Cat's eye (25 page)

The wooden footbridge over the ravine is torn down. Everyone says it’s about time, it was getting so unsafe. They’re going to replace it with a bridge made of concrete. I go one day and stand at the top of the hill on our side of the ravine, watching the bridge come down. There’s a pile of rotten boards down by the creek. The vertical piles are still standing, like the trunks of dead trees, and part of the cross-planking is attached to them, but the railings are gone. I have an uneasy feeling, as if something’s buried down there, a nameless, crucial thing, or as if there’s someone still on the bridge, left by mistake, up in the air, unable to get to the land. But it’s obvious there’s no one. Cordelia and Grace graduate and go elsewhere; Cordelia, it’s rumored, to St. Sebastian’s, a private school for girls, Grace to a high school farther north which emphasizes math. She’s good at adding things up in neat little rows. She still has her long braids when she graduates. Carol hangs around near the boys at recess, and is often chased by two or three of them. They like to throw her into snowbanks and rub snow into her face, or, when snow is lacking, to tie her up with skipping ropes. When she runs away from them she flings her arms around a lot. She runs in a funny wiggling way, slow enough to be caught, and screams loudly when she is. She wears a training bra. She isn’t much liked by the other girls. For Social Studies I do a project on Tibet, where there are prayer wheels and reincarnation and women have two husbands, and for Science I do different kinds of seeds. I have a boyfriend, as is the fashion. Occasionally he sends me a note across the aisle, written in very black pencil. Sometimes there are parties, with awkward dancing and clumsy guffaws and horseplay by the boys, and wet, inexpert, toothy kisses. My boyfriend carves my initials into the top of his new school desk and gets the strap for it. He gets the strap for other things too. This is admired. I see my first television set, which is like a small black-and-white puppet show of no great interest.

Carol Campbell moves away and I hardly notice. I skip Grade Seven and go straight into Grade Eight, missing the Kings of England in chronological order, missing the circulatory system, leaving my boyfriend behind. I get my hair cut. I want to do this. I’m tired of having long wavy hair that has to be held back by barrettes or hairbands, I’m tired of being a child. I watch with satisfaction as my hair falls away from me like fog and my head emerges, sharper-featured, more clearly defined. I’m ready for high school, I want to go there right away.

I reorganize my room in preparation. I clear old toys out of my cupboard, I empty out all the drawers in my bureau. I find a solitary cat’s eye marble rolling around at the back of the drawer, and some old dried-up chestnuts. Also a red plastic purse, which I remember getting for Christmas once. It’s a babyish purse. It rattles when I pick it up; inside there’s a nickel. I take the nickel out to spend, and put the marble inside the purse. I throw out the chestnuts.

I find my photo album with the black pages. I haven’t taken any pictures with my Brownie camera for a long time, so this album has slipped from view. Stuck into it with the black triangles there are pictures I can’t recall taking. For instance, there are several pictures of what look like large boulders, beside a lake. Underneath is printed, in white pencil:
Daisy. Elsie.
It’s my writing, but I don’t remember printing this. I take these things down to the cellar and put them into the trunk, where old things go that are not thrown out. My mother’s wedding dress is in there, several pieces of ornate silver, some sepia-toned portraits of people I don’t know, a packet of bridge tallies with silk tassels on them, left over from before the war. Some of our old drawings are in there, my brother’s spaceships and red and gold explosions, my delicate, old-fashioned little girls. I look at their pinafores and hair bows and their rudimentary faces and hands with distaste. I don’t like looking at things connected so closely with my life as a child. I think these drawings are inept: I can do much better now.

The day before the first day of high school the telephone rings. It’s Cordelia’s Mummie; she wants to speak to my mother. I assume it’s boring grown-ups’ business and go back to reading the newspaper on the living room floor. But after she puts the phone down, my mother comes into the room.

“Elaine,” she says. This is unusual, as she doesn’t often use my name. She sounds solemn. I look up from
Mandrake the Magician.
She looks down. “That was Cordelia’s mother,” she says.

“Cordelia will be going to your high school. Cordelia’s mother wonders whether you girls would like to walk to school together.”

“Cordelia?” I say. I haven’t seen or spoken to Cordelia for a whole year. She has vanished completely. I’ve chosen that school because I can walk to it, instead of going on a bus; so why not walk with Cordelia? “Okay,” I say.

