Cat's eye (29 page)

“Yes,” I say. “We sometimes go together. Because I’m a vampire too.”

“You’re not,” says Cordelia, standing up, brushing off the snow. She’s smiling uncertainly.

“How do you know?” I say. “How do you
know
?”

“You walk around in the daytime,” Cordelia says.

“That’s not me,” I say. “That’s my twin. You’ve never known, but I’m one of a twins. Identical ones, you can’t tell us apart by looking. Anyway it’s just the sun I have to avoid. On days like this it’s perfectly safe. I have a coffin full of earth where I sleep; it’s down in, down in”—I search for a likely place—“the cellar.”

“You’re being silly,” Cordelia says.

I stand up too. “Silly?” I say. I lower my voice. “I’m just telling you the truth. You’re my friend, I thought it was time you knew. I’m really dead. I’ve been dead for years.”

“You can stop playing that,” says Cordelia sharply. I’m surprised at how much pleasure this gives me, to know she’s so uneasy, to know I have this much power over her.

“Playing what?” I say. “I’m not playing. But
you
don’t have to worry. I won’t suck any of your blood. You’re my friend.”

“Don’t be a brat,” says Cordelia.

“In a minute,” I say, “we’re going to be locked in.” It strikes both of us that this may be the truth. We run along the roadway, gasping and laughing, and find a large gateway, which is luckily still open. Beyond it is Yonge Street, lined with rush-hour traffic.

Cordelia wants to point out Lump-lump Family cars, but I’m tired of this. I have a denser, more malevolent little triumph to finger: energy has passed between us, and I am stronger.

N
ow I’m in Grade Eleven, and as tall as many other girls, which is not very tall. I have a charcoal-gray pencil skirt that’s hard to walk in despite the kick pleat, and a bat wing sweater, a red one with modulated gray horizontal stripes across it. I have a wide black elastic cinch belt with an imitation gold clasp buckle, and flat ballerina shoes of velveteen that scuff as I walk and bulge out at the sides. I have a shortie coat to go with the pencil skirt. This is the look: boxy and flared at the top, with a long skinny stem of thighs and legs coming out the bottom. I have a mean mouth.

I have such a mean mouth that I become known for it. I don’t use it unless provoked, but then I open my mean mouth and short, devastating comments come out of it. I hardly have to think them up, they’re just there suddenly, like thought balloons with light bulbs in them. “Don’t be a pain” and “Takes one to know one” are standard repartee among girls, but I go much farther than that. I’m willing to say
pain in the
ass,
which skirts good taste, and to go in for crushing inventions, such as The Walking Pimple and The Before Part of an Arrid Armpit Ad. If any girl calls me a brain, I say, “Better a brain than a pin-headed moron like you.” “Use much hair grease?” I will say, or “Suck much?” I know where the weak spots are.

“Suck” is an especially satisfying word, especially annihilating. Boys say it mostly, to one another; it suggests thumbs and babies. I haven’t yet considered what else might be sucked, or under what circumstances.

Girls at school learn to look out for my mean mouth and avoid it. I walk the halls surrounded by an aura of potential verbal danger, and am treated with caution, which suits me fine. Strangely enough, my mean behavior doesn’t result in fewer friends, but, on the surface, more. The girls are afraid of me but they know where it’s safest: beside me, half a step behind. “Elaine is a riot,” they say, without conviction. Some of them are already collecting china and housewares, and have Hope Chests. For this kind of thing I feel amused disdain. And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.

I don’t have occasion to use my mean mouth on boys, since they don’t say provoking things to me. Except for Stephen, of course. These days we trade verbal meannesses as a kind of game, like badminton.
Got you. Got you back.
I can usually silence him with, “Where’d you get that haircut?

Lawnmowerville?” He’s sensitive about the haircut. Or, when he’s all spiffed up in his private school gray flannels and jacket: “Hey, you look like a Simpsons Rep.” Simpsons Reps are sucky kids who appear in high school yearbooks wearing blazers with crests on the pockets, looking clean-cut, and advertising Simpsons.

