Cat's Eye

Chapter 3

I’m lying on the floor, on a futon, covered by a duvet. Futon, duvet: this is how far we’ve come. I wonder if Stephen ever figured out what futons and duvets were. Most likely not. Most likely if you’d said futon to him, he’d have looked at you as if he was deaf or you were brain-damaged. He did not exist in the futon dimension.

When there were no futons and no duvets, the price of an ice cream cone was five cents. Now it’s a dollar if you’re lucky, and not as big either. That’s the bottom-line difference between then and now: ninety-five cents.

This is the middle of my life. I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I’m supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I’m supposed to be a person of substance. But since coming back here I don’t feel weightier. I feel lighter, as if I’m shedding matter, losing molecules, calcium from my bones, cells from my blood; as if I’m shrinking, as if I’m filling with cold air, or gently falling snow.

With all this lightness I do not rise, I descend. Or rather I am dragged downward, into the layers of this place as into liquefied mud.

The fact is that I hate this city. I’ve hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it. Once it was fashionable to say how dull it was. First prize a week in Toronto, second prize two weeks in Toronto, Toronto the Good, Toronto the Blue, where you couldn’t get wine on Sundays. Everyone who lived here said those things: provincial, self-satisfied, boring. If you said that, it showed you recognized these qualities but did not partake of them yourself.

Now you’re supposed to say how much it’s changed. World-class city is a phrase they use in magazines these days, a great deal too much. All those ethnic restaurants, and the theater and the boutiques. New York without the garbage and muggings, it’s supposed to be. People from Toronto used to go to Buffalo for the weekends, the men to watch girlie shows and drink after-hours beer, the women to shop; they’d come back jumped-up and pissed and wearing several layers of clothes to smuggle them through Customs. Now the weekend traffic is the other way around.

I’ve never believed either version, the dull, the world-class. Toronto was never dull, for me. Dull isn’t a word you’d use to describe such misery, and enchantment.

And I can’t believe it’s changed. Driving in from the airport yesterday in the taxi, past the flat neat factories and warehouses that were once flat neat farms, mile after mile of caution and utilitarianism, and then through the center of the city with the glitz and the European-style awnings and the paving stones, I could see it’s still the same. Underneath the flourish and ostentation is the old city, street after street of thick red brick houses, with their front porch pillars like the off-white stems of toadstools and their watchful, calculating windows. Malicious, grudging, vindictive, implacable. In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

Apart from all this, I do of course have a real life. I sometimes have trouble believing in it, because it doesn’t seem like the kind of life I could ever get away with, or deserve. This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise. I live in a house, with window curtains and a lawn, in British Columbia, which is as far away from Toronto as I could get without drowning. The unreality of the landscape there encourages me: the greeting-card mountains, of the sunset-and-sloppy-message variety, the cottagy houses that look as if they were built by the Seven Dwarfs in the thirties, the giant slugs, so much larger than a slug needs to be. Even the rain is overdone, I can’t take it seriously. I suppose these things are as real, and as oppressive, to the people who grew up there as this place is to me. But on good days it still feels like a vacation, an evasion. On bad days I don’t notice it, or much else.

I have a husband, not my first, whose name is Ben. He is not any sort of an artist, for which I am thankful. He runs a travel agency, specializing in Mexico. Among his other sterling qualities are cheap tickets to the Yucatán. The travel agency is why he hasn’t come with me on this trip: the months before Christmas are a hectic time in the travel business.

I also have two daughters, by now grown up. Their names are Sarah and Anne, good sensible names. One of them is almost a doctor, the other an accountant. These are sensible choices. I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children, because look what happened to Cordelia.

Alongside my real life I have a career, which may not qualify as exactly real. I am a painter. I even put that on my passport, in a moment of bravado, since the other choice would have been housewife. It’s an unlikely thing for me to have become; on some days it still makes me cringe. Respectable people do not become painters: only overblown, pretentious, theatrical people. The word artist embarrasses me; I prefer painter, because it’s more like a valid job. An artist is a tawdry, lazy sort of thing to be, as most people in this country will tell you. If you say you are a painter, you will be looked at strangely. Unless you paint wildlife, or make a lot of money at it, of course. But I only make enough to generate envy, among other painters, not enough so I can tell everyone else to stuff it. Most of the time though I exult, and think I have had a narrow escape. My career is why I’m here, on this futon, under this duvet. I’m having a retrospective, my first. The name of the gallery is Sub-Versions, one of those puns that used to delight me before they became so fashionable. I ought to be pleased by this retrospective, but my feelings are mixed; I don’t like admitting I’m old enough and established enough to have such a thing, even at an alternative gallery run by a bunch of women. I find it improbable, and ominous: first the retrospective, then the morgue. But also I’m cheesed off because the Art Gallery of Ontario wouldn’t do it. Their bias is toward dead, foreign men. The duvet is in a studio that belongs to my first husband Jon. It interests me that he would have a duvet here, although his house is elsewhere. So far I’ve restrained myself from going through his medicine cabinet, in search of hairpins and female deodorants, as I once would have done. This is none of my business any longer, I can leave the hairpins to his iron-clad wife.

