Cat's eye (24 page)

“No,” I say. “They weren’t there.”

I can tell she’s thinking about phoning their mothers no matter what I do, but I am too tired to care. “A lady helped me,” I say.

“What lady?” says my mother, but I know better than to tell her. If I say who it really was I won’t be believed. “Just a lady,” I say.

My mother says I’m lucky I don’t have severe frostbite. I know about frostbite: your fingers and toes fall off, as punishment for drink. She feeds me a cup of milky tea and puts me into bed with a hot water bottle and flannelette sheets, and spreads two extra blankets on top. I am still shivering. My father has come home and I hear them talking in low, anxious voices out in the hallway. Then my father comes in and puts his hand on my forehead, and fades to a shadow.

I dream I’m running along the street outside the school. I’ve done something wrong. It’s autumn, the leaves are burning. A lot of people are chasing after me. They’re shouting. An invisible hand takes mine, pulls upward. There are steps into the air and I go up them. No one else can see where the steps are. Now I’m standing in the air, out of reach above the upturned faces. They’re still shouting but I can no longer hear them. Their mouths close and open silently, like the mouths of fish. I am kept home from school for two days. The first day I lie in bed, floating in the glassy delicate clarity of fever. By the second day I am thinking about what happened. I can remember Cordelia throwing my blue knitted hat over the bridge, I remember falling through the ice and then my mother running toward me with her sleety hair. All these things are certain, but in between them there’s a hazy space. The dead people and the woman in the cloak are there, but in the same way dreams are. I’m not sure, now, that it really was the Virgin Mary. I believe it but I no longer know it.

I’m given a get-well card with violets on it from Carol, shoved through the letter slot. On the weekend Cordelia calls me on the telephone. “We didn’t know you fell in,” she says. “We’re sorry we didn’t wait. We thought you were right behind us.” Her voice is careful, precise, rehearsed, unrepentant. I know she’s told some story that conceals what really happened, as I have. I know that this apology has been exacted from her, and that I will be made to pay for it later. But she has never apologized to me before. This apology, however fake, makes me feel not stronger but weaker. I don’t know what to say.

“It’s okay,” is what I manage. I think I mean it.

When I go back to school, Cordelia and Grace are polite but distant. Carol is more obviously frightened, or interested. “My mother says you almost froze to death,” she whispers as we stand in line, two by two, waiting for the bell. “I got a spanking, with the hairbrush. I really
got
it.”

The snow is melting from the lawns; mud reappears on the floors, at school, in the kitchen at home. Cordelia circles me warily. I catch her eyes on me, considering, as we walk home from school. Conversation is artificially normal. We stop at the store for licorice whips, which Carol buys. As we stroll along, sucking in licorice, Cordelia says, “I think Elaine should be punished for telling on us, don’t you?”

“I didn’t tell,” I say. I no longer feel the sinking in my gut, the held-back tearfulness that such a false accusation would once have produced. My voice is flat, calm, reasonable.

“Don’t contradict me,” Cordelia says. “Then how come your mother phoned our mothers?”

“Yeah, how come?” says Carol.

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” I say. I’m amazed at myself.

“You’re being insolent,” says Cordelia. “Wipe that smirk off your face.”

I am still a coward, still fearful; none of that has changed. But I turn and walk away from her. It’s like stepping off a cliff, believing the air will hold you up. And it does. I see that I don’t have to do what she says, and, worse and better, I’ve never had to do what she says. I can do what I like.

“Don’t you dare walk away on us,” Cordelia says behind me. “You get back here right now!” I can hear this for what it is. It’s an imitation, it’s acting. It’s an impersonation, of someone much older. It’s a game. There was never anything about me that needed to be improved. It was always a game, and I have been fooled. I have been stupid. My anger is as much at myself as at them.

“Ten stacks of plates,” says Grace. This would once have reduced me. Now I find it silly. I keep walking. I feel daring, light-headed. They are not my best friends or even my friends. Nothing binds me to them. I am free.

