Cat's eye (7 page)

Grace Smeath is a year older and in the next grade up. At school she plays with the other girls in her class. But after school and on Saturdays she plays with Carol. There are no girls in her class on our side of the ravine.

Grace lives in a two-story shoebox-shaped red brick house with a front porch that has two thick round white pillars holding it up. She’s taller than Carol, with dark thick coarse hair done into two braids. Her skin is extremely pale, like a body under a bathing suit, but covered with freckles. She wears glasses. Usually she wears a gray skirt with two straps over the shoulders, and a red sweater pebbled with little balls of wool. Her clothes smell faintly of the Smeaths’ house, a mixture of scouring powder and cooked turnips and slightly rancid laundry, and the earth under porches. I think she is beautiful. On Saturdays I no longer go to the building. Instead I play with Carol and Grace. Because it’s winter, we play mostly inside. Playing with girls is different and at first I feel strange as I do it, self-conscious, as if I’m only doing an imitation of a girl. But I soon get more used to it. The things we play are mostly Grace’s ideas, because if we try to play anything she doesn’t like she says she has a headache and goes home, or else tells us to go home. She never raises her voice, gets angry, or cries; she is quietly reproachful, as if her headache is our fault. Because we want to play with her more than she wants to play with us, she gets her way in everything.

We color in Grace’s movie star coloring books, which show the movie stars in different outfits, doing different things: walking their dogs, going sailing in sailor suits, swirling around in evening dresses at parties. Grace’s favorite movie star is Esther Williams. I have no favorite movie star—I’ve never been to a movie—but I say mine is Veronica Lake, because I like the name. The Veronica Lake book is paper doll cutouts, with Veronica Lake in her bathing-suit and dozens of outfits you can stick onto her with tabs that fold around her neck. Grace won’t let us cut out these outfits, although we can put them on and take them off once she’s done it, but we’re allowed to work away at her coloring books as long as we stay inside the lines. She likes to get these books all colored in. She tells us what colors to use, on which parts. I know what my brother would do—green skin for Esther, with beetle antennae, and hairy legs for Veronica, eight of them—but I refrain from doing it. Anyway I like the clothes. We play school. Grace has a couple of chairs and a wooden table in her cellar, and a small blackboard and chalk. These are set up underneath the indoors clothesline where the Smeath underwear is hung up to dry when it rains or snows. The cellar isn’t a finished cellar: the floor is cement, the pillars holding up the house are brick, the water pipes and wires are showing, and the air smells of coal dust because the coal bin is right beside the blackboard.

Grace is always the teacher, Carol and I the students. We have to do spelling tests and sums in arithmetic; it’s like real school, but worse, because we never get to draw pictures. We can’t pretend to be bad, because Grace doesn’t like disorder.

Or we sit on the floor in Grace’s room with piles of old
Eaton’s Catalogues.
I’ve seen lots of
Eaton’s
Catalogues
before: up north they’re hung in outhouses for use as toilet paper.
Eaton’s Catalogues
remind me of the stench of such outhouses, the buzzing of the flies down the hole underneath, the box of lime and the wooden paddle for dumping the lime down, onto the piles of old and recent droppings, of all shapes and colors of brown. But here we treat these catalogues with reverence. We cut the small colored figures out of them and paste them into scrapbooks. Then we cut out other things—cookware, furniture—and paste them around the figures. The figures themselves are always women. We call them

“my lady.” “My lady’s going to have this refrigerator,” we say. “My lady’s getting this rug.” “This is my lady’s umbrella.”

Grace and Carol look at each other’s scrapbook pages and say, “Oh, yours is so good. Mine’s no good. Mine’s
awful.
” They say this every time we play the scrapbook game. Their voices are wheedling and false; I can tell they don’t mean it, each one thinks her own lady on her own page is good. But it’s the thing you have to say, so I begin to say it too.

I find this game tiring—it’s the weight, the accumulation of all these objects, these possessions that would have to be taken care of, packed, stuffed into cars, unpacked. I know a lot about moving house. But Carol and Grace have never moved anywhere. Their ladies live in a single house each and have always lived there. They can add more and more, stuff the pages of their scrapbooks with dining room suites, beds, stacks of towels, one set of dishes after another, and think nothing of it. I begin to want things I’ve never wanted before: braids, a dressing gown, a purse of my own. Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there’s a whole world of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of it without making any effort at all. I don’t have to keep up with anyone, run as fast, aim as well, make loud explosive noises, decode messages, die on cue. I don’t have to think about whether I’ve done these things well, as well as a boy. All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans out of the
Eaton’s Catalogue
with embroidery scissors, and say I’ve done it badly. Partly this is a relief.

