Cat's eye (12 page)

They tell Cordelia there are some things she’s too young to understand, and then they tell these things to her anyway. Cordelia, her voice lowered, her eyes big, passes on the truth: the curse is when blood comes out between your legs. We don’t believe her. She produces evidence: a sanitary pad, filched from Perdie’s wastebasket. On it is a brown crust, like dried gravy. “That’s not blood,” Grace says with disgust, and she’s right, it’s nothing like when you cut your finger. Cordelia is indignant. But she can prove nothing.

I haven’t thought much about grown-up women’s bodies before. But now these bodies are revealed in their true, upsetting light: alien and bizarre, hairy, squashy, monstrous. We hang around outside the room where Perdie and Mirrie are peeling the wax off their legs while they utter yelps of pain, trying to see through the keyhole, giggling: they embarrass us, although we don’t know why. They know they’re being laughed at and come to the door to shoo us away. “Cordelia, why don’t you and your little friends bug off!” They smile a little ominously, as if they know already what is in store for us. “Just wait and see,”

they say.

This frightens us. Whatever has happened to them, bulging them, softening them, causing them to walk rather than run, as if there’s some invisible leash around their necks, holding them in check—whatever it is, it may happen to us too. We look surreptitiously at the breasts of women on the street, of our teachers; though not of our mothers, that would be too close for comfort. We examine our legs and underarms for sprouting hairs, our chests for swellings. But nothing is happening: so far we are safe. Cordelia turns to the back pages of the catalogue, where the pictures are in gray and black and there are crutches and trusses and prosthetic devices. “Breast pumps,” she says. “See this? It’s for pumping your titties up bigger, like a bicycle pump.” And we don’t know what to believe. We can’t ask our mothers. It’s hard to imagine them without clothes, to think of them as having bodies at all, under their dresses. There’s a great deal they don’t say. Between us and them is a gulf, an abyss, that goes down and down. It’s filled with wordlessness. They wrap up the garbage in several layers of newspaper and tie it with string, and even so it drips onto the freshly waxed floor. Their clotheslines are strung with underpants, nighties, socks, a display of soiled intimacy, which they have washed and rinsed, plunging their hands into the gray curdled water. They know about toilet brushes, about toilet seats, about germs. The world is dirty, no matter how much they clean, and we know they will not welcome our grubby little questions. So instead a long whisper runs among us, from child to child, gathering horror. Cordelia says that men have carrots, between their legs. They aren’t really carrots but something worse. They’re covered with hair. Seeds come out the end and get into women’s stomachs and grow into babies, whether you want it or not. Some men have their carrots pierced and rings set into them as if they are ears.

Cordelia’s unclear about how the seeds get out or what they’re like. She says they’re invisible, but I think this can’t be so. If there are seeds at all they must be more like bird seeds, or carrot seeds, long and fine. Also she can’t say how the carrot gets in, to plant the seeds. Belly buttons are the obvious choice, but there would have to be a cut, a tear. The whole story is questionable, and the idea that we ourselves could have been produced by such an act is an outrage. I think of beds, where all of this is supposed to take place: the twin beds at Carol’s house, always so tidy, the elegant canopy bed at Cordelia’s, the dark mahogany-colored bed in Grace’s house, heavily respectable with its crocheted spread and layers of woolen blankets. Such beds are a denial in themselves, a repudiation. I think of Carol’s wry-mouthed mother, of Mrs. Smeath with her hairpinned crown of graying braids. They would purse their lips, draw themselves up in a dignified manner. They would not permit it.

Grace says, “God makes babies,” in that final way of hers, which means there is nothing more to be discussed. She smiles her buttoned-up disdainful smile, and we are reassured. Better God than us. But there are doubts. I know, for instance, a lot of things. I know that
carrot
is not the right word. I’ve seen dragonflies and beetles, flying around, stuck together, one on the back of the other; I know it’s called
mating.
I know about ovipositors, for laying eggs, on leaves, on caterpillars, on the surface of the water; they’re right out on the page, clearly labeled, on the diagrams of insects my father corrects at home. I know about queen ants, and about the female praying mantises eating the males. None of this is much help. I think of Mr. and Mrs. Smeath, stark-naked, with Mr. Smeath stuck to the back of Mrs. Smeath. Such an image, even without the addition of flight, will not do. I could ask my brother. But, although we’ve examined scabs and toe jam under the microscope, although we aren’t worried by pickled ox eyes and gutted fish and whatever can be found under dead logs, putting this question to him would be indelicate, perhaps hurtful. I think of JUPITER scrolled on the sand in his angular script, by his extra, dextrous finger. In Cordelia’s version it will end up covered with hair. Maybe he doesn’t know.

