Cat's eye (17 page)

“How would such a creature walk, sir?” asks Mr. Banerji, and my father, approving, says, “Well may you ask.” He tells Mr. Banerji that some darn fool scientists are working on a square tomato, which will supposedly pack more easily into crates than the round variety.

“All the flavor will be sacrificed, of course,” he says. “They care nothing for flavor. They bred a naked chicken, thinking they’d get more eggs by utilizing the energy saved from feather production, but the thing shivered so much they had to double-heat the coop, so it cost more in the end.”

“Fooling with Nature, sir,” says Mr. Banerji. I know already that this is the right response. Investigating Nature is one thing and so is defending yourself against it, within limits, but fooling with it is quite another. Mr. Banerji says he hears there is now a naked cat available, he’s read about it in a magazine, though he himself does not see the point of it at all. This is the most he has said so far. My brother asks if there are any poisonous snakes in India, and Mr. Banerji, now much more at ease, begins to enumerate them. My mother smiles, because this is going better than she thought it would. Poisonous snakes are fine with her, even at the dinner table, as long as they make people happy. My father has eaten everything on his plate and is dig ging for more stuffing in the cavity of the turkey, which resembles a trussed, headless baby. It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird. I’m eating a wing. It’s the wing of a tame turkey, the stupidest bird in the world, so stupid it can’t even fly any more. I am eating lost flight.

A
fter Christmas I’m offered a job. The job is wheeling Brian Finestein around the block in his baby carriage after school, for an hour or a little longer if it isn’t too cold, one day a week. For this I get twenty-five cents, which is a lot of money.

The Finesteins live in the house beside ours, the big house that was built suddenly where the mud mountain used to be. Mrs. Finestein is short for a woman, plump, with dark curly hair and lovely white teeth. These show often, as she laughs a lot, wrinkling up her nose like a puppy as she does it, shaking her head, which makes her gold earrings twinkle. I’m not sure, but I think these earrings actually go through little holes in her ears, unlike any earrings I have ever seen. I ring the doorbell and Mrs. Finestein opens the door. “My little lifesaver,” she says. I wait in the vestibule, my winter boots dripping onto the spread newspapers. Mrs. Finestein, wearing a flowered pink housecoat and slippers with high heels and real fur, bustles upstairs to get Brian. The vestibule smells of Brian’s ammonia-soaked diapers, which are in a pail waiting to be collected by the diaper company. I’m intrigued by the idea that someone else can come and take away your laundry. Mrs. Finestein always has a bowl of oranges out, on a table up a few steps from the vestibule; no one else leaves oranges lying around like that when it isn’t Christmas. There’s a gold-colored candlestick like a tree behind the bowl. These things—the sickly sweet baby shit smell of the festering diapers, the bowl of oranges and the gold tree—blend in my mind into an image of ultrasophistication.

Mrs. Finestein clops down the stairs carrying Brian, who is zipped into a blue bunny suit with ears. She gives him a big kiss on his cheek, joggles him up and down, tucks him into the carriage, snaps up the waterproof carriage cover. “There, Bry-Bry,” she says. “Now Mummy can hear herself think.” She laughs, wrinkles her nose, shakes her gold earrings. Her skin is rounded out, milky-smelling. She’s not like any mother I’ve ever seen.

I wheel Brian out into the cold air and we start off around the block, over the crunchy snow which is spread with cinders from people’s furnaces and dotted here and there with frozen horse buns. I can’t figure out how Brian would ever be able to interfere with Mrs. Finestein’s thinking, because he never cries. Also he never laughs. He never makes any noises at all, nor does he go to sleep. He just lies there in his carriage, gazing solemnly up at me with his round blue eyes as his button of a nose gets redder and redder. I make no attempt to entertain him. But I like him: he’s silent, but also uncritical. When I think it’s time I wheel him back, and Mrs. Finestein says, “Don’t tell me it’s five o’clock already!” I ask her to give me nickels instead of a quarter, because it looks like more. She laughs a lot at that, but she does it. I keep all my money in an old tin tea caddy with a picture of the desert on it, palm trees and camels. I like taking it out and spreading it over my bed. Instead of counting it, I arrange it by the year that’s stamped on each piece of money: 1935, 1942, 1945. Every coin has a King’s head on it, cut off neatly at the neck, but the Kings are different. The ones from before I was born have beards, but the ones now don’t, because it’s King George, the one at the back of the classroom. It gives me an odd comfort to sort this money into piles of cut-off heads.