Staying here is possibly a silly thing to do, too retrospective. But we’ve always kept in touch because of Sarah, who is his daughter also, and after we got through the shouting and the broken glass we settled into being friends of a sort, by long distance, which is always easier than up close. When he heard about the retrospective, he offered. The price of a hotel in Toronto, he said, even a second-rate hotel, is becoming offensive. Sub-Versions would have put me up, but I didn’t mention that. I don’t like the neatness of hotels, the squeaky-clean bathtubs. I don’t like hearing my own voice echo in there, especially at night. I prefer the shedding and disorder and personal dirt of people like myself, people like Jon. Transients and nomads.

Jon’s studio is down on King Street, near the waterfront. King Street used to be one of those places you never went, a place of dingy warehouses and rumbling trucks and dubious alleyways. Now it’s come up in the world. Artists have infested it; in fact the first wave of artists has almost come and gone, and brass lettering and heating pipes painted fire-engine red and firms of lawyers are taking over. Jon’s studio, on the fifth and top floor of one of the warehouses, doesn’t have long to live in its present form. Track lighting is spreading over the ceilings, the lower floors are being stripped of their old linoleum, smelling of Pine Sol with an obscure base note of ancient throwup and pee, and the wide boards underneath are being sandblasted. I know all this because I walk up the five floors; they haven’t got around to an elevator yet.

Jon left me the key in an envelope under the mat, and a note saying Blessings, which is a measure of how much he’s softened, or mellowed. Blessings was not his former style. He’s temporarily in Los Angeles, doing a chain-saw murder, but he’ll be back before my opening.

I last saw him at Sarah’s college graduation four years ago. He flew out to the coast, luckily without the wife, who is not fond of me. Although we haven’t met, I know about her lack of fondness. During the proceedings, the ritual mumbo-jumbo and the tea and cookies afterward, we acted like responsible, grown-up parents. We took both the girls out to dinner and behaved ourselves. We even dressed the way we knew Sarah wanted us to: I had on an outfit, matching shoes and all, and Jon wore a suit and an actual tie. I told him he looked like an undertaker.

But the next day we snuck out to lunch, alone, and got plastered. That word, plastered, on the brink of obsolescence, indicates to me what sort of an event that was. It was a retrospective. And I still think of it as sneaking out, though of course Ben knew all about it. Though he would never go to lunch with his own first wife.

“You’ve always said it was such a disaster,” Ben said to me, puzzled.

“It was,” I said. “It was horrible.”

“Then why would you want to have lunch with him?”

“That’s hard to explain,” I said, though it may not be. What we share, Jon and I, may be a lot like a traffic accident, but we do share it. We are survivors, of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.

In the old days Jon did constructions. He made them out of bits of wood and leather he’d pick out of people’s trash, or else he’d smash things—violins, glassware—and glue the pieces into the position of the smash; shatter patterns, he called them. At one time he wrapped pieces of colored tape around tree trunks and took photographs of them, at another he made a replica of a mold-covered loaf of bread that breathed in and out with the aid of a small electric motor. The mold was made from the hair clippings of himself and friends. I think there’s even some of my hair on that loaf of bread; I caught him snitching some out of my hairbrush.

He does special effects for movies now, to support his artist habit. The studio is scattered with his half-finished doings. On the workbench where he keeps his paints, glues, knives, and pliers, there’s a hand and arm, done in plastic resin, arteries worming from the cut end, straps to strap it on. There are hollow casts of legs and feet standing around on the floor like elephant-foot umbrella stands; in one of them there’s an umbrella. Also there’s part of a face, with the skin blackened and withered, made to fit over the actor’s real face. A monster, warped by others, bent on revenge. Jon has told me he isn’t sure this hacked-up body-part stuff is the sort of thing he should be doing. It’s too violent, it doesn’t contribute to human goodness. He’s coming to believe in human goodness in his old age, which is certainly a change; I’ve even found some herbal tea in the cupboard. He claims he’d rather make friendly animals for children’s shows. But as he says, you have to eat, and there’s just more demand for cut-off limbs.

I wish he were here, or Ben, or any man I know. I’m losing the appetite for strangers. Once I would have focused on the excitement, the hazard; now it’s the mess, the bother. Getting your clothes off gracefully, always such an impossibility; thinking up what to say afterward, without setting the echoes going in your head. Worse, the encounter with another set of particularities: the toenails, the ear holes, the nosehairs. Perhaps at this age we return to the prudishness we had as children. I get up off the duvet, feeling as if I haven’t slept. I riffle through the herbal tea bags in the kitchenette, Lemon Mist, Morning Thunder, and bypass them in favor of some thick, jolting, poisonous coffee. I find myself standing in the middle of the main room, not knowing exactly how I got in here from the kitchenette. A little time jump, a little static on the screen, probably jet lag: up too late at night, drugged in the morning. Early Alzheimer’s.

I sit at the window, drinking my coffee, biting my fingers, looking down the five stories. From this angle the pedestrians appear squashed from above, like deformed children. All around are flat-roofed, boxy warehouse buildings, and beyond them the flat railroad lands where the trains used to shunt back and forth, once the only entertainment available here on Sundays. Beyond that is flat Lake Ontario, a zero at the beginning and a zero at the end, slate-gray and brimming with venoms. Even the rain from it is carcinogenic.

