Cat's eye (13 page)

Mr. Smeath says, “Have you been good?” and the little girls say, “Yes, yes” again. Mrs. Smeath makes an indeterminate sound. “Oh, all right,” says Mr. Smeath to the little girls. He drives the car south through the empty streets, along the streetcar tracks, past a single streetcar like a gliding island, until finally we see the flat gray lake in the distance, and below us, over the edge of a sort of low cliff, a flat gray plain covered with train tracks. On this metal-covered plain several trains are shunting slowly back and forth. Because it is Sunday, and because this is evidently a routine after-church Sunday event for the Smeaths, I have the idea that the train tracks and the lethargic, ponderous trains have something to do with God. It is also clear to me that the person who really wants to see the trains is not Grace, or any of the little girls, but Mr. Smeath himself.

We sit there in the parked car watching the trains until Mrs. Smeath says that the dinner will be ruined. After that we drive back to Grace’s house.

I am invited for Sunday dinner. It’s the first time I’ve ever stayed for dinner at Grace’s. Before dinner Grace takes me upstairs so we can wash our hands, and I learn a new thing about her house: you are only allowed four squares of toilet paper. The soap in the bathroom is black and rough. Grace says it’s tar soap.

The dinner is baked ham and baked beans and baked potatoes and mashed squash. Mr. Smeath carves the ham, Mrs. Smeath adds the vegetables, the plates get passed around. Grace’s little sisters look at me through their eyeglasses when I start to eat.

“We say grace in this house,” says Aunt Mildred, smiling firmly, and I don’t know what she’s talking about. I look at Grace: why do they want to say her name? But they all bend their heads and put their hands together and Grace says, “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful, Amen,” and Mr. Smeath says, “Good food, good drink, good God, let’s eat,” and winks at me. Mrs. Smeath says “Lloyd,” and Mr. Smeath gives a small, conspiratorial laugh. After dinner Grace and I sit in the living room, on the velvet chesterfield, the same one Mrs. Smeath takes her naps on. I’ve never sat on it before and feel I’m sitting on something reserved, like a throne or a coffin. We read our Sunday school paper, which has the story of Joseph in it and a modern story about a boy who steals from the collection plate but repents and collects wastepaper and old bottles for the church, to make reparations. The pictures are black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings, but on the front is a colored picture of Jesus, in pastel robes, surrounded by children, all of different colors, brown, yellow, white, clean and pretty, some holding his hand, others gazing up at him with large worshipful eyes. This Jesus does not have a halo.

Mr. Smeath dozes in the maroon easy chair, his round belly swelling up. From the kitchen comes the clatter of silverware. Mrs. Smeath and Aunt Mildred are doing the dishes. I reach home in the late afternoon, with my red plastic purse and my Sunday school paper. “Did you like it?” says my mother, still with the same air of anxiety.

“Did you learn anything?” says my father.

“I have to memorize a psalm,” I say importantly. The word
psalm
sounds like a secret password. I am a little resentful. There are things my parents have been keeping from me, things I need to know. The hats, for instance: how could my mother have forgotten about the hats? God is not an entirely new idea for me: they have him at school in the morning prayers, and even in “God Save the King.” But it seems there is more to it, more things to be memorized, more songs to be sung, more nickels to be donated, before he can be truly appeased. I am worried about Heaven though. What age will I be when I get there? What if I’m old when I die? In Heaven I want to be the age I am.

I have a Bible, on loan from Grace, her second-best. I go to my room and begin to memorize:
The
heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day
uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.

I still don’t nave any bedroom curtains. I look out the window, look up: there are the heavens, there are the stars, where they usually are. They no longer look cold and white and remote, like alcohol and enamel trays. Now they look watchful.

