Cat's Eye

Chapter 21

I leave the gallery, walk east. I need to go shopping, get some decent food, organize. When I’m by myself I revert to the times when I would forget about eating, stay up all night working, go until I felt an odd sensation I’d identify after some thought as hunger. Then I’d go through the refrigerator like a vacuum cleaner, sucking in whatever there was. Leftovers.

This morning there were eggs, but there are no more eggs. There’s no more bread, there’s no more milk. Why were there eggs and bread and milk in the first place? It must have been a stash of Jon’s, he must eat there sometimes. Or could it have been that he got this stuff for me? It’s hardly believable. I will buy oranges, yogurt without the jam. I will have a positive attitude, take care of myself, I’ll feed myself enzymes, and friendly bacteria. These good thoughts carry me until I’m right downtown. This is where Eaton’s used to be, here on this corner, yellow and foursquare. Now there’s a huge building in its place, what they call a shopping complex, as if shopping were a psychic disease. It’s glassy and be-tiled, green as an iceberg.

Across the street from it is known territory: Simpsons department store. I know it has a food hall somewhere. In the plate-glass windows there are heaps of bath towels, overstuffed sofas and chairs, sheets in modern prints. I wonder where all this cloth ends up. People cart it away, stuff it into their houses: the nesting instinct. A less attractive concept if you’ve ever seen a nest up close. There must be a limit to how much cloth you can cram into any one house, but of course it’s disposable. You used to buy for quality, things that would last. You kept your clothes until they were part of you, you checked the hemlines, the way the buttons were sewed on, you rubbed the cloth between your finger and thumb. The next windows contain disgruntled mannequins, their pelvises thrust out, their shoulders flung this way and that, making them look like hunchbacked ax murderers. I guess this is the look now: surly aggression. On the sidewalks there are a lot of androgynes, in the flesh, the girls in the black leather jackets and tough boots of boys, crewcuts, ducktails, the boys with the sullen pouty look of those women on the front covers of fashion magazines, their hair gelled into quills. At a distance I can’t tell the difference, though they themselves probably can. They make me feel outmoded.

What are they aiming for? Is each an imitation of the other? Or does it only seem that way to me because they’re all so alarmingly young? Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.

But I suppose that’s what Cordelia and I looked like then, to older people, crossing the street right here with our collars turned up and our eyebrows plucked into sceptical arches, swaggering in our rubber boots and straining for nonchalance, on our way down to Union Station where the trains came in, to put our quarters into the photo machine, four shots in monochrome, wallet-sized. Cordelia with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, her eyelids half closed, trying for sultry. Ultrasharp. I revolve through the revolving doors into Simpsons, where I become lost immediately. They’ve changed the whole thing over. It used to be sedate wood-rimmed glass counters, with gloves in standard models, appropriate wrist-watches, accent scarves in floral prints. Serious-minded good taste. Now it’s a cosmetic fairground: silver trim, gold pillars, marquee lights, brand-name letters the size of a human head. The air is saturated with the stink of perfumes at war. There are video screens on which flawless complexions turn, preen, sigh through their parted lips, are caressed. On other screens are close-ups of skin pores, before and after, details of regimes for everything, your hands, your neck, your thighs. Your elbows, especially your elbows: aging begins at the elbows and metastasizes. This is religion. Voodoo and spells. I want to believe in it, the creams, the rejuvenating lotions, the transparent unguents in vials that slick on like roll-top glue. “Don’t you know what that junk is made of?”

Ben said once. “Ground-up cock’s combs.” But this doesn’t deter me, I’d use anything if it worked—slug juice, toad spit, eye of newt, anything at all to mummify myself, stop the drip-drip of time, stay more or less the way I am.

But I own enough of this slop already to embalm all of the girls in my high school graduating class, who must need it by now as much as I do. I stop only long enough to allow myself to be sprayed by a girl giving away free squirts of some venomous new perfume. The femme fatale must be back, Veronica Lake slinks again. The stuff smells like grape Kool-Aid. I can’t imagine it seducing anything but a fruit fly.

“You like this?” I say to the girl. They must get lonely, standing here all day in their high heels, spraying strangers.

