Cat's eye (14 page)

When I remember back to this time in the hole, I can’t really remember what happened to me while I was in it. I can’t remember what I really felt. Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions. I know the others came and got me out after a while, and the game or some other game continued. I have no image of myself in the hole; only a black square filled with nothing, a square like a door. Perhaps the square is empty; perhaps it’s only a marker, a time marker that separates the time before it from the time after. The point at which I lost power. Was I crying when they took me out of the hole? It seems likely. On the other hand I doubt it. But I can’t remember. Shortly after this I became nine. I can remember my other birthdays, later and earlier ones, but not this one. There must have been a party, my first real one, because who would have come to the others?

There must have been a cake, with candles and wishes and a quarter and a dime wrapped in wax paper hidden between the layers for someone to chip a tooth on, and presents. Cordelia would have been there, and Grace and Carol. These things must have occurred, but the only trace they’ve left on me has been a vague horror of birthday parties, not other people’s, my own. I think of pastel icing, pink candles burning in the pale November afternoon light, and there is a sense of shame and failure. I close my eyes, wait for pictures. I need to fill in the black square of time, go back to see what’s in it. It’s as if I vanish at that moment and reappear later, but different, not knowing why I have been changed. If I could even see the undersides of the boards above my head it might help. I close my eyes, wait for pictures.

At first there’s nothing; just a receding darkness, like a tunnel. But after a while something begins to form: a thicket of dark-green leaves with purple blossoms, dark purple, a sad rich color, and clusters of red berries, translucent as water. The vines are intergrown, so tangled over the other plants they’re like a hedge. A smell of loam and another, pungent scent rises from among the leaves, a smell of old things, dense and heavy, forgotten. There’s no wind but the leaves are in motion, there’s a ripple, as of unseen cats, or as if the leaves are moving by themselves.

Nightshade,
I think. It’s a dark word. There is no nightshade in November. The nightshade is a common weed. You pull it out of the garden and throw it away. The nightshade plant is related to the potato, which accounts for the similar shape of the flowers. Potatoes too can be poisonous, if left in the sun to turn green. This is the sort of thing it’s my habit to know.

I can tell it’s the wrong memory. But the flowers, the smell, the movement of the leaves persist, rich, mesmerizing, desolating, infused with grief.

Five - Wringer

I
leave the gallery, walk east. I need to go shopping, get some decent food, organize. When I’m by myself I revert to the times when I would forget about eating, stay up all night working, go until I felt an odd sensation I’d identify after some thought as hunger. Then I’d go through the refrigerator like a vacuum cleaner, sucking in whatever there was. Leftovers.

This morning there were eggs, but there are no more eggs. There’s no more bread, there’s no more milk. Why were there eggs and bread and milk in the first place? It must have been a stash of Jon’s, he must eat there sometimes. Or could it have been that he got this stuff for me? It’s hardly believable. I will buy oranges, yogurt without the jam. I will have a positive attitude, take care of myself, I’ll feed myself enzymes, and friendly bacteria. These good thoughts carry me until I’m right downtown. This is where Eaton’s used to be, here on this corner, yellow and foursquare. Now there’s a huge building in its place, what they call a shopping complex, as if shopping were a psychic disease. It’s glassy and be-tiled, green as an iceberg.

Across the street from it is known territory: Simpsons department store. I know it has a food hall somewhere. In the plate-glass windows there are heaps of bath towels, overstuffed sofas and chairs, sheets in modern prints. I wonder where all this cloth ends up. People cart it away, stuff it into their houses: the nesting instinct. A less attractive concept if you’ve ever seen a nest up close. There must be a limit to how much cloth you can cram into any one house, but of course it’s disposable. You used to buy for quality, things that would last. You kept your clothes until they were part of you, you checked the hemlines, the way the buttons were sewed on, you rubbed the cloth between your finger and thumb. The next windows contain disgruntled mannequins, their pelvises thrust out, their shoulders flung this way and that, making them look like hunchbacked ax murderers. I guess this is the look now: surly aggression. On the sidewalks there are a lot of androgynes, in the flesh, the girls in the black leather jackets and tough boots of boys, crewcuts, ducktails, the boys with the sullen pouty look of those women on the front covers of fashion magazines, their hair gelled into quills. At a distance I can’t tell the difference, though they themselves probably can. They make me feel outmoded.