“Are you sure you want to?” my mother says, a little anxiously. She doesn’t say why Cordelia will be coming to my school now and I don’t ask.

“Why wouldn’t I?” I say. I’m already sliding into flippancy, which goes with high school, but also I can’t see what she’s getting at. I’m being asked to do Cordelia, or Cordelia’s mother, some kind of a minor favor. My mother’s usual line is that you should do these favors when asked, so why is she hedging on this one?

She doesn’t answer this. Instead she hovers. I go back to reading the comics. “Shall I call her mother back, then, or would you like to speak with Cordelia yourself?” she says.

“You can call her,” I say. I add, “Please.” I have no particular wish to speak to Cordelia right now. The next morning I go to Cordelia’s house, which is on the way to school, to pick her up. The door opens and Cordelia is there, but she is no longer the same. She’s no longer angular and rangy; she’s grown full breasts and is heavier in the hips and face. Her hair is longer now, not a pageboy. She wears it in a ponytail with small white cloth lilies of the valley wired around the elastic band. She’s bleached a peroxide streak into the bangs. She has orange lipstick, and orange nail polish to match. My own lipstick is pale pink. Seeing Cordelia, I realize that I don’t look like a teenager, I look like a kid dressed up as one. I am still thin, still flat. I have a ferocious desire to be older. We walk to school together, not saying much at first, past a gas station, a funeral parlor, then a mile along a strip of shops, a Woolworth’s, an I.D.A. drugstore, a fruit and vegetable shop, a hardware store, all of them side by side in two-story flat-roofed yellow brick buildings. We hold our schoolbooks up against our chests, our full cotton skirts brushing against our bare legs. Right now it’s the end of summer, when all the lawns are dull green or yellow and used up.

I’ve assumed Cordelia would be a grade ahead of me. But she isn’t, she’s in the same grade now. She’s been expelled from St. Sebastian’s for drawing a penis on a bat. Or this is what she says. She says there was a large drawing of a bat on the blackboard, with its wings outspread and just a tiny bump between its legs. So she went up to the blackboard when the teacher was out of the room and rubbed out the little bump and made a bigger, longer one—“Not that much bigger”—and the teacher came into the room and caught her doing it.

“Is that all?” I say.

Not exactly. She also printed
Mr. Malder,
neatly, underneath the bump. Mr. Malder was the teacher’s name.

Probably this wasn’t all she did, but it’s all she’s telling about. As an afterthought she mentions that she failed her year. “I was too young for it,” she says. This sounds like something she’s been told by other people, her mother most likely. “I was only twelve. They shouldn’t have skipped me.”

Now she’s thirteen. I am twelve. I too have been skipped. I begin to wonder if I’ll end up the same way she has, drawing penises on bats, failing my year.

T
he school we go to is called Burnham High School. It’s recently built, oblong in shape, flat-roofed, undecorated, unrevealing, sort of like a factory. It’s the latest thing in modern architecture. Inside, it has long corridors with mottled floors of something that looks like granite but is not. The yellowish walls are lined with dark-green lockers, and there’s an auditorium and a P.A. system. Every morning we have announcements over the P.A. system. First we have a Bible reading and prayers. I bow my head during the prayers but I refuse to pray, though I don’t know why I do this. After the prayers the principal tells us of coming events, and he also warns us to pick up our chewing gum wrappers and not to moon around in the halls like old married couples. His name is Mr. MacLeod, although everyone calls him Chrome Dome behind his back because he’s bald on top; and he’s a Scot by affiliation. Burnham High has a school plaid, a school crest with a thistle and a couple of those Scottish knives they stick in their socks, and a Gaelic motto. The plaid, the crest, the motto, and the school colors all belong to Mr. MacLeod’s personal clan.

