Cat's eye (16 page)

I have memorized the names of all the books of the Bible, in order, and the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, and most of the Beatitudes. I’ve been getting ten out of ten on my Bible quizzes and my memory work, but I’m beginning to falter. In Sunday school we have to stand up and recite, out loud, in front of the others, and Grace watches me. She watches everything I do on Sundays, and reports on me, matter-of-factly, to Cordelia.

“She didn’t stand up straight in Sunday school yesterday.” Or: “She was a goody-goody.” I believe each of these comments: my shoulders sag, my spine crumples, I exude the wrong kind of goodness; I see myself shambling crookedly, I make an effort to stand straighter, my body rigid with anxiety. And it’s true that I got ten out of ten, again, and Grace only got nine. Is it wrong to be right? How right should I be, to be perfect? The next week I put five wrong answers, deliberately.

“She only got five out of ten on Bible,” Grace says on Monday.

“She’s getting stupider,” Cordelia says. “You aren’t really that stupid. You’ll have to try harder than that!”

Today is White Gift Sunday. We have all brought cans of food from home for the poor, wrapped up in white tissue paper. Mine are Habitant pea soup and Spam. I suspect they are the wrong things, but they’re what my mother had in the cupboard. The idea of white gifts bothers me: such hard gifts, made uniform, bleached of their identity and colors. They look dead. Inside those blank, sinister bundles of tissue paper piled up at the front of the church there could be anything. Grace and I sit on the wooden benches in the church basement, watching the illuminated slides on the wall, singing the words to the songs, while the piano plods onward in the darkness.
Jesus bids us shine

With a pure, clear light,

Like a little candle

Burning in the night:

In this world is darkness;

So let us shine,

You in your small corner,

And I in mine.

I want to shine like a candle. I want to be good, to follow instructions, to do what Jesus bids. I want to believe you should love your neighbors as yourself and the Kingdom of God is within you. But all of this seems less and less possible.

In the darkness I can see a gleam of light, to the side. It’s not a candle: it’s light reflected back off Grace’s glasses, from the light on the wall. She knows the words by heart, she doesn’t have to look at the screen. She’s watching me.

After church I go with the Smeaths through the vacant Sunday streets to watch the trains shunting monotonously back and forth along their tracks, on the gray plain beside the flat lake. Then I go back to their house for Sunday dinner. This happens every Sunday now, it’s part of going to church; it would be very bad if I said no, to either thing.

I’ve learned the way things are done here. I climb the stairs past the rubber plant, not touching it, and go into the Smeaths’ bathroom and count off four squares of toilet paper and wash my hands afterward with the gritty black Smeath soap. I no longer have to be admonished, I bow my head automatically when Grace says, “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful, Amen.”

“Pork and beans the musical fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot,” says Mr. Smeath, grinning round the table. Mrs. Smeath and Aunt Mildred do not think this is funny. The little girls regard him solemnly. They both have glasses and white freckled skin and Sunday bows on the ends of their brown wiry braids, like Grace.

“Lloyd,” says Mrs. Smeath.

“Come on, it’s harmless,” Mr. Smeath says. He looks me in the eye. “Elaine thinks it’s funny. Don’t you, Elaine?”

I am trapped. What can I say? If I say no, it could be rudeness. If I say yes, I have sided with him, against Mrs. Smeath and Aunt Mildred and all three of the Smeath girls, including Grace. I feel myself turn hot, then cold. Mr. Smeath is grinning at me, a conspirator’s grin.

“I don’t know,” I say. The real answer is no, because I don’t in fact know what this joke means. But I can’t abandon Mr. Smeath, not entirely. He is a squat, balding, flabby man, but still a man. He does not judge me.

Grace repeats this incident to Cordelia, next morning, in the school bus, her voice a near whisper. “She said she didn’t know.”

“What sort of an answer was that?” Cordelia asks me sharply. “Either you think it’s funny or you don’t. Why did you say ”I don’t know‘?“

I tell the truth. “I don’t know what it means.”

“You don’t know what
what
means?”

“Musical fruit,” I say. “The more you toot.” I am now deeply embarrassed, because I don’t know. Not knowing is the worst thing I could have done.

Cordelia gives a hoot of contemptuous laughter. “You don’t know what
that
means?” she says. “What a stupe! It means
fart.
Beans make you fart. Everyone knows that.”