They follow along behind me, making comments on the way I walk, on how I look from behind. If I were to turn I would see them imitating me. “Stuck up! Stuck up!” they cry. I can hear the hatred, but also the need. They need me for this, and I no longer need them. I am indifferent to them. There’s something hard in me, crystalline, a kernel of glass. I cross the street and continue along, eating my licorice. I stop going to Sunday school. I refuse to play with Grace or Cordelia or even Carol after school. I no longer walk home over the bridge, but the long way around, past the cemetery. When they come in a group to the back door to collect me I tell them I’m busy. They try kindness, to lure me back, but I am no longer susceptible to it. I can see the greed in their eyes. It’s as if I can see right into them. Why was I unable to do this before?

I spend a lot of time reading comic books in my brother’s room when he isn’t there. I would like to climb up skyscrapers, fly with a cape, burn holes in metal with my fingertips, wear a mask, see through walls. I would like to hit people, criminals, each fist making a red or yellow light-burst.
Kapow. Krac. Kaboom.
I know that I have the will to do these things. I intend to do them somehow. At school I make friends with a different girl, whose name is Jill. She is interested in other kinds of games, games of paper and wood. We go to her house and play Old Maid, Snap, Pick Up Sticks. Grace and Cordelia and Carol hang around the edges of my life, enticing, jeering, growing paler and paler every day, less and less substantial. I hardly hear them any more because I hardly listen.
Eight – Half a Face

F
or a long time, I would go into churches. I told myself I wanted to see the art; I didn’t know I was looking for something. I wouldn’t seek these churches out, even if they were in a guidebook and of historic significance, and I would never go into them during services, in fact I disliked the idea: it was what was in them, not what went on in them, that interested me. Mostly I would just see them by accident and go into them on impulse.

Once in, I paid little attention to the architecture, although I knew the terms: clerestories and naves were things I’d written papers about. I would look at the stained-glass windows, if any. I preferred Catholic churches to Protestant ones, the more ornate the better, because there was more to look at. I liked the shameless extravaganza: gold leaf and baroque excesses did not put me off. I would read the inscriptions on walls, and carved into floors, a special foible of rich Anglicans who thought they’d get more points with God by being engraved. Anglicans too went in for tattered military flags, and war memorials of other kinds.

But especially I sought out statues. Statues of saints, and of crusaders on their biers, or those pretending to be crusaders; effigies of all kinds. Statues of the Virgin Mary I would save for last. I would approach them with hope, but I was always disappointed. The statues were of no one I recognized. They were dolls dressed up, insipid in blue and white, pious and lifeless. Then I would not know why I’d been expecting to see something else.

I went to Mexico the first time with Ben. It was also our first trip together, our first time together; I thought it might be only an interlude. I wasn’t even sure I wanted a man in my life again; by that time I’d exhausted the notion that the answer to a man is another man, and I was out of breath. But it was a relief to be with someone who was so uncomplicated, and easily pleased.

We were by ourselves, on a two-week excursion that turned out to have something to do with Ben’s business. Sarah was staying with her best friend. We began in Veracruz, checking out shrimp and the hotels and cockroaches, then took a car up into the hills, looking as always for something picturesque and undervisited.

There was a small town beside a lake. The place was subdued, for Mexico, which had struck me as visceral, like a body turned inside out so the blood was on the outside. Perhaps it was the coolness, the lake.

While Ben was inspecting the market, searching for things to take pictures of, I went into the church. It wasn’t large, and looked poor. There was nobody in it; it smelled of old stone, old neglect, mustiness. I wandered around the outside aisles, looking at the awkward Stations of the Cross, done in grubby oils, almost a paint by numbers. They were bad, but genuine: someone had meant them. Then I saw the Virgin Mary. I didn’t know it was her at first, because she was dressed not in the usual blue or white and gold, but in black. She didn’t have a crown. Her head was bowed, her face in shadow, her hands held out open at the sides. Around her feet were the stubs of candles, and all over her black dress were pinned what I thought at first were stars, but which were instead little brass or tin arms, legs, hands, sheep, donkeys, chickens, and hearts.