“It’s been very popular,” she says evasively. Briefly I glimpse myself through her eyes: bloom off the rose, teetering on the brink of matronhood, hoping for the best. I am the market. I ask her where the food hall is, and she tells me. It’s down. I get on the escalator, but suddenly I’m going up. This is bad, confusing directions like that, or am I jumping time, did I go down already? I get off, and find myself wading through rack after rack of children’s party dresses. They have the lace collars, the puffed sleeves, the sashes I remember; many of them are in plaid, the authentic somber blood-lit colors, dark greens with a stripe of red, dark blues, black. Black Watch. Have these people forgotten history, don’t they know anything about the Scots, don’t they know any better than to clothe small girls in the colors of despair, slaughter, treachery and murder? My way of life, new line, Is fall’n into the sere and yellow leaf. Once we had to memorize things. Still, plaid was the fashion in my day too. The white socks, the Mary Janes, the always-inadequate birthday present swathed in tissue paper, and the little girls with their assessing eyes, their slippery deceitful smiles, tartaned up like Lady Macbeth. In the endless time when Cordelia had such power over me, I peeled the skin off my feet. I did it at night, when I was supposed to be sleeping. My feet would be cool and slightly damp, smooth, like the skin of mushrooms. I would begin with the big toes. I would bend my foot up and bite a small opening in the thickest part of the skin, on the bottom, along the outside edge. Then, with my fingernails, which I never bit because why bite something that didn’t hurt, I would pull the skin off in narrow strips. I would do the same to the other big toe, then to the ball of each foot, the heel of each. I would go down as far as the blood. Nobody but me ever looked at my feet, so nobody knew I was doing it. In the mornings I would pull my socks on, over my peeled feet. It was painful to walk, but not impossible. The pain gave me something definite to think about, something immediate. It was something to hold on to. I chewed the ends of my hair, so that there was always one lock of hair that was pointed and wet. I gnawed the cuticles off from around my fingernails, leaving welts of exposed, oozing flesh which would harden into rinds and scale off. In the bathtub or in dishwater my fingers looked nibbled, as if by mice. I did these things constantly, without thinking about them. But the feet were more deliberate. I remember thinking when the girls were born, first one and then the other, that I should have had sons and not daughters. I didn’t feel up to daughters, I didn’t know how they worked. I must have been afraid of hating them. With sons I would have known what to do: frog catching, fishing, war strategies, running around in the mud. I would have been able to teach them how to defend themselves, and what from. But the world of sons has changed; it’s more likely to be the boys now with that baffled look, like a night dweller gone blind in sunlight. “Stand up for yourself like a man,” I would have said. I would have been on shifty ground.

As for the girls, my girls at any rate, they seem to have been born with some kind of protective coating, some immunity I lacked. They look you in the eye, level and measuring, they sit at the kitchen table and the air around lights up with their lucidity. They are sane, or so I like to think. My saving graces. They amaze me, they always have. When they were little I felt I had to protect them from certain things about myself, the fear, the messier parts of the marriages, the days of nothing. I didn’t want to pass anything on to them, anything of mine they would be better off without. At those times I would lie on the floor in the dark, with the curtains drawn and the door closed. I would say, Mummy has a headache. Mummy’s working. But they didn’t seem to need that protection, they seemed to take everything in, look at it straight, accept everything. “Mummy’s in there lying on the floor. She’ll be fine tomorrow,” I heard Sarah tell Anne when one was ten and the other was four. And so I was fine. Such faith, like the faith in sunrise or the phases of the moon, sustained me. It must be this sort of thing that keeps God going.

Who knows what they’ll make of me later on, who knows what they’ve already made of me? I would like them to be the happy end of my story. But of course they are not the end of their own. Someone comes up behind me, a sudden voice out of thin air. She startles me. “May I help you?” It’s a saleslady, an older woman this time. Middle-aged. My age, I then think, discouraged. Mine and Cordelia’s.

I’m standing among the plaid dresses, fingering a sleeve. God knows how long I’ve been doing it. Have I been talking out loud? My throat feels tight and my feet hurt. But whatever else may be in store for me, I do not intend to slide off my trolley tracks in the middle of Simpsons Girlswear.

“The food hall,” I say.

She smiles gently. She is tired, and I am a disappointment to her, I don’t want any plaid. “Oh, you need to be right downstairs,” she says, “in the cellar.” Kindly, she directs me.

Chapter 22

The black door opens. I’m sitting in the mouse-dropping and formaldehyde smell of the building, on the window ledge, with the heat from the radiator going up my legs, watching out the window as the fairies and gnomes and snowballs below me slog through the drizzle to the tune of “Jingle Bells” played by a brass band. The fairies look foreshortened, damaged, streaked by the dust and rain on the window glass; my breath makes a foggy circle. My brother isn’t here, he’s too old for it. This is what he said. I have the whole window ledge to myself.

On the window ledge beside mine, Cordelia and Grace and Carol are sitting, jammed in together, whispering and giggling. I have to sit on a window ledge by myself because they aren’t speaking to me. It’s something I said wrong, but I don’t know what it is because they won’t tell me. Cordelia says it will be better for me to think back over everything I’ve said today and try to pick out the wrong thing. That way I will learn not to say such a thing again. When I’ve guessed the right answer, then they will speak to me again. All of this is for my own good, because they are my best friends and they want to help me improve. So this is what I’m thinking about as the pipe band goes past in sodden fur hats, and the drum majorettes with their bare wet legs and red smiles and dripping hair: what did I say wrong? I can’t remember having said anything different from what I would ordinarily say. My father walks into the room, wearing his white lab coat. He’s working in another part of the building, but he’s come to check on us. “Enjoying the parade, girls?” he says.

“Oh yes, thank you,” Carol says, and giggles. Grace says, “Yes, thank you.” I say nothing. Cordelia gets down off her windowsill and slides up onto mine, sitting close beside me.

