Cat's eye (18 page)

I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning. But it pleases me somehow to cut out all these imperfect women, with their forehead wrinkles that show how worried they are, and fix them into my scrapbook. At noon there’s the Happy Gang, on the radio, knocking at the door.

Knock knock knock.

Who’s there?

It’s the Happy Gang!

Well, come ON IN.!

Keep happy in the Happy Gang way,

Keep healthy, hope you re feeling okay,

Cause if you’re happy, and healthy,

The heck with being wealthy,

So he happy with the Happy Gang!

The Happy Gang fills me with anxiety. What happens to you if you aren’t happy and healthy? They don’t say. They themselves are always happy, or say they are; but I can’t believe anyone can be always happy. So they must be lying some of the time. But when? How much of their fake-sounding laughter is really fake?

A little later there’s the Dominion Observatory Official Time Signal: first a series of outer space beeps, then silence, then a long dash. The long dash means one o’clock. Time is passing; in the silence before the long dash the future is taking shape. I turn my head into the pillow. I don’t want to hear it.

T
he winter melts, leaving a grubby scum of cinders, wet paper, soggy old leaves. A huge pile of topsoil appears in our backyard, then a pile of rolled-up squares of grass. My parents, in muddy boots and earth-stained pants, lay them over our mud like bathroom tiles. They pull out couch grass and dandelions, plant green onions and a row of lettuce. Cats appear from nowhere, scratching and squatting in the soft, newly planted earth, and my father throws clumps of dug-up dandelions at them. “Dad-ratted cats,” he says.

The buds turn yellow, the skipping ropes come out. We stand in Grace’s driveway, beside her dark pink crab apple tree. I turn the rope, Carol turns the other end, Grace and Cordelia skip. We look like girls playing.

We chant:

Not last night but the night before

Twenty-four robbers come to my back door

And this is what they said…to…me!

Lady turn around, turn around, turn around,

Lady touch the ground, touch the ground, touch the ground;

Lady show your shoe, show your shoe, show your shoe,

Lady, lady, twenty-four skiddoo!

Grace, skipping in the middle, turns around, touches the driveway, kicks up one foot sedately, smiling her little smile. She rarely trips.

This chant is menacing to me. It hints at an obscure dirtiness. Something is not understood: the robbers and their strange commands, the lady and her gyrations, the tricks she’s compelled to perform, like a trained dog. And what does “twenty-four skiddoo” mean, at the end of it? Is she scooted out the door of her house while the robbers remain inside, free to take anything they like, break anything, do whatever they want? Or is it the end of her altogether? I see her dangling from the crab apple tree, the skipping rope noosed around her neck. I am not sorry for her.

The sun shines, the marbles return, from wherever they’ve been all winter. The voices of the children rise in the schoolyard:
purie, purie, bowlie, bowlie, two for one.
They sound to me like ghosts, or like animals caught in a trap: thin wails of exhausted pain.

We cross the wooden bridge on the way home from school. I am walking behind the others. Through the broken boards I can see the ground below. I remember my brother burying his jar full of puries, of waterbabies and cat’s eyes, a long time ago, down there somewhere under the bridge. The jar is still there in the earth, shining in the dark, in secret. I think about myself going down there alone despite the sinister unseen men, digging up the treasure, having all that mystery in my hands. I could never find the jar, because I don’t have the map. But I like to think about things the others know nothing about. I retrieve my blue cat’s eye from where it’s been lying all winter in the corner of my bureau drawer. I examine it, holding it up so the sunlight burns through it. The eye part of it, inside its crystal sphere, is so blue, so pure. It’s like something frozen in the ice. I take it to school with me, in my pocket, but I don’t set it up to be shot at. I hold on to it, rolling it between my fingers.

“What’s that in your pocket?” says Cordelia.

“Nothing,” I say. “It’s only a marble.”

It’s marble season; everyone has marbles in their pockets. Cordelia lets it pass. She doesn’t know what power this cat’s eye has, to protect me. Sometimes when I have it with me I can see the way it sees. I can see people moving like bright animated dolls, their mouths opening and closing but no real words coming out. I can look at their shapes and sizes, their colors, without feeling anything else about them. I am alive in my eyes only.