I could see what these were for: she was a Virgin of lost things, one who restored what was lost. She was the only one of these wood or marble or plaster Virgins who had ever seemed at all real to me. There could be some point in praying to her, kneeling down, lighting a candle. But I didn’t do it, because I didn’t know what to pray for. What was lost, what I could pin on her dress. Ben came after a while and found me. “What’s the matter?” he said. “What’re you doing down on the floor? Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Nothing. Just resting.”

I was chilled through from the stone, my muscles were cramped and stiff. I’d forgotten how I got down there.

My daughters, both of them, went through a phase when they would say
So?
Meaning
So what.
It was when the first one hit twelve or thirteen. They’d fold their arms and stare at me, or at their friends, or at each other.
So?

“Don’t do that,” I’d say. “It’s driving me crazy.”

“So?”

Cordelia did the same thing, at the same age. The same folded arms, the same immobile face, the blank-eyed stare. Cordelia! Put on your gloves, it’s cold out.
So?
I can’t come over, I have to finish my homework.
So?

Cordelia, I think. You made me believe I was nothing.

So?

To which there is no answer.

T
he summer comes and goes and then it’s fall and then winter, and the King dies. I hear it on the news at lunchtime. I walk back to school along the snowy street, thinking,
The King is dead.
Now all the things that happened when he was alive are over and done with: the war, the planes with only one wing, the mud outside our house, a lot of things. I think of those heads of his, thousands of them, on the money, which are now the heads of a dead person instead of a living one. The money will have to be changed, and the postage stamps; they will have the Queen on them instead. The Queen used to be Princess Elizabeth. I remember seeing her in photos, when she was much younger. I have some other memory of her, but it’s indistinct and makes me faintly uneasy.

Cordelia and Grace have both skipped a grade. They’re now in Grade Eight, even though they’re only eleven and the other ones in Grade Eight are thirteen. Carol Campbell and I are merely in Grade Six. All of us are at a different school now, one that’s finally been built on our side of the ravine, so we don’t have to take the school bus in the mornings or eat our lunches in the cellar or walk home over the collapsing footbridge after school. Our new school is a modern one-story yellow brick building that looks like a post office. It has soft-textured, eye-saving green blackboards instead of screechy black ones, and tiled pastel floors instead of the old creaky wooden ones in Queen Mary. There are no BOYS and GIRLS doors, there are no separate playgrounds. Even the teachers are different: younger, more casual. Some of them are young men.

I’ve forgotten things, I’ve forgotten that I’ve forgotten them. I remember my old school, but only dimly, as if I was last there five years ago instead of five months. I remember going to Sunday school, but not the details. I know I don’t like the thought of Mrs. Smeath, but I’ve forgotten why. I’ve forgotten about fainting and about the stacks of plates, and about falling into the creek and also about seeing the Virgin Mary. I’ve forgotten all of the bad things that happened. Although I see Cordelia and Grace and Carol every day, I remember none of those things; only that they used to be my friends, when I was younger, before I had other friends. There’s something to do with them, something like a sentence in tiny dry print on a page, flattened out, like the dates of ancient battles. Their names are like names in a footnote, or names written in spidery brown ink in the fronts of Bibles. There is no emotion attached to these names. They’re like the names of distant cousins, people who live far away, people I hardly know. Time is missing.

Nobody mentions anything about this missing time, except my mother. Once in a while she says, “That bad time you had,” and I am puzzled. What is she talking about? I find these references to bad times vaguely threatening, vaguely insulting: I am not the sort of girl who has bad times, I have good times only. There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly.
Happy as a clam,
is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.

My parents labor away at our house. Rooms are being constructed in the cellar, gradually and with a lot of hammering and sawing, in my father’s spare time: a darkroom, a storeroom for jars and jellies and jams. The lawn is a lawn now. In the garden they’ve planted a peach tree, a pear tree, an asparagus bed, rows and rows of vegetables. The borders are lush with flowers: tulips and daffodils, irises, peonies, pinks, chrysanthemums, something for every season. Occasionally I have to help, but mostly I watch with detachment as they upend themselves in the mud, digging and weeding, clay stains on the knees of their pants. They’re like kids in a sandpile. I like the flowers, but know I would not go to such lengths, make such efforts, get myself so dirty to produce them.