Cat's eye (27 page)

“You surd!” “You square root!” “You throwback!” The captured chess pieces, knights and pawns and bishops, line up on the outskirts of the board. Once in a while, to see how the game is going, I bring in glasses of milk and vanilla-chocolate pinwheel cookies which I’ve made out of the
Betty Crocker
Picture Cookbook.
This is a form of showing-off on my part, but it doesn’t get much response. They grunt, drink the milk with their left hands, stuff in the cookies, their eyes never leaving the board. The bishops topple, the queen falls, the king is encircled. “Mate in two,” they say. A finger comes down, knocks over the king. “Best of five.” And they start again.

In the evenings my brother studies. Sometimes he does this in a curious way. He stands on his head, to improve the circulation to his brain, or he throws spitballs at the ceiling. The area around his ceiling light fixture is pimply with little wads of once-chewed paper. At other times he indulges in manic bouts of physical activity: he splits huge piles of kindling, much more than is needed, or goes running down in the ravine, wearing disgraceful baggy pants and a forest-green sweater even more unraveled than his maroon one, and frayed gray running shoes that look like the kind you see one of in vacant lots. He says he’s training for the marathon.

A lot of the time my brother doesn’t seem aware of me. He’s thinking about other things, solemn things that are important. He sits at the dinner table, his right hand moving, pinching a breadcrust into pellets, staring at the wall behind my mother’s head, on which there is a picture of three milkweed pods in a vase, while my father explains why the human race is doomed. This time it’s because we’ve discovered insulin. All the diabetics aren’t dying the way they used to, they’re living long enough so that they’re passing the diabetes on to their children. Soon, by the law of geometric progression, we’ll all be diabetics, and since insulin is made from cows’ stomachs the whole world will be covered with insulin-producing cows, the parts that aren’t covered with human beings, who are reproducing much too rapidly for their own good anyway. The cows burp methane gas. Far too much methane gas is entering the atmosphere already, it will choke out the oxygen and perhaps cause the entire earth to become a giant greenhouse. The polar seas will melt and New York will be under six feet of water, not to mention many another coastal city. Also we have to worry about deserts, and erosion. If we don’t get burped to death by the cows we’ll end up like the Sahara Desert, says my father cheerfully, finishing up the meatloaf. My father has nothing against diabetics, or cows either. He just likes following chains of thought to their logical conclusions. My mother says it’s coffee soufflé for dessert.

Once my brother would have been more interested in the fate of the human race. Now he says that if the sun went supernova it would be eight minutes before we’d see it. He’s taking the long-range view. Sooner or later we’re going to be a cinder anyway, he implies, so why worry about a few cows more or less? Although he still collects butterfly sightings, he’s moving farther and farther away from biology. In the larger picture, we’re just a little green scuzz on the surface, says my brother. My father eats his coffee soufflé, frowning a little. My mother tactfully pours him a cup of tea. I see that the future of the human race is a battleground, that Stephen has won a point and my father has lost one. Whoever cares the most will lose.

I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort. How spruce budworms could be essential to the war effort I have not yet figured out, but apparently they were. Maybe this is why he always drives so fast, maybe he’s heading for takeoff.

I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn’t have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things: everyone there could use an ax and a saw. He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the light of a kerosene lamp; he put himself through university by working in lumber camps and cleaning out rabbit hutches, and was so poor that he lived in a tent in the summers to save money. He used to play country fiddle at square dances and was twenty-two before he heard an orchestra. All this is known, but unimaginable. Also I wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

I harden my heart toward the fate of the human race, and calculate in my head how much money I’ll need to save to buy a new lamb’s-wool sweater. In Home Economics, which really means cooking and sewing, I’ve learned how to install a zipper and make a flat-fell seam, and now I make a lot of my clothes myself because it’s cheaper, although they don’t always turn out exactly like the picture on the front of the pattern. I get very little help from my mother on the fashion front, because whatever I wear she says it looks lovely, as long as it has no visible rents.