We stay in the city later than we’ve ever stayed before. We stay until school ends for the summer and the daylight lasts past bedtime and wet heat descends over the streets like a steaming blanket. I drink grape Freshie, which does not taste like grapes but like something you might use to kill insects, and wonder when we’re going to leave for the north. I tell myself it will be never, so I won’t be disappointed. But despite my cat’s eye I know I can’t stand to be here in this place much longer. I will burst inward. I’ve read in the
National Geographic
about deepsea diving and why you have to wear a thick metal suit or the invisible pressure of the heavy undersea water will crush you like mud in a fist, until you implode. This is the word:
implode.
It has a dull final sound to it, like a lead door closing. I sit in the car, packed into the back seat like a parcel. Grace and Cordelia and Carol are standing among the apple trees, watching. I hunch down, avoiding them. I don’t want to pretend, to undergo goodbyes. As the car moves away they wave.

We drive north. Toronto is behind us, a smear of brownish air on the horizon, like smoke from a distant burning. Only now do I turn and look.

The leaves get smaller and yellower, folding back toward the bud, and the air crisps. I see a raven by the side of the road, picking at a porcupine that’s been run over by a car, its quills like a huge burr, its guts pink and scrambled like eggs. I see the northern granite rock rising straight up out of the ground with the road cut through it. I see a raggedy lake with dead trees stuck into the marsh around the edges. A sawdust burner, a fire tower.

Three Indians stand beside the road. They aren’t selling anything, no baskets and it’s too early for blueberries. They just stand there as if they’ve been doing it for a long time. They’re familiar to me but only as scenery. Do they see me as I stare at them out of the car window? Probably not. I’m a blur to them, one more face in a car that doesn’t stop. I have no claim on them, or on any of this. I sit in the back seat of the car that smells of gasoline and cheese, waiting for my parents, who are buying groceries. The car is beside a wooden general store, saggy and weathered gray, stuck together by the signs nailed all over the outside of it: BLACK CAT CIGARETTES, PLAYERS, COCA-COLA. This isn’t even a village, just a wide place in the highway, beside a bridge beside a river. Once I would have wanted to know the river’s name. Stephen stands on the bridge, dropping pieces of wood upstream, timing how long it takes them to come out the other side, calculating the rate of flow. The blackflies are out. Some of them are in the car, crawling up the window, jumping, crawling up again. I watch them do this: I can see their hunched backs, their abdomens like little black-red bulbs. I squash them against the glass, leaving red smears of my own blood.

I’ve begun to feel not gladness, but relief. My throat is no longer tight, I’ve stopped clenching my teeth, the skin on my feet has begun to grow back, my fingers have healed partially. I can walk without seeing how I look from the back, talk without hearing the way I sound. I go for long periods without saying anything at all. I can be free of words now, I can lapse back into wordlessness, I can sink back into the rhythms of transience as if into bed.

This summer we’re in a rented cabin on the north shore of Lake Superior. There are a few other cottages around, most of them empty; there are no other children. The lake is huge and cold and blue and treacherous. It can sink freighters, drown people. In a wind the waves roll in with the crash of oceans. Swimming in it doesn’t frighten me at all. I wade into the freezing water, watching my feet and then my legs go down into it, long and white and thinner than on land.

There’s a wide beach, and to one end of it a colony of boulders. I spend time among them. They’re rounded, like seals, only hard; they heat up in the sun, and stay warm in the evening when the air cools. I take pictures of them with my Brownie camera. I give them the names of cows. Above the beach, on the dunes, there are beach plants, fuzzy mulleins and vetch with its purple flowers and tiny bitter peapods, and grasses that will cut your legs; and behind that the forest, oak and moose maple and birch and poplar, with balsam and spruce among them. There’s poison ivy sometimes. It’s a secretive, watchful forest, though hard to get lost in, so close to the shore. Walking in the forest I find a dead raven. It’s bigger than they look alive. I poke it with a stick, turning it over, and see the maggots. It smells like rot, like rust, and, more strangely, like some sort of food I’ve eaten once but can’t remember. It’s black, but not like a color; more like a hole. Its beak is dingy, horn-colored, like old toenails. Its eyes are shriveled up.

