Cat's Eye

Chapter 56

I continue east along Queen Street, still a little dizzy from the wine at lunch. Tipsy was once the word. Alcohol’s a depressant, it will let me down later, but right now I’m jaunty, I hum to myself, mouth slightly open.

Right here there’s a group of statues, coppery-green, with black smears running down them like metal blood: a seated woman, holding a scepter, with three young soldiers marching forward grouped around her, their legs wound with bandagelike puttees, defending the Empire, their faces earnest, doomed, frozen into time. Above them on a stone tablet stands another woman, this time with angel wings: Victory or Death, or maybe both. This monument is in honor of the South African War, ninety years ago, more or less. I wonder if anyone remembers that war, or if anyone in all these cars barging forward ever even looks.

I head north on University Avenue, past the sterility of hospitals, along the old route of the Santa Claus Parade. The Zoology Building has been torn down, it must have been years ago. The window ledge where I once watched the soggy fairies and chilblained snowflakes, breathing in the smell of snakes and antiseptic and mice, is now empty air. Who else remembers where it used to be?

There are fountains up and down this roadway now, and squared-off beds of flowers, and new, peculiar statues. I follow the curve around the Parliament Building with its form of a squatting Victorian dowager, darkish pink, skirts huffed out, stolid. The flag I could never draw, demoted to the flag of a province, flies before it, bright scarlet, with the Union Jack in the top corner and all those impossible beavers and leaves encrested lower down. The new national flag flutters there as well, two red bands and a red maple leaf rampant on white, looking like a trademark for margarine of the cheaper variety, or an owl kill in snow. I still think of this flag as new, although they changed it long ago.

I cross the street, cut in behind a small church, left stranded here when they redeveloped. Sunday’s sermon is announced on a billboard identical to the kind for supermarket specials: Believing Is Seeing. A vertical wave of plate glass breaks against it. Behind the polished façades, bouquets of teased cloth, buffed leather, cunning silver trinkets. Pasta to die for. Theology has changed, over the years: just deserts used to be what everyone could expect to get, in the end. Now it’s a restaurant specializing in cakes. All they had to do was abolish guilt, and add an S.

I turn a corner, onto a side street, a double row of expensive boutiques: hand knits and French maternity outfits and ribbon-covered soaps, imported tobaccos, opulent restaurants where the wineglasses are thin-stemmed and they sell you location and overhead. The designer jeans emporium, the Venetian paper knickknack shop, the stocking boutique with its kicking neon leg.

These houses used to be semihovels; Josef’s old territory, where beer-saturated fat men sat on the front porches, sweating in the August heat, while their children screamed and their dogs lay panting with frayed ropes tethering them to the fence, and paint peeled from their woodwork and the dispirited cat pee marigolds wilted along their cracked walkways. A few thousand dollars in the right place then and you’d be a millionaire today, but who could have guessed? Not me, going up the narrow stairs to Josef’s second floor, with my breath quickening and his hand weighing on the small of my back, in the dying light of summer evenings: slow-paced, forbidden, sadly delicious.

I know more things about Josef now than I did then. I know them because I’m older. I know about his melancholy, his ambition, his desperation, the corners of emptiness in him that needed to be filled. I know the dangers.

What for instance was he doing with two women fifteen years younger than himself? If one of my daughters fell in love with such a man, I’d be frantic. It would be like the time Sarah and her best friend came rushing home from school, to tell me they’d seen their first flasher in the park. “Mummy, Mummy, a man had his pants down!”

To me it meant fear, and a ferocious anger. Touch them and I’ll kill you. But to them it was merely noteworthy, and hilarious.

Or the first time I saw my own kitchen, after I had Sarah. I brought her home from the hospital and thought: All those knives. All those sharp things and hot things. All I could see was what might hurt her.

Maybe one of my daughters has a man like Josef, or a man like Jon, hidden away in her life, in secret. Who knows what grubby or elderly boys they are bending to their own uses, or to counterpoint me? All the while protecting me from themselves, because they know I would be horrified. I see words on the front pages of newspapers that never used to be said out loud, much less printed—sexual intercourse, abortion, incest—and I want to hide their eyes, even though they are grown-up, or what passes for it. Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one.

I should get a little present for each of them, as I always did when they were younger and I went away. Once I knew by instinct what they would like. I don’t any more. It’s hard for me to remember exactly what age they’ve reached. I used to resent it when my mother would forget I was an adult, but I’m approaching the maundering phase myself, digging out the yellowing baby pictures, mooning over locks of hair.

I’m squinting into a window at some Italian silk scarves, wonderful indeterminate colors, gray-blue, sea-green, when I feel a touch on my arm, a chilly jump of the heart.

“Cordelia,” I say, turning.

But it’s not Cordelia. It’s nobody I know. It’s a woman, a girl really, Middle Eastern of some kind: a long full skirt to above the ankles, printed cotton, Canadian gum-soled boots incongruous beneath; a short jacket buttoned up, a kerchief folded straight across the forehead with a pleat at either side, like a wimple. The hand that touches me is lumpy in its northern mitten, the skin of the wrist between mitten and jacket cuff brownish, like coffee with double cream. The eyes are large, as in painted waifs.

“Please,” she says. “They are killing many people.” She doesn’t say where. It could be a lot of places, or in between places; homelessness is a nationality now. Somehow the war never ended after all, it just broke up into pieces and got scattered, it gets in everywhere, you can’t shut it out. Killing is endless now, it’s an industry, there’s money in it, and the good side and the bad side are pretty hard to tell apart.

“Yes,” I say. This is the war that killed Stephen.

“Some are here. They have no, they have nothing. They would be killed…”

“Yes,” I say. “I see.” This is what I get for walking. In a car you’re more insulated. And how do I know she is what she purports to be? She could be a dope addict. In the soft touch market, scams abound.

“I have with me a family of four. Two children. They are with me, it is my, it is my own responsibility.”

She stumbles a little on responsibility, but she gets it out. She’s shy, she doesn’t like what she’s doing, this grabbing people on the street.

“Yes?”

“I am doing it.” We look at each other. She is doing it. “Twenty-five dollars can feed a family of four for a month.”

What can they be eating? Stale bread, cast-off doughnuts? Does she mean a week? If she can believe this, she deserves my money. I take off my glove, raid my purse, rustle bills, pink ones, blue ones, purple. It’s obscene to have such power; also to feel so powerless. Probably she hates me.

“Here,” I say.

She nods. She’s not grateful, merely confirmed, in her opinion of me, or of herself. She takes off her bulky-knit mitten to receive the cash. I look at our hands, her smooth one, the nails pale moons, mine with its tattered cuticles, its skin of incipient toad. She tucks the bills in between the buttons of her jacket. She must have a purse in there, out of the reach of snatching. Then she slips on the mitt, dark red with a pink wool embroidered leaf.

“God will bless you,” she says. She doesn’t say Allah. Allah I might believe. I walk away from her, pulling on my glove. Every day there’s more of it, more of that silent wailing, those starving outstretched hands, need need, help help, there’s no end.

Chapter 57

In September I leave the Swiss Chalet and return to school. I also return to the cellar of my parents’ house, because I can’t afford not to. Both of these locations are hazardous: my life is now multiple, and I am in fragments. But I’m no longer lethargic. On the contrary I am alert, I crackle with adrenaline, despite the late-summer heat. It’s treachery that does this for me, keeping on top of my own deceptions: I need to hide Josef from my parents, and Jon from all of them. I sneak around, heart in my mouth, dreading revelations; I avoid late nights, I evade and tiptoe. Strangely enough, this does not make me feel more insecure, but safer.

Two men are better than one, or at least they make me feel better. I am in love with both, I tell myself, and having two means that I don’t have to make up my mind about either of them. Josef offers me what he has always offered, plus fear. He tells me, casually, in the same way he told me about shooting a man in the head, that in most countries except this one a woman belongs to a man: if a man finds his woman with another man, he kills both of them and everyone excuses him. He says nothing about what a woman does, in the case of another woman. He tells me this while running his hand up my arm, over my shoulder, lightly across the neck, and I wonder what he suspects. He has taken to demanding speech from me; or else he puts his hand over my mouth. I close my eyes and feel him as a source of power, nebulous and shifting. I suspect there would be something silly about him, if I could see him objectively. But I can’t.

As for Jon, I know what he offers. He offers escape, running away from the grown-ups. He offers fun, and mess. He offers mischief.

I consider telling him about Josef, to see what would happen. But the danger in this would be of a different order. He would laugh at me for sleeping with Josef, whom he considers ridiculous as well as old. He would not understand how I could take such a man seriously, he would not understand the compulsion. He would think less of me.

Jon’s apartment over the luggage store is long and narrow and smells of acrylic and used socks, and has only two rooms plus the bathroom. The bathroom is purple, with red footprints painted up the wall, across the ceiling and down the opposite wall. The front room is painted stark white, the other one—the bedroom—is glossy black. Jon says this is to get back at the landlord, who is a prick. “When I move out, it’ll take him fifteen coats to cover that up,” he says.

Sometimes Jon lives in this apartment by himself; sometimes another person will be there, sometimes two, camping out on the floor in sleeping bags. These are other painters, on the lam from irate landlords or between odd jobs. When I ring the downstairs doorbell I never know who will open the door or what will be going on: the morning remains of an all-night party, a multiple argument, someone tossing their cookies in the toilet. “Tossing their cookies” is what Jon calls it. He thinks it’s funny. Different women pass me on the stairs, going up or down; or they are found hovering around the far end of the white room, where there’s an improvised kitchen consisting of a hot plate and an electric kettle. It’s never clear who these women are paired with; occasionally they are other art students, dropping in to talk. They don’t talk much to one another though. They talk to the men, or are silent. Jon’s pictures hang in the white room or are stacked against the walls. They change almost weekly: Jon is productive. He paints very swiftly, in violent eye-burning acrylics, reds and pinks and purples, in frenzied loops and swirls. I feel I should admire these paintings, because I’m incapable of painting that way myself, and I do admire them, in monosyllables. But secretly I don’t like them very much: I’ve seen things like this beside the highway, when something’s been run over.

