Cat's eye (28 page)

There are indeed three photos. One is of my head, shot a little from beneath so it looks as if I have a double chin. The other two are of paintings. One is of Mrs. Smeath, bare-naked, flying heavily through the air. The church spire with the onion on it is in the distance. Mr. Smeath is stuck to her back like an asparagus beetle, grinning like a maniac; both of them have shiny brown insect wings, done to scale and meticulously painted.
Erbug, The Annunciation,
it’s called. The other is of Mrs. Smeath by herself, with a sickle-moon paring knife and a skinless potato, unclad from the waist up and the thighs down. This is from the
Empire Bloomers
series. The newspaper photos don’t do these paintings justice, because there’s no color. They look too much like snapshots. I know that in real life the bloomers on Mrs. Smeath are an intense indigo blue that took me weeks to get right, a blue that appears to radiate a dark and stifling light.

I scan the first paragraph: “Eminent artist Elaine Risley returns to hometown Toronto this week for a long overdue retrospective.”
Eminent,
the mausoleum word. I might as well climb onto the marble slab right now and pull the bedsheet over my head. There are the usual misquotations, nor does my blue jogging suit escape comment. “Elaine Risley, looking anything but formidable in a powder-blue jogging suit that’s seen better days, nevertheless can come out with a few pungent and deliberately provocative comments on women today.”

I suck in some coffee, skip to the last paragraph: the inevitable
eclectic,
the obligatory
post-feminist,
a
however
and a
despite.
Good old Toronto bet hedging and qualification. A blistering attack would be preferable, some flying fur, a little fire and brimstone. That way I would know I’m still alive. I think savagely of the opening. Perhaps I should be deliberately provocative, perhaps I should confirm their deepest suspicions. I could strap on some of Jon’s axmurder special effects, the burnt face with its one peeled bloodshot eye, the plastic blood-squirting arm. Or slip my feet into the hollow casts of feet and lurch in like something from a mad scientist movie.

I won’t do these things, but thinking about them is soothing. It distances the entire thing, reduces it to a farce or prank, in which I have no involvement aside from mockery.

Cordelia will see this piece in the paper, and maybe she will laugh. Even though she’s not in the phone book, she must still be around here somewhere. It would be like her to have changed her name. Or maybe she’s married; maybe she’s married more than once. Women are hard to keep track of, most of them. They slip into other names, and sink without a trace.

At any rate she’ll see this. She’ll know it’s Mrs. Smeath, she’ll get a kick out of that. She’ll know it’s me, and she’ll come. She’ll come in the door and she’ll see herself, titled, framed, and dated, hanging on the wall. She will be unmistakable: the long line of jaw, the slightly crooked lip. She appears to be in a room, alone; a room with walls of a pastel green.

This is the only picture I ever did of Cordelia, Cordelia by herself.
Half a Face,
it’s called: an odd title, because Cordelia’s entire face is visible. But behind her, hanging on the wall, like emblems in the Renaissance, or those heads of animals, moose or bear, you used to find in northern bars, is another face, covered with a white cloth. The effect is of a theatrical mask. Perhaps. I had trouble with this picture. It was hard for me to fix Cordelia in one time, at one age. I wanted her about thirteen, looking out with that defiant, almost belligerent stare of hers.
So?

But the eyes sabotaged me. They aren’t strong eyes; the look they give the face is tentative, hesitant, reproachful. Frightened.

Cordelia is afraid of me, in this picture.

I am afraid of Cordelia.

I’m not afraid of seeing Cordelia. I’m afraid of being Cordelia. Because in some way we changed places, and I’ve forgotten when.

A
fter the summer I’m in Grade Ten. Although I’m still shorter, still younger, I have grown. Specifically, I’ve grown breasts. I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse’s for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood. There are satisfactions in this. I shave my legs, not because there’s much to shave but because it makes me feel good. I sit in the bathtub, scraping away at my calves, which I wish were thicker, bulgier, like the calves of cheerleaders, while my brother mutters outside.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most beautiful of all?” he says.

“Go away,” I say tranquilly. I now have that privilege.