I wash in Jon’s tiny, greasy bathroom, resisting the medicine cabinet. The bathroom is smeared with fingerprints and painted dingy white, not the most flattering light. Jon wouldn’t feel like an artist without a certain amount of dinge around. I squint into the mirror, preparing my face: with my contact lenses in I’m too close to the mirror, without them I’m too far away. I’ve taken to doing these mirror things with one lens in my mouth, glassy and thin like the tag end of a lemon drop. I could choke on it by mistake, an undignified way to die. I should get bifocals. But then I’d look like an old biddy. I pull on my powder-blue sweatsuit, my disguise as a non-artist, and go down the four flights of stairs, trying to look brisk and purposeful. I could be a businesswoman out jogging, I could be a bank manager, on her day off. I head north, then east along Queen Street, which is another place we never used to go. It was rumored to be the haunt of grubby drunks, rubby-dubs we called them; they were said to drink rubbing alcohol and sleep in telephone booths and vomit on your shoes in the streetcar. But now it’s art galleries and bookshops, boutiques filled with black clothing and weird footgear, the saw-toothed edge of trend.

I decide I’ll go and have a look at the gallery, which I have never seen because all of this has been arranged by phone and mail. I don’t intend to go in, make myself known, not yet. I just want to look at it from the outside. I’ll walk past, glance casually, pretending to be a housewife, a tourist, someone window shopping. Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgment. I have to work up to them. But before I reach the gallery I come to a wall of plywood, concealing a demolition. On it is spray-painted, in defiance of squeaky-clean Toronto: It’s Bacon or Me, Babe. And underneath: What Is This Bacon and Where Can I Get Some? Beside this there’s a poster. Or not a poster, more like a flier: a violent shade of purple, with green accents and black lettering. RISLEY IN RETROSPECT, it says; just the last name, like a boy. The name is mine and so is the face, more or less. It’s the photo I sent the gallery. Except that now I have a mustache.

Whoever drew this mustache knew what he was doing. Or she: nothing precludes that. It’s a curled, flowing mustache, like a cavalier’s, with a graceful goatee to match. It goes with my hair. I suppose I should be worried about this mustache. Is it just doodling, or is it political commentary, an act of aggression? Is it more like Kilroy Was Here or more like Fuck Off? I can remember drawing such mustaches myself, and the spite that went into them, the desire to ridicule, to deflate, and the feeling of power. It was defacing, it was taking away someone’s face. If I were younger I’d resent it. As it is, I study the mustache and think: That looks sort of good. The mustache is like a costume. I examine it from several angles, as if I’m considering buying one for myself. It casts a different light. I think about men and their facial hair, and the opportunities for disguise and concealment they have always at their disposal. I think about mustache-covered men, and about how naked they must feel with the thing shaved off. How diminished. A lot of people would look better in a mustache. Then, suddenly, I feel wonder. I have achieved, finally, a face that a mustache can be drawn on, a face that attracts mustaches. A public face, a face worth defacing. This is an accomplishment. I have made something of myself, something or other, after all.

I wonder if Cordelia will see this poster. I wonder if she’ll recognize me, despite the mustache. Maybe she’ll come to the opening. She’ll walk in through the door and I will turn, wearing black as a painter should, looking successful, holding a glass of only moderately bad wine. I won’t spill a drop.

Chapter 4

Until we moved to Toronto I was happy.

Before that we didn’t really live anywhere; or we lived so many places it was hard to remember them. We spent a lot of the time driving, in our low-slung, boat-sized Studebaker, over back roads or along two-lane highways up north, curving past lake after lake, hill after hill, with the white lines going down the middle of the road and the telephone poles along the sides, tall ones and shorter ones, the wires looking as if they were moving up and down.

I sit by myself in the back of the car, among the suitcases and the cardboard boxes of food and the coats, and the gassy, dry-cleaning smell of the car upholstery. My brother Stephen sits in the front seat, beside the partly open window. He smells of peppermint LifeSavers; underneath that is his ordinary smell, of cedarwood lead pencils and wet sand. Sometimes he throws up into paper bags, or beside the road if my father can stop the car in time. He gets carsick and I do not, which is why he has to sit in the front. It’s his only weakness that I know of.

From my cramped vantage point in the back I have a good view of my family’s ears. My father’s, which stick out from under the brim of the old felt hat he wears to keep twigs and tree sap and caterpillars out of his hair, are large and soft-looking, with long lobes; they’re like the ears of gnomes, or those of the flesh-colored, doglike minor characters in Mickey Mouse comic books. My mother wears her hair pinned back at the sides with bobby pins, so her ears are visible from the back. They’re narrow, with fragile upper edges, like the handles of china cups, although she herself is not fragile. My brother’s ears are round, like dried apricots, or like the ears of the green-tinged, oval-headed aliens from outer space he draws with his colored pencils. Around and over his round ears and down the back of his neck his hair, dark blond and straight, grows in thick wisps. He resists haircuts. It’s difficult for me to whisper into my brother’s round ears when we’re in the car. In any case he can’t whisper back, because he has to look straight ahead at the horizon, or at the white lines of the road that washes toward us, wave after slowly undulating wave.