I’ve seen dead animals before, dead frogs, dead rabbits, but this raven is deader. It looks at me with its shriveled-up eye. I could poke this stick right through it. No matter what I do to it, it won’t feel a thing. No one can get at it.

It’s hard to fish from the shore of this lake. There’s nowhere to stand, no dock. We aren’t allowed out in a boat by ourselves because of the currents; anyway we have no boat. Stephen is doing other things. He makes a collection of the boat funnels from the lake freighters, checking them through binoculars. He sets up chess problems and works them out, or splits kindling, or goes for long walks by himself with a butterfly book. He isn’t interested in catching the butterflies and mounting them on a board with pins; he just wants to see them, identify them, count them. He writes them down in a list at the back of the book. I like looking at the pictures of butterflies in his book. My favorite is the luna moth, huge and pale green, with crescents on the wings. My brother finds one of these, and shows it to me. “Don’t touch it,” he says.

“Or the dust will come off its wings, and then it can’t fly.”

But I don’t play chess with him. I don’t start my own list of boat funnels or butterflies. I’m ceasing to be interested in games I can’t win.

Along the edges of the forest, where there’s open sunlight, there are chokecherry trees. The red chokecherries ripen and turn translucent. They’re so sour they dry up the inside of your mouth. I pick them into a lard pail, then sort out the dead twigs and leaves, and my mother makes jelly from them, boiling them up, straining the pits out through a cloth jelly bag, adding sugar. She pours the jelly into hot jars, capping them with paraffin wax. I count the beautiful red jars. I helped make them. They look poisonous.

As if I’ve been given permission I begin to dream. My dreams are brightly colored and without sound. I dream that the dead raven is alive, only it looks the same, it still looks dead. It hops around and flaps its decaying wings and I wake up, my heart beating fast.

I dream I’m putting on my winter clothes, in Toronto, but my dress doesn’t fit. I pull it on over my head and struggle to get my arms into the sleeves. I’m walking along the street and parts of my body are sticking out through the dress, parts of my bare skin. I am ashamed.

I dream that my blue cat’s eye is shining in the sky like the sun, or like the pictures of planets in our book on the solar system. But instead of being warm, it’s cold. It starts to move nearer, but it doesn’t get any bigger. It’s falling down out of the sky, straight toward my head, brilliant and glassy. It hits me, passes right into me, but without hurting, except that it’s cold. The cold wakes me up. My blankets are on the floor.

I dream that the wooden bridge over the ravine is falling apart. I’m standing on it, the boards crack and separate, the bridge sways. I walk along what’s left, clinging to the railing, but I can’t get onto the hill where the other people are standing because the bridge isn’t attached to anything. My mother is on the hill, but she’s talking to the other people.

I dream I’m picking the chokecherries off the chokecherry tree and putting them into the lard pail. Only they aren’t chokecherries. They’re deadly nightshade berries, translucent, brilliantly red. They’re filled with blood, like the bodies of blackflies. As I touch them they burst, and the blood runs over my hands. None of my dreams is about Cordelia.

Our father plays touch tag with us on the beach in the evenings, running lumberingly like a bear, laughing at the same time,
wuff wuff wuff.
Pennies and dimes fall out of his pockets into the sand. The lake boats go slowly by in the distance, their smoke trailing behind them, the sun sets to the left, pink and tranquil. I look in the mirror over the washbasin: my face is brown and rounder. My mother smiles at me, in the little kitchen with the woodstove, and hugs me with one arm. She thinks I am happy. Some nights we have marshmallows, for a treat.

Six – Cat’s Eye

S
impsons Basement used to be bargain clothes and wrenches. Now it’s resplendent. There are pyramids of imported chocolates, an ice cream counter, aisles and aisles of fancy cookies and canned gourmet food, ticking away like little clocks toward the obsolescence dates stamped on their packages. There’s even an espresso counter. It’s all very world-class down here, where I used to buy cheap nighties in high school with my tiny clothes allowance, on sale at that and a size too large. I’m overwhelmed by all the chocolates. Just looking at them reminds me of Christmas and the sticky feeling after eating too many, the surfeit and glut.