Above the beach, on the dunes, there are beach plants, fuzzy mulleins and vetch with its purple flowers and tiny bitter peapods, and grasses that will cut your legs; and behind that the forest, oak and moose maple and birch and poplar, with balsam and spruce among them. There's poison ivy sometimes. It's a secretive, watchful forest, though hard to get lost in, so close to the shore.
Walking in the forest I find a dead raven. It's bigger than they look alive. I poke it with a stick, turning it over, and see the maggots. It smells like rot, like rust, and, more strangely, like some sort of food I've eaten once but can't remember. It's black, but not like a color; more like a hole. Its beak is dingy, horn-colored, like old toenails. Its eyes are shriveled up.
I've seen dead animals before, dead frogs, dead rabbits, but this raven is deader. It looks at me with its shriveled-up eye. I could poke this stick right through it. No matter what I do to it, it won't feel a thing. No one can get at it.
It's hard to fish from the shore of this lake. There's nowhere to stand, no dock. We aren't allowed out in a boat by ourselves because of the currents; anyway we have no boat. Stephen is doing other things. He makes a collection of the boat funnels from the lake freighters, checking them through binoculars. He sets up chess problems and works them out, or splits kindling, or goes for long walks by himself with a butterfly book. He isn't interested in catching the butterflies and mounting them on a board with pins; he just wants to see them, identify them, count them. He writes them down in a list at the back of the book.
I like looking at the pictures of butterflies in his book. My favorite is the luna moth, huge and pale green, with crescents on the wings. My brother finds one of these, and shows it to me. "Don't touch it," he says. "Or the dust will come off its wings, and then it can't fly."
But I don't play chess with him. I don't start my own list of boat funnels or butterflies. I'm ceasing to be interested in games I can't win.
Along the edges of the forest, where there's open sunlight, there are chokecherry trees. The red chokecherries ripen and turn translucent. They're so sour they dry up the inside of your mouth. I pick them into a lard pail, then sort out the dead twigs and leaves, and my mother makes jelly from them, boiling them up, straining the pits out through a cloth jelly bag, adding sugar. She pours the jelly into hot jars, capping them with paraffin wax. I count the beautiful red jars. I helped make them. They look poisonous.
As if I've been given permission I begin to dream. My dreams are brightly colored and without sound.
I dream that the dead raven is alive, only it looks the same, it still looks dead. It hops around and flaps its decaying wings and I wake up, my heart beating fast.
I dream I'm putting on my winter clothes, in Toronto, but my dress doesn't fit. I pull it on over my head and struggle to get my arms into the sleeves. I'm walking along the street and parts of my body are sticking out through the dress, parts of my bare skin. I am ashamed.
I dream that my blue cat's eye is shining in the sky like the sun, or like the pictures of planets in our book on the solar system. But instead of being warm, it's cold. It starts to move nearer, but it doesn't get any bigger. It's falling down out of the sky, straight toward my head, brilliant and glassy. It hits me, passes right into me, but without hurting, except that it's cold. The cold wakes me up. My blankets are on the floor.
I dream that the wooden bridge over the ravine is falling apart. I'm standing on it, the boards crack and separate, the bridge sways. I walk along what's left, clinging to the railing, but I can't get onto the hill where the other people are standing because the bridge isn't attached to anything. My mother is on the hill, but she's talking to the other people.
I dream I'm picking the chokecherries off the chokecherry tree and putting them into the lard pail. Only they aren't chokecherries. They're deadly nightshade berries, translucent, brilliantly red. They're filled with blood, like the bodies of blackflies. As I touch them they burst, and the blood runs over my hands.
None of my dreams is about Cordelia.
Our father plays touch tag with us on the beach in the evenings, running lumberingly like a bear, laughing at the same time, wuff wuff wuff. Pennies and dimes fall out of his pockets into the sand. The lake boats go slowly by in the distance, their smoke trailing behind them, the sun sets to the left, pink and tranquil. I look in the mirror over the washbasin: my face is brown and rounder. My mother smiles at me, in the little kitchen with the woodstove, and hugs me with one arm. She thinks I am happy. Some nights we have marshmallows, for a treat.