Cordelia says boys put their tongues in your mouth when they kiss you. Not any boys we know, older ones. She says this the same way my brother says “slug juice” or “snot” when Carol’s around, and Carol does the same thing, the same wrinkle of the nose, the same wriggle. Grace says that Cordelia is being disgusting.

I think about the spit you sometimes see, downtown, on the sidewalk; or cow’s tongues in butcher’s shops. Why would they want to do such a thing, put their tongues in other people’s mouths? Just to be repulsive, of course. Just to see what you would do.

I
go up the cellar stairs, which have black rubber stair treads nailed onto them. Mrs. Smeath is standing at the kitchen sink in her bib apron. She’s finished her nap and now she’s upright, getting supper. She’s peeling potatoes; she often peels things. The peel falls from her large knuckly hands in a long pale spiral. The paring knife she uses is worn so thin its blade is barely more than a crescent moon sliver. The kitchen is steamy, and smells of marrow fat and stewing bones.

Mrs. Smeath turns and looks at me, a skinless potato in her left hand, the knife in her right. She smiles.

“Grace says your family don’t go to church,” she says. “Maybe you’d like to come with us. To our church.”

“Yes,” says Grace, who has come up the stairs behind me. And the idea is pleasing. I’ll have Grace all to myself on Sunday mornings, without Carol or Cordelia. Grace is still the desirable one, the one we all want.

When I tell my parents about this plan they become anxious. “Are you sure you really want to go?” my mother says. When she was young, she says, she had to go to church whether she liked it or not. Her father was very strict. She couldn’t whistle on Sundays. “Are you really sure?”

My father says he doesn’t believe in brainwashing children. When you’re grown up, then you can make up your own mind about religion, which has been responsible for a lot of wars and massacres in his opinion, as well as bigotry and intolerance. “Every educated person should know the Bible,” he says.

“But she’s only eight.”

“Almost nine,” I say.

“Well,” says my father. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

On Sunday I put on the clothes my mother and I have picked out, a dress of dark-blue and green wool plaid, white ribbed stockings that attach with garters onto my stiff white cotton waist. I have more dresses than I once had, but I don’t go shopping with my mother to help pick them out, the way Carol does. My mother hates shopping, nor does she sew. My girls’ clothes are secondhand, donated by a distant friend of my mother’s who has a larger daughter. None of these dresses fits me very well; the hems droop, or the sleeves bunch up under my arms. I think this is the norm, for dresses. The white stockings are new though, and even itchier than the brown ones I wear to school. I take my blue cat’s eye marble out of my red plastic purse and leave it in my bureau drawer, and put the nickel my mother’s given me for the collection plate into my purse instead. I walk along the rutted streets toward Grace’s house, in my shoes; it isn’t time for boots yet. Grace opens her front door when I ring. She must have been waiting for me. She has a dress on too and white stockings, and navy-blue bows at the ends of her braids. She looks me over. “She doesn’t have a hat,” she says. Mrs. Smeath, standing in the hallway, considers me as if I’m an orphan left on her doorstep. She sends Grace upstairs to search for another hat, and Grace comes back down with an old one of dark-blue velvet with an elastic under the chin. It’s too small for me but Mrs. Smeath says it will do for now. “We don’t go into our church with our heads uncovered,” she says. She emphasizes oar, as if there are other, inferior, bareheaded churches.

Mrs. Smeath has a sister, who is going with us to church. Her name is Aunt Mildred. She’s older and has been a missionary in China. She has the same knuckly red hands, the same metal-rimmed glasses, the same hair crown as Mrs. Smeath, only hers is all gray, and the hairs on her face are gray too and more numerous. Both of them have hats that look like packages of felt carelessly done up, with several ends sticking into the air. I’ve seen such hats in the
Eaton’s Catalogues
of several years back, worn by models with sleeked-back hair and high cheekbones and dark-red, glossy mouths. On Mrs. Smeath and her sister they don’t have the same effect.