“We’re enjoying it extremely, thank you very much,” she says in her voice for adults. My parents think she has beautiful manners. She puts an arm around me, gives me a little squeeze, a squeeze of complicity, of instruction. Everything will be all right as long as I sit still, say nothing, reveal nothing. I will be saved then, I will be acceptable once more. I smile, tremulous with relief, with gratitude. But as soon as my father is out of the room Cordelia turns to face me. Her expression is sad rather than angry. She shakes her head. “How could you?” she says. “How could you be so impolite? You didn’t even answer him. You know what this means, don’t you? I’m afraid you’ll have to be punished. What do you have to say for yourself?” And I have nothing to say.

I’m standing outside the closed door of Cordelia’s room. Cordelia, Grace, and Carol are inside. They’re having a meeting. The meeting is about me. I am just not measuring up, although they are giving me every chance. I will have to do better. But better at what?

Perdie and Mirrie come up the stairs, along the hall, in their armor of being older. I long to be as old as they are. They’re the only people who have any real power over Cordelia, that I can see. I think of them as my allies; or I think they would be my allies if they only knew. Knew what? Even to myself I am mute.

“Hello, Elaine,” they say. Now they say, “What’s the little game today? Hide-and-seek?”

“I can’t tell,” I answer. They smile at me, condescending and kind, and head toward their room, to do their toenails and talk about older things.

I lean against the wall. From behind the door comes the indistinct murmur of voices, of laughter, exclusive and luxurious. Cordelia’s Mummie drifts by, humming to herself. She’s wearing her painting smock. There’s a smudge of apple-green on her cheek. She smiles at me, the smile of an angel, benign but remote. “Hello, dear,” she says. “You tell Cordelia there’s a cookie for you girls, in the tin.”

“You can come in now,” says the voice of Cordelia from inside the room. I look at the closed door, at the doorknob, at my own hand moving up, as if it’s no longer a part of me. This is how it goes. It’s the kind of thing girls of this age do to one another, or did then, but I’d had no practice in it. As my daughters approached this age, the age of nine, I watched them anxiously. I scrutinized their fingers for bites, their feet, the ends of their hair. I asked them leading questions: “Is everything all right, are your friends all right?” And they looked at me as if they had no idea what I was talking about, why I was so anxious. I thought they’d give themselves away somehow: nightmares, moping. But there was nothing I could see, which may only have meant they were good at deception, as good as I was. When their friends arrived at our house to play, I scanned their faces for signs of hypocrisy. Standing in the kitchen, I listened to their voices in the other room. I thought I would be able to tell. Or maybe it was worse. Maybe my daughters were doing this sort of thing themselves, to someone else. That would account for their blandness, the absence of bitten fingers, their level blue-eyed gaze.

Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence, but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

It turns colder and colder. I lie with my knees up, as close to my body as I can get them. I’m peeling the skin off my feet; I can do it without looking, by touch. I worry about what I’ve said today, the expression on my face, how I walk, what I wear, because all of these things need improvement. I am not normal, I am not like other girls. Cordelia tells me so, but she will help me. Grace and Carol will help me too. It will take hard work and a long time.

In the mornings I get out of bed, put on my clothes, the stiff cotton waist with the garters, the ribbed stockings, the nubbled wool pullover, the plaid skirt. I remember these clothes as cold. Probably they were cold.

I put my shoes on, over my stockings and my peeled feet.

I go out to the kitchen, where my mother is cooking breakfast. There’s a pot with porridge in it, Red River cereal or oatmeal or Cream of Wheat, and a glass coffee percolator. I rest my arms on the edge of the white stove and watch the porridge, simmering and thickening, the flaccid bubbles coming up out of it one at a time and releasing their small puffs of steam. The porridge is like boiling mud. I know that when it comes time to eat the porridge I will have trouble: my stomach will contract, my hands will get cold, it will be difficult to swallow. Something tight sits under my breastbone. But I will get the porridge down somehow, because it’s required.

Or I watch the coffee percolator, which is better because I can see everything, the pinpoint bubbles gathering under the upside-down glass umbrella, then hesitating, then the column of water shooting upward through the stem, falling down over the coffee in its metal basket, the drops of coffee dripping down into the clear water, inking it brown.

Or I make toast, sitting at the table where the toaster is. Each of our spoons has a dark-yellow halibut liver oil capsule in it, shaped like a small football. There are the plates, gleaming whitely, and the glasses of juice. The toaster is on a silver heat pad. It has two doors, with a knob at the bottom of each, and a grid up the center that glows red-hot. When the toast is done on one side I turn the knobs and the doors open and the toast slides down and turns over, all by itself. I think about putting my finger in there, onto the red-hot grid.

All of these are ways of delaying time, slowing it down, so I won’t have to go out through the kitchen door. But no matter what I do, and despite myself, I am pulling on my snowpants, wadding my skirt in between my legs, tugging thick woolen socks on over my shoes, stuffing my feet into boots. Coat, scarf, mittens, knitted hat, I am encased, I am kissed, the door opens, then closes behind me, frozen air shoots up my nose. I waddle through the orchard of leafless apple trees, the legs of my snowpants whisking against each other, down to the bus stop.