PART
SIX
CAT'S
EYE
28
Simpsons Basement used to be bargain clothes and wrenches. Now it's resplendent. There are pyramids of imported chocolates, an ice cream counter, aisles and aisles of fancy cookies and canned gourmet food, ticking away like little clocks toward the obsolescence dates stamped on their packages. There's even an espresso counter. It's all very world-class down here, where I used to buy cheap nighties in high school with my tiny clothes allowance, on sale at that and a size too large. I'm overwhelmed by all the chocolates. Just looking at them reminds me of Christmas and the sticky feeling after eating too many, the surfeit and glut.
I sit at the espresso counter and have a cappuccino, to deal with the inertia that's come over me at the sight of so much sugar-coated self-indulgence. The espresso counter is either fake or real dark-green marble; it has a cute canopy over it, someone's idea of Italy, and little swivel stools. The view from here is the shoe repair counter, which is not very world-class but is reassuring to me. People still get their shoes repaired, despite all this chocolate, they don't just toss them out at the first hint of wear.
I think about the shoes of my childhood, the brown Oxfords scuffed at the toes, half-soled, new-heeled, the falling-apart grubby white running shoes, the brown sandals with two buckles that you wore with socks. Most shoes were brown. They went with the pot roast done in the pressure cooker along with the limp carrots and the flaccid potatoes and the onions with their slippery layers. The pressure cooker had a whistle-shaped thing on the top. If you forgot to pay attention to it the lid would blow off like a bomb, and the carrots and potatoes would be hurled to the ceiling, where they'd stick like mush. This happened to my mother once. Luckily she was not in the kitchen at the time and was not scalded. When she saw what had happened she did not swear. She laughed, and said, "Wouldn't that take the gold-plated gingerbread."
My mother did most of the cooking but it was not her favorite thing. She was not fond of housework generally. In the steamer trunk in the cellar, along with a cut-velvet evening gown from the twenties and a pair of riding jodhpurs, there were several things made of real silver: ornate salt and pepper shakers, sugar tongs in the shape of chickens' feet, rose bowls lavish with silver flowers. They were down there, wrapped in tissue paper and turning black, because otherwise they would have to be polished. Our knives and forks and spoons had to be polished, with an old toothbrush for the decorations. The scrolled legs under the dining table were dust catchers, and so were the kinds of objects--doodads, my mother called them--other people kept on their mantelpieces. But she liked making cakes, though this may only be something I prefer to think.
What would I have done if I had been my mother? She must have realized what was happening to me, or that something was. Even toward the beginning she must have noted my silences, my bitten fingers, the dark scabs on my lips where I'd pulled off patches of the skin. If it were happening now, to a child of my own, I would know what to do. But then? There were fewer choices, and a great deal less was said.
*
I once did a series about my mother. It was six images, six panels, like a double triptych or a comic book, arranged in two groups, three on top, three underneath. The first was my mother in colored pencil, in her city house kitchen and her late-forties dress. Even she had a bib apron, blue flowers with navy piping, even she wore it, from time to time. The second image was t
he same figure in collage, made from the illustrations from old Ladies' Home Journals and Chatelaines, not the photos but the artwork, with those rancid greens and faded blues and dirty-looking pinks. The third was the same figure, white on white, the raised parts pipe cleaners contoured side by side and glued onto a white cloth-covered backing. Reading across from left to right it looked as if my mother was slowly dissolving, from real life into a Babylonian bas-relief shadow.
The bottom set of images went the other way: first the pipe-cleaners, then the same image in collage, then the final one in full-colored realistic detail. But this time my mother was in her slacks and boots and her man's jacket, making chokecherry jam over the outdoor fire. You could read it as a materialization, out of the white pipe cleaner mist into the solid light of day.
I called the whole series Pressure Cooker. Because of when it was done and what was going on in those years, some people thought it was about the Earth Goddess, which I found hilarious in view of my mother's dislike of housework. Other people thought it was about female slavery, others that it was a stereotyping of women in negative and trivial domestic roles. But it was only my mother cooking, in the ways and places she used to cook, in the late forties.
