Cat's eye (9 page)

“Cockroaches,” my father says. “That’s all that’ll be left, once they get through with it.” He says this jovially, skewering a potato.

I sit eating my fried Spam, drinking my milk mixed from powder. What I relish the most are the lumps that float on the top. I’m thinking about Carol and Grace, my two best friends. At the same time I can’t remember exactly what they look like. Did I really sit on the floor of Grace’s bedroom, on her braided bedside rug, cutting out pictures of frying pans and washing machines from the
Eaton’s Catalogue
and pasting them into a scrapbook? Already it seems implausible, and yet I know I did it. Out behind the logging camp is a huge cutover where they’ve taken off the trees. Only the roots and stumps remain. There’s a lot of sand out there. The blueberry bushes have come up, as they do after a fire: first the fireweed, then the blueberries. We pick the berries into tin cups. Our mother pays us a cent a cup. She makes blueberry puddings, blueberry sauce, canned blueberries, boiling the jars in a large canning kettle over the outdoor fire.

The sun beats down, the heat comes wavering up off the sand. I wear a cotton kerchief on my head, folded into a triangle and tied behind my ears, the front of it damp with sweat. Around us is the drone of flies. I try to listen through it, behind it, for the sound of bears. I’m not sure what they would sound like, but I know that bears like blueberries, and they’re unpredictable. They may run away. Or they may come after you. If they come you should lie down and pretend to be dead. This is what my brother says. Then they might go away, he says; or they might scoop out your innards. I’ve seen fish guts, I can picture this. My brother finds a bear turd, blue and speckled and human-looking, and pokes a stick into it to see how fresh it is.

In the afternoons, when it’s too hot to pick berries, we swim in the lake, in the same water the fish come out of. I’m not supposed to go over my depth. The water is gelid, murky; down there, past where the sand drops away and it’s deep, there are old rocks covered with slime, sunken logs, crayfish, leeches, huge pike with undershot jaws. Stephen tells me fish can smell. He says they’ll smell us, and keep out of the way.

We sit on the shore, on rocks that poke up from the narrow beach, and toss bits of bread into the water, seeing what we can entice: minnows, a few perch. We search for flat stones and skip them, or we practice burping at will, or we put our mouths against the insides of our arms and blow to make farting noises, or we fill our mouths with water and see how far we can spit. In these contests I am not the winner, I am more like an audience; though my brother does not brag, and would probably do the same things, by himself, if I weren’t there.

Sometimes he writes in pee, on the thin edge of sand or on the surface of the water. He does this methodically, as if it’s important to do it well, the pee arching delicately out from the front of his swim trunks, from his hand and its extra finger, the writing angular, like his real writing, and ending always with a period. He doesn’t write his name, or dirty words, as other boys do, as I know from snowbanks. Instead he writes: MARS. Or, if he’s feeling up to it, something longer: JUPITER. By the end of the summer he has done the whole solar system, three times over, in pee.

It’s the middle of September; the leaves are already turning, dark red, bright yellow. At night when I walk to the outhouse, in the dark with no flashlight because I can see better that way, the stars are sharp and crystalline and my breath goes before me. I see my parents, in through the window, sitting beside the kerosene lamp, and they are like a faraway picture with a frame of blackness. It’s disquieting to look at them, in through the window, and know that they don’t know I can see them. It’s as if I don’t exist; or as if they don’t.

When we come back down from the north it’s like coming down from a mountain. We descend through layers of clarity, of coolness and uncluttered light, down past the last granite outcrop, the last small raggedy-edged lake, into the thicker air, the dampness and warm heaviness, the cricket noises and weedy meadow smells of the south.

We reach our house in the afternoon. It looks strange, different, as if enchanted. Thistles and goldenrod have grown up around it, like a thorny hedge, out of the mud. The huge hole and the mountain of earth next door have vanished, and in their place is a new house. How has this happened? I wasn’t expecting such changes.

Grace and Carol are standing among the apple trees, just where I left them. But they don’t look the same. They don’t look at all like the pictures of them I’ve carried around in my head for the past four months, shifting pictures in which only a few features stand out. For one thing they’re bigger; and they have on different clothes.

They don’t come running over, but stop what they’re doing and stare, as if we’re new people, as if I’ve never lived here. A third girl is with them. I look at her, empty of premonition. I’ve never seen her before.