Grace is waiting there and Carol, and especially Cordelia. Once I’m outside the house there is no getting away from them. They are on the school bus, where Cordelia stands close beside me and whispers into my ear: “Stand up straight! People are looking!” Carol is in my classroom, and it’s her job to report to Cordelia what I do and say all day. They’re there at recess, and in the cellar at lunchtime. They comment on the kind of lunch I have, how I hold my sandwich, how I chew. On the way home from school I have to walk in front of them, or behind. In front is worse because they talk about how I’m walking, how I look from behind. “Don’t hunch over,” says Cordelia. “Don’t move your arms like that.”

They don’t say any of the things they say to me in front of others, even other children: whatever is going on is going on in secret, among the four of us only. Secrecy is important, I know that: to violate it would be the greatest, the irreparable sin. If I tell I will be cast out forever. But Cordelia doesn’t do these things or have this power over me because she’s my enemy. Far from it. I know about enemies. There are enemies in the schoolyard, they yell things at one another and if they’re boys they fight. In the war there were enemies. Our boys and the boys from Our Lady of Perpetual Help are enemies. You throw snowballs at enemies and rejoice if they get hit. With enemies you can feel hatred, and anger. But Cordelia is my friend. She likes me, she wants to help me, they all do. They are my friends, my girl friends, my best friends. I have never had any before and I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please.

Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.

Chapter 23

None of this is unrelenting.

On some days Cordelia decides that it’s Carol’s turn to be improved. I am invited to join Grace and Cordelia as they walk ahead on the way home from school, with Carol trailing behind, and to think of things Carol has done wrong. “Carol is a smarty-pants,” Cordelia says. At these times I don’t pity Carol. She deserves what’s happening to her, because of all the times she’s done the same things to me. I rejoice that it’s her turn instead of mine.

But these times don’t last long. Carol cries too easily and noisily, she gets carried away with her own crying. She draws attention, she can’t be depended on not to tell. There’s a recklessness in her, she can be pushed just so far, she has a weak sense of honor, she’s reliable only as an informer. If this is obvious to me, it must be even more obvious to Cordelia.

Other days appear normal. Cordelia seems to forget about improving anybody, and I think she may have given up on it. I’m expected to behave as if nothing has ever happened. But it’s hard for me to do this, because I feel I’m always being watched. At any time I may step over some line I don’t even know is there.

Last year I was hardly ever home, by myself, after school or on weekends. Now I want to be. I make excuses so I won’t have to go out and play. I still call it playing.

“I have to help my mother,” I say. This has a ring of truth to it. Girls do have to help their mothers, sometimes; Grace in particular has to help her mother. But it’s less true than I would like it to be. My mother doesn’t linger over housework, she’d rather be outside raking up leaves in the fall, shoveling snow in the winter, pulling weeds in the spring. When I help her I slow her down. But I dangle around the kitchen, saying, “Can I help?” until she gives me a duster and has me dust the scrolled legs of the dining table, or the edges of the bookcases; or I cut up dates, chop nuts, grease the muffin cups with a corner of waxed paper torn from the inside wrapper of the Crisco box; or I rinse the wash. I like rinsing the wash. The laundry room is small and enclosed, secret, underground. On the shelves there are packages of odd, power-filled substances: laundry starch in white twisted shapes like bird droppings, bluing to make the whites look whiter, Sunlight soap in bars, Javex bleach with a skull and crossbones on it, reeking of sanitation and death.

The washing machine itself is tubular white enamel, a hulk on four spindly legs. It dances slowly across the floor, chug-lug, chug-lug, the clothes and the soapy water moving as if boiling sluggishly, like cloth porridge. I watch it, hands on the edge of the tub, chin on hands, my body dragging downward from this ledge, not thinking about anything. The water turns gray and I feel virtuous because of all the dirt that’s coming out. It’s as if I myself am doing this just by looking.

My job is to run the washed clothes through the wringer into the laundry sink full of clean water and then into the second laundry sink for the second rinse, and after that into the creaky laundry basket. After that my mother takes the clothes outside and hangs them onto the clothesline with wooden clothespins. Sometimes I do this too. In the cold the clothes freeze stiff, like plywood. One day a small neighborhood boy collects horse buns, from the milk wagon horse, and puts them along the bottom folds of the freshly washed double-hung white sheets. All sheets are white, all milk comes from horses. The wringer is two rubber rollers, the color of pale flesh, that revolve around and around, the clothes squeezing in between them, water and suds squooshing out like juice. I roll up my sleeves, stand on tiptoe, rummage in the tub and haul up the sopping underpants and slips and pajamas, which feel like something you might touch just before you know it’s a drowned person. I poke the corners of the clothes in between the wringers and they are grabbed and dragged through, the arms or the shirts ballooning with trapped air, suds dripping from the cuffs. I’ve been told to be very careful when doing this: women can get their hands caught in wringers, and other parts of their bodies, such as hair. I think about what would happen to my hand if it did get caught: the blood and flesh squeezing up my arm like a traveling bulge, the hand coming out the other side flat as a glove, white as paper. This would hurt a lot at first, I know that. But there’s something compelling about it. A whole person could go through the wringer and come out flat, neat, completed, like a flower pressed in a book.