In school I am silent and watchful. I do my homework. Cordelia plucks her eyebrows into two thin lines, thinner than mine, and paints her nails Fire and Ice. She loses things, such as combs and also her French homework. She laughs raucously in the halls. She comes up with new, complicated swearwords:
excrement of the ungulate,
she says, meaning
bullshit,
and
great flaming blue-eyed bald-headed
Jesus.
She takes up smoking and gets caught doing it in the girls’ washroom. It must be hard for the teachers, looking, to figure out why we are friends, what we’re doing together. Today on the way home it snows. Big soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers. Cordelia and I are elated, we racket along the sidewalk through the twilight while the cars drift past us, hushed and slowed by the snow. We sing:

Remember the name

Of Lydia Pinkham,

Whose remedies for women brought her FAME!

This is a singing commercial from the radio. We don’t know what Lydia Pinkham’s remedies are, but anything that says “for women” on it has to do with monthly blood or some equally unspeakable female thing, and so we think it’s funny. Also we sing:

Leprosy,

Night and day you torture me,

There goes my eyeball

Into my highball….

Or else:

Part of your heart,

That’s what I’m eating now,

Too bad we bad to part….

We sing these, and other parodies of popular songs, all of which we think are very witty. We run and slide, in our rubber boots with the tops turned down, and make snowballs which we throw at lampposts, at fire hydrants, bravely at passing cars, and as close as we dare at people walking on the sidewalk, women most of them, with shopping bags or dogs. We have to set our school books down to make the snowballs. Our aim is poor and we don’t hit much of anything, though we hit a woman in a fur coat, from behind, by mistake. She turns and scowls at us and we run away, around a corner and up a side street, laughing so much with terror and embarrassment we can hardly stand up. Cordelia throws herself backward onto a snow-covered lawn. “The evil eye!” she shrieks. For some reason I don’t like the sight of her lying there in the snow, arms spread out.

“Get up,” I say. “You’ll catch pneumonia.”

“So?” says Cordelia. But she gets up.

The streetlights come on, though it isn’t yet dark. We reach the place where the cemetery begins, on the other side of the street.

“Remember Grace Smeath?” Cordelia says.

I say yes. I do remember her, but not clearly, not continuously. I remember her from the time I first knew her, and later, sitting in the apple orchard with a crown of flowers on her head; and much later, when she was in Grade Eight and about to go off to high school. I don’t even know what high school she went to. I remember her freckles, her little smile, her coarse horsehair braids.

“They rationed their toilet paper,” Cordelia says. “Four squares a time, even for Number Two. Did you know that?”

“No,” I say. But it seems to me that I did know it, once.

“Remember that black soap they had?” says Cordelia. “Remember? It smelled like tar.”

I know what we’re doing now: we’re making fun of the Smeath family. Cordelia remembers all kinds of things: the greying underwear dripping on the clothesline in the cellar, the kitchen paring knife that was worn right down to a sliver, the winter coats from the
Eaton’s Catalogue.
Simpsons is the right place to shop, according to Cordelia. That’s where we go now on Saturday mornings, bareheaded, jerking downtown stop by stop on the streetcar. And shopping from the
Eaton’s Catalogue
is much worse than shopping at Eaton’s.

“The Lump-lump Family!” Cordelia shouts into the snowy air. It’s cruel and appropriate; we snort with laughter, “What does the Lump-lump Family have for dinner? Plates of gristle!”

Now it’s a full-blown game. What color is their underwear? Grunt color. Why did Mrs. Lump-lump have a Band-Aid on her face? Cut herself shaving. Anything can be said about them, invented about them. They’re defenseless, they’re at our mercy. We picture the two adult Lump-lumps making love, but this is too much for us, it can’t be done, it’s too vomit-making. Vomit-making is a new word, from Perdie.

“What does Grace Lump-lump do for fun? Pops her pimples!” Cordelia laughs so hard she doubles over and almost falls down. “Stop, stop, you’ll make me pee,” she says. She says that Grace started to grow pimples in Grade Eight: by now they must have increased in number. This is not made up but true. We relish the thought.