T
he girls stand in the schoolyard or up on top of the hill, in small clumps, whispering and whispering and doing spool work. It’s now the fashion to have a spool with four nails pounded into one end, and a ball of wool. You loop the wool over each nail in turn, twice around, and use a fifth nail to hook the bottom loops over the top ones. Out of the other end of the spool dangles a round thick wool tail, which you’re supposed to wind up like a flat snail shell and sew into a mat to put the teapot on. I have such a spool, and so do Grace and Carol, and even Cordelia, although her wool is a snarl. These clumps of whispering girls with their spools and colored wool tails have to do with boys, with the separateness of boys. Each cluster of girls excludes some other girls, but all boys. The boys exclude us too, but their exclusion is active, they make a point of it. We don’t need to. Sometimes I still go into my brother’s room and lie around on the floor reading comic books, but I never do this when any other girl is there. Alone I am tolerated, as part of a group of girls I would not be. This goes without saying.

Once I took boys for granted, I was used to them. But now I pay more attention, because boys are not the same. For example, they don’t take baths as often as they’re expected to. They smell of grubby flesh, of scalp, but also of leather, from the knee patches on their breeches, and wool, from the breeches themselves, which come down only to below the knee, and lace up there like football pants. On the bottom parts of their legs they wear thick wool socks, which are usually damp and falling down. On their heads, outdoors, they wear leather helmets that strap under the chin. Their clothing is khaki, or navy-blue or gray, or forest green, colors that don’t show the dirt as much. All of this has a military feel to it. Boys pride themselves on their drab clothing, their drooping socks, their smeared and inky skin: dirt, for them, is almost as good as wounds. They work at acting like boys. They call each other by their last names, draw attention to any extra departures from cleanliness. “Hey, Robertson! Wipe off the snot!” “Who farted?” They punch one another on the arm, saying, “Got you!” “Got you back!” There always seem to be more of them in the room than there actually are.

My brother punches arms and makes remarks about smells like the rest of them, but he has a secret. He would never tell it to these other boys, because of the way they would laugh. The secret is that he has a girlfriend. This girlfriend is so secret she doesn’t even know about it herself. I’m the only one he’s told, and I have been double-sworn not to tell anyone else. Even when we’re alone I’m not allowed to refer to her by her name, only by her initials, which are B.W. My brother will sometimes murmur these initials when there are other people around, my parents for instance. When he says them he stares at me, waiting for me to nod or give some sign that I have heard and understood. He writes me notes in code, which he leaves where I’ll find them, under my pillow, tucked into my top bureau drawer. When I translate these notes they turn out to be so unlike him, so lacking in invention, so moronic in fact, that I can hardly believe it: “Talked to B.W.” “Saw HER today.” He writes these notes in colored pencil, different colors, with exclamation marks. One night there’s a freak early snowfall, and in the morning when I wake up and look out my bedroom window there are the supercharged initials, etched in pee on the white ground, already melting.

I can see that this girlfriend is causing him some anguish, as well as excitement, but I can’t understand why. I know who she is. Her real name is Bertha Watson, she hangs around with the older girls, up on the hill under the stunted fir trees. She has straight brown hair with bangs and she’s of ordinary size. There’s no magic about her that I can see, or any abnormality. I’d like to know how she’s done it, this trick with my brother that’s turned him into a stupider, more nervous identical twin of himself. Knowing this secret, being the only one chosen to know, makes me feel important in a way. But it’s a negative importance, it’s the importance of a blank sheet of paper. I can know because I don’t count. I feel singled out, but also bereft. Also protective of him, because for the first time in my life I feel responsible for him. He is at risk, and I have power over him. It occurs to me that I could tell on him, lay him open to derision; I have that choice. He is at my mercy and I don’t want it. I want him back the way he was, unchanged, invincible.

The girlfriend doesn’t last long. After a while nothing more is heard of her. My brother makes fun of me again, or ignores me; he’s back in charge. He gets a chemistry set and does experiments down in the basement. As an obsession I prefer the chemistry set to the girlfriend. There are things stewing, horrible stinks, little sulfurous explosions, amazing illusions. There’s invisible writing that comes out when you hold the paper over a candle. You can make a hard-boiled egg rubbery so it will go into a milk bottle, although getting it out again is more difficult.
Turn Water to Blood,
the instructions say,
and Astound
Your Friends.

He still trades comic books, but effortlessly, absent-mindedly. Because he cares less about them he makes better trades. The comic books pile up under his bed, stacks and stacks of them, but he seldom reads them any more when the other boys aren’t around.