“You coming out to play?” says Cordelia, on our way home from school.

“I have to help my mother,” I say.

“Again?” says Grace. “How come she does that so much? She never used to do it.” Grace has begun talking about me in the third person, like one grown-up to another, when Cordelia is there. I think of saying my mother is sick, but my mother is so obviously healthy I know I won’t get away with this.

“She thinks she’s too good for us,” says Cordelia. Then, to me: “Do you think you’re too good for us?”

“No,” I say. Thinking you are too good is bad.

“We’ll come and ask your mother if you can play,” says Cordelia, switching back to her concerned, friendly voice. “She won’t make you work all the time. It isn’t fair.”

And my mother smiles and says yes, as if she’s pleased that I’m so much in demand, and I am pried away from the muffin cups and the washing machine wringer, expelled into the outside air. On Sundays I go to the church with the onion on top of it, crammed into the Smeaths’ car with all the Smeaths, Mr. Smeath, Mrs. Smeath, Aunt Mildred, Grace’s younger sisters, whose nostrils in the winter season are forever plugged with yellowy-green snot. Mrs. Smeath seems pleased about this arrangement, but she is pleased with herself, for going out of her way, for displaying charity. She’s not especially pleased with me. I can tell this by the line between her eyebrows when she looks at me, although she smiles with her closed lips, and by the way she keeps asking whether I wouldn’t like to bring my brother next time, or my parents? I focus on her chest, on her single breast that goes all the way down to her waist, with her dark-red, black-spotted heart beating within it, gasping in out, in out, out of breath like a fish on shore, and shake my head, ashamed. My failure to produce these other members of my family tells against me.

I have memorized the names of all the books of the Bible, in order, and the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, and most of the Beatitudes. I’ve been getting ten out of ten on my Bible quizzes and my memory work, but I’m beginning to falter. In Sunday school we have to stand up and recite, out loud, in front of the others, and Grace watches me. She watches everything I do on Sundays, and reports on me, matter-of-factly, to Cordelia.

“She didn’t stand up straight in Sunday school yesterday.” Or: “She was a goody-goody.” I believe each of these comments: my shoulders sag, my spine crumples, I exude the wrong kind of goodness; I see myself shambling crookedly, I make an effort to stand straighter, my body rigid with anxiety. And it’s true that I got ten out of ten, again, and Grace only got nine. Is it wrong to be right? How right should I be, to be perfect? The next week I put five wrong answers, deliberately.

“She only got five out of ten on Bible,” Grace says on Monday.

“She’s getting stupider,” Cordelia says. “You aren’t really that stupid. You’ll have to try harder than that!”

Today is White Gift Sunday. We have all brought cans of food from home for the poor, wrapped up in white tissue paper. Mine are Habitant pea soup and Spam. I suspect they are the wrong things, but they’re what my mother had in the cupboard. The idea of white gifts bothers me: such hard gifts, made uniform, bleached of their identity and colors. They look dead. Inside those blank, sinister bundles of tissue paper piled up at the front of the church there could be anything. Grace and I sit on the wooden benches in the church basement, watching the illuminated slides on the wall, singing the words to the songs, while the piano plods onward in the darkness.

I want to shine like a candle. I want to be good, to follow instructions, to do what Jesus bids. I want to believe you should love your neighbors as yourself and the Kingdom of God is within you. But all of this seems less and less possible.

In the darkness I can see a gleam of light, to the side. It’s not a candle: it’s light reflected back off Grace’s glasses, from the light on the wall. She knows the words by heart, she doesn’t have to look at the screen. She’s watching me.

After church I go with the Smeaths through the vacant Sunday streets to watch the trains shunting monotonously back and forth along their tracks, on the gray plain beside the flat lake. Then I go back to their house for Sunday dinner. This happens every Sunday now, it’s part of going to church; it would be very bad if I said no, to either thing.

I’ve learned the way things are done here. I climb the stairs past the rubber plant, not touching it, and go into the Smeaths’ bathroom and count off four squares of toilet paper and wash my hands afterward with the gritty black Smeath soap. I no longer have to be admonished, I bow my head automatically when Grace says, “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful, Amen.”

“Pork and beans the musical fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot,” says Mr. Smeath, grinning round the table. Mrs. Smeath and Aunt Mildred do not think this is funny. The little girls regard him solemnly. They both have glasses and white freckled skin and Sunday bows on the ends of their brown wiry braids, like Grace.

“Lloyd,” says Mrs. Smeath.

“Come on, it’s harmless,” Mr. Smeath says. He looks me in the eye. “Elaine thinks it’s funny. Don’t you, Elaine?”

