Cat's Eye

by Margaret Atwood

  "Point taken," he says, which makes me feel grown-up, worthy of this conversation. "But actually we perceive four."

  "Four?" I say.

  "Time is a dimension," he says. "You can't separate it from space. Space-time is what we live in." He says there are no such things as discrete objects which remain unchanged, set apart from the flow of time. He says space-time is curved and that in curved space-time the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line but a line following the curve. He says that time can be stretched or shrunk, and that it runs faster in some places than in others. He says that if you put one identical twin in a high-speed rocket for a week, he'd come back to find his brother ten years older than he is himself. I say I think that would be sad.

  My brother smiles. He says the universe is like a dot-covered balloon that's being blown up. The dots are the stars; they're moving farther and farther away from one another all the time. He says that one of the really interesting questions is whether the universe is infinite and unbounded, or infinite but bounded, like the balloon idea. All I can think of in connection with a balloon is the explosion when it breaks.

  He says that space is mostly empty and that matter is not really solid. It's just a bunch of widely spaced atoms moving at greater or lesser speeds. Anyway, matter and energy are aspects of each other. It's as if everything is made of solid light. He says that if we knew enough we could walk through walls as if they were air, if we knew enough we could go faster than light, and at that point space would become time and time would become space and we would be able to travel through time, back into the past.

  This is the first of these ideas of his that has really interested me. I'd like to see dinosaurs and a good many other things, such as the Ancient Egyptians. On the other hand there's something menacing about this notion. I'm not so sure I want to travel back into the past. I'm not so sure I want to be that impressed, either, by everything he says. It gives him too much of an advantage. Anyway it isn't a sensible way to talk. A lot of it sounds like comic books, the kind with ray guns.

  So I say, "What good would that be?"

  He smiles. "If you coud do it, you'd know you could do it," is what he says.

  I tell Cordelia that Stephen says we could walk through walls if we knew enough. This is the only one of his latest ideas I can trust myself to expound, at the moment. The rest are too complicated, or bizarre.

  Cordelia laughs. She says that Stephen is a brain and that if he weren't so cute he'd be a pill.

  Stephen has a summer job this summer, teaching canoeing at a boys' camp, but I don't, because I'm only thirteen. I go with my parents up to the north, near Sault Ste. Marie, where my father is overseeing an experimental colony of tent caterpillars in screened-in cages.

  Stephen writes me letters, in pencil, on pages torn from lined workbooks, in which he ridicules everything he can get his hands on, including his fellow camp instructors and the girls they go drooling around after on their days off. He describes these instructors with pimples popping from their skins, fangs sprouting in their mouths, their tongues hanging out like those of dogs, their eyes crossed in permanent, girl-inspired imbecility. This makes me think I have power, of a sort. Or will have it: I too am a girl. I go fishing by myself, mostly so I'll have something to put in my letters to him. Other than that I don't have much to tell.

  Cordelia's letters are in real ink, black in color. They are full of superlatives and exclamation marks. She dots her I's with little round circles, like Orphan Annie eyes, or bubbles. She signs them with things like, "Yours till Niagara Falls," "Yours till the cookie crumbles," or "Yours till the sea wears rubber pants to keep its bottom dry."

  "I am so bored!!!" she writes, with triple underlining. She sounds enthusiastic even about boredom. And yet her burbly style does not ring true. I have seen her, sometimes, when she thinks I'm not looking: her face goes still, remote, unreflecting. It's as if she's not inside it. But then she'll turn and laugh. "Don't you just love it when they roll up their sleeves and tuck the cigarette pack inside?" she'll say. "That takes biceps!" And she will be back to normal.

  I feel as if I'm marking time. I swim in the lake provided, and eat raisins and crackers spread thickly with peanut butter and honey while reading detective stories, and sulk because there's no one my age around. My parents' relentless cheer is no comfort. It would almost be better if they could be as surly as I am, or surlier; this would make me feel more ordinary.

  PART

  NINE

  LEPROSY

  41

  In late morning the phone wakes me. It's Charna. "Hey," she says. "We made the front page of Entertainment, and three, count them, three pictures! It's a real rave!"