For advice I turn to Mrs. Finestein next door, for whom I baby-sit on weekends. “Blue is your color, honey,” she says. “Very gorgeous. And cerise. You’d look stunning in cerise.” Then she goes out for the evening with Mr. Finestein, her hair upswept, her mouth vivid, teetering in her tiny shoes with high heels, jingling with bracelets and dangly gold earrings, and I read
The Little Engine That Could
to Brian Finestein and tuck him into bed.

Sometimes Stephen and I still get stuck doing the dishes together, and then he remembers he’s my brother. I wash, he dries, and he asks me benign, avuncular, maddening questions, such as how do I like Grade Nine. He is in Grade Eleven, stairways and stairways above me; he doesn’t have to rub it in. But on some of these dish-drying nights he reverts to what I consider to be his true self. He tells me the nicknames of the teachers at his school, all of which are rude, such as The Armpit or The Human Stool. Or we invent new swearwords together, words that suggest an unspecific dirtiness. “Frut,” he says. I counter with “pronk,” which I tell him is a verb. We lean against the kitchen counter, doubled over with laughter, until our mother comes into the kitchen and says, “What are you two kids up to?”

Sometimes he decides that it’s his duty to educate me. He has a low opinion of most girls, it seems, and doesn’t want me turning into one of the ordinary kind. He doesn’t want me to be a pin-headed fuzzbrain. He thinks I’m in danger of becoming vain. In the mornings he stands outside the bathroom door and asks if I can bear to unstick myself from the mirror.

He thinks I should develop my mind. In order to help me do this, he makes a Möbius strip for me by cutting out a long slip of paper, twisting it once and gluing the ends together. This Möbius strip has only one side, you can prove it by running your finger along the surface. According to Stephen, this is a way of visualizing infinity. He draws me a Klein bottle, which has no outside and no inside, or rather the outside and the inside are the same. I have more trouble with the Klein bottle than the Möbius strip, probably because it’s a bottle, and I can’t think of a bottle that isn’t intended to contain something. I can’t see the point of it.

Stephen says he’s interested in the problems of two-dimensional universes. He wants me to imagine what a three-dimensional universe would look like to someone who was perfectly flat. If you stood in a two-dimensional universe you would only be perceived at the point of intersection, you’d be perceived as two oblong discs, two two-dimensional cross sections of your own feet. Then there are five-dimensional universes, seven-dimensional ones. I try very hard to picture these but I can’t seem to get past three.

“Why three?” says Stephen. This is a favorite technique of his, asking me questions to which he knows the answers, or other answers.

“Because that’s how many there are,” I say.

“That’s how many we
perceive,
you mean,” he says. “We’re limited by our own sensory equipment. How do you think a fly sees the world?” I know how a fly perceives the world, I’ve seen many flies’

eyes, through microscopes. “In facets,” I say. “But each facet would still have only three dimensions.”

“Point taken,” he says, which makes me feel grown-up, worthy of this conversation. “But actually we perceive four.”

“Four?” I say.

“Time is a dimension,” he says. “You can’t separate it from space. Space-time is what we live in.” He says there are no such things as discrete objects which remain unchanged, set apart from the flow of time. He says space-time is curved and that in curved space-time the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line but a line following the curve. He says that time can be stretched or shrunk, and that it runs faster in some places than in others. He says that if you put one identical twin in a high-speed rocket for a week, he’d come back to find his brother ten years older than he is himself. I say I think that would be sad.