My brother exhausts the chemistry set. Now he has a star map, pinned to the wall of his room, and at night he turns out the lights and sits beside the darkened, open window, in the cold, with his maroon sweater pulled on over his pajamas, gazing skyward. He has a pair of my father’s binoculars, which he’s allowed to use as long as he keeps the strap around his neck so he won’t drop them. What he really wants next is a telescope.

When he allows me to join him, and when he feels like talking, he teaches me new names, charts the reference points: Orion, the Bear, the Dragon, the Swan. These are constellations. Every one of them is made up of a huge number of stars, hundreds of times bigger and hotter than our own sun. These stars are light-years away, he says. We aren’t really seeing them at all, we’re just seeing the light they sent out years, hundreds of years, thousands of years ago. The stars are like echoes. I sit there in my flannelette pajamas, shivering, the back of my neck hurting from the upward tilt, squinting into the cold and the infinitely receding darkness, into the black caldron where the fiery stars boil and boil. His stars are different from the ones in the Bible: they’re wordless, they flame in an obliterating silence. I feel as if my body is dissolving and I am being drawn up and up, like thinning mist, into a vast emptying space.

“Arcturus,” my brother says. It’s a foreign word, one I don’t know, but I know the tone of his voice: recognition, completion, something added to a set. I think of his jars of marbles in the spring, the way he dropped the marbles into the jar, one by one, counting. My brother is collecting again; he’s collecting stars.

B
lack cats and paper pumpkins gather on the school windows. On Halloween Grace wears an ordinary lady’s dress, Carol a fairy outfit, Cordelia a clown suit. I wear a sheet, because that’s what there is. We walk from door to door, our brown paper grocery bags filling with candy apples, popcorn balls, peanut brittle, chanting at each door:
Shell out! Shell out! The witches are out!
In the front windows, on the porches, the large orange heads of the pumpkins float, glowing, unbodied. The
next day
we take our pumpkins to the wooden bridge and throw them over the edge, watching them smash open on the ground below. Now it’s November.

Cordelia is digging a hole, in her back garden where there’s no sod. She has started several holes before, but they have been unsuccessful, they struck rock. This one is more promising. She digs with a pointed shovel; sometimes we help her. It isn’t a small hole but a large, square hole; it gets deeper and deeper as the dirt piles up around it. She says we can use it for a clubhouse, we can put chairs down in the hole and sit on them. When it’s deep enough she wants to cover it over with boards, for a roof. She’s already collected the boards, scrap boards from the two new houses they’re building near her house. She’s very wrapped up in this hole, it’s hard to get her to play anything else.

On the darkening streets the poppies blossom, for Remembrance Day. They’re made of fuzzy cloth, red like valentine hearts, with a black spot and a pin through the center. We wear them on our coats. We memorize a poem about them:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow,

Between the crosses row on row

That mark our place.

At eleven o’clock we stand beside our desks in the dust motes of the weak November sunshine for the three minutes of silence, Miss Lumley grim at the front of the room, heads bowed, eyes closed, listening to the hush and the rustle of our own bodies and the booming of the guns in the distance.
We are the
dead.
I keep my eyes closed, trying to feel pious and sorry for the dead soldiers, who died for us, whose faces I can’t imagine. I have never known any dead people.

Cordelia and Grace and Carol take me to the deep hole in Cordelia’s backyard. I’m wearing a black dress and a cloak, from the dress-up cupboard. I’m supposed to be Mary, Queen of Scots, headless already. They pick me up by the underarms and the feet and lower me into the hole. Then they arrange the boards over the top. The daylight air disappears, and there’s the sound of dirt hitting the boards, shovelful after shovelful. Inside the hole it’s dim and cold and damp and smells like toad burrows. Up above, outside, I can hear their voices, and then I can’t hear them. I lie there wondering when it will be time to come out. Nothing happens. When I was put into the hole I knew it was a game; now I know it is not one. I feel sadness, a sense of betrayal. Then I feel the darkness pressing down on me; then terror.