However, the pictures are not supposed to be pictures of anything you would recognize. They are a moment of process, trapped on the canvas. They are pure painting.

Jon is big on purity, but only in art: it doesn’t apply to his housekeeping, which is an exuberant protest against all mothers and especially his own. He washes the dishes, when he washes them, in the bathtub, where scraps of crust and kernels of canned corn are to be seen caught in the drain. His living room floor is like a beach after the weekend. His bedsheets are a moment of process in themselves, but a moment that has gone on for some time. I prefer the top of his sleeping bag, which is less septic. The bathroom is like the bathrooms of service stations, on out-of-the-way roads, up north: a brown ring around the toilet bowl, which is likely to contain floating cigarette butts, handprints on the towels, if any, nondescript pieces of paper here and there on the floor.

At the moment I make no moves toward cleanliness. To do so would be to overstep the bounds, and to display a bourgeois lack of cool. “What are you, my mom?” I’ve heard him say, to one of the hovering women who was making feeble attempts to corral some of the moldier clutter. I don’t want to be his mom, but rather a fellow conspirator.

Making love with Jon is not the leisurely, agonizing trance it is with Josef, but rambunctious, like puppies in mud. It’s dirty, as in street fighting, as in jokes. Afterward we lie on top of his sleeping bag, eating potato chips out of the bag and giggling about nothing. Jon doesn’t think women are helpless flowers, or shapes to be arranged and contemplated, as Josef does. He thinks they are smart or stupid. These are his categories. “Listen, pal,” he says to me. “You’ve got more brains than most.” This pleases me, but also dismisses me. I can take care of myself.

Josef begins asking me where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing. I am casual and sly. I hold Jon against him like an ace: if he can be duplicitous, then so can I. But he does not talk about Susie any more. The last time I saw her was in late August, before I left the Swiss Chalet. She came in and had dinner by herself, a half chicken and some Burgundy Cherry ice cream. She’d been neglecting her hair, which was darker and straighter; her body had grown stubby, her face round. She ate in a mechanical way, as if eating was a chore, but she finished everything. It could be that she was eating for consolation, because of Josef: whatever else might happen, he would never marry her, and she must have known that. I assumed she was there to talk to me about him and I evaded her, brushing her away with a neutral smile. Her table wasn’t one of mine.

But before she left she walked right up to me. “Have you seen Josef?” she asked. Her voice was plaintive, which annoyed me.

I lied, not well. “Josef?” I said, flushing. “No. Why would I?”

“I just thought you might know where he is,” she said. She wasn’t reproachful, but hopeless. She walked out, slumping like a middle-aged woman. With such an ass end, I thought, no wonder Josef’s keeping away. He didn’t like scrawny women but there was a limit in the other direction too. Susie was letting herself go.

Now, however, she calls me. It’s late afternoon and I’m studying in the cellar when my mother summons me to the phone.

Susie’s voice on the line is a soft, desperate wail. “Elaine,” she says. “Please come over.”

“What’s the matter?” I say.

“I can’t tell you. Just come over.”

Sleeping pills, I think. That would be her style. And why me, why hasn’t she phoned Josef? I feel like slapping her.

“Are you all right?” I say.

“No,” she says, her voice rising. “I’m not all right. Something’s gone wrong.”

It doesn’t occur to me to call a taxi. Taxis are for Josef; I’m used to going everywhere on buses and streetcars, and the subway. It takes me nearly an hour to get over to The Monte Carlo. Susie didn’t tell me her apartment number and I didn’t think to ask, so I have to locate the superintendent. When I knock on the door, nobody answers, and I resort to the superintendent again.

“I know she’s in there,” I say, when he’s reluctant to unlock the door for me. “She called me. It’s an emergency.”

When I finally get in, the apartment is dark; the drapes are drawn, the windows are closed, and there’s an odd smell. Clothes are scattered here and there, jeans, winter boots, a black shawl I’ve seen Susie wearing. The furniture looks as if it’s been picked out by her parents: a square-armed off-green sofa, a wheat-colored carpet, a coffee table, two lamps with the cellophane still on the shades. None of it goes with Susie as I’ve imagined her.

On the carpet there’s a dark footprint.

Susie is behind the curtain that closes off the sleeping area. She’s lying on the bed in her pink nylon shortie nightie, white as an uncooked chicken, eyes closed. The top covers of the bed and the pink tufted spread are on the floor. Underneath her, across the sheet, is a great splotch of fresh blood, spreading out like bright red wings to either side of her.

Desolation sweeps through me: I feel, for no good reason, that I have been abandoned. Then I feel sick. I run into the bathroom and throw up. It’s worse because the toilet bowl is dark red with blood. There are footprints of blood on the white and black tiled floor, fingerprints on the sink. The wastebasket is crammed with sopping sanitary pads.

I wipe my mouth on Susie’s baby-blue towel, wash my hands in the blood-spattered sink. I don’t know what to do next; whatever this is, I don’t want to be involved. I have the fleeting, absurd idea that if she’s dead I will be accused of murder. I think of sneaking out of the apartment, closing the door behind me, covering my tracks.

Instead I go back to the bed and feel Susie’s pulse. I know that this is what you’re supposed to do. Susie is still alive.

I find the superintendent, who calls an ambulance. I also call Josef, who is not there. I ride to the hospital with Susie, in the back of the ambulance. She is now semiconscious, and I hold her hand, which is cold and small. “Don’t tell Josef,” she whispers to me. The pink nightie brings it home to me: she is none of the things I’ve thought about her, she never has been. She’s just a nice girl playing dress-ups.

But what she’s done has set her apart. It belongs to the submerged landscape of the things that are never said, which lies beneath ordinary speech like hills under water. Everyone my age knows about it. Nobody discusses it. Rumors are down there, kitchen tables, money exchanged in secret; evil old women, illegal doctors, disgrace and butchery. Down there is terror.

The two attendants are casual, and scornful. They have seen this before.

“What’d she use, a knitting needle?” one says. His tone is accusing: he may think I was helping her.

“I have no idea,” I say. “I hardly even know her.” I don’t want to be implicated.

“That’s what it usually is,” he says. “Stupid kids. You’d think they’d have more sense.”

I agree with him that she’s been stupid. At the same time I know that in her place I would have been just as stupid. I would have done what she has done, moment by moment, step by step. Like her I would have panicked, like her I would not have told Josef, like her I would not have known where to go. Everything that’s happened to her could well have happened to me.

But there is also another voice; a small, mean voice, ancient and smug, that comes from somewhere deep inside my head: It serves her right.

Josef, when he is finally located, is devastated. “The poor child, the poor child,” he says. “Why didn’t she tell me?”

“She thought you’d get mad at her,” I say coldly. “Like her parents. She thought you’d kick her out, for getting pregnant.”

Both of us know this is a possibility. “No, no,” Josef says uncertainly. “I would have taken care of her.”

This could mean several things.

He calls the hospital, but Susie refuses to see him. Something has changed in her, hardened. She tells him she might never be able to have babies. She doesn’t love him. She doesn’t want to see him ever again. Now Josef wallows. “What have I done to her?” he moans, tugging his hair. He becomes more melancholy than ever; he doesn’t want to go out for dinner, he doesn’t want to make love. He stays in his apartment, which is no longer neat and empty but is filling up with disorganized parts of his life: take-out Chinese food containers, unwashed sheets.

He says he will never get over it, what he has done to Susie. This is how he thinks of it: something he’s done, to Susie, to her inert and innocent flesh. At the same time he has been wounded by her: how can she treat him like this, cut him out of her life?

He expects me to console him, for his own guilt and the damage that’s been done to him. But I am not good at this. I am beginning to dislike him.

“It was my child,” he says.

“Would you have married her?” I ask. The spectacle of his suffering does not make me compassionate, but ruthless.

“You are cruel to me,” says Josef. This was something he used to say before, in a sexual context, teasing. Now he means it. Now he is right.

Without Susie, whatever has been keeping us in equilibrium is gone. The full weight of Josef rests on me, and he is too heavy for me. I can’t make him happy, and I resent my failure: I am not enough for him, I am inadequate. I see him as weak now, clinging, gutted like a fish. I can’t respect a man who can allow himself to be reduced to such rubble by women. I look at his doleful eyes and feel contempt. I make excuses, over the phone. I tell him I am very busy. One evening I stand him up. This is so deeply gratifying that I do it again. He tracks me down at the university, rumpled and unshaven and suddenly too old, and pleads with me as I walk between classes. I’m angered by this overlap of worlds.

“Who was that?” say the girls in the cashmere twin sets.

“Just someone I used to know,” I say lightly.

Josef waylays me outside the museum and announces I have driven him to despair: because of the way I’ve treated him, he is leaving Toronto forever. He does not fool me: he was planning to do this anyway. My mean mouth takes over.

“Good,” I say.

He gives me a pained, reproachful stare, drawing himself up into the proud, theatrical, poker-up-the-bum stance of a matador.

I walk away from him. It’s enormously pleasing to me, this act of walking away. It’s like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.

I do not dream about Josef. Instead I dream about Susie, in her black turtleneck and jeans but shorter than she really is, her hair cut into a pageboy. She’s standing on a street I know but do not recognize, among piles of smoldering autumn leaves, holding a coiled skipping rope, licking one half of an orange Popsicle.

She is not drained and boneless, as I’ve last seen her. Instead she is sly-eyed, calculating. “Don’t you know what a twin set is?” she says spitefully.

She continues to lick her Popsicle. I know I have done something wrong.

Chapter 58

Time passes, and Susie fades. Josef does not reappear.

This leaves me with Jon. I have the sense that, like one of a pair of bookends, he is incomplete by himself. But I feel virtuous, because I’m no longer hiding anything from him. This makes no difference to him, however, since he didn’t know I was hiding anything in the first place. He doesn’t know why I am less casual about what he does with the rest of his time.

I decide I’m in love with him. Though I am too cagey to say it: he might object to the vocabulary, or think he’s being pinned down.

