Cat's eye (49 page)

When she talks about Stephen, he is never more than twelve years old. After that he got beyond her. I come to realize that she was, or is, in awe of him, slightly afraid of him. She didn’t intend to give birth to such a person.

“Those girls gave you a bad time,” she says one day. I’ve made both or us a cup of tea—she’s permitted this—and we sit at the kitchen table, drinking it. She’s still surprised to catch me drinking tea, and has asked several times whether I wouldn’t prefer milk.

“What girls?” I say. My fingers are a wreck; I shred them quietly, out of sight beneath the tabletop, as I do in times of stress; an old bad habit I cannot seem to break.

“Those girls. Cordelia and Grace, and the other one. Carol Campbell.” She looks at me, a little slyly, as if testing.

“Carol?” I say. I remember a stubby girl, turning a skipping rope.

“Of course, Cordelia was your best friend, in high school,” she says. “I never thought she was behind it. It was that Grace, not Cordelia. Grace put her up to it, I always thought. What became of her?”

“I have no idea,” I say. I don’t want to talk about Cordelia. I still feel guilty, about walking away from her and not helping.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she says. “They came to me that day and said you’d been kept in at school, for being rude to the teacher. It was that Carol who said it. I didn’t think they were telling the truth.” She avoids the word
lie,
if possible.

“What day?” I say carefully. I don’t know what day she means. She’s begun to get things mixed up, because of the drugs.

“That day you almost froze. If I’d believed them I wouldn’t have gone to look for you. I went down the road, along by the cemetery, but you weren’t there.” She regards me anxiously, as if wondering what I will say.

“Oh yes,” I say, pretending I know what she’s talking about. I don’t want to confuse her. But I am growing confused myself. My memory is tremulous, like water breathed on. For an instant I see Cordelia and Grace, and Carol, walking toward me through the astonishing whiteness of the snow, their faces in shadow.

“I was so worried,” she says. What she wants from me is forgiveness, but for what?

On some days she is stronger, and gives the illusion of improvement. Today she wants me to help her sort through the things in the cellar. “So you won’t have to go through a lot of that old junk, later on,” she says delicately. She won’t say
death;
she wants to spare my feelings. I don’t like cellars. This one is unfinished: gray cement, rafters above. I make sure the upstairs door is left open. “You should have a railing put on these stairs,” I say. They are narrow, undependable.

“I can manage,” says my mother. From the days when managing was enough. We sort through the old magazines, the stash of different-sized cardboard boxes, the shelves of clean jars. She threw out a lot less than she could have, when they moved; or else she’s accumulated more. I carry things up the stairs and stow them in the garage. In there they seem disposed of. There’s a whole shelf of my father’s shoes and boots, lined-up pairs: city shoes with perforated toecaps, overshoes, rubber boots, wading boots for fishing, heavy-soled boots for walking in the woods, with a bacon grease patina and leather laces. Some of them must be fifty years old, or more. My mother will not throw them out, I know; but neither does she mention them. I can sense what she expects of me, in the way of control. I did my mourning at the funeral. She doesn’t need to deal with a tearful child, not now. I remember the old Zoology Building where we used to go on Saturdays, the creaking, overheated corridors, the bottles of eyeballs, the comforting smells of formaldehyde and mice. I remember sitting at the dinner table, with Cordelia, his warnings washing over our heads, the ruined water, the poisoned trees, species after species snuffed out like stepped-on ants. We did not think such things were prophecies. We thought they were boring then, a form of adult gossip that did not concern us. Now it’s all come true, except worse. I live in his nightmare, no less real for being invisible. You can still breathe the air, but for how long?

Against his bleak forecasting is set my mother’s cheerfulness, in retrospect profoundly willed. We start on the steamer trunk. It’s the one I remember from our Toronto house; I still think of it as mysterious, the repository of treasure. My mother too views this as an adventure: she says she hasn’t looked into that trunk for years, she has no idea what’s in there. She is no less alive because dying. I open the trunk, and the smell of mothballs blossoms upward. Out come the baby clothes folded in tissue paper, the pieces of flowery silver, yellowy-black. “Keep these for the girls,” she says. “You have this one.” The wedding dress, the wedding pictures, the sepia-colored relatives. A packet of feathers. Some bridge tallies with tassels on them, two pairs of white kid gloves. “Your father was a wonderful dancer,” she says. “Before we were married.” I have never known this. We go down through the layers, unearthing discoveries: my high school pictures, my lipsticked mouth unsmiling, somebody’s hair in an envelope, a single knitted baby sock. Old mittens, old neckties. An apron. Some things are to be kept, others thrown out or given away. Some things I will take back with me. We have several piles.

