Cat's eye (30 page)

My brother Stephen treats these boys with scorn. As far as he’s concerned they are dimwits and unworthy of my serious consideration. He laughs at them behind their backs and makes fun of their names. They are not George but Georgie-Porgie, not Roger but Rover. He makes bets as to how long each one will last. “Three months for him,” he’ll say, after seeing the boy for the first time; or, “When are you going to throw him over?”

I don’t dislike my brother for this. I expect it of him, because he’s partly right. I don’t feel about these boys the way girls do in true romance comic books. I don’t sit around wondering when they’ll call. I like them but I don’t fall in love with them. None of the teenage magazine descriptions of girls moping, one tear on each cheek like pearl earrings, applies to me. So partly the boys are not a serious matter. But at the same time they are.

The serious part is their bodies. I sit in the hall with the cradled telephone, and what I hear is their bodies. I don’t listen much to the words but to the silences, and in the silences these bodies re-create themselves, are created by me, take form. When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess.
Don’t move,
I think.
Stay like that. Let me have that.
What power they have over me is held through the eyes, and when I’m tired of them it’s an exhaustion partly physical, but also partly visual.

Only some of this has to do with sex; although some of it does. Some of the boys have cars, but others do not, and with them I go on buses, on streetcars, on the newly opened Toronto subway that is clean and uneventful and looks like a long pastel-tiled bathroom. These boys walk me home, we walk the long way around. The air smells of lilac or mown grass or burning leaves, depending on the season. We walk over the new cement footbridge, with the willow trees arching overhead, the sound of running water from the creek beneath. We stand in the dim light coming from the lampposts on the bridge and lean back against the railing, their arms around me and mine around them. We lift each other’s clothing, run our hands over each other’s backbones, and I feel the backbone tensed and strung to breaking. I feel the length of the whole body, I touch the face, amazed. The faces of the boys change so much, they soften, open up, they ache. The body is pure energy, solidified light.

A
girl is found murdered, down in the ravine. Not the ravine near our house, but a larger branch of it, farther south, past the brickworks, where the Don River, willow-bordered, junk-strewn and dingy, winds sluggishly toward the lake. Such things are not supposed to happen in Toronto, where people leave their back doors unlocked, their windows unlatched at night; but they do happen, it seems. It’s on the front pages of all the papers.

This girl is our age. Her bicycle has been found near her. She has been strangled, and also molested. We know what
molested
means. There are photos of her when alive, which already have that haunted look such photos usually take years to acquire, the look of vanished time, unrecoverable, unredeemed. There are extensive descriptions of her clothing. She was wearing an angora sweater, and a little fur collar with pom-poms, of the sort that is currently fashionable. I don’t have a collar like this, but would like one. Hers was white but you can get them in mink. She was wearing a pin on the sweater, in the shape of two birds with red glass jewels for eyes. It’s what anyone would wear to school. All these details about her clothing strike me as unfair, although I devour them. It doesn’t seem right that you can just walk out one day, wearing ordinary clothes, and be murdered without warning, and then have all those people looking at you, examining you. Murder ought to be a more ceremonial occasion. I have long since dismissed the idea of bad men in the ravine. I’ve considered them a scarecrow story, put up by mothers. But it appears they exist, despite me.

This murdered girl troubles me. After the first shock, nobody at school says much about her. Even Cordelia does not want to talk about her. It’s as if this girl has done something shameful, herself, by being murdered. So she goes to that place where all things go that are not mentionable, taking her blond hair, her angora sweater, her ordinariness with her. She stirs up something, like dead leaves. I think of a doll I had once, with white fur on the border of her skirt. I remember being afraid of this doll. I haven’t thought about that in years.

Cordelia and I sit at the dining table doing our homework. I am helping Cordelia, I’m trying to explain the atom to her, but she’s refusing to take it seriously. The diagram of the atom has a nucleus, with electrons circling it. The nucleus looks like a raspberry, the electrons and their rings look like the planet Saturn. Cordelia sticks her tongue in the side of her mouth and frowns at the nucleus. “This looks like a raspberry,” she says.