I still go over to his long white and black apartment, still end up on top of his sleeping bag, although haphazardly: Jon isn’t big on planning in advance, or on remembering. Sometimes when I arrive at his downstairs door there’s no answer. Or else his phone gets cut off because he hasn’t paid the bill. We are a couple, in a way, though nothing is explicit between us. When he’s with me he’s with me: that’s about as far as he’ll go in his definition of what is not yet called our relationship. There are murky, smoky parties, with the lights turned out and candles flickering in bottles. The other painters are there, and assorted turtlenecked women, who have begun to appear in long, straight hair, parted in the middle. They sit in clumps, on the floor, in the dark, listening to folksongs about women being stabbed with daggers, and smoking marijuana cigarettes, which is what people do in New York. They refer to these as “dope” or “pot,” and claim they loosen up your art. Cigarettes of any kind make me choke, so I don’t smoke them. Some nights I wind up in the back hall with one or another of the painters, because I would rather not see what Jon may be getting up to with the straight-haired girls. Whatever it is, I wish he would do it in secret. But he doesn’t feel the need to hide anything: sexual possessiveness is bourgeois, and just a hangover from notions about the sanctity of private property. Nobody owns anybody.

He doesn’t say all this. All he says is, “Hey, you don’t own me.”

Sometimes the other painters are merely stoned, or drunk, but sometimes they want to tell me their problems. They do this fumblingly, in starts and stops, in short words. Their problems are mostly about their girlfriends. Soon they will be bringing me their socks to darn, their buttons to sew on. They make me feel like an aunt. This is what I do instead of jealousy, in which there is no future. Or so I think. Jon has given up on his paintings of swirls and innards. He says they are too romantic, too emotional, too sloppy, too sentimental. Now he’s doing pictures in which all the shapes are either straight lines or perfect circles. He uses masking tape to get the lines straight. He works in blocks of flat color, no impasto showing.

He calls these paintings things like Enigma: Blue and Red, or Variation: Black and White, or Opus 36. They make your eyes hurt when you look at them. Jon says this is the point. In the daytime I go to school.

Art and Archaeology is murkier and more velvety than last year, and filled with impasto and chiaroscuro. There are still Madonnas, but their bodies have lost their previous quality of suffused light and are more likely to be seen at night. There are still saints, though they no longer sit in quiet rooms or deserts, with their memento mori skulls and their doglike lions resting at their feet; instead they writhe in contorted poses, stuck full of arrows or tied to stakes. Biblical subjects tilt toward violence: Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes is now popular. There are a lot more classical gods and goddesses. There are wars, fights and slaughters, as before, but more confused and with intertwined arms and legs. There are still portraits of rich people, although in darker clothing.

As we run through the centuries, new things appear: ships by themselves, animals by themselves, such as dogs and horses. Peasants by themselves. Landscapes, with or without houses. Flowers by themselves, plates of fruit and cuts of meat, with or without lobsters. Lobsters are a favorite, because of the color. Naked women.

There is considerable overlap: a naked goddess wreathed in flowers, with a couple of dogs standing by; biblical people with or without clothes, plus or minus animals, trees, and ships. Rich people pretending to be gods and goddesses. Fruit and slaughters are not usually combined, nor are gods and peasants. The naked women are presented in the same manner as the plates of meat and dead lobsters, with the same attention to the play of candlelight on skin, the same lusciousness, the same sensuous and richly rendered detail, the same painterly delight in tactility. ( Richly rendered, I write. Painterly delight in tactility. ) They appear served up.

I don’t like these shadowy, viscous pictures. I prefer the earlier ones, with their daytime clarity, their calm arrested gestures. I have given up, too, on oil paints; I have come to dislike their thickness, their obliteration of line, their look of licked lips, the way they call attention to the brushstrokes of the painter. I can make nothing of them. What I want instead is pictures that seem to exist of their own accord. I want objects that breathe out light; a luminous flatness.

I draw with colored pencils. Or I paint in egg tempera, the technique of monks. Nobody teaches this any more, so I hunt through the library, searching for instructions. Egg tempera is difficult and messy, painstaking and, at first, heartbreaking. I muck up my mother’s kitchen floor and pots, cooking the gesso, and ruin panel after panel before I can work out how to paint it on for a smooth working surface. Or I forget about my bottles of egg yolk and water, which go bad and stink up the cellar with a smell like sulfur. I use up a lot of egg yolks. The whites I separate carefully, and take upstairs to my mother, who makes them into meringue cookies.

I draw beside the picture window in the living room upstairs, when there is nobody home, or in the daylight from the cellar window. At night I use two gooseneck lamps, each of which takes three bulbs. None of this is adequate, but it’s all I can manage. Later, I think, I will have a large studio, with skylights; though what I will paint in it is far from clear. Whatever it is will appear, even later, in colored plates, in books; like the work of Leonardo da Vinci, whose studies of hands and feet and hair and dead people I pore over.

I become fascinated with the effects of glass, and of other light-reflecting surfaces. I study paintings in which there are pearls, crystals, mirrors, shiny details of brass. I spend a long time over Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage, going over the inadequate color print of it in my textbook with a magnifying glass; what fascinates me is not the two delicate, pallid, shoulderless hand-holding figures, but the pier glass on the wall behind them, which reflects in its convex surface not only their backs but two other people who aren’t in the main picture at all. These figures reflected in the mirror are slightly askew, as if a different law of gravity, a different arrangement of space, exists inside, locked in, sealed up in the glass as if in a paperweight. This round mirror is like an eye, a single eye that sees more than anyone else looking: over this mirror is written, Johannes de Eyck fuit hic. 1434. It’s disconcertingly like a washroom scribble, something you’d write with spray paint on a wall.

There is no pier glass in our house for me to practice on. So instead I paint ginger ale bottles, wineglasses, ice cubes from the refrigerator, the glazed teapot, my mother’s fake pearl earrings. I paint polished wood, and metal: a copper-bottomed frying pan, as seen from the bottom, an aluminum double boiler. I fiddle over details, hunch over my pictures, dabbing at the highlights with tiny brushes. I’m aware that my tastes are not fashionable, and so I pursue them in secret. Jon, for instance, would call this illustration. Any picture that’s a picture of something recognizable is illustration, as far as he’s concerned. There is no spontaneous energy in this kind of work, he would say. No process. I might as well be a photographer, or Norman Rockwell. Some days I agree with him, because what have I done so far? Nothing that doesn’t look like a random sampling from the Housewares Department of the Eaton’s Catalogue. But I keep on.

On Wednesday evenings I take another night course: not Life Drawing, which is taught this year by an excitable Yugoslavian, but Advertising Art. The students are quite different from the Life Drawing bunch. They’re mostly from the Commercial division of the Art College, not the Fine Arts one. Again they’re mostly boys. Some of them have serious artistic ambitions, but they don’t drink as much beer. They’re cleaner and more earnest, and they want paying jobs when they graduate. So do I. The teacher is an elderly man, thin and defeated-looking. He thinks he has failed in the real world, although he once created a famous illustration for canned pork and beans that I can remember from childhood. We ate a lot of canned pork and beans, during the war. His specialty is the rendering of smiles: the trick is to be able to do teeth, nice white even teeth, without putting in the separation between each tooth, which makes the smile appear too canine or too much like false teeth (which he himself has). He tells me I show ability in smiles, and that I could go far.

Jon teases me a little about this night course, but not as much as I thought he would. He refers to the teacher as Mr. Beanie Weenie, and lets it go at that.

Chapter 59

I graduate from university, and discover that there’s nothing much I can do with my degree. Or nothing I want to do at any rate. I don’t want to go on to graduate work, I don’t want to teach high school or be a curator’s flunky in a museum.

By this time I’ve accumulated five night courses from the Art College, four of them in the Commercial area, and I trot them and my portfolio of smiles and dishes of caramel pudding and canned peach halves around to various ad agencies. For these purposes I buy a beige wool suit (on sale), medium-heel pumps to match, some pearl button earrings and a tasteful silk scarf (on sale) at Simpsons; this on the recommendation of my last night course instructor, in Layout and Design, who was a woman. She also recommended a haircut, but I would only go so far as a French roll, engineered with the help of some big rollers and hair-setting gel and a lot of bobby pins. Eventually I get a menial job doing mock-ups, and a small furnished two-bedroom apartment with kitchenette and separate entrance in a large crumbling house in the Annex, north of Bloor. I use the second bedroom for painting, and keep the door to it closed.

This place has a real bed, and a real kitchen sink. Jon comes for dinner and teases me about the towels I’ve bought (on sale), the ovenproof dishes I’ve acquired, my shower curtain. “Better Homes and Gardens, eh?” he says. He teases me about the bed, but he likes sleeping in it. He comes to my place, now, more often than I go to his.

My parents sell their house and move up north. My father has left the university and has gone back to research; he’s now head of the Forest Insect Laboratory at Sault Ste. Marie. He says Toronto is getting overpopulated, and also polluted. He says the lower Great Lakes are the world’s largest sewer and that if we knew what was going into the drinking water we would all become alcoholics. As for the air, it’s so full of chemicals we should be wearing gas masks. Up north you can still breathe. My mother was not too happy to leave her garden, but made the best of it: “At least it’s a chance to throw out a lot of that junk in the cellar,” she said. They’ve started another garden in the Soo, although the growing season is shorter. In the summers though they’re mostly on the road, driving from infestation to infestation. There is no shortage of insect life.

I don’t miss my parents. Not yet. Or rather I don’t want to be living with them. I am happy to be left to my own devices, my own messes. I can eat haphazardly now, snack on junk food and takeouts without worrying about balanced meals, go to bed when I like, let my dirty laundry rot, neglect the dishes. I get a promotion. After a time I move to the art department of a publishing company, where I design book covers. At night, when Jon is not there, I paint. Sometimes I forget to go to bed, and find that it has become dawn and I have to change into my work clothes and go to work. I am groggy on those days, and have trouble hearing what is said to me; but nobody seems to notice. I get postcards and the occasional short letter from my mother, sent from places like Duluth and Kapuskasing. She says the roads are getting too crowded. “Too many trailers,” she says. I reply with news about my job, my apartment, and the weather. I don’t mention Jon, because there is no news. News would be something definite and respectable, such as an engagement. My brother Stephen is here and there. He has become more taciturn: he too now communicates by postcard. One comes from Germany, with a man in short leather pants on it and the message: Great particle accelerator; one from Nevada, with a cactus and the note, Interesting life forms. He goes to Bolivia on what I suppose to be a holiday, and sends a cigar-smoking woman in a high-crowned hat: Excellent butterflies. Hope you are well. At one point he gets married, which is announced by a postcard from San Francisco, with the Golden Gate Bridge and a sunset on it, and, Got married. Annette sends regards. This is all I hear about it until several years later, when he sends a postcard of the Statue of Liberty from New York, which says: Got divorced. I assume he has been puzzled by both events, as if they’re not something he’s done himself, on purpose, but things that have happened to him accidentally, like stubbing your toe. I think of him as walking into marriage as into a park, in a foreign country, at night, unaware of the possibilities for damage.