I am trapped. What can I say? If I say no, it could be rudeness. If I say yes, I have sided with him, against Mrs. Smeath and Aunt Mildred and all three of the Smeath girls, including Grace. I feel myself turn hot, then cold. Mr. Smeath is grinning at me, a conspirator’s grin.

“I don’t know,” I say. The real answer is no, because I don’t in fact know what this joke means. But I can’t abandon Mr. Smeath, not entirely. He is a squat, balding, flabby man, but still a man. He does not judge me.

Grace repeats this incident to Cordelia, next morning, in the school bus, her voice a near whisper. “She said she didn’t know.”

“What sort of an answer was that?” Cordelia asks me sharply. “Either you think it’s funny or you don’t. Why did you say ”I don’t know‘?“

I tell the truth. “I don’t know what it means.”

“You don’t know what what means?”

“Musical fruit,” I say. “The more you toot.” I am now deeply embarrassed, because I don’t know. Not knowing is the worst thing I could have done.

Cordelia gives a hoot of contemptuous laughter. “You don’t know what that means?” she says. “What a stupe! It means fart. Beans make you fart. Everyone knows that.”

I am doubly mortified, because I didn’t know, and because Mr. Smeath said fart at the Sunday dinner table and enlisted me on his side, and I did not say no. It isn’t the word itself that makes me ashamed. I’m used to it, my brother and his friends say it all the time, when there are no adults listening. It’s the word at the Smeath dinner table, stronghold of righteousness.

But inwardly I do not recant. My loyalty to Mr. Smeath is similar to my loyalty to my brother: both are on the side of ox eyeballs, toe jam under the microscope, the outrageous, the subversive. Outrageous to whom, subversive of what? Of Grace and Mrs. Smeath, of tidy paper ladies pasted into scrapbooks. Cordelia ought to be on this side too. Sometimes she is, sometimes she isn’t. It’s hard to tell.

Chapter 24

In the mornings the milk is frozen, the cream risen in icy, granular columns out of the bottle necks. Miss Lumley bends over my desk, her invisible navy-blue bloomers casting their desolating aura around her. On either side of her nose the skin hangs down, like the jowls of a bulldog; there’s a trace of dried spit in the corner of her mouth. “Your handwriting is deteriorating,” she says. I look at my page in dismay. She’s right: the letters are no longer round and beautiful, but spidery, frantic, and disfigured with blots of black rusty ink where I’ve pressed down too hard on the steel nib. “You must try harder.” I curl my fingers under. I think she’s looking at the ragged edges of skin. Everything she says, everything I do, is heard and seen by Carol and will be reported later.

Cordelia is in a play and we go to watch her. This is my first play and I ought to be excited. Instead I am filled with dread, because I know nothing of the etiquette of play-going and I’m sure I’ll do something wrong. The play is at the Eaton’s Auditorium; the stage has blue curtains with black velvet horizontal stripes on them. The curtains part to reveal The Wind in the Willows. All the actors are children. Cordelia is a weasel, but since she’s in a weasel costume with a weasel head, it’s impossible to tell her apart from all the other weasels. I sit in the plush theater seat, biting my fingers, craning my neck, looking for her. Knowing she’s there but not knowing where is the worst thing. She could be anywhere. The radio fills with sugary music: “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which we have to sing in school, standing beside our desks with Miss Lumley tooting on her pitch pipe to give the note and keeping time with her wooden ruler, the same one she whacks the boys’

hands with when they fidget. Rudolph bothers me, because there’s something wrong with him; but at the same time he gives me hope, because he ended up beloved. My father says he is a nauseating commercial neologism. “A fool and his money are soon parted,” he says. We make red bells out of construction paper, folding the paper in half before cutting out the shape. We make snowmen the same way. It’s Miss Lumley’s recipe for symmetry: everything has to be folded, everything has two halves, a left and a right, identical.

I go through these festive tasks like a sleepwalker. I take no interest in bells or snowmen or for that matter in Santa Claus, in whom I’ve ceased to believe, since Cordelia has told me it’s really just your parents. There’s a class Christmas party, which consists of cookies brought from home and eaten silently at our desks, and different-colored jelly beans provided by Miss Lumley, five for each child. Miss Lumley knows what the conventions are and pays her own rigid tributes to them. For Christmas I get a Barbara Ann Scott doll, which I’ve said I wanted. I had to say I wanted something and I did in a way want this doll. I haven’t had any girl-shaped dolls before. Barbara Ann Scott is a famous figure skater, a very famous one. She has won prizes. I’ve studied the pictures of her in the newspaper.

The doll of her has little leatherette skates and a fur-trimmed costume, pink with white fur, and fringed eyes that open and close, but it looks nothing at all like the real Barbara Ann Scott. According to the pictures she’s muscular, with big thighs, but the doll is a slender stick. Barbara is a woman, the doll is a girl. It has the worrying power of effigies, a lifeless life that fills me with creeping horror. I put it back into its cardboard box and tuck the tissue paper around it, over the face. I say I’m doing this to keep it safe, but in fact I don’t want it watching me.