F
or Christmas, Carol gives me some Friendship’s Garden bath salts and Grace gives me a coloring book of Virginia Mayo. I open their presents before anyone else’s.

I also get a photo album, to go with my camera. The pages and covers are black, tied together with something that looks like a big black shoelace; there’s a package of black triangles with glue on them to stick the photos in with. So far I have taken only one roll of film with my camera. I think about what each picture will look like as I press the button. I don’t want to waste any. When the pictures come back from being developed, the negatives come too. I hold them up to the light: everything that’s white in the real picture is black in the negative. Snow for instance is black, and people’s eyeballs and teeth. I stick my photos into the album with the black triangles. Some of the pictures are of my brother, making threatening gestures with snowballs. Some are of Carol, some of Grace. There’s only that one picture of me, standing in front of the motel door with 9 on it, long ago, a month ago. Already that child seems much younger, poorer, farther away, a shrunken, ignorant version of myself. Another thing I get for Christmas is a red plastic purse, oval in shape, with a gold-colored clasp and a handle at the top end. It’s soft and pliable inside the house, but hardens outside in the cold, so that things rattle in it. I keep my allowance in it, five cents a week.

By this time we have a living room floor, hardwood, waxed by my mother down on her knees, polished with a long-handled weighted brush that she pushes back and forth, making a sound like waves. The living room has been painted, the fixtures installed, the baseboards added on. There are even curtains; drapes, they’re called. The public, visible parts of the house have been finished first. Our bedrooms remain in a rawer state. The windows there do not yet have drapes. Lying in bed at night, I can look out of my window at the snow falling, illuminated by the light from my brother’s bedroom window beside mine.

It’s the darkest time of the year. Even in the daytime it seems dark; and at night, when the lights are on, this darkness pervades everything, like a fog. Outside there are only a few streetlights, and they’re far apart and not very bright. The lamps in people’s houses cast a yellowish light, not cold and greenish but a buttery dim yellow with a tinge of brown. The colors of things in houses have darkness mixed into them: maroon, mushroom beige, a muted green, a dusty rose. These colors look a little dirty, like the squares in a paint box when you forget to rinse the brush.

We have a maroon chesterfield which has come out of storage, with an oriental-style maroon and purple rug in front of it. We have a tri-light floor lamp. The air in the evening lamplight is coagulated, like a custard thickening; heavier sediments of light collect in the corners of the living room. The drapes are kept closed at night, folds and folds of cloth drawn against the winter, hoarding the dim heavy light, keeping it in.

In this light I spread the evening paper out on the polished hardwood floor and rest on my knees and elbows, reading the comics. In the comics there are people with round holes for eyes, others who can hypnotize you instantly, others with secret identities, others who can stretch their faces into any shape at all. Around me is the scent of newsprint and floor wax, the bureau drawer smell of my itchy stockings mingled with that of grimy knees, the scratchy hot smell of wool plaid and the cat box aroma of cotton underpants. Behind me the radio plays square dance music from the Maritimes, Don Messer and His Islanders, in preparation for the six o’clock news. The radio is of dark varnished wood with a single green eye that moves along the dial as you turn the knob. Between the stations this eye makes eerie noises from outer space. Radio waves, says Stephen.

Often, now, Grace Smeath asks me over to her house after school without asking Carol. She tells Carol there’s a reason why she isn’t invited: it’s because of her mother. Her mother is tired, so Grace can only have one best friend over that day.

Grace’s mother has a bad heart. Grace doesn’t treat this as a secret, as Carol would. She says it unemotionally, politely, as if requesting you to wipe your feet on the mat; but also smugly, as if she has something, some privilege or moral superiority that the two of us don’t share. It’s the attitude she takes toward the rubber plant that stands on the landing halfway up her stairs. This is the only plant in Grace’s house, and we aren’t allowed to touch it. It’s very old and has to be wiped off leaf by leaf with milk. Mrs. Smeath’s bad heart is like that. It’s because of this heart that we have to tiptoe, walk quietly, stifle our laughter, do what Grace says. Bad hearts have their uses; even I can see that. Every afternoon Mrs. Smeath has to take a rest. She does this, not in her bedroom, but on the chesterfield in the living room, stretched out with her shoes off and a knitted afghan covering her. That is how she is always to be found when we go there to play after school. We come in through the side door, up the steps to the kitchen, trying to be as quiet as possible, and into the dining room as far as the double French doors, where we peer in through the glass panes, trying to see whether her eyes are open or closed. She’s never asleep. But there’s always the possibility—put into our heads by Grace, in that same factual way—that on any given day she may be dead.