He turns up in Toronto to give a lecture, at a conference, notifying me in advance with a postcard of a statue of Paul Revere, from Boston: Arrive Sun. 12th. My paper is on Mon. See you. I attend the lecture, not because I have high hopes for it on my own account—the title of it is “The First Picoseconds and the Quest for a Unified Field Theory: Some Minor Speculations”—but because he is my brother. I sit nibbling my fingers as the university auditorium fills with the audience, which is composed largely of men. Most of them look like people I wouldn’t have gone out with in high school. Then my brother comes in, with the man who will introduce him. I haven’t seen my brother for years; he’s thinner, and his hair is beginning to recede. He needs glasses to read his text; I can see them poking out of his breast pocket. Someone has upgraded his wardrobe for him and he’s wearing a suit and tie. These alterations don’t make him appear more normal, however, but more anomalous, like a creature from an alien planet disguised in human clothing. He has a look of amazing brilliance, as if at any minute his head will light up and become transparent, disclosing a huge brightly colored brain inside. At the same time he looks rumpled and bewildered, as if he’s just wakened from a pleasant dream to find himself surrounded by Munchkins.

The man introducing my brother says he needs no introduction, then goes on to list the papers he has written, the awards he has won, the contributions he has made. There is clapping, and my brother goes to the podium. He stands in front of a white projection screen, clears his throat, shifts from one foot to the other, puts on his glasses. Now he looks like someone who will turn up, later, on a stamp. He is ill at ease and I am nervous for him. I think he will mumble. But once he begins he is fine.

“When we gaze at the night sky,” he says, “we are looking at fragments of the past. Not only in the sense that the stars as we see them are echoes of events that occurred light-years distant in time and space: everything up there and indeed everything down here is a fossil, a leftover from the first picoseconds of creation, when the universe crystallized out from the primal homogeneous plasma. In the first picosecond, conditions were scarcely imaginable. If we could travel in a time machine back toward this explosive moment, we would find ourselves in a universe replete with energies we do not understand and strangely behaving forces distorted beyond recognition. The farther back we probe, the more extreme these conditions become. Current experimental facilities can take us only a short way along this path. Beyond that point, theory is our only guide.” After this he continues, in a language that sounds like English but is not, because I can’t understand one word of it.

Luckily there is something to look at. The room darkens and the screen lights up, and there is the universe, or parts of it: the black void punctuated by galaxies and stars, white-hot, blue-hot, red. An arrow moves among them on the screen, searching and finding. Then there are diagrams and strings of numbers, and references to things that everyone here seems to recognize except me. There are, apparently, a great many more dimensions than four.

Murmurs of interest ripple through the room; there are whisperings, the rustling of paper. At the end, when the lights have come on again, my brother returns to language. “But what of the moment beyond the first moment?” he says. “Or does it even make sense to use the word before, since time cannot exist without space and space-time without events and events without matter-energy? But there is something that must have existed before. That something is the theoretical framework, the parameters within which the laws of energy must operate. Judging from the scanty but mounting evidence now available to us, if the universe was created with a fiat lux, that fiat must have been expressed, not in Latin, but in the one truly universal language: mathematics.” This sounds a lot like metaphysics to me, but the men in the audience don’t seem to take it amiss. There is applause.

I go to the reception afterward, which offers the usual university fare: bad sherry, thick tea, cookies out of a package. The numbers men murmur in groups, shake one another’s hands. Among them I feel overly visible, and out of place.

I locate my brother. “That was great,” I say to him.

“Glad you got something out of it,” he says with irony.

“Well, math was never my totally strong point,” I say. He smiles benignly. We exchange news of our parents, who when last I heard from them were in Kenora, and heading west.

“Still counting the old budworms, I guess,” says my brother.

I remember how he used to throw up by the side of the road, and his smell of cedar pencils. I remember our life in tents and logging camps, the scent of cut lumber and gasoline and crushed grass and rancid cheese, the way we used to sneak around in the dark. I remember his wooden swords with the orange blood, his comic book collection. I see him crouching on the swampy ground, calling Lie down, you’re dead. I see him dive-bombing the dishes with forks. All my early images of him are clear and sharp and Technicolor: his baggy-legged shorts, his striped T-shirt, his raggedy hair bleached by the sun, his winter breeches and leather helmet. Then there is a gap, and he appears again on the other side of it, unaccountably two years older.

“Remember that song you used to sing?” I say. “During the war. Sometimes you whistled it. ”Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer‘?“

He looks perplexed, frowns a little. “I can’t say I do,” he says.

“You used to draw all those explosions. You borrowed my red pencil, because yours was used up.”

He looks at me, not as if he doesn’t remember these things himself, but as if he’s puzzled that I do. “You can’t have been very old then,” he says.

I wonder what it was like for him, having a little sister tagging along. For me, he was a given: there was never a time when he didn’t exist. But I was not a given, for him. Once he was singular, and I was an intrusion. I wonder if he resented me when I was born. Maybe he thought I was a pain in the bum; there’s no doubt that he thought this sometimes. Considering everything and on the whole though, he made the best of me.

“Remember that jar of marbles you buried, under the bridge?” I say. “You would never tell me why you did it.” The best ones, the red and blue puries, the waterbabies and cat’s eyes, put into the ground, out of reach. He would have stamped the dirt down on top of the jar, and scattered leaves.

“I think I recall that,” he says, as if not entirely willing to be reminded of his former, younger self. It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he’s lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he’s forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?

“Maybe they’re still down there,” I say. “I wonder if anyone ever found them, when they built that new bridge. You buried the map, too.”

“So I did,” he says, smiling in his old, secret, maddening way. He still isn’t telling, and I am reassured: despite his changed façade, his thinning hair and provisional suit, he is still the same person underneath. After he has gone back, to wherever he’s going next, I think of getting him a star named after himself, for his birthday. I have seen an advertisement for these: you send in your money, and you get a certificate with a star map, your own star marked on it. Possibly he would find this amusing. But I’m not sure that the word birthday, for him, would still have meaning.

Chapter 60

Jon has given up his eye-damaging geometrical shapes and is painting pictures that look like commercial illustrations: huge Popsicles, giant salt and pepper shakers, peach halves in syrup, paper dishes overflowing with french fries. He does not talk about purity any more but of the necessity of using common cultural sign systems to reflect the iconic banality of our times. I think I could give him a few tips from my own professional experience: his peach halves could be glossier, for instance. But I don’t say this.

Increasingly, Jon paints these things in my living room. He’s been gradually moving in his things, beginning with the paints and canvas. He says he can’t paint at his place because there are too many people in it, which is true: the front room is silting up with American draft dodgers, a shifting population, all of whom seem to be friends of friends. Jon has to step over them to get to the walls, because they lie around on their sleeping bags, forlorn and smoking dope, wondering what to do next. They are depressed because Toronto isn’t the United States without a war on, as they thought it would be, but some limbo they have strayed into by accident and can’t get out of. Toronto is nowhere, and nothing happens in it. Jon stays over three or four nights a week. I don’t ask what he does on the other nights. He thinks he is making a large concession, to something he assumes I want. And maybe I do want it. When I’m alone, I let the dishes accumulate in the sink, I allow colored fur to grow in jars of leftovers, I use up all my underpants before washing any of them. But Jon turns me into a model of tidiness and efficiency. I get up in the morning and make coffee for him, I set two places at the table, with my newly acquired ovenproof earthenware in off-white, with speckles. I don’t even mind doing his laundry at the Laundromat, along with my own.

Jon is not used to having all these clean clothes. “You’re the sort of girl who should get married,” he says one day, when I appear with a pile of folded shirts and jeans. I think this may be an insult, but I’m not sure.

“Do your own laundry then,” I say.

“Hey,” he says, “don’t be like that.”

On Sundays we sleep late, make love, go for walks, holding hands.

One day, when nothing has changed, nothing has been done or happened that is any different from usual, I discover I am pregnant. My first reaction is unbelief. I count and recount, wait another day, then another, listening to the inside of my body as if for a footfall. Finally I slink off to the drugstore with some pee in a bottle, feeling like a criminal. Married women go to their doctors. Unmarried women do this. The man in the drugstore tells me the results are positive. “Congratulations,” he says, with disapproving irony. He can see right through me.

I’m afraid to tell Jon. He will expect me to go and have it out, like a tooth. He will say “it.” Or he will want me to sit in the bathtub while he pours boiling water into it; he will want me to drink gin. Or else he will vanish. He’s said, often enough, that artists can’t live like other people, tied down to demanding families and expensive material possessions.

I think about things I’ve heard: drinking a lot of gin, knitting needles, coat hangers; but what do you do with them? I think about Susie and her wings of red blood. Whatever it was she did, I will not do it. I am too frightened. I refuse to end up like her.

I go back to my apartment, lie down on the floor. My body is numb, inert, without sensation. I can hardly move, I can hardly breathe. I feel as if I’m at the center of noth ingness, of a black square that is totally empty; that I’m exploding slowly outward, into the cold burning void of space. When I wake up it’s the middle of the night. I don’t know where I am. I think I’m back in my old room with the cloudy light fixture, in my parents’ house, lying on the floor because I’ve fallen out of bed, as I used to do when we had the army cots. But I know that the house has been sold, that my parents are no longer there. I have somehow been overlooked, left behind.