Brian and I wheel around the block, around the block again. It’s hard for me to tell when it’s an hour because I don’t have a watch. Cordelia and Grace come around the corner up ahead, with Carol trailing. They see me, walk over.

“What rhymes with Elaine?” Cordelia asks me. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Elaine is a pain.”

Carol peers into the baby carriage. “Look at the bunny ears,” she says. “What’s his name?” Her voice is wistful. I see Brian in a new light. It isn’t everyone who’s allowed to wheel a baby.

“Brian,” I say. “Brian Finestein.”

“Finestein is a Jewish name,” says Grace.

I don’t know what Jewish is. I’ve seen the word
Jew,
the Bible is full of that word, but I didn’t know there were any live, real ones, especially next door to me.

“Jews are kikes,” says Carol, glancing at Cordelia for approval.

“Don’t be vulgar,” says Cordelia, in her adult voice. “Kike is not a word we use.”

I ask my mother
what Jewish
is. She says it’s a different kind of religion. Mr. Banerji is a different kind of religion as well, though not Jewish. There are many different kinds. As for the Jews, Hitler killed a great many of them, during the war.

“Why?” I say.

“He was demented,” says my father. “A megalomaniac.” Neither of these words is much help.

“A bad person,” says my mother.

I wheel Brian over the cindery snow, easing him around the potholes. He goggles up at me, his nose red, his tiny mouth unsmiling. Brian has a new dimension: he is a Jew. There is something extra and a little heroic about him; not even the blue ears of his bunny suit can detract from that.
Jewish
goes with the diapers, the oranges in the bowl, Mrs. Finestein’s gold earrings and her possibly real ear holes, but also with ancient, important matters. You wouldn’t expect to see a Jew every day. Cordelia and Grace and Carol are beside me. “How’s the little baby today?” asks Cordelia.

“He’s fine,” I say guardedly.

“I didn’t mean him, I meant you,” says Cordelia.

“Can I have a turn?” asks Carol.

“I can’t,” I tell her. If she does it wrong, if she upsets Brian Finestein into a snowbank, it will be my fault.

“Who wants an old Jew baby anyway,” she says.

“The Jews killed Christ,” says Grace primly. “It’s in the Bible.”

But Jews don’t interest Cordelia much. She has other things on her mind. “If a man who catches fish is a fisher, what’s a man who catches bugs?” she says.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“You are so stupid,” says Cordelia. “That’s what your father is, right? Go on. Figure it out. It’s really simple.”

“A bugger,” I say.

“Is that what you think of your own father?” Cordelia says. “He’s an
entomologist,
stupid. You should be ashamed. You should have your mouth washed out with soap.”

I know that
bugger
is a dirty word, but I don’t know why. Nevertheless I have betrayed, I have been betrayed. “I nave to go,” I say. Wheeling Brian back to Mrs. Finestein’s, I cry silently, while Brian watches me, expressionless. “Goodbye, Brian,” I whisper to him.

I tell Mrs. Finestein that I can’t do the job any more because I have too much schoolwork. I can’t tell her the real reason: that in some obscure way Brian is not safe with me. I have images of Brian headfirst in a snowbank; Brian hurtling in his carriage down the icy hill by the side of the bridge, straight toward the creek full of dead people; Brian tossed into the air, his bunny ears flung upwards in terror. I have only a limited ability to say no.

“Honey, that’s all right,” she says, looking into my raw, watery eyes. She puts her arm around me and gives me a hue and an extra nickel. No one has ever called me
honey
before this. I go home, knowing I have failed her, and also myself.
Bugger,
I think to myself. I say it over and over until it disappears into its own syllables.
Erbug, erbug.
It’s a word with no meaning, like
kike,
but it reeks of ill will, it has power. What have I done to my father?

I take all of Mrs. Finestein’s King’s-head nickels and spend them at the store on the way home from school. I buy licorice whips, jelly beans, many-layered blackballs with the seed in the middle, packages of fizzy sherbet you suck up through a straw. I dole them out equally, these offerings, these atonements, into the waiting hands of my friends. In the moment just before giving, I am loved.

I
t’s Saturday. Nothing has happened all morning. Icicles form on the eaves trough above the south window, dripping in the sunlight with a steady sound like a leak. My mother is baking in the kitchen, my father and brother are elsewhere. I eat my lunch alone, watching the icicles. The lunch is crackers and orange cheese and a glass of milk, and a bowl of alphabet soup. My mother thinks of alphabet soup as a cheerful treat for children. The alphabet soup has letters floating in it, white letters: capital A’s and O’s and S’s and R’s, the occasional X or Z. When I was younger I would fish the letters out and spell things with them on the edge of the plate, or eat my name, letter by letter. Now I just eat the soup, taking no particular interest. The soup is orangey-red and has a flavor, but the letters themselves taste like nothing.