Mrs. Smeath is not like Mrs. Campbell. For instance, she has no twin sets, and views them with contempt. I know this because once, when Carol was bragging about her mother’s twin sets, Mrs. Smeath said, “Is that so,” not as a question but as a way of making Carol shut up. She doesn’t wear lipstick or face powder, even when she goes out. She has big bones, square teeth with little gaps between them so that you can see each tooth distinctly, skin that looks rubbed raw as if scrubbed with a potato brush. Her face is rounded and bland, with that white skin of Grace’s, though without the freckles. She wears glasses like Grace too, but hers have steel rims instead of brown ones. Her hair is parted down the middle and graying at the temples, braided and wound over her head into a flat hair crown crisscrossed with hairpins.

She wears print housedresses, not only in the mornings but most of the time. Over the dresses she wears bibbed aprons that sag at the bosom and make it look as if she doesn’t have two breasts but only one, a single breast that goes all the way across her front and continues down until it joins her waist. She wears lisle stockings with seams, which make her legs look stuffed and sewn up the backs. She wears brown Oxfords. Sometimes, instead of the stockings, she has thin cotton socks, above which her legs rise white and sparsely haired, like a woman’s mustache. She has a mustache too, though not very much of one, just a sprinkling of hairs around the corners of the mouth. She smiles a lot, with her lips closed over her large teeth; but, like Grace, she does not laugh.

She has big hands, knuckly and red from the wash. There’s a lot of wash, because Grace has two younger sisters who get her skirts and blouses and also her underpants passed down to them. I’m used to getting my brother’s jerseys, but not his underpants. It’s these underpants, thin and gray with use, that hang dripping on the line over our heads as we sit in Grace’s cellar pretending to be schoolchildren. Before Valentine’s Day we have to cut out hearts of red construction paper at school and decorate them with pieces of paper doily to stick on the tall thin windows. While I am cutting mine I think about Mrs. Smeath’s bad heart. What exactly is wrong with it? I picture it hidden, underneath her woolen afghan and the billow of her apron bib, pumping in the thick fleshy darkness of the inside of her body: something taboo, intimate. It would be red, but with a reddish-black patch on it, like rot in an apple or a bruise. It hurts when I think about it. A little sharp wince of pain goes through me, as it did when I watched my brother cut his finger once on a piece of glass. But the bad heart is also compelling. It’s a curiosity, a deformity. A horrible treasure.

Day after day I press my nose against the glass of the French doors, trying to see if Mrs. Smeath is still alive. This is how I will see her forever: lying unmoving, like something in a museum, with her head on the antimacassar pinned to the arm of the chesterfield, a bed pillow under her neck, the rubber plant on the landing visible behind her, turning her head to look at us, her scrubbed face, without her glasses, white and strangely luminous in the dim space, like a phosphorescent mushroom. She is ten years younger than I am now. Why do I hate her so much? Why do I care, in any way, what went on in her head?

T
he snow erodes, leaving the potholes in the roads near our house filled with muddy water. Thin bubbles of ice form across these puddles overnight; we shatter them with the heels of our boots. Icicles crash down from the eaves of roofs, and we pick them up and lick them like Popsicles. We wear our mittens dangling. On the lawns, as we walk home from school, we can see damp pieces of paper under the hedges, old dog turds, crocuses poking up through the grainy, soot-colored snow. The gutters run with brownish water; the wooden bridge over the ravine is slippery and soft and has regained its smell of rot. Our house looks like something left over from the war: all around it spreads rubble, devastation. My parents stand in their backyard, hands on their hips, looking out over the expanse of raw mud, planning their garden. Already clumps of couch grass are beginning to thrust up. Couch grass can grow in anything, my father says. He also says that the contractor, the same one that flew the coop, took the dense clay from where our cellar went in and spread it around the house, over what should have been the topsoil. “An idiot as well as a crook,” says my father.