The roads are mostly empty, because it’s the war, though once in a while there’s a truck loaded with cut tree trunks or fresh lumber, trailing its perfume of sawdust. At lunchtime we stop by the roadside and spread a groundsheet among the white papery everlasting and the purple fireweed and eat the lunch our mother makes, bread and sardines or bread and cheese, or bread and molasses or bread and jam if we can’t get anything else. Meat and cheese are scarce, they are rationed. That means you have a ration book with colored stamps in it.

Our father makes a small fire to boil water in a billy tin for tea. After lunch we disappear into the bushes, one by one, with pieces of toilet paper in our pockets. Sometimes there are other pieces of toilet paper there already, melting among the bracken and dead leaves, but mostly there are not. I squat, listening behind me for bears, aster leaves rough on the tops of my legs, then bury the toilet paper under sticks and bark and dried bracken. Our father says you should make it look as if you haven’t been there at all. Our father walks into the forest, carrying his ax, a pack-sack, and a large wooden box with a leather shoulder strap. He looks up, from tree to tree to tree, considering. Then he spreads a tarpaulin out on the ground, underneath the chosen tree, wrapping it around the trunk. He opens the wooden box, which is filled with racks of small bottles. He hits the tree trunk with the back of his ax. The tree shakes; leaves and twigs and caterpillars patter down, bouncing off his gray felt hat, hitting the tarpaulin. Stephen and I crouch, picking up the caterpillars, which are blue-striped, and velvety and cool, like the muzzles of dogs. We put them into the collecting bottles filled with pale alcohol. We watch them twist and sink. My father looks at the harvest of caterpillars as if he’s grown them himself. He examines the chewed leaves. “A beautiful infestation,” he says. He’s joyful, he’s younger than I am now. The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing, like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.

When it gets to the end of the day we stop again and put up our tent, heavy canvas with wooden poles. Our sleeping bags are khaki and thick and lumpy, and always feel a little damp. Underneath them we put groundsheets, and inflatable mattresses that make you feel dizzy while you blow them up and fill your nose and mouth with the taste of stale rain boots or spare tires piled in a garage. We eat around the fire, which turns brighter as the shadows grow out from the trees like darker branches. We crawl into the tent and take our clothes off inside our sleeping bags, the flashlight making a circle on the canvas, a light ring enclosing a darker one, like a target. The tent smells of tar and kapok and brown paper with cheese grease on it, and crushed grass. In the mornings the weeds outside are sprinkled with dew. Sometimes we stay in motels, but only if it’s too late at night to find a place to set up the tent. The motels are always far from anything, set against a dark wall of forest, their lights glimmering in the uniform obscuring night like those of ships, or oases. They have gas pumps outside, human-sized, with round discs on top, lit up like pale moons or haloes minus the head. On each disc is a shell or a star, an orange maple leaf, a white rose. The motels and the gas pumps are often empty or closed: gas is rationed, so people don’t travel much unless they have to.

Or we stay in cabins belonging to other people or to the government, or we stay in abandoned logging camps, or we pitch two tents, one for sleeping and one for supplies. In the winters we stay in towns or cities up north, the Soo or North Bay or Sudbury, in apartments that are really the top floors of other people’s houses, so that we have to be careful about the noise of our shoes on the wooden floors. We have furniture which comes from storage. It’s always the same furniture but it always looks unfamiliar. In these places there are flush toilets, white and alarming, where things vanish in an instant, with a roar. When we first get to cities my brother and I go to the bathroom a lot, and drop things in as well, such as pieces of macaroni, to see them disappear. There are air-raid sirens, and then we pull the curtains and turn off the lights, though our mother says the war will never come here. The war filters in over the radio, remote and crackly, the voices from London fading through the static. Our parents are dubious as they listen, their mouths tighten: it could be that we are losing.

My brother does not think so. He thinks our side is the good side, and therefore it will win. He collects cigarette cards with pictures of airplanes on them, and knows the names of all the planes. My brother has a hammer and some wood, and his own jackknife. He whittles and hammers: he’s making a gun. He nails two pieces of wood at right angles, with another nail for the trigger. He has several of these wooden guns, and daggers and swords also, with blood coloured onto the blades with red pencils. Some of the blood is orange, from when he ran out of red. He sings: Coming in on a wing and a prayer,

He sings this cheerfully, but I think it’s a sad song, because although I’ve seen the pictures of the airplanes on the cigarette cards I don’t know how they fly. I think it’s like birds, and a bird with one wing can’t fly. This is what my father says in the winters, before dinner, lifting his glass when there are other men there at the table: “You can’t fly on one wing.” So in fact the prayer in the song is useless. Stephen gives me a gun and a knife and we play war. This is his favorite game. While our parents are putting up the tent or making the fire or cooking, we sneak around behind the trees and bushes, aiming through the leaves. I am the infantry, which means I have to do what he says. He waves me forward, motions me back, tells me to keep my head down so the enemy won’t blow it off.

“You’re dead,” he says.

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are. They got you. Lie down.”

There is no arguing with him, since he can see the enemy and I can’t. I have to lie down on the swampy ground, propped against a stump to avoid getting too wet, until it’s time for me to be alive again. Sometimes, instead of war, we hunt through the forest, turning over logs and rocks to see what’s underneath. There are ants, grubs and beetles, frogs and toads, garter snakes, even salamanders if we’re lucky. We don’t do anything with the things we find. We know they will die if we put them into bottles and leave them by accident in the sun in the back window of the car, as we have done before. So we merely look at them, watching the ants hiding their pill-shaped eggs in panic, the snakes pouring themselves into darkness. Then we put the logs back where they were, unless we need some of these things for fishing.