G
race waves. After a moment Carol waves too. The third girl doesn’t wave. They stand among the asters and goldenrod, waiting as I go toward them. The apple trees are covered with scabby apples, red ones and yellow ones; some of the apples have fallen off and are rotting on the ground. There’s a sweet, cidery smell, and the buzz of drunken yellowjackets. The apples mush under my feet. Grace and Carol are browner, less pasty; their features are farther apart, their hair lighter. The third girl is the tallest. Unlike Grace and Carol, who are in summer skirts, she wears corduroys and a pullover. Both Carol and Grace are stubby-shaped, but this girl is thin without being fragile: lanky, sinewy. She has dark-blond hair cut in a long pageboy, with bangs falling half into her greenish eyes. Her face is long, her mouth slightly lopsided; something about the top lip is a little skewed, as if it’s been cut open and sewn up crooked.

But her mouth evens out when she smiles. She has a smile like a grown-up’s, as if she’s learned it and is doing it out of politeness. She holds out her hand. “Hi, I’m Cordelia. And you must be…”

I stare at her. If she were an adult, I would take the hand, shake it, I would know what to say. But children do not shake hands like this.

“Elaine,” Grace says.

I feel shy with Cordelia. I’ve been riding in the back of the car for two days, sleeping in a tent; I’m conscious of my grubbiness, my unbrushed hair. Cordelia is looking past me to where my parents are unloading the car. Her eyes are measuring, amused. I can see, without turning around, my father’s old felt hat, his boots, the stubble on his face, my brother’s uncut hair and seedy sweater and baggy knees, my mother’s gray slacks, her manlike plaid shirt, her face blank of makeup.

“There’s dog poop on your shoe,” Cordelia says.

I look down. “It’s only a rotten apple.”

“It’s the same color though, isn’t it?” Cordelia says. “Not the hard kind, the soft squooshy kind, like peanut butter.” This time her voice is confiding, as if she’s talking about something intimate that only she and I know about and agree on. She creates a circle of two, takes me in. Cordelia lives farther east than I do, in a region of houses even newer than ours, with the same surrounding mud. But her house is not a bungalow, it has two stories. It has a dining room separated by a curtain which you can pull back to make the living room and the dining room into one big room, and a bathroom on the ground floor with no bathtub in it which is called the powder room. The colors in Cordelia’s house are not dark, like those in other houses. They’re light grays and light greens and whites. The sofa, for instance, is apple-green. There’s nothing flowered or maroon or velvet. There’s a picture, framed in light gray, of Cordelia’s two older sisters, done in pastels when they were younger, both wearing smocked dresses, their hair feathery, their eyes like mist. There are real flowers, several different kinds at once, in chunky, flowing vases of Swedish glass. It’s Cordelia who tells us the glass is Swedish. Swedish glass is the best kind, she says.

Cordelia’s mother arranges the flowers herself, wearing gardening gloves. My own mother doesn’t arrange flowers. Sometimes she sticks a few into a pot and puts them on the dinner table, but these are flowers she picks herself, during her exercise walks, in her slacks, along the road or in the ravine. Really they are weeds. She would never think of spending money on flowers. It occurs to me for the first time that we are not rich.

Cordelia’s mother has a cleaning lady. She is the only one of our mothers who has one. The cleaning lady is not called the cleaning lady, however. She is called the woman. On the days when the woman comes, we have to stay out of her way.

“The woman before this one,” Cordelia tells us, in a hushed, scandalized voice, “was caught stealing potatoes. She put her bag down and they rolled out, all over the floor. It was so embarrassing.” She means for them, not for the woman. “Of course we had to let her go.”

Cordelia’s family does not eat boiled eggs mushed up in a bowl but out of egg cups. Each egg cup has an initial on it, one for each person in the family. There are napkin rings too, also with initials. I have never heard of an egg cup before and I can tell Grace hasn’t either, by the way she keeps silent about it. Carol says uncertainly that she has them at home.

“After you eat the egg,” Cordelia tells us, “you have to put a hole in the bottom of the shell.”

“Why?” we say.

“So the witches can’t put out to sea.” She says this lightly but scornfully, as if only a fool would need to ask. But there’s the possibility she’s joking, or teasing. Her two older sisters have this habit also. It’s hard to tell when they mean to be taken seriously. They have an extravagant, mocking way of talking, which seems like an imitation of something, only it’s unclear what they’re imitating.

