Cat's eye (3 page)

Whoever drew this mustache knew what he was doing. Or she: nothing precludes that. It’s a curled, flowing mustache, like a cavalier’s, with a graceful goatee to match. It goes with my hair. I suppose I should be worried about this mustache. Is it just doodling, or is it political commentary, an act of aggression? Is it more like
Kilroy Was Here
or more like
Fuck Off?
I can remember drawing such mustaches myself, and the spite that went into them, the desire to ridicule, to deflate, and the feeling of power. It was defacing, it was taking away someone’s face. If I were younger I’d resent it. As it is, I study the mustache and think:
That looks sort of good.
The mustache is like a costume. I examine it from several angles, as if I’m considering buying one for myself. It casts a different light. I think about men and their facial hair, and the opportunities for disguise and concealment they have always at their disposal. I think about mustache-covered men, and about how naked they must feel with the thing shaved off. How diminished. A lot of people would look better in a mustache. Then, suddenly, I feel wonder. I have achieved, finally, a face that a mustache can be drawn on, a face that attracts mustaches. A public face, a face worth defacing. This is an accomplishment. I have made something of myself, something or other, after all.

I wonder if Cordelia will see this poster. I wonder if she’ll recognize me, despite the mustache. Maybe she’ll come to the opening. She’ll walk in through the door and I will turn, wearing black as a painter should, looking successful, holding a glass of only moderately bad wine. I won’t spill a drop.

U
ntil we moved to Toronto I was happy.

Before that we didn’t really live anywhere; or we lived so many places it was hard to remember them. We spent a lot of the time driving, in our low-slung, boat-sized Studebaker, over back roads or along two-lane highways up north, curving past lake after lake, hill after hill, with the white lines going down the middle of the road and the telephone poles along the sides, tall ones and shorter ones, the wires looking as if they were moving up and down.

I sit by myself in the back of the car, among the suitcases and the cardboard boxes of food and the coats, and the gassy, dry-cleaning smell of the car upholstery. My brother Stephen sits in the front seat, beside the partly open window. He smells of peppermint LifeSavers; underneath that is his ordinary smell, of cedarwood lead pencils and wet sand. Sometimes he throws up into paper bags, or beside the road if my father can stop the car in time. He gets carsick and I do not, which is why he has to sit in the front. It’s his only weakness that I know of.

From my cramped vantage point in the back I have a good view of my family’s ears. My father’s, which stick out from under the brim of the old felt hat he wears to keep twigs and tree sap and caterpillars out of his hair, are large and soft-looking, with long lobes; they’re like the ears of gnomes, or those of the flesh-colored, doglike minor characters in
Mickey Mouse
comic books. My mother wears her hair pinned back at the sides with bobby pins, so her ears are visible from the back. They’re narrow, with fragile upper edges, like the handles of china cups, although she herself is not fragile. My brother’s ears are round, like dried apricots, or like the ears of the green-tinged, oval-headed aliens from outer space he draws with his colored pencils. Around and over his round ears and down the back of his neck his hair, dark blond and straight, grows in thick wisps. He resists haircuts. It’s difficult for me to whisper into my brother’s round ears when we’re in the car. In any case he can’t whisper back, because he has to look straight ahead at the horizon, or at the white lines of the road that washes toward us, wave after slowly undulating wave.

The roads are mostly empty, because it’s the war, though once in a while there’s a truck loaded with cut tree trunks or fresh lumber, trailing its perfume of sawdust. At lunchtime we stop by the roadside and spread a groundsheet among the white papery everlasting and the purple fireweed and eat the lunch our mother makes, bread and sardines or bread and cheese, or bread and molasses or bread and jam if we can’t get anything else. Meat and cheese are scarce, they are rationed. That means you have a ration book with colored stamps in it.