Once in a while we fight. I don’t win these fights: Stephen is bigger and more ruthless than I am, and I want to play with him more than he wants to play with me. We fight in whispers or well out of the way, because if we’re caught we will both be punished. For this reason we don’t tell on each other. We know from experience that the satisfactions of betrayal are scarcely worth it. Because they’re secret, these fights have an extra attraction. It’s the attraction of dirty words we aren’t supposed to say, words like bum; the attraction of conspiracy, of collusion. We step on each other’s feet, pinch each other’s arms, careful not to give away the pain, loyal even in outrage. How long did we live this way, like nomads on the far edges of the war?

Today we’ve driven a long time, we’re late setting up our tent. We’re near the road, beside a raggedy anonymous lake. The trees around the shore are doubled in the water, the leaves of the poplars are yellowing towards fall. The sun sets in a long, chilly, lingering sunset, flamingo pink, then salmon, then the improbable vibrant red of Mercurochrome. The pink light rests on the surface, trembling, then fades and is gone. It’s a clear night, moonless, filled with antiseptic stars. There is the Milky Way clear as can be, which predicts bad weather.

We pay no attention to any of this, because Stephen is teaching me to see in the dark, as commandos do. You never know when you might need to do this, he says. You can’t use a flashlight; you have to stay still, in the darkness, waiting until your eyes become accustomed to no light. Then the shapes of things begin to emerge, grayish and glimmering and insubstantial, as if they’re condensing from the air. Stephen tells me to move my feet slowly, balancing on one foot at a time, careful not to step on twigs. He tells me to breathe quietly. “If they hear you they’ll get you,” he whispers.

He crouches beside me, outlined against the lake, a blacker patch of water. I catch the glint of an eye, then he’s gone. This is a trick of his.

I know he’s sneaking up on the fire, on my parents, who are flickering, shadowy, their faces indistinct. I’m alone with my heartbeat and my too-loud breathing. But he’s right: now I can see in the dark. Such are my pictures of the dead.

Chapter 5

I have my eighth birthday in a motel. My present is a Brownie box camera, black and oblong, with a handle on top and a round hole at the back to look through.

The first picture taken with it is of me. I’m leaning against the doorframe of the motel cabin. The door behind me is white and closed, with the metal number on it showing: 9. I’m wearing pants, baggy at the knees, and a jacket too short in the sleeves. Under the jacket, I know though you can’t see it, is a hand-me-down brown and yellow striped jersey of my brother’s. Many of my clothes were once his. My skin is ultrawhite from overexposure of the film, my head is tilted to one side, my mittenless wrists dangle. I look like old photos of immigrants. I look as if I’ve been put there in front of the door and told to stand still.

What was I like, what did I want? It’s hard to remember. Did I want a camera for my birthday?

Probably not, although I was glad to have it.

I want some more cards from the Nabisco Shredded Wheat boxes, the gray cards with pictures on them that you color, cut out, and fold to make the houses in a town. Also I want some pipe cleaners. We have a book called Rainy Day Hobbies that shows how to make a walkie-talkie out of two cans and a piece of string, or how to make a boat that will go forward if you drop lubricating oil into a hole in it; also now to make a doll’s chest of drawers out of miniature matchboxes, and how to make various animals—a dog, a sheep, a camel—out of pipe cleaners. The boat and the chest of drawers don’t appeal to me, only the pipe cleaners. I’ve never seen a pipe cleaner.

I want some silver paper out of cigarette packages. I have several pieces already, but I want more. My parents don’t smoke cigarettes, so I have to collect this paper where I can find it, on the edges of gas stations, in the weedy grass near motels. I am in the habit of scavenging along the ground this way. When I find some I clean it off and flatten it out and store it between the pages of my school reader. I don’t know what I’ll do with it when I have enough, but it will be something amazing. I want a balloon. Balloons are coming back, now that the war is over. When I was sick with the mumps, once in the winter, my mother found one at the bottom of her steamer trunk. She must have tucked it away there before the war, suspecting perhaps that there would not be any more for a while. She blew it up for me. It was blue, translucent, round, like a private moon. The rubber was old and rotting and the balloon burst almost at once, and I was heartbroken. But I want another balloon, one that will not break. I want some friends, friends who will be girls. Girl friends. I know that these exist, having read about them in books, but I’ve never had any girl friends because I’ve never been in one place long enough. Much of the time it’s raw and overcast, the low metallic sky of late autumn; or else it rains and we have to stay inside the motel. The motel is the kind we’re used to: a row of cottages, flimsily built, strung together with Christmas tree lights, yellow or blue or green. These are called “housekeeping cottages,”

which means they have some kind of a stove in them, a pot or two and a tea kettle, and a table covered with oilcloth. The floor of our housekeeping cottage is linoleum, with a faded pattern of floral squares. The towels are skimpy and thin, the sheets have worn places in the middles, rubbed there by other people’s bodies. There’s a framed print of the woods in winter and another of ducks in flight. Some motels have outhouses, but this one has a real though smelly flush toilet, and a bathtub. We’ve been living in this motel for weeks, which is unusual: we never stay in motels for more than a night at a time. We eat cans of Habitant pea soup, heated up on the two-burner stove in a dented pot, and slices of bread spread with molasses, and hunks of cheese. There’s more cheese, now that the war is over. We wear our outdoor clothes indoors, and socks at night, because these cottages with their one-layer walls are supposed to be for summer tourists. The hot water is never more than lukewarm, and our mother heats water in the tea kettle and pours it into the tub for our baths. “Just to get the crust off,” she says.