“I almost
died
” they say. Or, “I look like the wrath of God.” Sometimes they say, “I look like an absolute hag,” and sometimes, “I look like Haggis McBaggis.” This is an ugly old woman they seem to have made up. But they don’t really believe they almost died, or that they look ugly. Both of them are beautiful: one dark and intense, the other blond and kind-eyed and soulful. Cordelia is not beautiful in the same way. Cordelia’s two older sisters are Perdita and Miranda, but nobody calls them that. They’re called Perdie and Mirrie. Perdie is the dark one; she takes ballet, and Mirrie plays the viola. The viola is kept in the coat closet, and Cordelia takes it out and shows it to us, lying there mysterious and important in its velvet-lined case. Perdie and Mirrie make drawling, gentle fun of each other and of themselves for doing these things, but Cordelia says they are gifted. This sounds like vaccinated, something that’s done to you and leaves a mark. I ask Cordelia if she is gifted, but she puts her tongue in the corner of her mouth and turns away, as if she’s concentrating on something else.

Cordelia ought to be Cordie, but she’s not. She insists, always, on being called by her full name: Cordelia. All three of these names are peculiar; none of the girls at school have names like that. Cordelia says they’re out of Shakespeare. She seems proud of this, as though it’s something we should all recognize. “It was Mummie’s idea,” she says.

All three of them call their mother Mummie, and speak of her with affection and indulgence, as if she’s a bright but willful child who has to be humored. She’s tiny, fragile, absent-minded; she wears glasses on a silver chain around her neck and takes painting classes. Some of her paintings hang in the upstairs hall, greenish paintings of flowers, of lawns, of bottles and vases.

The girls have spun a web of conspiracy around Mummie. They agree not to tell her certain things.

“Mummie isn’t supposed to know that,” they remind one another. But they don’t like to disappoint her. Perdie and Mirrie try to do what they like as much as they can, but without disappointing Mummie. Cordelia is less agile at this: less able to do what she likes, more disappointing. This is what Mummie says when she’s angry: “I am disappointed in you.” If she gets very disappointed, Cordelia’s father will be called into it, and that is serious. None of the girls jokes or drawls when mentioning him. He is large, craggy, charming, but we have heard him shouting, upstairs.

We sit in the kitchen, avoiding the dust mop of the woman, waiting for Cordelia to come down to play. She has been disappointing again, she has to finish tidying her room. Perdie strolls in, her camel’s-hair coat thrown loosely, gracefully over one shoulder, her schoolbooks balanced on one hip. “Do you know what Cordelia says she wants to be when she grows up?” she says, in her husky, mock-serious, confiding voice. “A horse!” And we can’t tell at all whether or not it’s true. Cordelia has a whole cupboard filled with dress-up costumes: old dresses of Mummie’s, old shawls, old sheets you can cut up and drape around yourself. These used to be Perdie’s and Mirrie’s, but they’ve outgrown them. Cordelia wants us to act out plays, with her dining room and its curtain for the stage. She has an idea that we’ll put these plays on and charge money for them. She turns out the lights, holds a flashlight under her chin, laughs in an eerie manner: this is how such things are done. Cordelia has been to plays, and even the ballet, once:
Giselle,
she says, offhand, as if we know. But somehow these plays never take shape the way she wants them to. Carol giggles and can’t remember what she’s supposed to say. Grace doesn’t like being told what to do, and says she has a headache. Made-up stories don’t interest her unless they contain a lot of real things: toasters, ironing boards, the wardrobes of movie stars. Cordelia’s melodramas are beyond her.

“Now you kill yourself,” says Cordelia.

“Why?” says Grace.

“Because you’ve been deserted,” says Cordelia.

“I don’t want to,” says Grace. Carol, who is playing the maid, starts to giggle. So we merely dress up and then trail down the stairs and out across the newly sodded front lawn, our shawls dragging behind us, uncertain what’s supposed to happen next. Nobody wants to take boys’

parts because there are no good clothes for them, though from time to time Cordelia draws a mustache on herself with Perdie’s eyebrow pencil and wraps herself up in an old velvet curtain, in a last-ditch attempt at plot.