I made this right after she died. I suppose I wanted to bring her back to life. I suppose I wanted her timeless, though there is no such thing on earth. These pictures of her, like everything else, are drenched in time.
I finish my cappuccino, pay for it, leave a tip for the imitation Italian waiter who served it to me. I know I won't buy any food in the food hall, I'm too intimidated by it. Ordinarily, or in some other city, I would not be: I am a grown-up and used to shopping. But how could I find, down here, anything I want right now? I'll stop in at some corner store on the way back, some place where they sell milk till midnight and slightly stale sliced white bread. Such stores are run, now, by people the color of Mr. Banerji, or by Chinese people. They aren't necessarily any friendlier than the pasty-white people who used to run such stores, but the general content of their disapproval is more easily guessed, though not the details.
I head back up the escalator, into the perfumed fug of the ground floor. The air is bad here, there's too much musk, the overpowering scent of money. I make it into the open air and walk west, past the murderous mannequins in the windows, past the bivalvular City Hall.
Ahead of me there's a body lying on the sidewalk. People walk around it, look down, look away, keep going. I see their faces coming toward me bearing that careful rearrangement of the features that's meant to say, This is none of my business.
When I get up even, I see that this person is a woman. She's lying on her back, staring straight at me. "Lady," she says. "Lady. Lady."
That word has been through a lot. Noble lady, Dark Lady, she's a real lady, old-lady lace, Listen lady, Hey lady watch where you're going, Ladies' Room, run through with lipstick and replaced with Women. But still the final word of appeal. If you want something very badly you do not say Woman, Woman, you say Lady, Lady. As she is saying now.
I think, What if she's had a heart attack? I look: there's blood on her forehead, not much, but a cut. She must have hit her head falling. And no one's stopping, and she's lying there on her back, a bulky fifty-odd woman in a poor-person green coat, gabardine, and lamentable shoes all cracked, her arms outflung. The tanned-looking skin around her brown eyes is red and puffy, her long black and gray hair is splayed across the sidewalk.
"Lady," she says, or something, it's a mumble, but she's got me now.
I look over my shoulder to see if anyone else will do this, but there are no takers. I kneel, say to her, "Are you all right?" What a stupid question, she so obviously isn't. Vomit and alcohol are around here somewhere. I have visions of myself taking her for coffee, and then where? I won't be able to get rid of her, she'll follow me back to the studio, throw up in the bathtub, sleep on the futon. They get me every time, they can spot me coming, pick me out of the crowd no matter how hard I frown. Sidewalk rap artists, Moonies, guitar-playing young men who ask me for subway tokens. In the clutch of the helpless I am helpless.
"She's only drunk," a man says in passing. What does he mean, only? It's hell enough.
"Here," I say, "I'll help you up." Wimp, I tell myself. She'll ask you for money and you'll give it to her, and she'll spend it on cheap sweet wine. But I have her on her feet now, she's slumped against me. If I can lug her over to the nearest wall I can prop her up, dust her off a little, think how to get away.
"There," I say. But she won't lean against the wall, she's leaning against me instead. Her breath smells like a bad accident. She's crying now, the shameless abandoned weeping of a child; her fingers clutch my sleeve.
"Don't leave me," she says. "Oh God. Don't leave me all alone." Her eyes are closed, her voice is pure neediness, pure woe. It hits the weakest, most sorrowing part of me; but I am only a surrogate, for who knows what lack, what loss. There's nothing I can do.
"Here," I say. I fumble in my purse, find a ten, crumple it into her hand, paying her off. I'm a sucker, I'm a bleeding heart. There's a cut in my heart, it bleeds money.
"Bless you," she says. Her head rolls from side to side, back against the wall. "God bless you lady, Our Lady bless you." It's a slurred blessing, but who's to say I don't need it? She must be a Catholic. I could find a church, slide her in through the door like a packet. She's theirs, let them deal with her.