  I shudder at her idea of a rave; and what does she mean, we? But she's pleased: I've graduated from Living to Entertainment, this is a good sign. I remember when I had ideas about eternal greatness, when I wanted to be Leonardo da Vinci. Now I'm in with the rock groups and the latest movie. Art is what you can get away with, said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shoplifting or some other minor crime. And maybe that's all it ever was, or is: a kind of stealing. A hijacking of the visual.

  I know it will be bad news. Still, I can't resist. I pull on my clothes, go down in search of the nearest paper box. I do have the decency to wait until I get upstairs before I open the paper.

  The bold print says: CROTCHETY ARTIST STILL HAS POWER TO DISTURB. I take note: artist instead of painter, the foreboding still, sign-pointing the way to senility. Andrea the acorn-headed ingenue getting her own back. I'm surprised she'd use an old-fashioned word like crotchety. It manages to suggest both crotches and crocheting, both of which seem appropriate. But probably she didn't write the headline.

  There are indeed three photos. One is of my head, shot a little from beneath so it looks as if I have a double chin. The other two are of paintings. One is of Mrs. Smeath, bare-naked, flying heavily through the air. The church spire with the onion on it is in the distance. Mr. Smeath is stuck to her back like an asparagus beetle, grinning like a maniac; both of them have shiny brown insect wings, done to scale and meticulously painted. Erbug, The Annunciation, it's called. The other is of Mrs. Smeath by herself, with a sickle-moon paring knife and a skinless potato, unclad from the waist up and the thighs down. This is from the Empire Bloomers series. The newspaper photos don't do these paintings justice, because there's no color. They look too much like snapshots. I know that in real life the bloomers on Mrs. Smeath are an intense indigo blue that took me weeks to get right, a blue that appears to radiate a dark and stifling light.

  I scan the first paragraph: "Eminent artist Elaine Risley returns to hometown Toronto this week for a long-overdue retrospective." Eminent, the mausoleum word. I might as well climb onto the marble slab right now and pull the bedsheet over my head. There are the usual misquotations, nor does my blue jogging suit escape comment. "Elaine Risley, looking anything but formidable in a powder-blue jogging suit that's seen better days, nevertheless can come out with a few pungent and deliberately provocative comments on women today."

  I suck in some coffee, skip to the last paragraph: the inevitable eclectic, the obligatory post-feminist, a however and a despite. Good old Toronto bet hedging and qualification. A blistering attack would be preferable, some flying fur, a little fire and brimstone. That way I would know I'm still alive.

  I think savagely of the opening. Perhaps I should be deliberately provocative, perhaps I should confirm their deepest suspicions. I could strap on some of Jon's ax-murder special effects, the burnt face with its one peeled bloodshot eye, the plastic blood-squirting arm. Or slip my feet into the hollow casts of feet and lurch in like something from a mad scientist movie.

  I won't do these things, but thinking about them is soothing. It distances the entire thing, reduces it to a farce or prank, in which I have no involvement aside from mockery.

  Cordelia will see this piece in the paper, and maybe she will laugh. Even though she's not in the
phone book, she must still be around here somewhere. It would be like her to have changed her name. Or maybe she's married; maybe she's married more than once. Women are hard to keep track of, most of them. They slip into other names, and sink without a trace.

  At any rate she'll see this. She'll know it's Mrs. Smeath, she'll get a kick out of that. She'll know it's me, and she'll come. She'll come in the door and she'll see herself, titled, framed, and dated, hanging on the wall. She will be unmistakable: the long line of jaw, the slightly crooked lip. She appears to be in a room, a room with walls of a pastel green.

  This is the only picture I ever did of Cordelia, Cordelia by herself. Half a Face, it's called: an odd title, because Cordelia's entire face is visible. But behind her, hanging on the wall, like emblems in the Renaissance, or those heads of animals, moose or bear, you used to find in northern bars, is another face, covered with a white cloth. The effect is of a theatrical mask. Perhaps.