Our father makes a small fire to boil water in a billy tin for tea. After lunch we disappear into the bushes, one by one, with pieces of toilet paper in our pockets. Sometimes there are other pieces of toilet paper there already, melting among the bracken and dead leaves, but mostly there are not. I squat, listening behind me for bears, aster leaves rough on the tops of my legs, then bury the toilet paper under sticks and bark and dried bracken. Our father says you should make it look as if you haven’t been there at all. Our father walks into the forest, carrying his ax, a pack-sack, and a large wooden box with a leather shoulder strap. He looks up, from tree to tree to tree, considering. Then he spreads a tarpaulin out on the ground, underneath the chosen tree, wrapping it around the trunk. He opens the wooden box, which is filled with racks of small bottles. He hits the tree trunk with the back of his ax. The tree shakes; leaves and twigs and caterpillars patter down, bouncing off his gray felt hat, hitting the tarpaulin. Stephen and I crouch, picking up the caterpillars, which are blue-striped, and velvety and cool, like the muzzles of dogs. We put them into the collecting bottles filled with pale alcohol. We watch them twist and sink. My father looks at the harvest of caterpillars as if he’s grown them himself. He examines the chewed leaves. “A beautiful infestation,” he says. He’s joyful, he’s younger than I am now. The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing, like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.

When it gets to the end of the day we stop again and put up our tent, heavy canvas with wooden poles. Our sleeping bags are khaki and thick and lumpy, and always feel a little damp. Underneath them we put groundsheets, and inflatable mattresses that make you feel dizzy while you blow them up and fill your nose and mouth with the taste of stale rain boots or spare tires piled in a garage. We eat around the fire, which turns brighter as the shadows grow out from the trees like darker branches. We crawl into the tent and take our clothes off inside our sleeping bags, the flashlight making a circle on the canvas, a light ring enclosing a darker one, like a target. The tent smells of tar and kapok and brown paper with cheese grease on it, and crushed grass. In the mornings the weeds outside are sprinkled with dew. Sometimes we stay in motels, but only if it’s too late at night to find a place to set up the tent. The motels are always far from anything, set against a dark wall of forest, their lights glimmering in the uniform obscuring night like those of ships, or oases. They have gas pumps outside, human-sized, with round discs on top, lit up like pale moons or haloes minus the head. On each disc is a shell or a star, an orange maple leaf, a white rose. The motels and the gas pumps are often empty or closed: gas is rationed, so people don’t travel much unless they have to.

Or we stay in cabins belonging to other people or to the government, or we stay in abandoned logging camps, or we pitch two tents, one for sleeping and one for supplies. In the winters we stay in towns or cities up north, the Soo or North Bay or Sudbury, in apartments that are really the top floors of other people’s houses, so that we have to be careful about the noise of our shoes on the wooden floors. We have furniture which comes from storage. It’s always the same furniture but it always looks unfamiliar. In these places there are flush toilets, white and alarming, where things vanish in an instant, with a roar. When we first get to cities my brother and I go to the bathroom a lot, and drop things in as well, such as pieces of macaroni, to see them disappear. There are air-raid sirens, and then we pull the curtains and turn off the lights, though our mother says the war will never come here. The war filters in over the radio, remote and crackly, the voices from London fading through the static. Our parents are dubious as they listen, their mouths tighten: it could be that we are losing.

My brother does not think so. He thinks our side is the good side, and therefore it will win. He collects cigarette cards with pictures of airplanes on them, and knows the names of all the planes. My brother has a hammer and some wood, and his own jackknife. He whittles and hammers: he’s making a gun. He nails two pieces of wood at right angles, with another nail for the trigger. He has several of these wooden guns, and daggers and swords also, with blood coloured onto the blades with red pencils. Some of the blood is orange, from when he ran out of red. He sings:
Coming in on a wing and a prayer,

Coming in on a wing and a prayer,

Though there’s one motor gone

We will still carry on,

Coming in on a wing and a prayer.

He sings this cheerfully, but I think it’s a sad song, because although I’ve seen the pictures of the airplanes on the cigarette cards I don’t know how they fly. I think it’s like birds, and a bird with one wing can’t fly. This is what my father says in the winters, before dinner, lifting his glass when there are other men there at the table: “You can’t fly on one wing.” So in fact the prayer in the song is useless. Stephen gives me a gun and a knife and we play war. This is his favorite game. While our parents are putting up the tent or making the fire or cooking, we sneak around behind the trees and bushes, aiming through the leaves. I am the infantry, which means I have to do what he says. He waves me forward, motions me back, tells me to keep my head down so the enemy won’t blow it off.