I am doubly mortified, because I didn’t know, and because Mr. Smeath
said fart
at the Sunday dinner table and enlisted me on his side, and I did not say no. It isn’t the word itself that makes me ashamed. I’m used to it, my brother and his friends say it all the time, when there are no adults listening. It’s the word at the Smeath dinner table, stronghold of righteousness.

But inwardly I do not recant. My loyalty to Mr. Smeath is similar to my loyalty to my brother: both are on the side of ox eyeballs, toe jam under the microscope, the outrageous, the subversive. Outrageous to whom, subversive of what? Of Grace and Mrs. Smeath, of tidy paper ladies pasted into scrapbooks. Cordelia ought to be on this side too. Sometimes she is, sometimes she isn’t. It’s hard to tell.

I
n the mornings the milk is frozen, the cream risen in icy, granular columns out of the bottle necks. Miss Lumley bends over my desk, her invisible navy-blue bloomers casting their desolating aura around her. On either side of her nose the skin hangs down, like the jowls of a bulldog; there’s a trace of dried spit in the corner of her mouth. “Your handwriting is deteriorating,” she says. I look at my page in dismay. She’s right: the letters are no longer round and beautiful, but spidery, frantic, and disfigured with blots of black rusty ink where I’ve pressed down too hard on the steel nib. “You must try harder.” I curl my fingers under. I think she’s looking at the ragged edges of skin. Everything she says, everything I do, is heard and seen by Carol and will be reported later.

Cordelia is in a play and we go to watch her. This is my first play and I ought to be excited. Instead I am filled with dread, because I know nothing of the etiquette of play-going and I’m sure I’ll do something wrong. The play is at the Eaton’s Auditorium; the stage has blue curtains with black velvet horizontal stripes on them. The curtains part to reveal
The Wind in the Willows.
All the actors are children. Cordelia is a weasel, but since she’s in a weasel costume with a weasel head, it’s impossible to tell her apart from all the other weasels. I sit in the plush theater seat, biting my fingers, craning my neck, looking for her. Knowing she’s there but not knowing where is the worst thing. She could be anywhere. The radio fills with sugary music: “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which we have to sing in school, standing beside our desks with Miss Lumley tooting on her pitch pipe to give the note and keeping time with her wooden ruler, the same one she whacks the boys’

hands with when they fidget. Rudolph bothers me, because there’s something wrong with him; but at the same time he gives me hope, because he ended up beloved. My father says he is a nauseating commercial neologism. “A fool and his money are soon parted,” he says. We make red bells out of construction paper, folding the paper in half before cutting out the shape. We make snowmen the same way. It’s Miss Lumley’s recipe for symmetry: everything has to be folded, everything has two halves, a left and a right, identical.

I go through these festive tasks like a sleepwalker. I take no interest in bells or snowmen or for that matter in Santa Claus, in whom I’ve ceased to believe, since Cordelia has told me it’s really just your parents. There’s a class Christmas party, which consists of cookies brought from home and eaten silently at our desks, and different-colored jelly beans provided by Miss Lumley, five for each child. Miss Lumley knows what the conventions are and pays her own rigid tributes to them. For Christmas I get a Barbara Ann Scott doll, which I’ve said I wanted. I had to say I wanted something and I did in a way want this doll. I haven’t had any girl-shaped dolls before. Barbara Ann Scott is a famous figure skater, a very famous one. She has won prizes. I’ve studied the pictures of her in the newspaper.

The doll of her has little leatherette skates and a fur-trimmed costume, pink with white fur, and fringed eyes that open and close, but it looks nothing at all like the real Barbara Ann Scott. According to the pictures she’s muscular, with big thighs, but the doll is a slender stick. Barbara is a woman, the doll is a girl. It has the worrying power of effigies, a lifeless life that fills me with creeping horror. I put it back into its cardboard box and tuck the tissue paper around it, over the face. I say I’m doing this to keep it safe, but in fact I don’t want it watching me.

Over our chesterfield there’s a badminton net, festooned across the wall. In the squares of this net my parents have hung their Christmas cards. No one else I know has a badminton net like this on their wall. Cordelia’s Christmas tree is not like others: it’s covered in gauzy angel hair, and all the lights and decorations on it are blue. But she can get away with such differences, I can’t. I know I’ll be made to pay for the badminton net, sooner or later.