My mother is excited, and I catch some of this excitement from her: it’s like a Christmas stocking. Although not pure joy.

Stephen’s packets of airplane trading cards, held together with rotting elastic bands. His scrapbooks, his drawings of explosions, his old report cards. These she sets aside.

My own drawings and scrapbooks. There are the pictures of little girls I now remember, with their puffed sleeves and pink skirts and hairbows. Then, in the scrapbooks, some unfamiliar pictures cut from magazines: women’s bodies, in clothes of the forties, with other women’s heads glued onto them.
This is
a Watchbird watching YOU.

“You loved those magazines,” says my mother. “You used to pore over them for hours, when you were sick in bed.”

Underneath the scrapbooks is my old photo album, the black pages held together with the tie like a shoelace. Now I can remember putting it into the trunk, before I went to high school.

“We gave you that,” says my mother. “For Christmas, to go with your camera.” Inside is my brother, poised with a snowball, and Grace Smeath crowned with flowers. A couple of large boulders, with names printed underneath them in white pencil. Myself, in a jacket with the sleeves too short, standing against a motel cabin door. The number 9.

“I wonder what happened to that camera?” says my mother. “I must’ve given it away. You lost interest in it, after a while.”

I’m aware of a barrier between us. It’s been there for a long time. Something I have resented. I want to put my arms around her. But I am held back.

“What’s that?” she says.

“My old purse,” I say. “I used to take it to church.” I did. I can see the church now, the onion on the spire, the pews, the stained-glass windows. THE•KINGDOM•OF•GOD•IS•WITHIN•YOU.

“Well, what do you know. I don’t know why I saved that,” says my mother, with a little laugh. “Put it on the throw-out pile.” It’s squashed flat; the red plastic is split at the sides, where the sewing is. I pick it up, push at it to make it go back into shape. Something rattles. I open it up and take out my blue cat’s eye.

“A marble!” says my mother, with a child’s delight. “Remember all those marbles Stephen used to collect?”

“Yes,” I say. But this one was mine.

I look into it, and see my life entire.

D
own this street is where the store was. We bought red licorice whips, bubble gum, orange Popsicles, black jawbreakers that faded to a seed. Things you could buy for a penny, with the King’s head on it.
Georgius VI Dei Gratia.

I’ve never got used to the Queen being grown up. Whenever I see her cut-off head on the money, I think of her as fourteen years old, in her Girl Guide uniform, her back as straight as ours were supposed to be, looking down at me from the yellowing newspaper clippings on Miss Lumley’s Grade Four blackboard; standing in front of the clumsy diamond of a radio microphone, frowning with earnestness and well-concealed fear, rallying the forces as the bombs fell on London, as we sang “There’ll Always Be an England” to the waving of Miss Lumley’s life-threatening wooden pointer, in a time warp eight years later.

The Queen has had grandchildren since, discarded thousands of hats, grown a bosom and (heresy to think it) the beginning of a double chin. None of this fools me. She’s in there somewhere, that other one. I walk the next blocks, turn the corner, expecting to see the familiar dingy oblong of the school, in weathered red brick the color of dried liver. The cindered schoolyard, the tall thin windows with orange paper pumpkins and black cats stuck onto them for Hallowe’en, the graven lettering over the doors, BOYS and GIRLS, like the inscriptions on mausoleums of the late nineteenth century. But the school has disappeared. In its place a new school has risen instantly, like a mirage: light-colored, block-shaped, glossy and modern.

I feel hit, in the pit of the stomach. The old school has been erased, wiped from space. It’s as if it was never there at all. I lean against a telephone pole, bewildered, as if something has been cut out of my brain. Suddenly I’m bone tired. I would like to go to sleep.

After a while I approach the new school, go toward it through the gate, walk slowly around it. BOYS

and GIRLS have been abolished, that much is clear; though there’s still a chain-link fence. The schoolyard is dotted with swings, with climbing bars and slides, in bright primary colors; a few children have come back early from lunch and are clambering about.