“Cordelia,” I say. “The exam is tomorrow.” Molecules do not interest her, she doesn’t seem able to grasp the Periodic Table. She refuses to understand mass, she refuses to understand why atom bombs blow up. There’s a picture of one blowing up in the Physics book, mushroom cloud and all. To her it’s just another bomb. “Mass and energy are different aspects,” I tell her. “That’s
why
E = mc2.”

“It would be easier if Percy the Prude weren’t such a creep,” she says. Percy the Prude is the Physics teacher. He has red hair that stands up at the top like Woody Woodpecker’s, and he lisps. Stephen walks through the room, looks over our shoulders. “So they’re still teaching you kiddie Physics,”

he says indulgently. “They’ve still got the atom looking like a raspberry.”

“See?” says Cordelia.

I feel subverted. “This is the atom that’s going to be on the exam, so you’d better learn it,” I say to Cordelia. To Stephen I say, “So what does it really look like?”

“A lot of empty space,” Stephen says. “It’s hardly there at all. It’s just a few specks held in place by forces. At the subatomic level, you can’t even say that matter exists. You can only say that it has a tendency to exist.”

“You’re confusing Cordelia,” I say. Cordelia has lit a cigarette and is looking out the window, where several squirrels are chasing one another around the lawn. She is paying no attention to any of this. Stephen considers Cordelia. “Cordelia has a tendency to exist,” is what he says. Cordelia doesn’t go out with boys the way I do, although she does go out with them. Once in a while I arrange double dates, through whatever boy I’m going out with. Cordelia’s date is always a boy of lesser value, and she knows this and refuses to approve of him.

Cordelia can’t seem to decide what kind of boy she really does approve of. The ones with haircuts like my brother’s are drips and pills, but the ones with ducktails are sleazy greaseballs, although sexy. She thinks the boys I go out with, who go no further than crewcuts, are too juvenile for her. She’s abandoned her ultrared lipstick and nail polish and her turned-up collars and has taken up moderate pinks and going on diets, and grooming. This is what magazines call it: Good Grooming, as in horses. Her hair is shorter, her wardrobe more subdued.

But something about her makes boys uneasy. It’s as if she’s too attentive to them, too polite, studied and overdone. She laughs when she thinks they’ve made a joke and says, “That’s very witty, Stan.” She will say this even when they haven’t intended to be funny, and then they aren’t sure whether or not she’s making fun of them. Sometimes she is, sometimes she isn’t. Inappropriate words slip out of her. After we’ve finished our hamburgers and fries she turns to the boys and says brightly, “Are you sufficiently sophonsified?” and they gape at her. They are not the kind or boys who would have napkin rings. She asks them leading questions, tries to draw them into conversations, as a grown-up would do, not appearing to know that the best thing, with them, is to let them exist in their own silences, to look at them only out of the corners of the eyes. Cordelia tries to look at them sincerely, head-on; they are blinded by the glare, and freeze like rabbits in a headlight. When she’s in the back seat with them I can tell, from the breathing and gasps, that she’s going too far in that direction as well. “She’s kind of strange, your friend,”

the boys say to me, but they can’t say why. I decide it’s because she has no brother, only sisters. She thinks that what matters with boys is what you say; she’s never learned the intricacies, the nuances of male silence.

But I know Cordelia isn’t really interested in anything the boys themselves have to say, because she tells me so. Mostly she thinks they’re dim. Her attempts at conversation with them are a performance, an imitation. Her laugh, when she’s with them, is refined and low, like a woman’s laugh on the radio, except when she forgets herself. Then it’s too loud. She’s mimicking something, something in her head, some role or image that only she can see.

The Earle Grey Players come to our high school, as they do every year. They go from high school to high school, they are well known for this. Every year they do one play by Shakespeare; it’s always the play that’s on the province-wide Grade Thirteen Examinations, the ones you have to pass in order to get into university. There aren’t many theaters in Toronto, in fact there are only two, so many people go to these plays. The kids go to them because it’s on the exam and the parents go because they don’t often get a chance to see plays.

The Earle Grey Players are Mr. Earle Grey, who always plays the leads, Mrs. Earle Grey who plays the lead woman, and two or three other actors who are thought to be Earle Grey cousins and who are likely to double up and do two or more parts. The rest of the parts are played by students in whatever high school they’re performing at that week. Last year the play was
Julius Caesar,
and Cordelia got to be part of the crowd. She had to smear burnt cork on her face for dirt and wrap herself up in a bedsheet from home, and say
rabble rabble
during the crowd scene when Mark Antony was making his Ears speech.