  I had trouble with this picture. It was hard for me to fix Cordelia in one time, at one age. I wanted her about thirteen, looking out with that defiant, almost belligerent stare of hers. So?

  But the eyes sabotaged me. They aren't strong eyes; the look they give the face is tentative, hesitant, reproachful. Frightened.

  Cordelia is afraid of me, in this picture.

  I am afraid of Cordelia.

  I'm not afraid of seeing Cordelia. I'm afraid of being Cordelia. Because in some way we changed places, and I've forgotten when.

  42

  After the summer I'm in Grade Ten. Although I'm still shorter, still younger, I have grown. Specifically, I've grown breasts. I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood. There are satisfactions in this. I shave my legs, not because there's much to shave but because it makes me feel good. I sit in the bathtub, scraping away at my calves, which I wish were thicker, bulgier, like the calves of cheerleaders, while my brother mutters outside.

  "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most beautiful of all?" he says.

  "Go away," I say tranquilly. I now have that privilege.

  *

  In school I am silent and watchful. I do my homework. Cordelia plucks her eyebrows into two thin lines, thinner than mine, and paints her nails Fire and Ice. She loses things, such as combs and also her French homework. She laughs raucously in the halls. She comes up with new, complicated swearwords: excrement of the ungulate, she says, meaning bullshit, and great flaming blue-eyed bald-headed Jesus. She takes up smoking and gets caught doing it in the girls' washroom. It must be hard for the teachers, looking, to figure out why we are friends, what we're doing together.

  Today on the way home it snows. Big soft caressing flakes fall onto our sin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers. Cordelia and I are elated, we racket along the sidewalk through the twilight while the cars drift past us, hushed and slowed by the snow. We sing:

  Remember the name

  Of Lydia Pinkham,

  Whose remedies for women brought her FAME!

  This is a singing commercial from the radio. We don't know what Lydia Pinkham's remedies are, but anything that says "for women" on it has to do with monthly blood or some equally unspeakable female thing, and so we think it's funny. Also we sing:

  Leprosy,

  Night and day you torture me,

  There goes my eyeball

  Into my highball ...

  Or else:

  Part of your heart,

  That's what I'm eating now,

  Too bad we had to part....

  We sing these, and other parodies of popular songs, all of which we think are very witty. We run and side, in our rubber boots with the tops turned down, and make snowballs which we throw at lampposts, at fire hydrants, bravely at passing cars, and as close as we dare at people walking on the sidewalk, women most of them, with shopping bags or dogs. We have to set our schoolbooks down to make the snowballs. Our aim is poor and we don't hit much of anything, though we hit a woman in a fur coat, from behind, by mistake. She turns and scowls at us and we run away, around a corner and up a side street, laughing so much with terror and embarrassment we can hardly stand up. Cordelia throws herself backward onto a snow-covered lawn. "The evil eye!" she shrieks. For some reason I don't like the sight of her lying there in the snow, arms spread out.

  "Get up," I say. "You'll catch pneumonia."

  "So?" says Cordelia. But she gets up.

  The streetlights come on, though it isn't yet dark. We reach the place where the cemetery begins, on the other side of the street.

  "Remember Grace Smeath?" Cordelia says.

  I say yes. I do remember her, but not clearly, not continuously. I remember her from the time I first knew her, and later, sitting in the apple orchard with a crown of flowers on her head; and much later, when she was in Grade Eight and about to go off to high school. I don't even know what high school she went to. I remember her freckles, her little smile, her coarse horsehair braids.

  "They rationed their toilet paper," Cordelia says. "Four squares a time, even for Number Two. Did you know that?"

  "No," I say. But it seems to me that I did know it, once.

  "Remember that black soap they had?" says Cordelia. "Remember? It smelled like tar."

  I know what we're doing now: we're making fun of the Smeath family. Cordelia remembers all kinds of things: the graying underwear dripping on the clothesline in the cellar, the kitchen paring knife that was worn right down to a sliver, the winter coats from the Eaton's Catalogue. Simpsons is the right place to shop, according to Cordelia. That's where we go now on Saturday mornings, bareheaded, jerking downtown stop by stop on the streetcar. And shopping from the Eaton's Catalogue is much worse than shopping at Eaton's.