"I have to go now," I say. "You'll be all right." Lying through my teeth. She opens her eyes wide, trying to focus. Her face goes quiet.
"I know about you," she says. "You're Our Lady and you don't love me."
Full-blown booze madness, and absolutely the wrong person. I draw my hand back from her as if she's a live socket. "No," I say. She's right, I don't love her. Her eyes are not brown but green. Cordelia's.
I walk away from her, guilt on my hands, absolving myself: I'm a good person. She could have been dying. Nobody else stopped.
I'm a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good.
I know too much to be good. I know myself.
I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.
29
We come back in September. In the north the nights are cold and the leaves are beginning to turn, but the city is still hot, still damp. It's astonishingly noisy and stinks of gasoline and the tar of melting roads. The air inside our house is stale and flat, air that's been locked up in the heat all summer. The water's rusty at first, coming out of the taps. I take a bath in the reddish lukewarm water. Already my body is stiffening, emptying itself of feeling. The future is closing on me like a door.
Cordelia has been waiting for me. I know this as soon as I see her standing at the school bus stop. Before the summer she would alternate between kindness and malice, with periods of indifference; but now she's harsher, more relentless. It's as if she's driven by the urge to see how far she can go. She's backing me toward an edge, like the edge of a cliff: one step back, another step, and I'll be over and falling.
*
Carol and I are in Grade Five now. We have a new teacher, Miss Stuart. She's Scottish and has an accent. "Now gerruls," she says. She has a little bunch of dried heather stuck into a jelly jar on her desk, and a miniature of Bonnie Prince Charlie, who was ruined by the English and whose last name is the same as her own, and a bottle of hand lotion in her desk drawer. She cooks this hand lotion herself.
In the afternoons she makes herself a cup of tea, which does not smell entirely like tea but of something else she puts into it, out of a small silver bottle. She has bluish-white hair, beautifully waved, and wears rustling, silky mauve dresses with a lace-edged handkerchief tucked into the sleeve. She often has a nurse's white gauze mask over her nose and mouth because she's allergic to chalk dust. This doesn't stop her from throwing the blackboard brushes at boys who aren't paying attention. Although she throws underhand and not hard, she never misses. After she hits the boy he has to bring the blackboard brush back t
o her. The boys don't seem to resent this habit of hers; they take it as a mark of distinction to get hit.
Everyone loves Miss Stuart. Carol says we are lucky to be in her class. I would love her too, if I had the energy. But I am too numb, too enthralled.
I keep my cat's eye in my pocket, where I can hold on to it. It rests in my hand, valuable as a jewel, looking out through bone and cloth with its impartial gaze. With the help of its power I retreat back into my eyes. Up ahead of me are Cordelia, Grace, and Carol. I look at their shapes as they walk, the way shadow moves from one leg to another, the blocks of color, a red square of cardigan, a blue triangle of skirt. They're like puppets up ahead, small and clear. I could see them or not, at will.
I reach the path to the bridge, start down, past the nightshade vines with their red berries, past the undulating leaves, the lurking cats. The three of them are already on the bridge but they've stopped, they're waiting for me. I look at the ovals of their faces, the outline of hair around each one. Their faces are like moldy eggs. My feet move down the hill.
I think about becoming invisible. I think about eating the deadly nightshade berries from the bushes beside the path. I think about drinking the Javex out of the skull and crossbones bottle in the laundry room, about jumping off the bridge, smashing down there like a pumpkin, half of an eye, half of a grin. I would come apart like that, I would be dead, like the dead people.
I don't want to do these things, I'm afraid of them. But I think about Cordelia telling me to do them, not in her scornful voice, in her kind one. I hear her kind voice inside my head. Do it Come on. I would be doing these things to please her.
I consider telling my brother, asking him for help. But tell him what exactly? I have no black eyes, no bloody noses to report: Cordelia does nothing physical. If it was boys, chasing or teasing, he would know what to do, but I don't suffer from boys in this way. Against girls and their indirectness, their whisperings, he would be helpless.
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