My father says, “Your sharp tongue will get you in trouble some day, young lady.”
Young lady
is a sign that I’ve gone too daringly close to some edge or other, but although it silences me for the moment it doesn’t tone me down. I’ve come to enjoy the risk, the sensation of vertigo when I realize that I’ve shot right over the border of the socially acceptable, that I’m walking on thin ice, on empty air. The person I use my mean mouth on the most is Cordelia. She doesn’t even have to provoke me, I use her as target practice. We sit on the hill overlooking the football field, wearing our jeans, which are only allowed at school on the days of football games. We have our overlong pant cuffs pinned up with blanket pins, the latest thing. The cheerleaders leap around in their mid-thigh skirts, waving their paper pom-poms; they don’t look long-legged and golden, like the cheerleaders at the back of
Life
magazine, but ill-assorted, dumpy, and dark. However I still envy their calves. The football team jogs on. Cordelia says, “That Gregory! What a hunk,” and I say, “Of cheese.” Cordelia gives me a hurt look. “I think he’s a doll.” “If you like them covered with corn oil,” I say. When she says it’s a bad idea to sit down on the high school toilet seats without wiping them off first because you might get a disease, I say, “Who told you that? Your Mummie?”

I make fun of her favorite singers. “Love, love, love,” I say. “They’re always moaning.” I have developed a searing contempt for gushiness and schmaltz. Frank Sinatra is The Singing Marshmallow, Betty Hutton is The Human Grindstone. Anyway, these people are out of date, they are sentimental mushballs. The real truth is to be found in rock and roll: “Hearts Made of Stone” is more like it. Sometimes Cordelia can think of things to say back, but sometimes she can’t. She says, “That’s cruel.”

Or she sticks her tongue in the side of her mouth and changes the subject. Or she lights a cigarette. I sit in History class, doodling on the side of the page. We are taking the Second World War. The teacher is an enthusiast, he’s hopping around at the front of the room, waving his arms and his pointer. He’s a short man with an unruly strand of hair and a limp, who may have been in the war himself, or so rumor goes. On the board he’s drawn a large map of Europe, in white, with yellow dotted lines for the borders between countries. Hitler’s armies invade, by means of pink chalk arrows. Now it’s the
Anschluss,
and now Poland falls, and now France. I draw tulips and trees, putting a line for the ground and including the root systems in every case. Submarines appear in the English Channel, in green. I draw the face of the girl sitting across the aisle from me. The Blitz is on, bombs drift down through the air like sinister silver angels, London is disintegrating block by block, house by house, mantelpieces, chimneys, double beds hand-carved and passed down through the generations blasted into burning splinters, history reduced to shards. “It was the end of an era,” says the teacher. It’s hard for us to understand, he says, but nothing will ever be the same again. He is deeply moved by this, you can tell, it’s embarrassing. The same as what? I think.

It’s incredible to me that I myself was alive when all those chalk things were going on, all those statistical deaths. I was alive when women wore those ridiculous clothes with the big shoulder pads and the nipped-in waists, with peplums over their bums like backward aprons. I draw a woman with wide shoulders and a picture hat. I draw my own hand. Hands are the hardest. It’s difficult to keep them from looking like clumps of sausages.

I go out with boys. This is not part of a conscious plan, it just happens. My relationships with boys are effortless, which means that I put very little effort into them. It’s girls I feel awkward with, it’s girls I feel I have to defend myself against; not boys. I sit in my bedroom picking the pilly fuzzballs off my lambswool sweaters and the phone will ring. It will be a boy. I take the sweater into the hall, where the phone is, and sit on the hall chair with the receiver cradled between my ear and shoulder and continue to pick off the fuzzballs, while a long conversation goes on that is mostly silence.

Boys by nature require these silences; they must not be startled by too many words, spoken too quickly. What they actually say is not that important. The important parts exist in the silences between the words. I know what we’re both looking for, which is escape. They want to escape from adults and other boys, I want to escape from adults and other girls. We’re looking for desert islands, momentary, unreal, but there.

My father paces the living room, jingling his keys and small change in his pockets. He’s impatient, he can’t help hearing these monosyllables, these murmurs, these silences. He walks into the hall and makes snipping motions with his fingers, meaning I’m to cut it short. “I have to go now,” I say. The boy makes a sound like air coming out of an inner tube. I understand it.