“You’re dead,” he says.

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are. They got you. Lie down.”

There is no arguing with him, since he can see the enemy and I can’t. I have to lie down on the swampy ground, propped against a stump to avoid getting too wet, until it’s time for me to be alive again. Sometimes, instead of war, we hunt through the forest, turning over logs and rocks to see what’s underneath. There are ants, grubs and beetles, frogs and toads, garter snakes, even salamanders if we’re lucky. We don’t do anything with the things we find. We know they will die if we put them into bottles and leave them by accident in the sun in the back window of the car, as we have done before. So we merely look at them, watching the ants hiding their pill-shaped eggs in panic, the snakes pouring themselves into darkness. Then we put the logs back where they were, unless we need some of these things for fishing.

Once in a while we fight. I don’t win these fights: Stephen is bigger and more ruthless than I am, and I want to play with him more than he wants to play with me. We fight in whispers or well out of the way, because if we’re caught we will both be punished. For this reason we don’t tell on each other. We know from experience that the satisfactions of betrayal are scarcely worth it. Because they’re secret, these fights have an extra attraction. It’s the attraction of dirty words we aren’t supposed to say, words like
bum;
the attraction of conspiracy, of collusion. We step on each other’s feet, pinch each other’s arms, careful not to give away the pain, loyal even in outrage. How long did we live this way, like nomads on the far edges of the war?

Today we’ve driven a long time, we’re late setting up our tent. We’re near the road, beside a raggedy anonymous lake. The trees around the shore are doubled in the water, the leaves of the poplars are yellowing towards fall. The sun sets in a long, chilly, lingering sunset, flamingo pink, then salmon, then the improbable vibrant red of Mercurochrome. The pink light rests on the surface, trembling, then fades and is gone. It’s a clear night, moonless, filled with antiseptic stars. There is the Milky Way clear as can be, which predicts bad weather.

We pay no attention to any of this, because Stephen is teaching me to see in the dark, as commandos do. You never know when you might need to do this, he says. You can’t use a flashlight; you have to stay still, in the darkness, waiting until your eyes become accustomed to no light. Then the shapes of things begin to emerge, grayish and glimmering and insubstantial, as if they’re condensing from the air. Stephen tells me to move my feet slowly, balancing on one foot at a time, careful not to step on twigs. He tells me to breathe quietly. “If they hear you they’ll get you,” he whispers.

He crouches beside me, outlined against the lake, a blacker patch of water. I catch the glint of an eye, then he’s gone. This is a trick of his.

I know he’s sneaking up on the fire, on my parents, who are flickering, shadowy, their faces indistinct. I’m alone with my heartbeat and my too-loud breathing. But he’s right: now I can see in the dark. Such are my pictures of the dead.

I
have my eighth birthday in a motel. My present is a Brownie box camera, black and oblong, with a handle on top and a round hole at the back to look through.

The first picture taken with it is of me. I’m leaning against the doorframe of the motel cabin. The door behind me is white and closed, with the metal number on it showing: 9. I’m wearing pants, baggy at the knees, and a jacket too short in the sleeves. Under the jacket, I know though you can’t see it, is a hand-me-down brown and yellow striped jersey of my brother’s. Many of my clothes were once his. My skin is ultrawhite from overexposure of the film, my head is tilted to one side, my mittenless wrists dangle. I look like old photos of immigrants. I look as if I’ve been put there in front of the door and told to stand still.

What was I like, what did I want? It’s hard to remember. Did I want a camera for my birthday?

Probably not, although I was glad to have it.

I want some more cards from the Nabisco Shredded Wheat boxes, the gray cards with pictures on them that you color, cut out, and fold to make the houses in a town. Also I want some pipe cleaners. We have a book called
Rainy Day Hobbies
that shows how to make a walkie-talkie out of two cans and a piece of string, or how to make a boat that will go forward if you drop lubricating oil into a hole in it; also now to make a doll’s chest of drawers out of miniature matchboxes, and how to make various animals—a dog, a sheep, a camel—out of pipe cleaners. The boat and the chest of drawers don’t appeal to me, only the pipe cleaners. I’ve never seen a pipe cleaner.