Over our chesterfield there’s a badminton net, festooned across the wall. In the squares of this net my parents have hung their Christmas cards. No one else I know has a badminton net like this on their wall. Cordelia’s Christmas tree is not like others: it’s covered in gauzy angel hair, and all the lights and decorations on it are blue. But she can get away with such differences, I can’t. I know I’ll be made to pay for the badminton net, sooner or later.

We sit around the table, eating our Christmas dinner. There’s a student of my father’s, a young man from India who’s here to study insects and who’s never seen snow before. We’re having him to Christmas dinner because he’s foreign, he’s far from home, he will be lonely, and they don’t even have Christmas in his country. This has been explained to us in advance by our mother. He’s polite and ill at ease and he giggles frequently, looking with what I sense is terror at the array of food spread out before him, the mashed potatoes, the gravy, the lurid green and red Jell-O salad, the enormous turkey: my mother has said that the food is different there. I know he’s miserable, underneath his smiles and politeness. I’m developing a knack for this, I can sniff out hidden misery in others now with hardly any effort at all. My father sits at the head of the table, beaming like the Jolly Green Giant. He lifts his glass, his gnome’s eyes twinkling. “Mr. Banerji, sir,” he says. He always calls his students Mr. and Miss. “You can’t fly on one wing.”

Mr. Banerji giggles and says, “Very true, sir,” in his voice that sounds like the BBC News. He lifts his own glass and sips. What is in the glass is wine. My brother and I have cranberry juice in our wineglasses. Last year or the year before we might have tied our shoelaces together, under the table, so we could signal each other with secret jerks and tugs, but we’re both beyond this now for different reasons.

My father ladles out the stuffing, deals the slices of dark and light; my mother adds the mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce and asks Mr. Banerji, enunciating carefully, whether they have turkeys in his country. He says he doesn’t believe so. I sit across the table from him, my feet dangling, staring at him, enthralled. His spindly wrists extend from his over-large cuffs, his hands are long and thin, ragged around the nails, like mine. I think he is very beautiful, with his brown skin and brilliant white teeth and his dark appalled eyes. There’s a child these colors in the ring of children on the front of the Sunday school missionary paper, yellow children, brown children, all in different costumes, dancing around Jesus. Mr. Banerji doesn’t have a costume, only a jacket and tie like other men. Nevertheless I can hardly believe he’s a man, he seems so unlike one. He’s a creature more like myself: alien and apprehensive. He’s afraid of us. He has no idea what we will do next, what impossibilities we will expect of him, what we will make him eat. No wonder he bites his fingers.

“A little off the sternum, sir?” my father asks him, and Mr. Banerji brightens at the word.

“Ah, the sternum,” he says, and I know they have entered together the shared world of biology, which offers refuge from the real, awkward world of manners and silences we’re sitting in at the moment. As he slices away with the carving knife my father indicates to all of us, but especially to Mr. Banerji, the areas where the flight muscles attach, using the carving fork as a pointer. Of course, he says, the domestic turkey has lost the ability to fly.

“Meleagris gallopavo,” he says, and Mr. Banerji leans forward; the Latin perks him up. “A pea-brained animal, or bird-brained you might say, bred for its ability to put on weight, especially on the drumsticks”—he points these out—“certainly not for intelligence. It was originally domesticated by the Mayans.” He tells a story of a turkey farm where the turkeys all died because they were too stupid to go into their shed during a thunderstorm. Instead they stood around outside, looking up at the sky with their beaks Wide open and the rain ran down their throats and drowned them. He says this is a story told by farmers and probably not true, although the stupidity of the bird is legendary. He says that the wild turkey, once abundant in the deciduous forests in these regions, is far more intelligent and can elude even practiced hunters. Also it can fly.

I sit picking at my Christmas dinner, as Mr. Banerji is picking at his. Both of us have messed the mashed potatoes around on our plates without actually eating much. Wild things are smarter than tame ones, that much is clear. Wild things are elusive and wily and look out for themselves. I divide the people I know into tame and wild. My mother, wild. My father and brother, also wild; Mr. Banerji, wild also, but in a more skittish way. Carol, tame. Grace, tame as well, though with sneaky vestiges of wild. Cordelia, wild, pure and simple.

“There are no limits to human greed,” says my father.

“Indeed, sir?” says Mr. Banerji, as my father goes on to say that he’s heard some son of a gun is working on an experiment to breed a turkey with four drumsticks, instead of two drumsticks and two wings, because there’s more meat on a drumstick.

“How would such a creature walk, sir?” asks Mr. Banerji, and my father, approving, says, “Well may you ask.” He tells Mr. Banerji that some darn fool scientists are working on a square tomato, which will supposedly pack more easily into crates than the round variety.

“All the flavor will be sacrificed, of course,” he says. “They care nothing for flavor. They bred a naked chicken, thinking they’d get more eggs by utilizing the energy saved from feather production, but the thing shivered so much they had to double-heat the coop, so it cost more in the end.”