In the front hall, alongside the Queen, hangs a portrait of Dame Flora MacLeod with her two bagpipe-playing grandsons, posed outside Dunvegan Castle. We are encouraged to think of this castle as our ancestral home, and of Dame Flora as our spiritual leader. In choir we learn “The Skye Boat Song,”

about Bonnie Prince Charlie escaping the genocidal English. We learn “Scots Wha‘ Hae,” and a poem about a mouse, which causes some snickering as it contains the word
breast.
I think all this Scottishness is normal for high schools, never having gone to one before; and even the several Armenians, Greeks, and Chinese in our school lose the edges of their differences, immersed as we all are in a mist of plaid. I don’t know many people at this school and neither does Cordelia. In my graduating class from public school there were only eight people, and in Cordelia’s there were four. So it’s a school full of strangers. In addition to that, we’re in different homerooms, so we don’t even have each other to rely on. Everyone in my homeroom is bigger than I am. This is to be expected, because everyone is also older. The girls have breasts and a drowsy, powdery, hot-day smell; the skin of their faces is slippery-looking, slick with oily juice. I’m wary of them and dislike the changing room where we have to put on the blue cotton bloomer-bottomed gym suits with our names embroidered on the pockets. In there I feel skinnier than ever; when I catch sight of myself in the mirror I can see the ribs below my collarbone. During volleyball games, these other girls lollop and thunder around me, their voices outsized and raucous, their new, extra flesh wobbling. I take care to keep out of their way, simply because they are bigger and might knock me over. But I’m not really afraid of them. In a way I despise them, because they are so much like Carol Campbell, squealing and flinging themselves around.

Among the boys there are a few pipsqueaks whose voices have not yet changed, but many of the boys are gigantic. Some are fifteen, almost sixteen. They have hair that’s long at the sides and greased back into ducktails, and they shave. Some of them look as if they shave a lot. They sit at the back of the room and stick their long legs out into the aisle. They’ve already failed a grade, at least once; they’ve given up and been given up on, and they’re doing time until they can leave. Although they call remarks at other girls in the halls and make kissing sounds at them, or dangle around their lockers, they pay no attention at all to me. To them I’m just a child.

But I don’t feel younger than these people. In some ways I feel older. In our Health book there’s a chapter on teenage emotions. According to this book, I’m supposed to be caught in a whirlwind of teenage emotions, laughing one minute, crying the next, zooming around on a roller coaster, which is their term. However, this description does not apply to me. I am calm; I regard the antics of my fellow students, who act like the textbook, with a combination of scientific curiosity and almost matronly indulgence. When Cordelia says, “Don’t you think he’s a dreamboat?” I have a hard time understanding what she means. Occasionally I do cry for no reason, as it says you’re supposed to. But I can’t believe in my own sadness, I can’t take it seriously. I watch myself crying in the mirror, intrigued by the sight of tears.

At lunchtime I sit with Cordelia in the cafeteria, which is pale-colored, with long whitish tables. We eat the lunches that have been sweltering in our school lockers all morning and which taste faintly of gym shoes, and drink chocolate milk through straws, and make what we consider to be witty, sarcastic remarks to each other, about the other kids at the school, about the teachers. Cordelia has been to high school for a year already and knows how to do this. She wears the collar of her blouse turned up and affects a derisive laugh. “He’s a pill,” she says; or, “What a creep.” These are words that apply only to boys. Girls can be tough, stuck-up or cheap, mousy or boy-crazy; or they can be brains and sucks and brownnosers, like boys, if they are thought to study too much. But they can’t be pills and creeps. I like the word
pill.
I think it refers to the little balls of wool that form on sweaters. Boys who are pills have sweaters like that. I take care to pick all such woolen balls off of my own sweaters. Cordelia collects glossy photos of movie stars and singers, which she sends away for, finding the addresses of the fan clubs in movie magazines that advertise Frederick‘s of Hollywood peekaboo lingerie at the back, and chocolate-flavored tablets you chew to lose weight. She thumbtacks the photos to the bulletin board over her desk and Scotch tapes them to the walls of her room. Whenever I’m in there I feel as if there’s a crowd watching me, their glossy black-and-white eyes following me around the room. Some of these pictures have signatures on them, and we examine them under the light to see if the pen has dented the paper. If not, they’re only printed on. Cordelia likes June Allyson, but she also likes Frank Sinatra and Betty Hutton. Burt Lancaster is the sexiest, according to Cordelia. On the way home from school we go to the record store and try out 78 records in the tiny cork-lined booth. Sometimes Cordelia will buy a record with her allowance, which is larger than mine, but most of the time she just tries them out. She expects me to roll my eyes in ecstasy, the way she does; she expects me to groan. She knows the rituals, she knows how we’re supposed to be behaving, now that we’re in high school. But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can’t do them without feeling I’m acting.