What are they aiming for? Is each an imitation of the other? Or does it only seem that way to me because they’re all so alarmingly young? Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.

But I suppose that’s what Cordelia and I looked like then, to older people, crossing the street right here with our collars turned up and our eyebrows plucked into sceptical arches, swaggering in our rubber boots and straining for nonchalance, on our way down to Union Station where the trains came in, to put our quarters into the photo machine, four shots in monochrome, wallet-sized. Cordelia with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, her eyelids half closed, trying for sultry. Ultrasharp. I revolve through the revolving doors into Simpsons, where I become lost immediately. They’ve changed the whole thing over. It used to be sedate wood-rimmed glass counters, with gloves in standard models, appropriate wrist-watches, accent scarves in floral prints. Serious-minded good taste. Now it’s a cosmetic fairground: silver trim, gold pillars, marquee lights, brand-name letters the size of a human head. The air is saturated with the stink of perfumes at war. There are video screens on which flawless complexions turn, preen, sigh through their parted lips, are caressed. On other screens are close-ups of skin pores, before and after, details of regimes for everything, your hands, your neck, your thighs. Your elbows, especially your elbows: aging begins at the elbows and metastasizes. This is religion. Voodoo and spells. I want to believe in it, the creams, the rejuvenating lotions, the transparent unguents in vials that slick on like roll-top glue. “Don’t you know what that junk is made of?”

Ben said once. “Ground-up cock’s combs.” But this doesn’t deter me, I’d use anything if it worked—slug juice, toad spit, eye of newt, anything at all to mummify myself, stop the drip-drip of time, stay more or less the way I am.

But I own enough of this slop already to embalm all of the girls in my high school graduating class, who must need it by now as much as I do. I stop only long enough to allow myself to be sprayed by a girl giving away free squirts of some venomous new perfume. The femme fatale must be back, Veronica Lake slinks again. The stuff smells like grape Kool-Aid. I can’t imagine it seducing anything but a fruit fly.

“You like this?” I say to the girl. They must get lonely, standing here all day in their high heels, spraying strangers.

“It’s been very popular,” she says evasively. Briefly I glimpse myself through her eyes: bloom off the rose, teetering on the brink of matronhood, hoping for the best. I am the market. I ask her where the food hall is, and she tells me. It’s down. I get on the escalator, but suddenly I’m going up. This is bad, confusing directions like that, or am I jumping time, did I go down already? I get off, and find myself wading through rack after rack of children’s party dresses. They have the lace collars, the puffed sleeves, the sashes I remember; many of them are in plaid, the authentic somber blood-lit colors, dark greens with a stripe of red, dark blues, black. Black Watch. Have these people forgotten history, don’t they know anything about the Scots, don’t they know any better than to clothe small girls in the colors of despair, slaughter, treachery and murder?
My way of life,
new line,
Is fall’n
into the sere and yellow leaf.
Once we had to memorize things. Still, plaid was the fashion in my day too. The white socks, the Mary Janes, the always-inadequate birthday present swathed in tissue paper, and the little girls with their assessing eyes, their slippery deceitful smiles, tartaned up like Lady Macbeth. In the endless time when Cordelia had such power over me, I peeled the skin off my feet. I did it at night, when I was supposed to be sleeping. My feet would be cool and slightly damp, smooth, like the skin of mushrooms. I would begin with the big toes. I would bend my foot up and bite a small opening in the thickest part of the skin, on the bottom, along the outside edge. Then, with my fingernails, which I never bit because why bite something that didn’t hurt, I would pull the skin off in narrow strips. I would do the same to the other big toe, then to the ball of each foot, the heel of each. I would go down as far as the blood. Nobody but me ever looked at my feet, so nobody knew I was doing it. In the mornings I would pull my socks on, over my peeled feet. It was painful to walk, but not impossible. The pain gave me something definite to think about, something immediate. It was something to hold on to. I chewed the ends of my hair, so that there was always one lock of hair that was pointed and wet. I gnawed the cuticles off from around my fingernails, leaving welts of exposed, oozing flesh which would harden into rinds and scale off. In the bathtub or in dishwater my fingers looked nibbled, as if by mice. I did these things constantly, without thinking about them. But the feet were more deliberate. I remember thinking when the girls were born, first one and then the other, that I should have had sons and not daughters. I didn’t feel up to daughters, I didn’t know how they worked. I must have been afraid of hating them. With sons I would have known what to do: frog catching, fishing, war strategies, running around in the mud. I would have been able to teach them how to defend themselves, and what from. But the world of sons has changed; it’s more likely to be the boys now with that baffled look, like a night dweller gone blind in sunlight. “Stand up for yourself like a man,” I would have said. I would have been on shifty ground.

