Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

My mother is tired, but restless. She won’t take naps in the afternoon, insists on walking to the corner store. “I can manage,” she says. She doesn’t want me to cook for her. “You’ll never find anything in this kitchen,” she says, meaning she thinks she’ll never find anything herself if I start messing around in there. I smuggle frozen TV dinners into the refrigerator and con her into eating them by saying they’ll go to waste if she doesn’t. Waste is still a bugaboo for her. I take her to a movie, checking it first for violence, sex and death, and to a Chinese restaurant. In the north, in the old days, the Chinese restaurants were the only ones that could be depended on. The others went in for white bread and gravy mix sandwiches, lukewarm baked beans, pies made from cardboard and glue.

She is on painkillers, then stronger painkillers. She lies down more. “I’m glad I don’t have to have an operation, in a hospital,” she says. “The only time I was ever in a hospital was with you kids. With Stephen they gave me ether. I went out like a light, and when I woke up, there he was.”

A lot of what she says is about Stephen. “Remember those smells he used to make, with that chemistry set of his? That was the day I was having a bridge party! We had to open the doors, and it was the middle of winter.” Or else: “Remember all those comic books he had stowed away under his bed? There were too many to save. I chucked them out, after he went away. I didn’t think there was any use for them. But people collect them, I read about it; now they’d be worth a fortune. We always thought they were just trash.” She tells this like a joke on herself.

When she talks about Stephen, he is never more than twelve years old. After that he got beyond her. I come to realize that she was, or is, in awe of him, slightly afraid of him. She didn’t intend to give birth to such a person.

“Those girls gave you a bad time,” she says one day. I’ve made both or us a cup of tea—she’s permitted this—and we sit at the kitchen table, drinking it. She’s still surprised to catch me drinking tea, and has asked several times whether I wouldn’t prefer milk.

“What girls?” I say. My fingers are a wreck; I shred them quietly, out of sight beneath the tabletop, as I do in times of stress; an old bad habit I cannot seem to break.

“Those girls. Cordelia and Grace, and the other one. Carol Campbell.” She looks at me, a little slyly, as if testing.

“Carol?” I say. I remember a stubby girl, turning a skipping rope.

“Of course, Cordelia was your best friend, in high school,” she says. “I never thought she was behind it. It was that Grace, not Cordelia. Grace put her up to it, I always thought. What became of her?”

“I have no idea,” I say. I don’t want to talk about Cordelia. I still feel guilty, about walking away from her and not helping.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she says. “They came to me that day and said you’d been kept in at school, for being rude to the teacher. It was that Carol who said it. I didn’t think they were telling the truth.” She avoids the word lie, if possible.

“What day?” I say carefully. I don’t know what day she means. She’s begun to get things mixed up, because of the drugs.

“That day you almost froze. If I’d believed them I wouldn’t have gone to look for you. I went down the road, along by the cemetery, but you weren’t there.” She regards me anxiously, as if wondering what I will say.

“Oh yes,” I say, pretending I know what she’s talking about. I don’t want to confuse her. But I am growing confused myself. My memory is tremulous, like water breathed on. For an instant I see Cordelia and Grace, and Carol, walking toward me through the astonishing whiteness of the snow, their faces in shadow.

“I was so worried,” she says. What she wants from me is forgiveness, but for what?

On some days she is stronger, and gives the illusion of improvement. Today she wants me to help her sort through the things in the cellar. “So you won’t have to go through a lot of that old junk, later on,” she says delicately. She won’t say death; she wants to spare my feelings. I don’t like cellars. This one is unfinished: gray cement, rafters above. I make sure the upstairs door is left open. “You should have a railing put on these stairs,” I say. They are narrow, undependable.

“I can manage,” says my mother. From the days when managing was enough. We sort through the old magazines, the stash of different-sized cardboard boxes, the shelves of clean jars. She threw out a lot less than she could have, when they moved; or else she’s accumulated more. I carry things up the stairs and stow them in the garage. In there they seem disposed of. There’s a whole shelf of my father’s shoes and boots, lined-up pairs: city shoes with perforated toecaps, overshoes, rubber boots, wading boots for fishing, heavy-soled boots for walking in the woods, with a bacon grease patina and leather laces. Some of them must be fifty years old, or more. My mother will not throw them out, I know; but neither does she mention them. I can sense what she expects of me, in the way of control. I did my mourning at the funeral. She doesn’t need to deal with a tearful child, not now. I remember the old Zoology Building where we used to go on Saturdays, the creaking, overheated corridors, the bottles of eyeballs, the comforting smells of formaldehyde and mice. I remember sitting at the dinner table, with Cordelia, his warnings washing over our heads, the ruined water, the poisoned trees, species after species snuffed out like stepped-on ants. We did not think such things were prophecies. We thought they were boring then, a form of adult gossip that did not concern us. Now it’s all come true, except worse. I live in his nightmare, no less real for being invisible. You can still breathe the air, but for how long?

Against his bleak forecasting is set my mother’s cheerfulness, in retrospect profoundly willed. We start on the steamer trunk. It’s the one I remember from our Toronto house; I still think of it as mysterious, the repository of treasure. My mother too views this as an adventure: she says she hasn’t looked into that trunk for years, she has no idea what’s in there. She is no less alive because dying. I open the trunk, and the smell of mothballs blossoms upward. Out come the baby clothes folded in tissue paper, the pieces of flowery silver, yellowy-black. “Keep these for the girls,” she says. “You have this one.” The wedding dress, the wedding pictures, the sepia-colored relatives. A packet of feathers. Some bridge tallies with tassels on them, two pairs of white kid gloves. “Your father was a wonderful dancer,” she says. “Before we were married.” I have never known this. We go down through the layers, unearthing discoveries: my high school pictures, my lipsticked mouth unsmiling, somebody’s hair in an envelope, a single knitted baby sock. Old mittens, old neckties. An apron. Some things are to be kept, others thrown out or given away. Some things I will take back with me. We have several piles.

My mother is excited, and I catch some of this excitement from her: it’s like a Christmas stocking. Although not pure joy.

Stephen’s packets of airplane trading cards, held together with rotting elastic bands. His scrapbooks, his drawings of explosions, his old report cards. These she sets aside.

My own drawings and scrapbooks. There are the pictures of little girls I now remember, with their puffed sleeves and pink skirts and hairbows. Then, in the scrapbooks, some unfamiliar pictures cut from magazines: women’s bodies, in clothes of the forties, with other women’s heads glued onto them. This is a Watchbird watching YOU.