In the mornings we wrap blankets around our shoulders while we eat our breakfast. Sometimes we can see our own breath, even inside the cottage. All of this is irregular, and slightly festive. It isn’t just that we aren’t going to school. We’ve never gone to school for more than three or four months at a time anyway. I was in school the last time eight months ago and have only dim and temporary ideas of what it was like. In the mornings we do our schoolwork, in our workbooks. Our mother tells us which pages to do. Then we read our school readers. Mine is about two children who live in a white house with ruffled curtains, a front lawn, and a picket fence. The father goes to work, the mother wears a dress and an apron, and the children play ball on the lawn with their dog and cat. Nothing in these stories is anything like my life. There are no tents, no highways, no peeing in the bushes, no lakes, no motels. There is no war. The children are always clean, and the little girl, whose name is Jane, wears pretty dresses and patent-leather shoes with straps.

These books have an exotic appeal for me. When Stephen and I draw with our colored pencils, he draws wars, ordinary wars and wars in space. His red and yellow and orange are worn to stubs, from the explosions, and his gold and silver are used up too, on the shining metal carapaces of the tanks and spaceships and on the helmets and the complicated guns. But I draw girls. I draw them in old-fashioned clothing, with long skirts, pinafores and puffed sleeves, or in dresses like Jane’s, with big hairbows on their heads. This is the elegant, delicate picture I have in my mind, about other little girls. I don’t think about what I might say to them if I actually met some. I haven’t got that far. In the evenings we’re supposed to do the dishes—“Rattle them up,” our mother calls it. We squabble in whispers and monosyllables about whose turn it is to wash: drying with a clammy tea towel isn’t as good as washing, which warms up your hands. We float the plates and glasses in the dish pan and dive-bomb them with the spoons and knives, whispering “Bombs away.” We try to aim as close as possible without actually hitting them. They aren’t our dishes. This gets on our mother’s nerves. If it gets on her nerves enough, she will do the dishes herself, which is intended to be a rebuke. At night we lie in the saggy pull-out bed, head to toe, which is supposed to make us go to sleep sooner, and kick each other silently under the covers; or else we try to see how far we can get our sock feet up each other’s pajama legs. Once in a while the headlights of a passing car show through the window, moving first along one wall, then along the next wall, then fading away. There’s an engine sound, then the sizzle of tires on the wet road. Then silence.

Chapter 6

I don’t know who took that picture of me. It must have been my brother, because my mother is inside the cabin, behind the white door, wearing gray slacks and a dark-blue plaid shirt, packing our food into cardboard boxes and our clothes into suitcases. She has a system for packing; she talks to herself while she’s doing it, reminding herself of details, and she likes us out of the way. Right after the picture it begins to snow, small dry flakes falling singly out of the hard northern November sky. There’s a kind of hush and lassitude until that first snow, with the light waning and the last moose-maple leaves dangling from the branches like seaweed. We felt sleepy until it began to snow. Now we feel exhilarated.

We’re running around outside the motel, wearing nothing but our worn-out summer shoes, with our bare hands outstretched to the falling snowflakes, our heads thrown back, our mouths open, eating snow. If it were thick on the ground we would roll in it, like dogs in dirt. It fills us with the same kind of rapture. But our mother looks out the window and sees us, and the snow, and makes us come inside and dry our feet off with the skimpy towels. We have no winter boots that fit. While we’re inside, the snow turns to sleet. Our father is pacing the floor, jingling his keys in his pocket. He always wants things to happen sooner than they do, and now he wants to leave right away, but my mother says he’ll have to hold his horses. We go outside and help him scrape the crust of ice off the car windows and then we carry boxes, and finally we squeeze into the car ourselves and drive south. I know it’s south because of the direction of the sunlight, which is coming weakly through the clouds now, touching the icy trees with glitter, glaring off the ice patches at the sides of the road, making it hard to see.

Our parents say we’re going to our new house. This time the house will be really ours, not rented. It’s in a city called Toronto. This name means nothing to me. I think about the house in my school reader, white, with a picket fence and a lawn, and window curtains. I want to see what my bedroom will be like. By the time we arrive at the house it’s late afternoon. At first I think there must be some mistake; but no, this is the house all right, because my father is already opening the door with a key. The house is hardly on a street at all, more like a field. It’s square-shaped, a bungalow, built of yellow brick and surrounded by raw mud. On one side of it is an enormous hole in the ground, with large mud piles heaped around it. The road in front is muddy too, unpaved, potholed. There are some concrete blocks sunk in the mud for stepping-stones so we can get to the door.