When all of the Smeaths have their coats and hats on we climb into their car: Mrs. Smeath and Aunt Mildred in the front, me and Grace and her two little sisters in the back. Although I still worship Grace, this worship is not at all physical, and being squashed into the back seat of her car, so close to her, embarrasses me. Right in front of my face Mr. Smeath is driving. He is short and bald and hardly ever seen. It’s the same with Carol’s father, with Cordelia’s: in the daily life of houses, fathers are largely invisible.

We drive through the nearly empty Sunday streets, following the streetcar tracks west. The air inside the car fills with the used breath of the Smeaths, a stale smell like dried saliva. The church is large and made of brick; on the top of it, instead of a cross, there’s a thing that looks like an onion and goes around. I ask about this onion, which may mean something religious for all I know, but Grace says it’s a ventilator. Mr. Smeath parks the car and we get out of it and go inside. We sit in a row, on a long bench made of dark shiny wood, which Grace says is a pew. This is the first time I’ve ever been inside a church. There’s a high ceiling, with lights shaped like morning glories hanging down on chains, and a plain gold cross up at the front with a vase of white flowers. Behind that there are three stained-glass windows. The biggest, middle one has Jesus in white, with his hands held out sideways and a white bird hovering over his head. Underneath it says in thick black Bible-type letters with dots in between the words: THE•

KINGDOM•OF•GOD•IS•WITHIN•YOU. On the left side is Jesus sitting down, sideways in pinky-red, with two children leaning on his knees. It says: SUFFER•THE•LITTLE•CHILDREN. Both of the Jesuses have halos. On the other side is a woman in blue, with no halo and a white kerchief partly covering her face. She’s carrying a basket and reaching down one hand. There’s a man sitting down at her feet, with what looks like a bandage wound around his head. It says: THE•GREATEST•OF•THESE•IS•CHARITY. Around all these windows are borders, with vines twining around and bunches of grapes, and different flowers. The windows have light coming in behind them, which illuminates them. I can hardly take my eyes off them.

Then there’s organ music and everyone stands up, and I become confused. I watch what Grace does, and stand up when she stands up, sit when she sits. During the songs she holds the hymnbook open and points, but I don’t know any of the tunes. After a while it’s time for us to go to Sunday school, and so we file out with the other children in a line and go down into the church basement. At the entrance to the Sunday school place there’s a blackboard, where someone has printed, in colored chalk: KILROY WAS HERE. Beside this is a drawing of a man’s eyes and nose, looking over a fence. Sunday school is in classes, like ordinary school. The teachers are younger though; ours is an older teenager with a light-blue hat and a veil. Our class is all girls. The teacher reads us a Bible story about Joseph and his coat of many colors. Then she listens as the girls recite things they’re supposed to have memorized. I sit on my chair, dangling my legs. I haven’t memorized anything. The teacher smiles at me and says she hopes I will come back every week.

After this all the different classes go into a large room with rows of gray wooden benches in it, like the benches we eat our lunches on at school. We sit on the benches, the lights are turned off, and colored slides are projected onto the bare wall at the far end of the room. The slides aren’t photographs but paintings. They look old-fashioned. The first one shows a knight riding through the forest, gazing upward to where a shaft of light streams down through the trees. The skin of this knight is very white, his eyes are large like a girl’s, and his hand is pressed to where his heart must be, under his armor, which looks like car fenders. Under his large, luminous face I can see the light switches and the top boards of the wainscoting, and the corner of the small piano, where it juts out.

The next picture has the same knight only smaller, and underneath him some words, which we sing to the heavy thumping of chords from the unseen piano:

I would be true, for there are those who trust me,

I would be pure, for there are those who care,

I would be strong, for there is much to suffer,

I would be brave, for there is much to dare.

Beside me, in the dark, I hear Grace’s voice going up and up, thin and reedy, like a bird’s. She knows all the words; she knew all the words to her memory passage from the Bible too. When we bend our heads to pray I reel suffused with goodness, I feel included, taken in. God loves me, whoever he is. After Sunday school we go back into the regular church for the last part, and I put my nickel on the collection plate. Then there is something called the Doxology. Then we walk out of the church and stuff back into the Smeaths’ car, and Grace says carefully, “Daddy, may we go and see the trains?” and the little girls, with a show of enthusiasm, say, “Yes, yes.”