This is only the end of a dream. I get up, turn on the lights, make myself some hot milk, sit at the kitchen table, shivering with cold.

Until now I’ve always painted things that were actually there, in front of me. Now I begin to paint things that aren’t there.

I paint a silver toaster, the old kind, with knobs and doors. One of the doors is partly open, revealing the red-hot grill within. I paint a glass coffee percolator, with bubbles gathering in the clear water; one drop of dark coffee has fallen, and is beginning to spread.

I paint a wringer washing machine. The washing machine is a squat cylinder of white enamel. The wringer itself is a disturbing flesh-tone pink.

I know that these things must be memories, but they do not have the quality of memories. They are not hazy around the edges, but sharp and clear. They arrive detached from any context; they are simply there, in isolation, as an object glimpsed on the street is there.

I have no image of myself in relation to them. They are suffused with anxiety, but it’s not my own anxiety. The anxiety is in the things themselves.

I paint three sofas. One of them is chintz, in dirty rose; one is maroon velvet, with doilies. The one in the middle is apple-green. On the middle cushion of the middle sofa is an egg cup, five times life-size, with a broken eggshell in it.

I paint a glass jar, with a bouquet of nightshade rising out or it like smoke, like the darkness from a genie’s bottle. The stems twist and intertwine, the branches cluster with red berries, purple flowers. Scarcely visible, far back in the dense tangle of the glossy leaves, are the eyes of cats. In the daytime I go to work, come back, talk, and eat. Jon comes over, eats, sleeps, and goes away. I watch him with detachment; he notices nothing. Every move I make is sodden with unreality. When no one is around, I bite my fingers. I need to feel physical pain, to attach myself to daily life. My body is a separate thing. It ticks like a clock; time is inside it. It has betrayed me, and I am disgusted with it. I paint Mrs. Smeath. She floats up without warning, like a dead fish, materializing on a sofa I am drawing: first her white, sparsely haired legs without ankles, then her thick waist and potato face, her eyes in their steel rims. The afghan is draped across her thighs, the rubber plant rises behind her like a fan. On her head is the felt hat like a badly done-up package that she used to wear on Sundays. She looks out at me from the flat surface of paint, three-dimensional now, smiling her closed half-smile, smug and accusing. Whatever has happened to me is my own fault, the fault of what is wrong with me. Mrs. Smeath knows what it is. She isn’t telling.

One picture of Mrs. Smeath leads to another. She multiplies on the walls like bacteria, standing, sitting, flying, with clothes, without clothes, following me around with her many eyes like those 3-D postcards of Jesus you can get in the cheesier corner stores. Sometimes I turn her faces to the wall.

Chapter 61

I wheel Sarah along the street in her stroller, avoiding the mounds of melting slush. Although she is over two, she still can’t walk fast enough in her red rubber boots to keep up when we go shopping. Also this way I can hang the grocery bags from the stroller handle, or tuck them in around her. I know a great many such minor tricks now, involving objects and gadgets and the rearrangement of space, that I didn’t need to know before.

We’re living in a larger place now, the three of us: the upper two stories of a red brick semidetached house with a sagging wooden square-pillared porch, on a side street west along Bloor. There are a lot of Italians around here. The older women, the married ones and the widows, wear black clothes and no makeup, as I used to do. When I was in the later months of pregnancy, they would smile at me, as if I was almost one of them. Now they smile at Sarah first.

I myself wear miniskirts in primary colors, with tights underneath and boots, and an ankle-length coat over top. I am not entirely satisfied with this clothing. It’s hard to sit down in. Also I’ve put on some weight, since having Sarah. These skimpy skirts and tiny bodices were designed for women a lot skinnier than I am, of which there now seem to be dozens, hundreds: weasel-faced girls with long hair hanging to the place where their bums ought to be, their chests flat as plywood, making me feel bulbous by comparison.

A new vocabulary has come with them. Far out, they say. Cosmic. Blew my mind. Uptight. Let it all bang out. I consider myself too old for such words: they are for young people, and I am no longer young. I have found a gray hair behind my left ear. In a couple of years I will be thirty. Over the hill. I wheel Sarah up the walk, unbuckle her, set her at the foot of the porch steps, unhook and lift out the grocery bags, fold up the stroller. I walk Sarah up the steps to the front door: these steps can be slippery. I go back for the bags and the stroller, lug them up the steps, fumble in my purse for the key, open the door, lift Sarah inside, then the bags and stroller, close and lock the door. I walk Sarah up the inside stairs, open the inside door, put her inside, close the baby gate, go back down for the bags, carry them up, open the gate, go in, close the gate, go into the kitchen, set the bags on the table, and begin to unpack: eggs, toilet paper, cheese, apples, bananas, carrots, hot dogs, and buns. I worry about serving too many hot dogs: when I was young they were carnival food, and supposed to be bad for you. You might get polio from them.

Sarah is hungry, so I stop unpacking the groceries to get her a glass of milk. I love her ferociously, and am frequently irritated by her.

For the first year I was tired all the time, and fogged by hormones. But I’m coming out of it now. I’m looking around me.

Jon comes in, scoops Sarah up, gives her a kiss, tickles her face with his beard, carries her squealing off into the living room. “Let’s hide on Mummy,” he says. He has a way of putting the two of them into the same camp, in pretended league against me, that annoys me more than it should. Also I don’t like it when he calls me Mummy. I am not his mummy, but hers. But he too loves her. This was a surprise, and I’m not finished being grateful for it. I don’t yet see Sarah as a gift I have given him, but one he has allowed me. It’s because of her that we got married, at City Hall, for the oldest of reasons. One that was nearly obsolete. But we didn’t know that.

Jon, who is a lapsed Lutheran from Niagara Falls, thought we should go there for our honeymoon. He broke up over the word honeymoon. He thought it would be a sort of joke: self-conscious corniness, like a painting of a giant Coke bottle. “Amazing visuals,” he said. He wanted to take me to the waxworks, the flower clock, the Maid of the Mist. He wanted us to get satin shirts with our names embroidered on the pockets and NIAGARA FALLS across the back. But I was silently offended by this approach to our marriage. Whatever else we were getting into as the weeks passed one another and my body swelled like a slow flesh balloon, it was not a joke. So we ended by not going. Right after we were married, I lapsed into a voluptuous sloth. My body was like a feather bed, warm, boneless, deeply comforting, in which I lay cocooned. It may have been the pregnancy, sponging up my adrenaline. Or it may have been relief. Jon glowed for me then like a plum in sunlight, richly colored, perfect in form. I would lie in bed beside him or sit at the kitchen table, running my eyes over him like hands. My adoration was physical, and wordless. I would think Ah, nothing more. Like a breath breathed out. Or I would think, like a child, Mine. Knowing it wasn’t true. Stay that way, I would think. But he could not.

Jon and I have begun to have fights. Our fights are secret fights, conducted at night, when Sarah is asleep: a squabbling in undertones. We keep them from her, because if they are frightening to us—as they are—how much more frightening will they be to her?

We thought we were running away from the grown-ups, and now we are the grown-ups: this is the crux of it. Neither of us wants to take it on, not the whole thing. We compete, for instance, over which of us is in worse shape. If I get a headache, he gets a migraine. If his back hurts, my neck is killing me. Neither one of us wants to be in charge of the Band-Aids. We fight over our right to remain children. At first I do not win these fights, because of love. Or so I say to myself. If I were to win them, the order of the world would be changed, and I am not ready for that. So instead I lose the fights, and master different arts. I shrug, tighten my mouth in silent rebuke, turn my back in bed, leave questions unanswered. I say, “Do it however you like,” provoking sullen fury from Jon. He does not want just capitulation, but admiration, enthusiasm, for himself and his ideas, and when he doesn’t get it he feels cheated.

Jon has a job now, supervising part-time at a co-op graphics studio. I am part-time as well. Between the two of us, we can manage to cover the rent.

Jon is no longer painting on canvas, or on anything flat. In fact he is no longer painting. Flat surfaces with paint on them he calls “art-on-the-wall.” There is no reason for art to be on the wall, there’s no reason for it to have a frame around it or paint on it. Instead he is making constructions, out of things he gathers from junk heaps or finds here and there. He makes wooden boxes with compartments, each containing a different item: three pairs of outsize ladies’ panties in fluorescent colors, a plaster hand with long false nails glued onto it, an enema bag, a toupee. He makes a motorized furry bedroom slipper that runs around on the floor by itself, and a family of diaphragms fitted up with monster movie eyes and mouths and jumping legs underneath that hop around on the table like radiation-damaged oysters. He’s decorated our bathroom in red and orange, with purple mermaids swimming on the walls, and hooked up the toilet seat so that it plays “Jingle Bells” when it’s raised. This is for Sarah’s benefit. He makes toys for her as well, and lets her play with ends of wood and leftover pieces of cloth and some of his less dangerous tools, while he’s working.

That’s when he’s here. Which is by no means most of the time.

For the first year after Sarah was born I didn’t paint at all. I was freelancing then, working at home, and just keeping up with the few book cover assignments I’d taken on was a major effort. I felt clogged, as if swimming with my clothes on. Now that I’m half a day at work, it’s better. I’ve done some of what I call my own work as well, although hesitantly: my hands are out of practice, my eyes disused. Most of what I do is drawing, because the preparation of the surface, the laborious underpainting and detailed concentration of egg tempera are too much for me. I have lost confidence: perhaps all I will ever be is what I am now.

I’m sitting on a wooden folding chair, on a stage. The curtains are open and I can see the auditorium, which is small, battered, and empty. Also on the stage is a stage set, not yet dismantled, for a play which has just closed. The set consists of the future, which will be sparsely furnished, but will contain a good many cylindrical black columns and several austere flights of stairs. Arranged around the columns on other wooden chairs, and sitting here and there on the stairs, are seventeen women. Every one of them is an artist, or something like it. There are several actresses, two dancers, three painters besides me. There’s one magazine writer, and an editor from my own publishing company. One woman is a radio announcer (daytime classical music), one does puppet shows for children, one is a professional clown. One is a set designer, which is why we’re here: she got us the space for this meeting. The reason I know all of this is that we had to say our names, going around the circle, and what we do. Not for a living: for a living is different, especially for the actresses. Also for me. This is a meeting. It’s not the first such meeting I’ve been to, but I still find it startling. For one thing, it’s all women. That in itself is unusual, and has an air of secrecy about it, and an unfocused, attractive dirtiness: the last all-women gathering I was at was Health Class in high school, where the girls were separated off from the boys so they could be told about the curse. Not that the word was used. “Those days” was the accepted, official phrase. It was explained that tampons, although not recommended for young girls, which we knew meant virgins, could not get lost inside you and end up in your lung. There was considerable giggling, and when the teacher spelled blood—“B-L-O-O-D”—one girl fainted. Today there is no giggling or fainting. This meeting is about anger.