My brother smiles. He says the universe is like a dot-covered balloon that’s being blown up. The dots are the stars; they’re moving farther and farther away from one another all the time. He says that one of the really interesting questions is whether the universe is infinite and unbounded, or infinite but bounded, like the balloon idea. All I can think of in connection with a balloon is the explosion when it breaks. He says that space is mostly empty and that matter is not really solid. It’s just a bunch of widely spaced atoms moving at greater or lesser speeds. Anyway, matter and energy are aspects of each other. It’s as if everything is made of solid light. He says that if we knew enough we could walk through walls as if they were air, if we knew enough we could go faster than light, and at that point space would become time and time would become space and we would be able to travel through time, back into the past. This is the first of these ideas of his that has really interested me. I’d like to see dinosaurs and a good many other things, such as the Ancient Egyptians. On the other hand there’s something menacing about this notion. I’m not so sure I want to travel back into the past. I’m not so sure I want to be that impressed, either, by everything he says. It gives him too much of an advantage. Anyway it isn’t a sensible way to talk. A lot of it sounds like comic books, the kind with ray guns. So I say, “What good would that be?”

He smiles. “If you could do it, you’d know you could do it,” is what he says. I tell Cordelia that Stephen says we could walk through walls if we knew enough. This is the only one of his latest ideas I can trust myself to expound, at the moment. The rest are too complicated, or bizarre. Cordelia laughs. She says that Stephen is a brain and that if he weren’t so cute he’d be a pill. Stephen has a summer job this summer, teaching canoeing at a boys’ camp, but I don’t, because I’m only thirteen. I go with my parents up to the north, near Sault Ste. Marie, where my father is overseeing an experimental colony of tent caterpillars in screened-in cages.

Stephen writes me letters, in pencil, on pages torn from lined workbooks, in which he ridicules everything he can get his hands on, including his fellow camp instructors and the girls they go drooling around after on their days off. He describes these instructors with pimples popping from their skins, fangs sprouting in their mouths, their tongues hanging out like those of dogs, their eyes crossed in permanent, girl-inspired imbecility. This makes me think I have power, of a sort. Or will have it: I too am a girl. I go fishing by myself, mostly so I’ll have something to put in my letters to him. Other than that I don’t have much to tell. Cordelia’s letters are in real ink, black in color. They are full of superlatives and exclamation marks. She dots her I’s with little round circles, like Orphan Annie eyes, or bubbles. She signs them with things like,

“Yours till Niagara Falls,” “Yours till the cookie crumbles,” or “Yours till the sea wears rubber pants to keep its bottom dry.”

“I am
so bored!!!
” she writes, with triple underlining. She sounds enthusiastic even about boredom. And yet her burbly style does not ring true. I have seen her, sometimes, when she thinks I’m not looking: her face goes still, remote, unreflecting. It’s as if she’s not inside it. But then she’ll turn and laugh. “Don’t you just
love
it when they roll up their sleeves and tuck the cigarette pack inside?” she’ll say. “That takes biceps!” And she will be back to normal.

I feel as if I’m marking time. I swim in the lake provided, and eat raisins and crackers spread thickly with peanut butter and honey while reading detective stories, and sulk because there’s no one my age around. My parents’ relentless cheer is no comfort. It would almost be better if they could be as surly as I am, or surlier; this would make me feel more ordinary.

Nine - Leprosy

I
n late morning the phone wakes me. It’s Charna. “Hey,” she says. “We made the front page of Entertainment, and three, count them, three pictures! It’s a real rave!”

I shudder at her idea of a rave; and what does she mean,
we?
But she’s pleased: I’ve graduated from Living to Entertainment, this is a good sign. I remember when I had ideas about eternal greatness, when I wanted to be Leonardo da Vinci. Now I’m in with the rock groups and the latest movie. Art is what you can get away with, said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shoplifting or some other minor crime. And maybe that’s all it ever was, or is: a kind of stealing. A hijacking of the visual. I know it will be bad news. Still, I can’t resist. I pull on my clothes, go down in search of the nearest paper box. I do have the decency to wait until I get upstairs before I open the paper. The bold print says: CROTCHETY ARTIST STILL HAS POWER TO DISTURB. I take note:
artist
instead of
painter,
the foreboding
still,
sign-pointing the way to senility. Andrea the acorn-headed ingénue getting her own back. I’m surprised she’d use an old-fashioned word like
crotchety.
It manages to suggest both crotches and crocheting, both of which seem appropriate. But probably she didn’t write the headline.