This year the play is
Macbeth.
Cordelia is a serving woman, and also a soldier in the final battle scene. This time she has to bring a plaid car-rug from home. She’s lucky because she also has a kilt, an old one of Perdie’s from when she went to her girls’ private school. In addition to her parts, Cordelia is the props assistant. She’s in charge of tidying up the props after each performance, setting them in order, always the same order, so that the actors can grab them backstage and run on without a moment’s thought. During the three days of rehearsal Cordelia is very excited. I can tell by the way she chain-smokes on the way home and acts bored and nonchalant, referring, every once in a while, to the real, professional actors by their first names. The younger ones make such an effort to be funny, she says. They call the Witches The Three Wired Sisters; they call Cordelia a cream-faced loon, and they threaten to put eye of newt and toe of frog into her coffee. They say that when Lady Macbeth says, “Out, damned spot,” during the mad scene, she’s referring to her dog Spot, who has poo’ed on the carpet. She says real actors will never say the name
Macbeth
out loud, because it’s bad luck. They call it “The Tartans” instead.

“You just said it,” I say.

“What?”

“Macbeth,” I say.

Cordelia stops snort in the middle of the sidewalk. “Oh God,” she says. “I did, didn’t I?” She pretends to laugh it off, but it bothers her.

At the end of the play Macbeth’s head gets cut off and Macduff has to bring it onto the stage. The head is a cabbage wrapped up in a white tea towel; Macduff throws it onto the stage, where it hits with an impressive, flesh-and-bone thud. Or this is what has happened in rehearsal. But the night before the first performance—there are to be three—Cordelia notices that the cabbage is going bad, it’s getting soft and squooshy and smells like sauerkraut. She replaces it with a brand-new cabbage. The play is put on in the school auditorium, where the school assemblies are, and the choir practice. Opening night is packed. Things go without much mishap, apart from the sniggers in the wrong places and the anonymous voice that says, “Go on, do it!” when Macbeth is hesitating outside Duncan‘s chamber, and the catcalls and whistles from the back of the auditorium when Lady Macbeth appears in her nightgown. I watch for Cordelia in the battle scene, and there she is, running across backstage in her kilt with a wooden sword, her car rug thrown over her shoulder. But when Macduff comes in at the end and tosses down the cabbage in the tea towel, it doesn’t hit once and lie still. It bounces, bumpity-bump, right across the stage like a rubber ball, and falls off the edge. This dampens the tragic effect, and the curtain comes down on laughter.

It’s Cordelia’s fault, for replacing the cabbage. She is mortified. “It was
supposed
to be rotten,” she wails backstage, where I have gone to congratulate her. “So now they tell me!” The actors have made light of it; they tell her it’s a novel effect. But although Cordelia laughs and blushes and tries to pass it off lightly, I can see she is almost in tears.

I ought to feel pity, but I do not. Instead, on the way home from school the next day, I say “Bumpity bumpity bump, plop,” and Cordelia says, “Oh, don’t.” Her voice is toneless, leaden. This is not a joke. I wonder, for an instant, how I can be so mean to my best friend. For this is what she is. Time passes and we are older, we are the oldest, we are in Grade Thirteen. We can look down on the incoming students, those who are still mere children as we were once. We can smile at them. We’re old enough to take Biology, which is taught in the Chemistry lab. For this we leave our homeroom group and meet with students from other homerooms. This is why Cordelia is my Biology lab partner, at the Chemistry lab table, which is black and has a sink. Cordelia doesn’t like Biology any more than she liked Physics, which she barely squeaked through, but she has to take something in the sciences and it’s easier, to her mind, than a number of the things she might have to take otherwise. We are given dissecting kits with scalpel-like knives that could be sharper, and trays with a coating of wax at the bottom, and a package of pins, as in sewing classes. First we have to dissect a worm. Each of us is given one of these. We look at the diagram of the inside of the worm, in the Zoology textbook: this is what we’re supposed to see once we get the worm open. The worms wriggle and twine in the wax-bottomed trays, and snout their way along the sides, trying to get out. They smell like holes in the ground.