Things are being said that I have never consciously thought about before. Things are being overthrown. Why, for instance, do we shave our legs? Wear lipstick? Dress up in slinky clothing? Alter our shapes?

What is wrong with us the way we are?

It’s Jody asking these questions, one of the other painters. She does not dress up or alter her shape. She wears workboots, and striped coveralls, one leg of which she hauls up to show us the real leg underneath, which is defiantly, resplendently hairy. I think of my own cowardly, naked legs, and feel brainwashed, because I know I cannot go all the way. I draw the line at armpits. What is wrong with us the way we are is men.

Many things are said about men. Two of these women have been raped, for instance. One has been beaten up. Others have been discriminated against at work, passed over or ignored; or their art has been ridiculed, dismissed as too feminine. Others have begun to compare their salaries with those of men, and have found them to be less.

I have no doubt that all of these things are true. Rapists exist, and those who molest children and strangle girls. They exist in the shadows, like the sinister men who lurk in ravines, not one of whom I have ever seen. They are violent, wage wars, commit murders. They do less work and make more money. They shove the housework off on women.

They are insensitive and refuse to confront their own emotions. They are easily fooled, and wish to be: for instance, with a few gasps and wheezes they can be conned into thinking they are sexual supermen. There are giggles of recognition over this. I begin to wonder if I’ve been faking orgasm without knowing it.

But I am on shaky ground, in this testifying against men, because I live with one. Women like me, with a husband, a child, have been referred to with some scorn as nukes, for nuclear family. Pronatalist is suddenly a bad word. There are some other nukes in this group, but they are not in the majority and say nothing in their own defence. It seems to be worthier to be a woman with a child but no man. That way you’ve paid your dues. If you stay with the man, whatever problems you are having are your own fault. None of this is actually said.

These meetings are supposed to make me feel more powerful, and in some ways they do. Rage can move mountains. In addition, they amaze me: it’s shocking, and exciting, to hear such things emerging from the mouths of women. I begin to think that women I have thought were stupid, or wimps, may simply have been hiding things, as I was.

But these meetings also make me nervous, and I don’t understand why. I don’t say much, I am awkward and uncertain, because whatever I do say might be the wrong thing. I have not suffered enough, I haven’t paid my dues, I have no right to speak. I feel as if I’m standing outside a closed door while decisions are being made, disapproving judgments are being pronounced, inside, about me. At the same time I want to please.

Sisterhood is a difficult concept for me, I tell myself, because I never had a sister. Brotherhood is not. I work at night, when Sarah is asleep, or in the early morning. Right now I am painting the Virgin Mary. I paint her in blue, with the usual white veil, but with the head of a lioness. Christ lies in her lap in the form of a cub. If Christ is a lion, as he is in traditional iconography, why wouldn’t the Virgin Mary be a lioness? Anyway it seems to me more accurate about motherhood than the old bloodless milk-and-water Virgins of art history. My Virgin Mary is fierce, alert to danger, wild. She stares levely out at the viewer with her yellow lion’s eyes. A gnawed bone lies at her feet.

I paint the Virgin Mary descending to the earth, which is covered with snow and slush. She is wearing a winter coat over her blue robe, and has a purse slung over her shoulder. She’s carrying two brown paper bags full of groceries. Several things have fallen from the bags: an egg, an onion, an apple. She looks tired.

Our Lady of Perpetual Help, I call her.

Jon does not like me painting at night. “When else can I do it?” I say. “You tell me.” There is only one answer, one that would not involve the loss of his own time: Don’t do it at all. But he doesn’t say this. He doesn’t say what he thinks of my paintings, but I know anyway. He thinks they are irrelevant. In his mind, what I paint is lumped in with the women who paint flowers. Lumped is the word. The present tense is moving forward, discarding concept after concept, and I am off to the side somewhere, fiddling with egg tempera and flat surfaces, as if the twentieth century has never happened. There is freedom in this: because it doesn’t matter what I do, I can do what I like. We have begun to slam doors, and to throw things. I throw my purse, an ashtray, a package of chocolate chips, which breaks on impact. We are picking up chocolate chips for days. Jon throws a glass of milk, the milk, not the glass: he knows his own strength, as I do not. He throws a box of Cheerios, unopened. The things I throw miss, although they are worse things. The things he throws hit, but are harmless. I begin to see how the line is crossed, between histrionics and murder. Jon smashes things, and glues the shards into place in the pattern of breakage. I can see the appeal. Jon sits in the living room, having a beer with one of the painters. I am in the kitchen, slamming around the pots.

“What’s with her?” says the painter.

“She’s mad because she’s a woman,” Jon says. This is something I haven’t heard for years, not since high school. Once it was a shaming thing to say, and crushing to have it said about you, by a man. It implied oddness, deformity, sexual malfunction.

I go to the living room doorway. “I’m not mad because I’m a woman,” I say. “I’m mad because you’re an asshole.”

Chapter 62

Some of us from the meetings are having a group show, of women only. This is risky business, and we know it. Jody says we could get trashed, by the male art establishment. Their line these days is that great art transcends gender. Jody’s line is that art so far has been mostly men admiring one another. A woman artist can get admired by them only as a sideline, a sort of freaky exception. “Titless wonders,” says Jody.

We could get trashed by women as well, for singling ourselves out, putting ourselves forward. We could be called elitist. There are many pitfalls.

There are four of us in on the show. Carolyn, who has an angelic moon face framed in a Dutch cut with dark bangs, calls herself a fabric artist. Some of her pieces are patchwork quilts, in inventive designs. One has condoms stuffed with tampons (unused), glued onto it in the shapes of letters, spelling out WHAT IS LUV? Another is done in florals, with an appliquéd message:

UP YOUR

MAN

IFESTO!

Or else she makes wall hangings out of toilet paper twisted like rope, braided and woven with reels of outdated girlie movies, the kind that used to be called “art films.” “Used porn,” she says cheerfully. “Why not recycle it, eh?”

Jody does store mannequins, sawn apart, the pieces glued back together in disturbing poses. She, fixes them up with paint and collage and steel wool stuck on at appropriate places. One hangs from a meat hook, stuck through the solar plexus, another has trees and flowers painted all over her face like fine tattooing, with a delicacy I wouldn’t have suspected from Jody. Another has the heads of six or seven old dolls attached to her stomach. I recognize some of them: Sparkle Plenty, Betsy Wetsy, Barbara Ann Scott.

Zillah is blond and skimpy, like the frail flower girls of a few years back. She calls her pieces Lintscapes. They are made from the wads of feltlike fuzz that accumulate on drier filters and can be peeled off in sheets. I have admired these myself as I stuffed them into the wastebasket: their texture, their soft colors. Zillah has bought a number of towels in different shades and run them repeatedly through the dryer, to get shades of pink, of gray-green, of off-white, as well as the standard underneath-the-bed gray. These she has cut and shaped and glued carefully to a backing, to form multilayered compositions that resemble cloudscapes. I am entranced by them, and wish I had thought of this first. “It’s like making a soufflé,”

Zillah says. “One breath of cold air and you’re dead in the water.”

Jody, who is more in charge than anyone, has gone through my paintings and chosen the ones for the show. She’s taken some of the still lifes, Wringer, Toaster, Deadly Nightshade, and Three Witches. Three Witches is the one of the three different sofas.

Apart from the still lifes, what I’m showing is mostly figurative, although there are a couple of constructions made from drinking straws and uncooked macaroni, and one called Silver Paper. I didn’t want to include these, but Jody liked them. “Domestic materials,” she said. The Virgin Mary pieces are in the show, and all of the Mrs. Smeaths. I thought there were too many of her, but Jody wanted them. “It’s woman as anticheesecake,” she said. “Why should it always be young, beautiful women? It’s good to see the aging female body treated with compassion, for a change.” This, only in more high-flown language, is what she’s written in the catalogue. The show is held in a small defunct supermarket, west on Bloor Street. It is to be converted to a hamburger heaven, shortly; but meanwhile it’s empty, and one of the women who knows a cousin of the wife of the developer who owns it has managed to persuade him to let us use it for two weeks. She told him that in the Renaissance the most famous dukes were known for their aesthetic taste and patronage of the arts, and this idea appealed to him. He doesn’t know it’s an all-woman show; just some artists, is what she told him. He says it’s okay with him as long as we don’t get the place dirty.

“What’s to get dirty?” says Carolyn, as we look around. She’s right, it’s dirty enough already. The produce counters and shelves have been torn up, there are patches ripped off the erstwhile linoleum tile flooring where the wide bare boards show through, lights dangle in wire cages; only some of them work. The checkout counters are still in place, though, and there are a few tattered signs drooping on the walls: SPECIAL 3/95¢. FRESH FROM CALIFORNIA. MEAT LIKE YOU LIKE IT.

“We can make this space work for us,” says Jody, striding around with her hands in her coverall pockets.

“How?” says Zillah.

“I didn’t take judo for nothing,” says Jody. “Let the momentum of the enemy carry him off balance.”

In practice this means that she appropriates the MEAT LIKE YOU LIKE IT sign and incorporates it into one of her constructions, an especially violent dismemberment in which the mannequin, dressed only in ropes and leather straps, has ended up with her head tucked upside-down under her arm.

“If you were a man you’d get stomped for that,” Carolyn tells her.

Jody smiles sweetly. “But I’m not one.”