We sit around the table, eating our Christmas dinner. There’s a student of my father’s, a young man from India who’s here to study insects and who’s never seen snow before. We’re having him to Christmas dinner because he’s foreign, he’s far from home, he will be lonely, and they don’t even have Christmas in his country. This has been explained to us in advance by our mother. He’s polite and ill at ease and he giggles frequently, looking with what I sense is terror at the array of food spread out before him, the mashed potatoes, the gravy, the lurid green and red Jell-O salad, the enormous turkey: my mother has said that the food is different there. I know he’s miserable, underneath his smiles and politeness. I’m developing a knack for this, I can sniff out hidden misery in others now with hardly any effort at all. My father sits at the head of the table, beaming like the Jolly Green Giant. He lifts his glass, his gnome’s eyes twinkling. “Mr. Banerji, sir,” he says. He always calls his students Mr. and Miss. “You can’t fly on one wing.”

Mr. Banerji giggles and says, “Very true, sir,” in his voice that sounds like the BBC News. He lifts his own glass and sips. What is in the glass is wine. My brother and I have cranberry juice in our wineglasses. Last year or the year before we might have tied our shoelaces together, under the table, so we could signal each other with secret jerks and tugs, but we’re both beyond this now for different reasons.

My father ladles out the stuffing, deals the slices of dark and light; my mother adds the mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce and asks Mr. Banerji, enunciating carefully, whether they have turkeys in his country. He says he doesn’t believe so. I sit across the table from him, my feet dangling, staring at him, enthralled. His spindly wrists extend from his over-large cuffs, his hands are long and thin, ragged around the nails, like mine. I think he is very beautiful, with his brown skin and brilliant white teeth and his dark appalled eyes. There’s a child these colors in the ring of children on the front of the Sunday school missionary paper, yellow children, brown children, all in different costumes, dancing around Jesus. Mr. Banerji doesn’t have a costume, only a jacket and tie like other men. Nevertheless I can hardly believe he’s a man, he seems so unlike one. He’s a creature more like myself: alien and apprehensive. He’s afraid of us. He has no idea what we will do next, what impossibilities we will expect of him, what we will make him eat. No wonder he bites his fingers.

“A little off the sternum, sir?” my father asks him, and Mr. Banerji brightens at the word.

“Ah, the sternum,” he says, and I know they have entered together the shared world of biology, which offers refuge from the real, awkward world of manners and silences we’re sitting in at the moment. As he slices away with the carving knife my father indicates to all of us, but especially to Mr. Banerji, the areas where the flight muscles attach, using the carving fork as a pointer. Of course, he says, the domestic turkey has lost the ability to fly.

“
Meleagris gallopavo
,” he says, and Mr. Banerji leans forward; the Latin perks him up. “A pea-brained animal, or bird-brained you might say, bred for its ability to put on weight, especially on the drumsticks”—he points these out—“certainly not for intelligence. It was originally domesticated by the Mayans.” He tells a story of a turkey farm where the turkeys all died because they were too stupid to go into their shed during a thunderstorm. Instead they stood around outside, looking up at the sky with their beaks Wide open and the rain ran down their throats and drowned them. He says this is a story told by farmers and probably not true, although the stupidity of the bird is legendary. He says that the wild turkey, once abundant in the deciduous forests in these regions, is far more intelligent and can elude even practiced hunters. Also it can fly.

I sit picking at my Christmas dinner, as Mr. Banerji is picking at his. Both of us have messed the mashed potatoes around on our plates without actually eating much. Wild things are smarter than tame ones, that much is clear. Wild things are elusive and wily and look out for themselves. I divide the people I know into tame and wild. My mother, wild. My father and brother, also wild; Mr. Banerji, wild also, but in a more skittish way. Carol, tame. Grace, tame as well, though with sneaky vestiges of wild. Cordelia, wild, pure and simple.

“There are no limits to human greed,” says my father.

“Indeed, sir?” says Mr. Banerji, as my father goes on to say that he’s heard some son of a gun is working on an experiment to breed a turkey with four drumsticks, instead of two drumsticks and two wings, because there’s more meat on a drumstick.