The telephone rings. It’s Grace. “You want to come out and play?” she says, in her neutral voice that is at the same time blank and unsoft, like glazed paper. I know Cordelia is standing beside her. If I say no, I will be accused of something. If I say yes, I will have to do it. I say yes.

“We’ll come and get you,” Grace says.

My stomach feels dull and heavy, as if it’s full of earth. I put on my snowsuit and boots, my knitted hat and mittens. I tell my mother I’m going out to play. “Don’t get chilled,” she says. The sun on the snow is blinding. There’s a crust of ice over the drifts, where the top layer of snow has melted and then refrozen. My boots make clean-edged footprints through the crust. There’s no one around. I walk through the white glare, toward Grace’s house. The air is wavery, filled with light, overfilled; I can hear the pressure of it against my eyes. I feel translucent, like a hand held over a flashlight or the pictures of jellyfish I’ve seen in magazines, floating in the sea like watery flesh balloons. At the end of the street I can see the three of them, very dark, walking toward me. Their coats look almost black. Even their faces when they come closer look too dark, as if they’re in shadow. Cordelia says, “We said we would come and get you. We didn’t say you could come here.”

I say nothing.

Grace says, “She should answer when we talk to her.”

Cordelia says, “What’s the matter, are you deaf?”

Their voices sound far away. I turn aside and throw up onto a snowbank. I didn’t mean to do it and didn’t know I was going to. I feel sick to my stomach every morning, I’m used to that, but this is the real thing, alphabet soup mixed with shards of chewed-up cheese, amazingly red and orange against the white of the snow, with here and there a ruined letter.

Cordelia doesn’t say anything. Grace says, “You better go home.” Carol, behind them, sounds as if she’s going to cry. She says, “It’s on her face.” I walk back toward my house, smelling the vomit on the front of my snow-suit, tasting it in my nose and throat. It feels like bits of carrot. I lie in bed with the scrub pail beside me, floating lightly on waves of fever. I throw up several times, until nothing but a little green juice comes out. My mother says, “I suppose we’ll all get it,” and she’s right. During the night I can hear hurrying footsteps and retching and the toilet flushing. I feel safe, small, wrapped in my illness as if in cotton wool.

I begin to be sick more often. Sometimes my mother looks into my mouth with a flashlight and feels my forehead and takes my temperature and sends me to school, but sometimes I’m allowed to stay home. On these days I feel relief, as if I’ve been running for a long time and have reached a place where I can rest, not forever but for a while. Having a fever is pleasant, vacant. I enjoy the coolness of things, the flat ginger ale I’m given to drink, the delicacy of taste, afterward.

I lie in bed, propped up on pillows, a glass of water on a chair beside me, listening to the faraway sounds coming from my mother: the eggbeater, the vacuum cleaner, music from the radio, the lakeshore sound of the floor polisher. Winter sunlight slants in through the window, between the half-drawn curtains. I now have curtains. I look at the ceiling light fixture, opaque yellowish glass with the shadows of two or three dead flies caught inside it showing through as if through cloudy jelly. Or I look at the doorknob. Sometimes I cut things out of magazines and paste them into a scrapbook with LePage’s mucilage, from the bottle that looks like a chess bishop. I cut out pictures of women, from
Good Housekeeping, The
Ladies’ Home Journal, Chatelaine.
If I don’t like their faces I cut off the heads and glue other heads on. These women have dresses with puffed sleeves and full skirts, and white aprons that tie very tightly around their waists. They put germ killers onto germs, in toilet bowls; they polish windows, or clean their spotty complexions with bars of soap, or shampoo their oily hair; they get rid of their unwanted odors, rub hand lotion onto their rough wrinkly hands, hug rolls of toilet paper against their cheeks. Other pictures show women doing things they aren’t supposed to do. Some of them gossip too much, some are sloppy, others bossy. Some of them knit too much. “Walking, riding, standing, sitting, Where she goes, there goes her knitting,” says one. The picture shows a woman knitting on a streetcar, with the ends of her knitting needles poking into the people beside her and her ball of wool unrolling down the aisle. Some of the women have a Watchbird beside them, a red and black bird like a child’s drawing, with big eyes and stick feet. “This is a Watchbird watching a Busybody,” it says. “This is a Watchbird watching YOU.”