We work for three days, arranging and rearranging. After we have the stuff in place, there are the rented trestle tables to be assembled for the bar, the hooch and eats to be bought. Hooch and eats are Jody’s words. We get Canadian wine in gallon jugs, Styrofoam cups to serve it in, pretzels and potato chips, hunks of cheddar cheese wrapped in plastic film, Ritz crackers. This is what we can afford; but also there’s an unspoken rule that the food has to be unwaveringly plebeian. Our catalogue is a couple of mimeographed sheets stapled together at the top corner. This catalogue is supposed to be a collective effort, but in fact Jody has written most of it, because she has the knack. Carolyn makes a banner, out of bedsheets dyed to look as if someone’s bled on them, to hang above the outside door:

F(OUR) FOR ALL.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” says Jon, who has dropped by, supposedly to pick me up, really to see. He is suspicious of my doings with women, although he will not demean himself by saying so. He does however refer to them as “the girls.”

“It’s a pun on free for all” I tell him, although I know he knows this. “Plus it encapsulates the word our.” Encapsulate is also one of Jody’s words.

He does not comment.

It’s the banner that attracts the newspapers: this kind of thing is new, it’s an event, and it promises disruption. One newspaper sends a photographer, in advance, who says, jokingly, “Come on, girls, burn a few bras for me,” while he’s taking our pictures.

“Pig,” says Carolyn in a low voice.

“Cool it,” says Jody. “They love it when you freak.”

Before the opening, I come to the gallery early. I pace around the show, up and down the former aisles, around the checkout counters where Jody’s sculptures pose like models on a runway, past the wall where Carolyn’s quilts yell defiance. This is strong work, I think. Stronger than mine. Even Zillah’s gauzy constructions appear to me to have a confidence and subtlety, an assurance, that my own paintings lack: in this context my pictures are too highly finished, too decorative, too merely pretty. I have strayed off course, I have failed to make a statement. I am peripheral. I drink some of the awful wine and then some more, and feel better; although I know that later I will feel worse. The stuff tastes like something you’d use to tenderize pot roast. I stand against the wall, beside the door, hanging onto my Styrofoam cup. I’m standing here because it’s the exit. Also the entrance: people arrive, and then more people.

Many, most of these people are women. There are all kinds of them. They have long hair, long skirts, jeans and overalls, earrings, caps like construction workers‘, lavender shawls. Some of them are other painters, some just look like it. Carolyn and Jody and Zillah are here by now, and there are greetings called, squeezes of the arm, kisses on cheeks, shrieks of delight. They all seem to have more friends than I do, more close women friends. I’ve never really considered it before, this absence; I’ve assumed that other women were like me. They were, once. And now they are not.

There is Cordelia, of course. But I haven’t seen her for years.

Jon is not here yet, although he said he would come. We even got a baby-sitter so he could. I think maybe I will flirt with someone, someone inappropriate, just to see what could happen; but there aren’t many possibilities, because there aren’t many men. I make my way through the crowd with another Styrofoam cup of the dreadful red marinade, trying not to feel left out. Right behind me a woman’s voice says, “Well, they certainly are different. ” It’s the quintessential Toronto middle-class-matron put-down, the ultimate disapproval. It’s what they say about slums. It would not look good over the sofa, is what she means. I turn and look at her: a well-cut silver-gray suit, pearls, a suave scarf, expensive suede shoes. She’s convinced of her own legitimacy, her right to pronounce: I and my kind are here on sufferance.

“Elaine, I’d like you to meet my mother,” says Jody. The idea of this woman being Jody’s mother is breathtaking. “Mum, Elaine did the flower painting. The one you like?”

She means Deadly Nightshade. “Oh yes,” says Jody’s mother, smiling warmly. “You girls are all so gifted. I did like that one, the colors are lovely. But what are all those eyes doing in it?”

This is so much what my own mother would say that I am swept with longing. I want my mother to be here. She would dislike most of this, the cut-up mannequins especially; she wouldn’t understand it at all. But she would smile, and dredge up something nice to say. Very recently I would have derided such talents. Now I have need of them.

I get myself another cup of wine and a Ritz cracker with some cheese on it, and peer through the crowd for Jon, for anyone. What I see, over the heads, is Mrs. Smeath.

Mrs. Smeath is watching me. She lies on the sofa with her turbanlike Sunday hat on, the afghan wrapped around her. I have named this one Torontodalisque: Homage to Ingres, because of the pose, and the rubber plant like a fan behind her. She sits in front of a mirror with half of her face peeling off, like the villain in a horror comic I once read; this one is called Leprosy. She stands in front of her sink, her wicked paring knife in one hand, a half-peeled potato in the other. This one is called AN•EYE•FOR•AN•EYE.

Next to this is White Gift, which is in four panels. In the first one, Mrs. Smeath is wrapped up in white tissue paper like a can of Spam or a mummy, with just her head sticking out, her face wearing its closed half-smile. In the next three she’s progressively unwrapped: in her print dress and bib apron, in her back-of-the-catalogue Eaton’s flesh-colored foundation garment—although I don’t expect she possessed one—and finally in her saggy-legged cotton underpants, her one large breast sectioned to show her heart. Her heart is the heart of a dying turtle: reptilian, dark-red, diseased. Across the bottom of this panel is stenciled: THE•KINGDOM•OF•GOD•IS•WITHIN•YOU.

It’s still a mystery to me, why I hate her so much.

I look away from Mrs. Smeath, and there is another Mrs. Smeath, only this one is moving. She’s just inside the door and heading toward me. She’s the same age as she was. It’s as if she’s stepped down off the wall, the walls: the same round raw potato face, the hulky big-boned frame, the glittering spectacles and hairpin crown. My gut clenches in fear; then there’s that rancid hate, flashing up in an instant. But of course this can’t be Mrs. Smeath, who must be much older by now. And it isn’t. The hairpin crown was an optical illusion: it’s just hair, graying and cropped short. It’s Grace Smeath, charmless and righteous, in shapeless, ageless clothing, dun in color; she is ringless and without ornament. By the way she stalks, rigid and quivering, lips pinched, the freckles standing out on her root-white skin like bug bites, I can see that this will not be transformed into a light social occasion by any weak-chinned smiling of mine.

I try anyway. “Is it Grace?” I say. Several nearby people have stopped in mid-word. This is not the sort of woman who usually frequents gallery openings, of any kind.

Grace clumps relentlessly forward. Her face is fatter than it used to be. I think of orthopedic shoes, lisle stockings, underwear laundered thin and gray, coal cellars. I am afraid of her. Not of anything she could do to me, but of her judgment. And here it comes.

“You are disgusting,” she says. “You are taking the Lord’s name in vain. Why do you want to hurt people?”

What is there to be said? I could claim that Mrs. Smeath is not Grace’s mother but a composition. I could mention the formal values, the careful use of color. But White Gift is not a composition, it’s pictures of Mrs. Smeath, and indecent pictures at that. It’s washroom graffiti raised to a higher order. Grace is staring past me at the wall: there are not just one or two foul pictures to be appalled by, there are many. Mrs. Smeath in metamorphosis, from frame to frame, naked, exposed and desecrated, along with the maroon velvet chesterfield, the sacred rubber plant, the angels of God. I have gone way too far. Grace’s hands are fists, her fatted chin is trembling, her eyes are pink and watery, like a laboratory rabbit’s. Is that a tear? I am aghast, and deeply satisfied. She is making a spectacle of herself, at last, and I am in control.

But I look again, more closely: this woman is not Grace. She doesn’t even look like Grace. Grace is my age, she would not be this old. There’s a generic resemblance, that’s all. This woman is a stranger.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” says the woman who is not Grace. Her eyes narrow behind her glasses. She raises her fist, and I drop my glass of wine. Red splashes the wall and floor. What she has in her clenched hand is a bottle of ink. With a shaky twist she unscrews the top, and I hold my breath, with fright but also curiosity: is it me she’ll throw it at? For throwing is clearly her intention. There are gasps around us, this is happening fast, Carolyn and Jody are pushing forward. The woman who is not Grace hurls the ink, bottle and all, straight at White Gift. The bottle careens and thuds to the carpet, ink pours down over the skyscape, veiling Mrs. Smeath in Parker’s Washable Blue. The woman gives me a triumphant smile and turns, not stalking now but scurrying, heading for the door. I have my hands over my mouth, as if to scream. Carolyn envelops me, hugging. She smells like a mother. “I’ll call the police,” she says.

“No,” I say. “It will come off.” And it probably will, because White Gift is varnished, and painted on wood. Maybe there won’t even be a dent.

There are women gathering around me, the rustle of their feathers, a cooing. I am soothed and consoled, patted, cherished as if in shock. Maybe they mean it, maybe they like me after all. It’s so hard for me to tell, with women.

“Who was that?” they ask.

“Some religious nut case,” says Jody. “Some reactionary.”

I will be looked at, now, with respect: paintings that can get bottles of ink thrown at them, that can inspire such outraged violence, such uproar and display, must have an odd revolutionary power. I will seem audacious, and brave. Some dimension of heroism has been added to me. FEATHERS FLY AT FEMINIST FRACAS, says the paper. The picture is of me cringing, hands over my mouth, Mrs. Smeath bare-naked and dripping with ink in the background. This is how I learn that women fighting is news. There’s something titillating about it, upended and comic, like men in evening gowns and high heels. Hen fighting, it’s called.

The show itself attracts bad adjectives: “abrasive,” “aggressive” and “shrill.” It’s mostly Jody’s statues and Carolyn’s quilts that are called these things. Zillah’s lintscapes are termed “subjective,” “introverted”

and “flimsy.” Compared with the rest of them, I get off easy: “naive surrealism with a twist of feminist lemon.”

Carolyn makes a bright yellow banner with the words “abrasive,” “aggressive” and “shrill” on it in red, arid hangs it outside the door. A great many people come.