It’s all so clean-cut, so open. Surely behind those glassy, candid doors there are no more long wooden pointers, no black rubber strap, no hard wooden desks in rows; no King and Queen in their stiff regalia, no inkwells; no sniggering about underpants; no bitter, whiskery old women. No cruel secrets. Everything like that is gone.

I come around the back corner, and there is the eroded hill, with its few sparse trees. That much is still the same, then.

No one’s up there.

I climb up the wooden steps, stand where I used to stand. Where I am still standing, never having been away. The voices of the children from the playground below could be any children’s voices, from any time, the light under the trees thickens, turns malevolent. Ill will surrounds me. It’s hard to breathe. I feel as if I’m pushing against something, a pressure on me, like opening the door against a snowstorm. Get me out of this, Cordelia. I’m locked in.

I don’t want to be nine years old forever.

The air is soft, autumnal, the sun shines. I am standing still. And yet I walk head down, into the unmoving wind.

Fourteen – Unified Field Theory

I
put on my new dress, cutting off the price tag with Jon’s wire cutters. I ended up with black, after all. Then I go into the bathroom to squint at myself in the inadequate, greasy mirror: now that I’ve got the thing on, it looks much the same as all the other black dresses I’ve ever owned. I check it for lint, apply my pink lipstick, and end up looking nice, as far as I can tell. Nice, and negligible. I could jazz myself up somehow. I ought to have some dangly earrings, some bangles, a silver bow tie on a little chain, an outsize Isadora Duncan strangle-yourself-by-mistake scarf, a rhinestone brooch of the thirties, in sly bad taste. But I don’t have any of these things, and it’s too late to go out and buy any. I will have to do. Come-as-you-are parties, they used to have. I will come as I am. I’m at the gallery an hour early. Charna is not here, or the others; they may have gone out to eat, or more likely to change. Everything is set up though, the rented thick-stemmed wineglasses, the bottles of mediocre hooch, the mineral water for teetotalers, because who would serve unadulterated chlorine from the tap? The cheeses hardening at the edges, the sulfur-drenched grapes, luscious and shiny as wax, plumped with blood from the dying field workers of California. It doesn’t pay to know too many of these things; eventually there’s nothing you can put into your mouth without tasting the death in it. The bartender, a severe-eyed young woman in gelled hair and unstructured black, is polishing glasses behind the long table that serves as the bar. I extract a glass of wine from her. She’s doing the bartending for money, her nonchalance implies: her true ambitions lie elsewhere. She tightens her lips while doling out my drink: she doesn’t approve of me. Possibly she wants to be a painter, and thinks I have compromised my principles, knuckled under to success. How I used to revel in such bitter little snobberies myself; how easy they were, once.

I walk slowly around the gallery, sipping at my glass of wine, permitting myself to look at the show, for the first time really. What is here, and what is not. There’s a catalogue, put together by Charna, a professional-looking computer-and-laser-printer affair. I remember the catalogue from the first show, done on a mimeo machine, smeared and illegible, its poverty a badge of authenticity. I remember the sound of the roller turning, the tang of the ink, the pain in my arm. Chronology won out after all: the early things are on the east wall, what Charna calls the middle period on the end wall, and on the west wall are five recent pictures which I’ve never shown before. They’re all I’ve been able to do in the past year. I work more slowly, these days. Here are the still lifes. “Early forays by Risley into the realm of female symbolism and the charismatic nature of domestic objects,” says Charna. In other words, the toaster, the coffee percolator, my mother’s wringer washer. The three sofas. The silver paper.

Farther along are Jon and Josef. I look at them with some fondness, them and their muscles and their cloudy-headed notions about women. Their youngness is terrifying. How could I have put myself into the hands of such inexperience?

Next to them is Mrs. Smeath; many of her. Mrs. Smeath sitting, standing, lying down with her holy rubber plant, flying, with Mr. Smeath stuck to her back, being screwed like a beetle; Mrs. Smeath in the dark-blue bloomers of Miss Lumley, who somehow combines with her in a frightening symbiosis. Mrs. Smeath unwrapped from white tissue paper, layer by layer. Mrs. Smeath bigger than life, bigger than she ever was. Blotting out God.