Inside, things are even more daunting. There are doors and windows, true, and walls, and the furnace works. There’s a picture window in the living room, though the view is of a large expanse of rippling mud. The toilet actually flushes, though it has a yellowish-brown ring around the inside of the bowl and several floating cigarette butts; and reddish, warmish water comes from the hot water tap when I turn it on. But the floors are not polished wood or even linoleum. They’re made of wide, rough boards with cracks in between, gray with plaster dust and scattered with white speckles, like bird droppings. Only a few of the rooms have light fixtures; the others have wires dangling out of the middle of the ceiling. There are no counters in the kitchen, only the bare sink; there’s no stove. Nothing is painted. Dust is on everything: the windows, the window ledges, the fixtures, the floor. There are a lot of dead flies around.

“We all have to pitch in,” says our mother, which means that we are not to complain. We will have to do the best we can, she says. We will have to finish the house ourselves, because the man who was supposed to do it has gone bankrupt. Flown the coop, is how she puts it. Our father is not so cheerful. He paces around the house, peering and prodding at it, muttering to himself and making small whistling noises. “Son of a gun, son of a gun,” is what he says.

From somewhere in the depths of the car our mother unearths a primus stove, which she sets up on the kitchen floor, since there is no table. She begins to heat up some pea soup. My brother goes outside; I know he’s climbing up the mountain of dirt next door, or assessing the possibilities of the large hole in the ground, but I don’t have the heart to join him.

I wash my hands in the reddish water in the bathroom. There’s a crack in the sink, which at this moment seems a disaster, worse than any of the other flaws and absences. I look at my face in the dust-smeared mirror. There’s no shade on the light, just a bare bulb overhead, which makes my face look pallid and ill, with circles under the eyes. I rub my eyes; I know it would be wrong to be seen crying. Despite its rawness, the house feels too hot, maybe because I’m still wearing my outside clothes. I feel trapped. I want to be back in the motel, back on the road, in my old rootless life of impermanence and safety. The first nights we sleep on the floor, in our sleeping bags, on top of our air mattresses. Then some army surplus cots appear, canvas stretched across a metal frame smaller at the base than at the top, so that if you roll over in the night you tip off onto the floor and the cot falls on top of you. Night after night I fall out and wake up lying on the rough dusty floor wondering where I am, and my brother is not there to snicker at me or order me to shut up, because I’m in a room by myself. At first I found the thought of my own room exciting—an empty space to be arranged as I wanted, without regard to Stephen and his strewn clothes and wooden guns—but now I’m lonely. I’ve never been in a room by myself at night before.

Each day new things appear in the house while we’re at school: a stove, a refrigerator, a card table and four chairs, so that we can eat in the ordinary way, sitting at a table, instead of cross-legged on a groundsheet spread in front of the fireplace. The fireplace actually works; this is one part of the house that has been finished. In it we burn scrap pieces of wood left over from the construction. In his spare time our father hammers away at the interior of the house. Floor coverings spread across the floors: narrow hardwood boards in the living room, asphalt tiles in our bedrooms, advancing row by row. The house begins to look more like a house. But this takes a lot longer than I would like: we are a far cry from picket fences and white curtains, here in our lagoon of postwar mud.

Chapter 7

We’re used to seeing our father in windbreakers, battered gray felt hats, flannel shirts with the cuffs tightly buttoned to keep the blackflies from crawling up his arms, heavy pants tucked into the tops of woolen work socks. Except for the felt hats, what our mother wore wasn’t all that different. Now, however, our father wears jackets and ties and white shirts, and a tweed overcoat and a scarf. He has galoshes that buckle on over his shoes instead of leather boots waterproofed with bacon grease. Our mother’s legs have appeared, sheathed in nylons with seams up the backs. She draws on a lipstick mouth when she goes out. She has a coat with a gray fur collar, and a hat with a feather in it that makes her nose look too long. Every time she puts on this hat, she looks into the mirror and says, “I look like the Witch of Endor.”

Our father has changed his job: this explains things. Instead of being a forest-insect field researcher, he is now a university professor. The smelly jars and collecting bottles that once were everywhere have diminished in number. Instead, scattered around the house, there are stacks of drawings made by his students with colored pencils. All of them are of insects. There are grasshoppers, spruce budworms, forest tent caterpillars, wood-boring beetles, each one the size of a page, their parts neatly labeled: mandibles, palps, antennae, thorax, abdomen. Some of them are in section, which means they’re cut open so you can see what’s inside them: tunnels, branches, bulbs and delicate filaments. I like this kind the best.

My father sits in an armchair in the evenings with a board across the arms of the chair and the drawings on the board, going through them with a red pencil. Sometimes he laughs to himself while doing this, or shakes his head, or makes ticking noises through his teeth. “Idiot,” he says, or “blockhead.” I stand behind his chair, watching the drawings, and he points out that this person has put the mouth at the wrong end, that person has made no provision for a heart, yet another one cannot tell a male from a female. This is not how I judge the drawings: I find them better or worse depending on the colors. On Saturdays we get into the car with him and drive down to the place where he works. It is actually the Zoology Building, but we don’t call it that. It is just the building. The building is enormous. Whenever we’re there it’s almost empty, because it’s Saturday; this makes it seem even larger. It’s of dark-brown weathered brick, and gives the impression of having turrets, although it has none. Ivy grows on it, leafless now in winter, covering it with skeletal veining. Inside it there are long hallways with hardwood floors, stained and worn from generations of students in slushy winter boots, but still kept polished. There are staircases, also of wood, which creak when we climb them, and banisters we aren’t supposed to slide down, and iron radiators that make banging noises and are either stone cold or blazing hot.