Chapter 63

I’m waiting, in a waiting room. The waiting room has several nondescript blondwood chairs in it, with seats upholstered in olive green, and three end tables. This furniture is a clunky imitation of the early Scandinavian furniture of ten or fifteen years ago, now drastically out of style. On one of the tables there are some thumbed Reader’s Digest and Maclean’s magazines, and on another an ashtray, white with a rosebud trim. The carpet is an orangey-green, the walls an off-yellow. There is one picture, a lithoprint of two coy, grisly children in pseudo-peasant costume, vaguely Austrian, using a mushroom for an umbrella. The room smells of old cigarette smoke, old rubber, the worn intimacy of cloth too long against flesh. On top of that, an overlay of floor wash antiseptic, seeping in from the corridors beyond. There are no windows. This room sets me on edge, like fingernails on a blackboard. Or like a dentist’s waiting room, or the room where you’d wait before a job interview, for a job you didn’t want to get. This is a discreet private loony bin. A rest home, it’s called: The Dorothy Lyndwick Rest Home. The sort of place well-off people use for stowing away those members of their families who are not considered fit to run around in public, in order to keep them from being carted off to 999 Queen, which is neither discreet nor private.

999 Queen is both a real place and high school shorthand for all funny farms, booby hatches, and nuthouses that could possibly be imagined. We had to imagine them, then, never having seen one. “999

Queen,” we would say, sticking our tongues out the sides of our mouths, crossing our eyes, making circles near our ears with our forefingers. Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.

I am waiting for Cordelia. Or I think it will be Cordelia: her voice on the phone did not sound like her, but slower and somehow damaged. “I saw you,” is what she said, as if we had been talking together only five minutes before. But in fact it had been seven years, or eight, or nine: the summer she worked at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, the summer of Josef. “In the paper,” she added. And then a pause, as if this was a question.

“Right,” I said. Then, because I knew I should, “Why don’t we get together?”

“I can’t go out,” Cordelia said, in the same slowed-down voice. “You’ll have to come here.”

And so I am here.

Cordelia comes through a door at the far end of the room, walking carefully, as if balancing, or lame. But she is not lame. Behind her is another woman, with the optimistic, false, toothy smile of a paid attendant. It takes me a moment to recognize Cordelia, because she doesn’t look at all the same. Or rather she doesn’t look the way she did when I last saw her, in her wide cotton skirt and barbaric bracelet, elegant and confident. She is in an earlier phase, or a later one: the soft green tweeds and tailored blouses of her good-taste background, which now appear matronly on her, because she has put on weight. Or has she?

Flesh has been added, but it has slid down, toward the middle of her body, like mud sliding down a hill. The long bones have risen to the surface of her face, the skin tugged downward on them as if by irresistible gravitational pull. I can see how she’ll be when she’s old. Someone has done her hair. Not her. She would never make it in tight little waves like that. Cordelia stands uncertainly, squinting a little, head poking forward and swinging imperceptibly from side to side, the way an elephant’s does, or some slow, bewildered animal. “Cordelia,” I say, standing up.

“There’s your friend,” says the woman, smiling relent lessly. She takes Cordelia by the arm and gives a small tug, to start her in the right direction. “There you are,” I say, falling already into the trap of addressing her like a child. I come forward, give her an awkward kiss. I find to my surprise that I’m glad to see her.

“Better late than never,” Cordelia says, with the same hesitation, the thickness in her voice I’ve heard over the phone. The woman steers her to the chair across from mine, settles her down into it with a little push, as if she’s elderly, and stubborn.

Suddenly I’m outraged. No one has a right to treat Cordelia this way. I scowl at the woman, who says,

“How nice of you to come! Cordelia enjoys a visit, don’t you, Cordelia?”

“You can take me out,” Cordelia says. She looks up at the woman, for approval.

“Yes, that’s right,” says the woman. “For tea or something. If you promise to bring her back, that is!”

She gives a cheery laugh, as if this is a joke.

I take Cordelia out. The Dorothy Lyndwick Rest Home is in High Park, a suburb where I’ve never been before and don’t know my way around, but there’s a corner café a few blocks along. Cordelia knows it, and her way there. I don’t know whether I should take her arm or not, and so I don’t; I walk along beside her, watchful at crossings as if she’s blind, slowing my pace to hers.

“I don’t have any money,” says Cordelia. “They won’t let me have any. They even get my cigarettes for me.”

“That’s all right,” I say.

We ease into a booth, order coffee and two toasted Danishes. I give the order: I don’t want the waitress staring. Cordelia fumbles, produces a cigarette. Her hand, lighting it, is shaky. “Great flaming blue-headed balls of Jesus,” she says, making an effort with the syllables. “It’s good to be out of there.”

She tries a laugh, and I laugh with her, feeling culpable and accused. I should ask her things: what has she been doing, for these years we’ve skipped? What about her acting, what became of that? Did she get married, have children? What exactly has been going on, to bring her where she is? But all of this is beside the point. It’s detachable, it’s been added on. The main thing is Cordelia, the fact of her now.

“What the shit have they got you on?” I say.

“Some sort of tranquilizers,” she says. “I hate them. They make me drool.”

“What for?” I say. “How did you end up in that nuthatch anyway? You aren’t any crazier than I am.”

Cordelia looks at me, blowing out smoke. “Things weren’t working out very well,” she says after a while.

“So?” I say.

“So. I tried pills.”

“Oh, Cordelia.” Something goes through me with a slice, like watching a child fall, mouth down on rock.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It just came over me. I was tired,” she says.

There is no point telling her she shouldn’t have done such a thing, I do what I’d do in high school: I ask for the details. “So did you conk out?”

“Yes,” she said. “I checked into a hotel, to do it. But they figured it out—the manager or someone. I had to get my stomach pumped. That was revolting. Vomit-making, you could say.”

She does what would be a laugh, except that her face is so rigid. I think I may cry. At the same time I’m angry with her, though I don’t know why. It’s as if Cordelia has placed herself beyond me, out of my reach, where I can’t get at her. She has let go of her idea of herself. She is lost.

“Elaine,” she says, “get me out.”

“What?” I say, brought up short.

“Help me get out of there. You don’t know what it’s like. You have no privacy.” This is the closest to pleading she’s ever come.

A phrase comes to me, a remnant left over from boys, from Saturday afternoons, reading the comics: Pick on somebody your own size. “How could I do that?” I say.

“Visit me tomorrow and we’ll go in a taxi.” She sees me hesitate. “Or just lend me the money. That’s all you have to do. I can hide the pills in the morning, I won’t take them. Then I’ll be all right. I know it’s those pills that’re keeping me like this. Just twenty-five dollars is all I need.”

“I don’t have a lot of money with me,” I say, which is true enough, but an evasion. “They’d catch you. They’d know you were off the pills. They could tell.”

“I can fool them any day,” Cordelia says, with a flicker of her old cunning. Of course, I think, she’s an actress. Or was. She can counterfeit anything. “Anyway, those doctors are so dumb. They ask all these questions, they believe anything I tell them, they write it all down.”

There are doctors, then. More than one. “Cordelia, how can I take the responsibility? I haven’t even talked, I haven’t talked to anyone.”

“They’re all assholes,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with me. You know, you said yourself.” There’s a frantic child in there, behind that locked, sagging face.

I have an image of spiriting Cordelia away, rescuing her. I could do it, or something like it; but then where would she end up? Hiding out in our apartment, sleeping on an improvised bed like the draft dodgers, a refugee, a displaced person, smoking up the kitchen with Jon wondering who the hell she is and why she’s there. Things are uneven between us as it is; I’m not sure I can afford Cordelia. She’d be one more sin of mine, to be chalked up to the account he’s keeping in his head. Also I am not feeling totally glued together myself.

And there’s Sarah to think of. Would she take to this Auntie Cordelia? How is Cordelia with small children? And exactly how sick in the head is she, anyway? How long before I’d come back and find her out cold on the bathroom floor, or worse? In the middle of a bright red sunset. Jon’s work table is an arsenal, there are little saws lying around, little chisels. Maybe it would just be melodrama, a skin-deep slash or two, her old theatricality; though perhaps theatrical people are not less risky, but more. In the interests of the role they’ll sacrifice anything.

“I can’t, Cordelia,” I say gently. But I don’t feel gentle toward her. I am seething, with a fury I can neither explain nor express. How dare you ask me? I want to twist her arm, rub her face in the snow. The waitress brings the bill. “Are you sufficiently sophonsified?” I say to Cordelia, trying for lightness, and a change of subject. But Cordelia has never been stupid.

“So you won’t,” she says. And then, forlornly: “I guess you’ve always hated me.”

“No,” I say. “Why would I? No!” I am shocked. Why would she say such a thing? I can’t remember ever hating Cordelia.

“I’ll get out anyway,” she says. Her voice is not thick now, or hesitant. She has that stubborn, defiant look, the one I remember from years ago. So?

I walk her back, deposit her. “I’ll come to visit you,” I say. I intend to, but know at the same time that the chances are slim. She’ll be all right, I tell myself. She was like this at the end of high school, and then things got better. They could again.

On the streetcar going back, I read the advertisements: a beer, a chocolate bar, a brassiere turning into a bird. I imitate relief. I feel free, and weightless.

But I am not free, of Cordelia.

I dream Cordelia falling, from a cliff or bridge, against a background of twilight, her arms outspread, her skirt open like a bell, making a snow angel in the empty air. She never hits or lands; she falls and falls, and I wake with my heart pounding and gravity cut from under me, as in an elevator plummeting out of control.

I dream her standing in the old Queen Mary schoolyard. The school is gone, there is nothing but a field, and the hill behind with the scrawny evergreen trees. She is wearing her snowsuit jacket, but she is not a child, she’s the age she is now. She knows I have deserted her, and she is angry. After a month, two months, three, I write Cordelia a note, on flowered notepaper of the sort that doesn’t leave much space for words. I purchase this notepaper specially. My note is written with such false cheerfulness I can barely stand to lick the flap of the envelope. In it I propose another visit. But my note comes back in the mail, with address unknown scrawled across it. I examine this writing from every angle, trying to figure out if it could be Cordelia’s, disguised. If it isn’t, if she’s no longer at the rest home, where has she gone? She could ring the doorbell at any minute, call on the phone. She could be anywhere.

I dream a mannequin statue, like one of Jody’s in the show, hacked apart and glued back together. It’s wearing nothing but a gauze costume, covered with spangles. It ends at the neck. Underneath its arm, wrapped in a white cloth, is Cordelia’s head.