I know things about boys. I know what goes on in their heads, about girls and women, things they can’t admit to other boys, or to anyone. They’re fearful about their own bodies, shy about what they say, afraid of being laughed at. I know what kind of talk goes on among them as they horse around in the locker room, sneak cigarettes behind the field house.
Stunned broad, dog, bag
and
bitch
are words they apply to girls, as well as worse words. I don’t hold these words against them. I know these words are another version of pickled ox eyes and snot eating, they’re prove-it words boys need to exchange, to show they are strong and not to be taken in. The words don’t necessarily mean they don’t like real girls, or one real girl. Sometimes real girls are an alternative to these words and sometimes they’re an incarnation of them, and sometimes they’re just background noise.

I don’t think any of these words apply to me. They apply to other girls, girls who walk along the high school halls in ignorance of them, swinging their hair, swaying their little hips as if they think they’re seductive, talking too loudly and carelessly to one another, fooling nobody; or else acting pastel, blank, daisy-fresh. And all the time these clouds of silent words surround them,
stunned broad, dog, bag
and
bitch,
pointing at them, reducing them, cutting them down to size so they can be handled. The trick with these silent words is to walk in the spaces between them, turn sideways in your head, evade. Like walking through walls.

This is what I know about boys in general. None of it has to do with individual boys by themselves, the boys I go out with. These boys are usually older than I am, although they aren’t the kind with greasy ducktails and a lot of leather, they’re nicer than that. When I go out with them I’m supposed to be home on time. If I’m not, my father has long conversations with me in which he explains that being home on time is like being on time for a train. If I were to be late for a train, I would miss the train, wouldn’t I?

“But this house isn’t a train,” I say. “It’s not going anywhere.” My father is exasperated; he jingles his keys in his pocket. “That’s not the point,” he says.

What my mother says is, “We worry.” “What about?” I say. There’s nothing to worry about, as far as I can see.

My parents are a liability in this as in other matters. They won’t buy a television, like everyone else, because my father says it turns you into a cretin and emits harmful radiation and subliminal messages as well. When the boys come to pick me up, my father emerges from the cellar wearing his old gray felt hat and carrying a hammer or a saw, and grips their hands in his bear paw handshake. He assesses them with his shrewd, twinkly, ironic little eyes and calls them “sir,” as if they’re his graduate students. My mother goes into her nice lady act and says almost nothing. Or else she tells me I look sweet, right in front of the boys.

In the spring they appear around the corner of the house in their baggy gardening pants, smudged with mud, to see me off. They drag the boys out to the backyard, where there is now a large pile of cement blocks accumulated by my father for some future contingency. They want the boys to see their display of irises, as if these boys are old ladies; and the boys have to say something about the irises, although irises are the last thing on their minds. Or else my father attempts to engage them in improving conversation about current topics, or asks them if they’ve read this book or that one, pulling books from the bookshelves while the boys shift on their feet. “Your father’s a card,” the boys say uneasily, later. My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out humiliating things that can neither be anticipated nor controlled. I sign and make the best of it. I feel I’m older than they are, much older. I feel ancient.

What I do with the boys is nothing to worry about. It’s normal. We go to movies, where we sit in the smoking section and neck, or we go to drive-ins and eat popcorn and neck there as well. There are rules for necking, which we observe: approach, push away, approach, push away. Garter belts are going too far and so are brassieres. No zippers. The boys mouths taste of cigarettes and salt, their skin smells like Old Spice after-shave. We go to dances and twirl around during the rock numbers, or shuffle in the blue light, surrounded by the shuffling of the other couples. After formal dances we go to someone’s house or to the St. Charles Restaurant, and after that we neck, though not for long because the time has usually run out. For formal dances I have dresses which I sew myself because I can’t afford to buy them. They have layers of tulle and are propped up underneath with crinolines, and I worry about the hooks coming unfastened. I have shoes in matching satin or silver straps, I have earrings which pinch like hell. For these dances the boys send corsages, which I press afterward and keep in my bureau drawer: squashed carnations and brown-edged rosebuds, wads of dead vegetation, like a collection of floral shrunken heads.