The Smeaths in our rendition of them are charmless, miserly, heavy as dough, boring as white margarine, which we claim they eat for dessert. We ridicule their piety, their small economies, the size of their feet, their rubber plant, which sums them up. We speak of them in the present tense, as if we still know them. This for me is a deeply satisfying game. I can’t account for my own savagery; I don’t question why I’m enjoying it so much, or why Cordelia is playing it, insists on playing it, whips it to life again when it seems to be flagging. She looks at me sideways, as if estimating how far, how much farther I’ll go in what we both know, surely, is base treachery. I have a fleeting image of Grace once more, disappearing into her house through the front door, in her skirt with the straps, her pilly sweater. She was adored, by all of us. But she is not any more. And in Cordelia’s version, now, she never was. We run across the street in the falling snow, open the small wrought-iron gate in the cemetery fence, go in. We’ve never done this before.

This is the raw end of the cemetery. The trees are only saplings; they look even more temporary without their leaves. Much of the ground is untouched, but there are scars like giant claw marks, diggings, earthworks going on. The gravestones are few and recent: blockish oblongs of granite polished to a Presbyterian gloss, the letters cut plainly and without any attempt at prettiness. They remind me of men’s overcoats.

We walk among these gravestones, pointing out which ones—particularly gray, particularly oafish—the Lump-lump Family would choose to bury one another beneath. From here we can look through the chain-link fence and see the houses on the other side of the street. Grace Smeath’s is one of them. It’s strange and oddly pleasant to think that she might be inside it at this very moment, inside that ordinary-looking brick box with the white porch pillars, not knowing a thing about what we’ve just been saying about her. Mrs. Smeath might be in there, lying on the velvet chesterfield, the afghan spread over her; I remember this much. The rubber plant will be on the landing, not much bigger. Rubber plants grow slowly. We are bigger though, and the house looks small.

The cemetery stretches out before us, acres and acres. Now the ravine is on our left, with the new concrete bridge just visible. I have a quick memory of the old bridge, of the creek beneath it: under our feet the dead people must be dissolving, turning to water, cold and clear, flowing downhill. But I forget about this immediately. Nothing about the cemetery is frightening, I tell myself. It’s too pragmatic, too ugly, too neat. It’s only like a kitchen shelf, where you put things away. We walk for a while without speaking, not knowing where we’re going, or why. The trees are taller, the tombstones older. There are Celtic crosses now, and the occasional angel.

“How do we get out of here?” says Cordelia, laughing a little.

“If we keep going we’ll hit a road,” I say. “Isn’t that the traffic?”

“I need a ciggie-poo,” Cordelia says. We find a bench and sit down so Cordelia can free her hands for the cigarette, cupping it against the air, lighting it. She isn’t wearing gloves, or a scarf on her head. She has a tiny black and gold lighter.

“Look at all the little dead people houses,” she says.

“Mausoleums,” I say knowingly.

“The Lump-lump Family Mausoleum,” she says, giving the joke one last push.

“They wouldn’t have one,” I say. “Too ritzy.”

“Eaton,” Cordelia reads. “That must be the store, it’s the same lettering. The
Eaton’s Catalogues
are buried in there.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Catalogue,” I say.

“I wonder if they’re wearing foundation garments,” says Cordelia, inhaling. We’re trying for a return to our hilarity, but it isn’t working, I think of the Eatons, both of them or maybe more, tucked away for storage as if they’re fur coats or gold watches, in their private tomb, which is all the stranger for being shaped like a Greek temple. Where exactly are they, inside there? On biers? In cobwebby stone-lidded coffins, as in the horror comics? I think of their jewels, glinting in the dark—of course they would have jewels—and of their long dry hair. Your hair grows after you’re dead, also your fingernails. I don’t know how I know this.

“Mrs. Eaton is really a vampire, you know,” I say slowly. “She comes out at night. She’s dressed in a long white ballgown. That door creaks open and she comes out.”

“To drink the blood of Lump-lumps out too late,” says Cordelia hopefully, stubbing out her cigarette. I refuse to laugh. “No, seriously,” I say. “She does. I happen to know.”

Cordelia looks at me nervously. The snow is falling, it’s twilight, there’s nobody here but us. “Yeah?” she says, waiting for the joke.