not enough to give lip service and to believe in equal pay: there has to be a conversion, from the heart. Or so they imply.