On the second floor there are corridors leading into other corridors, lined with shelves that contain jars full of dead lizards or pickled ox eyeballs. In one room there are glass cages with snakes in them, snakes bigger than any we’ve ever seen before. One is a tame boa constrictor, and if the man in charge of it is there he gets it out and winds it around his arm, so we can see how it crushes things to death in order to eat them. We’re allowed to stroke it. Its skin is cool and dry. Other cages have rattlesnakes, and the man shows us how he milks the venom out of their fangs. For this he wears a leather glove. The fangs are curved and hollow, the venom dripping from them is yellow.

In the same room is a cement pool filled with thick-looking greenish water in which large turtles sit and blink or clamber ponderously up onto the rocks provided for them, hissing if we get too close. This room is hotter and steamier than the others because the snakes and turtles need it to be; it smells musky. In yet another room is a cage full of gigantic African cockroaches, white-colored and so poisonous that their keeper has to gas them to make them unconscious every time he opens the cage to feed them or get one out.

Down in the cellar there are shelves and shelves of white rats and black mice, special ones that aren’t wild. They eat food pellets from hoppers in their cages and drink from bottles fitted with eyedroppers. They have chewed-newspaper nests full of pink hairless baby mice. They run over and under one another and sleep in heaps, and sniff one another with their quivering noses. The mouse feeder tells us that if you put a strange mouse into one of their cages, one with the wrong, alien scent, they will bite it to death. The cellar smells strongly of mouse droppings, a smell which wafts upward through the whole building, getting fainter as you go up, mingling with the smell of the green Dustbane used to clean the floors, and with the other smells, the floor polish and furniture wax and formaldehyde and snakes. We don’t find any of the things in the building repulsive. The general arrangements, though not the details, are familiar to us, though we’ve never seen so many mice in one place before and are awed by their numbers and stench. We would like to get the turtles out of their pool and play with them, but since they’re snapping turtles and bad-tempered and can take your fingers off, we know enough not to. My brother wants an ox eyeball out of one of the jars: it’s the sort of thing other boys find impressive. Some of the upstairs rooms are labs. The labs have vast ceilings and blackboards across the front. They contain rows and rows of large dark desks, more like tables than desks, with high stools to sit on. Each desk has two lamps with green glass shades, and two microscopes, old microscopes, with heavy thin tubing and brass fittings.

We’ve seen microscopes before, but not at such length; we can spend a lot of time with them before getting tired of them. Sometimes we’re given slides to look at: butterfly wings, cross-sections of worms, planaria stained with pink and purple dyes so you can see the different parts. At other times we put our fingers under the lenses and examine our fingernails, the pale parts curved like hills against their dark pink sky, the skin around them grainy and creased like the edge of a desert. Or we pull hairs out of our heads to look at them, hard and shiny like the bristles that grow out of the chitonous skins of insects, with the hair roots at the end like tiny onion bulbs.

We like scabs. We pick them off—there isn’t room for a whole arm or leg under the microscope—and turn the magnification up as high as it will go. The scabs look like rocks, bumpy, with a sheen like silica; or else like some kind of fungus. If we can get a scab off a finger we put the finger under and watch the place where the blood oozes out, bright red, in a round button, like a berry. Afterward we lick off the blood. We look at earwax, or snot, or dirt from our toes, checking first to see that there’s no one around: we know without asking that such things would not be approved of. Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly.

This is what we do on Saturday mornings, while our father attends to things in his office and our mother goes grocery shopping. She says it keeps us out of her hair.

The building overlooks University Avenue, which has lawns and some copper-green statues of men on horses. Right across the road is the Ontario Parliament Building, which is also old and dingy. I think it must be another building like the building, filled with long creaky corridors and shelves of pickled lizards and ox eyes.

It’s from the building that we watch our first Santa Claus Parade. We’ve never seen a parade before. You can listen to this parade on the radio, but if you want to actually see it you have to bundle up in your winter clothes and stand on the sidewalk, stomping your feet and rubbing your hands to keep warm. Some people climb up onto the horse statues to get a better view. We don’t have to do this, as we can sit on the window ledge of one of the main labs in the building, separated from the weather by a pane of dusty glass, with blasts of heat from the iron radiator going up our legs. From there we watch as people dressed like snowflakes, like elves, like rabbits, like sugar plum fairies, march past us, strangely truncated because we’re looking down on them. There are bands of bagpipers in kilts, and things like big cakes, with people on them waving, that slide past on wheels. It’s begun to drizzle. Everyone down there looks cold.

Santa Claus is at the end, smaller than expected. His voice and his loudspeaker jingle bells are muted by the dusty glass; he rocks back and forth behind his mechanical reindeer, looking soggy, blowing kisses to the crowd.

I know he isn’t the real Santa Claus, just someone dressed up like him. Still, my idea of Santa Claus has altered, has acquired a new dimension. After this it becomes hard for me to think of him without thinking also of the snakes and the turtles and the pickled eyes, and the lizards floating in their yellow jars, and of the vast, echoing, spicy, ancient and forlorn but also comforting smell of old wood, furniture polish, formaldehyde and distant mice.