  "The Lump-lump Family!" Cordelia shouts into the snowy air. It's cruel and appropriate; we snort with laughter. "What does the Lump-lump Family have for dinner? Plates of gristle!"

  Now it's a full-blown game. What color is their underwear? Grunt color. Why did Mrs. Lump-lump have a Band-Aid on her face? Cut herself shaving. Anything can be said about them, invented about them. They're defenseless, they're at our mercy. We picture the two adult Lump-lumps making love, but this is too much for us, it can't be done, it's too vomit-making. Vomit-making is a new word, from Perdie.

  "What does Grace Lump-lump do for fun? Pops her pimple!" Cordelia laughs so hard she doubles over and almost falls down. "Stop, stop, you'll make me pee," she says. She says that Grace started to grow pimples in Grade Eight: by now they must have increased in number. This is not make up but true. We relish the thought.

  The Smeaths in our rendition of them are charmless, miserly, heavy as dough, boring as white margarine, which we claim they eat for dessert. We ridicule their piety, their small economies, the size of their feet, their rubber plant, which sums them up. We speak of them in the present tense, as if we still know them.

  This for me is a deeply satisfying game. I can't acount for my own savagery; I don't question why I'm enjoying it so much, or why Cordelia is playing it, insists on playing it, whips it to life again when it seems to be flagging. She looks at me sideways, as if estimating how far, how much farther I'll go in what we both know, surely, is base treachery. I have a fleeting image of Grace once more, disappearing into her house through the front door, in her. skirt with the straps, her pilly sweater. She was adored, by all of us. But she is not any more. And in Cordelia's version, now, she never was.

  We run across the street in the falling snow, open the small wrought-iron gate in the cemetery fence, go in. We've never done this before.

  This is the raw end of the cemetery. The trees are only saplings; they look even more temporary without their leaves. Much of the ground is untouched, but there are scars like giant claw marks, diggings, earthworks going on. The gravestones are few and recent: blockish oblon
gs of granite polished to a Presbyterian gloss, the letters cut plainly and without any attempt at prettiness. They remind me of men's overcoats.

  We walk among these gravestones, pointing out which ones--particularly gray, particularly oafish--the Lump-lump Family would choose to bury one another beneath. From here we can look through the chain-link fence and see the houses on the other side of the street. Grace Smeath's is one of them. It's strange and oddly pleasant to think that she might be inside it at this very moment, inside that ordinary-looking brick box with the white porch pillars, not knowing a thing about what we've just been saying about her. Mrs. Smeath might be in there, lying on the velvet chesterfield, the afghan spread over her; I remember this much. The rubber plant will be on the landing, not much bigger. Rubber plants grow slowly. We are bigger though, and the house looks small.

  The cemetery stretches out before us, acres and acres. Now the ravine is on our left, with the new concrete bridge just visible. I have a quick memory of the old bridge, of the creek beneath it: under our feet the dead people must be dissolving, turning to water, cold and clear, flowing downhill. But I forget about this immediately. Nothing about the cemetery is frightening, I tell myself. It's too pragmatic, too ugly, too neat. It's only like a kitchen shelf, where you put things away.

  We walk for a while without speaking, not knowing where we're going, or why. The trees are taller, the tombstones older. There are Celtic crosses now, and the occasional angel.

  "How do we get out of here?" says Cordelia, laughing a little.

  "If we keep going we'll hit a road," I say. "Isn't that the traffic?"

  "I need a ciggie-poo," Cordelia says. We find a bench and sit down so Cordelia can free her hands for the cigarette, cupping it against the air, lighting it. She isn't wearing gloves, or a scarf on her head. She has a tiny black and gold lighter.

  "Look at all the little dead people houses," she says.

  "Mausoleums," I say knowingly.

  "The Lump-lump Family Mausoleum," she says, giving the joke one last push.