As for the girls, my girls at any rate, they seem to have been born with some kind of protective coating, some immunity I lacked. They look you in the eye, level and measuring, they sit at the kitchen table and the air around lights up with their lucidity. They are sane, or so I like to think. My saving graces. They amaze me, they always have. When they were little I felt I had to protect them from certain things about myself, the fear, the messier parts of the marriages, the days of nothing. I didn’t want to pass anything on to them, anything of mine they would be better off without. At those times I would lie on the floor in the dark, with the curtains drawn and the door closed. I would say,
Mummy has a headache.
Mummy’s working.
But they didn’t seem to need that protection, they seemed to take everything in, look at it straight, accept everything. “Mummy’s in there lying on the floor. She’ll be fine tomorrow,” I heard Sarah tell Anne when one was ten and the other was four. And so I was fine. Such faith, like the faith in sunrise or the phases of the moon, sustained me. It must be this sort of thing that keeps God going.

Who knows what they’ll make of me later on, who knows what they’ve already made of me? I would like them to be the happy end of my story. But of course they are not the end of their own. Someone comes up behind me, a sudden voice out of thin air. She startles me. “May I help you?” It’s a saleslady, an older woman this time. Middle-aged. My age, I then think, discouraged. Mine and Cordelia’s.

I’m standing among the plaid dresses, fingering a sleeve. God knows how long I’ve been doing it. Have I been talking out loud? My throat feels tight and my feet hurt. But whatever else may be in store for me, I do not intend to slide off my trolley tracks in the middle of Simpsons Girlswear.

“The food hall,” I say.

She smiles gently. She is tired, and I am a disappointment to her, I don’t want any plaid. “Oh, you need to be right downstairs,” she says, “in the cellar.” Kindly, she directs me.

T
he black door opens. I’m sitting in the mouse-dropping and formaldehyde smell of the building, on the window ledge, with the heat from the radiator going up my legs, watching out the window as the fairies and gnomes and snowballs below me slog through the drizzle to the tune of “Jingle Bells” played by a brass band. The fairies look foreshortened, damaged, streaked by the dust and rain on the window glass; my breath makes a foggy circle. My brother isn’t here, he’s too old for it. This is what he said. I have the whole window ledge to myself.

On the window ledge beside mine, Cordelia and Grace and Carol are sitting, jammed in together, whispering and giggling. I have to sit on a window ledge by myself because they aren’t speaking to me. It’s something I said wrong, but I don’t know what it is because they won’t tell me. Cordelia says it will be better for me to think back over everything I’ve said today and try to pick out the wrong thing. That way I will learn not to say such a thing again. When I’ve guessed the right answer, then they will speak to me again. All of this is for my own good, because they are my best friends and they want to help me improve. So this is what I’m thinking about as the pipe band goes past in sodden fur hats, and the drum majorettes with their bare wet legs and red smiles and dripping hair: what did I say wrong? I can’t remember having said anything different from what I would ordinarily say. My father walks into the room, wearing his white lab coat. He’s working in another part of the building, but he’s come to check on us. “Enjoying the parade, girls?” he says.