“Fooling with Nature, sir,” says Mr. Banerji. I know already that this is the right response. Investigating Nature is one thing and so is defending yourself against it, within limits, but fooling with it is quite another. Mr. Banerji says he hears there is now a naked cat available, he’s read about it in a magazine, though he himself does not see the point of it at all. This is the most he has said so far. My brother asks if there are any poisonous snakes in India, and Mr. Banerji, now much more at ease, begins to enumerate them. My mother smiles, because this is going better than she thought it would. Poisonous snakes are fine with her, even at the dinner table, as long as they make people happy. My father has eaten everything on his plate and is dig ging for more stuffing in the cavity of the turkey, which resembles a trussed, headless baby. It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird. I’m eating a wing. It’s the wing of a tame turkey, the stupidest bird in the world, so stupid it can’t even fly any more. I am eating lost flight.

Chapter 25

After Christmas I’m offered a job. The job is wheeling Brian Finestein around the block in his baby carriage after school, for an hour or a little longer if it isn’t too cold, one day a week. For this I get twenty-five cents, which is a lot of money.

The Finesteins live in the house beside ours, the big house that was built suddenly where the mud mountain used to be. Mrs. Finestein is short for a woman, plump, with dark curly hair and lovely white teeth. These show often, as she laughs a lot, wrinkling up her nose like a puppy as she does it, shaking her head, which makes her gold earrings twinkle. I’m not sure, but I think these earrings actually go through little holes in her ears, unlike any earrings I have ever seen. I ring the doorbell and Mrs. Finestein opens the door. “My little lifesaver,” she says. I wait in the vestibule, my winter boots dripping onto the spread newspapers. Mrs. Finestein, wearing a flowered pink housecoat and slippers with high heels and real fur, bustles upstairs to get Brian. The vestibule smells of Brian’s ammonia-soaked diapers, which are in a pail waiting to be collected by the diaper company. I’m intrigued by the idea that someone else can come and take away your laundry. Mrs. Finestein always has a bowl of oranges out, on a table up a few steps from the vestibule; no one else leaves oranges lying around like that when it isn’t Christmas. There’s a gold-colored candlestick like a tree behind the bowl. These things—the sickly sweet baby shit smell of the festering diapers, the bowl of oranges and the gold tree—blend in my mind into an image of ultrasophistication.

Mrs. Finestein clops down the stairs carrying Brian, who is zipped into a blue bunny suit with ears. She gives him a big kiss on his cheek, joggles him up and down, tucks him into the carriage, snaps up the waterproof carriage cover. “There, Bry-Bry,” she says. “Now Mummy can hear herself think.” She laughs, wrinkles her nose, shakes her gold earrings. Her skin is rounded out, milky-smelling. She’s not like any mother I’ve ever seen.

I wheel Brian out into the cold air and we start off around the block, over the crunchy snow which is spread with cinders from people’s furnaces and dotted here and there with frozen horse buns. I can’t figure out how Brian would ever be able to interfere with Mrs. Finestein’s thinking, because he never cries. Also he never laughs. He never makes any noises at all, nor does he go to sleep. He just lies there in his carriage, gazing solemnly up at me with his round blue eyes as his button of a nose gets redder and redder. I make no attempt to entertain him. But I like him: he’s silent, but also uncritical. When I think it’s time I wheel him back, and Mrs. Finestein says, “Don’t tell me it’s five o’clock already!” I ask her to give me nickels instead of a quarter, because it looks like more. She laughs a lot at that, but she does it. I keep all my money in an old tin tea caddy with a picture of the desert on it, palm trees and camels. I like taking it out and spreading it over my bed. Instead of counting it, I arrange it by the year that’s stamped on each piece of money: 1935, 1942, 1945. Every coin has a King’s head on it, cut off neatly at the neck, but the Kings are different. The ones from before I was born have beards, but the ones now don’t, because it’s King George, the one at the back of the classroom. It gives me an odd comfort to sort this money into piles of cut-off heads.

Brian and I wheel around the block, around the block again. It’s hard for me to tell when it’s an hour because I don’t have a watch. Cordelia and Grace come around the corner up ahead, with Carol trailing. They see me, walk over.

“What rhymes with Elaine?” Cordelia asks me. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Elaine is a pain.”

Carol peers into the baby carriage. “Look at the bunny ears,” she says. “What’s his name?” Her voice is wistful. I see Brian in a new light. It isn’t everyone who’s allowed to wheel a baby.

“Brian,” I say. “Brian Finestein.”

“Finestein is a Jewish name,” says Grace.

I don’t know what Jewish is. I’ve seen the word Jew, the Bible is full of that word, but I didn’t know there were any live, real ones, especially next door to me.

“Jews are kikes,” says Carol, glancing at Cordelia for approval.

“Don’t be vulgar,” says Cordelia, in her adult voice. “Kike is not a word we use.”

I ask my mother what Jewish is. She says it’s a different kind of religion. Mr. Banerji is a different kind of religion as well, though not Jewish. There are many different kinds. As for the Jews, Hitler killed a great many of them, during the war.

“Why?” I say.

“He was demented,” says my father. “A megalomaniac.” Neither of these words is much help.

“A bad person,” says my mother.

I wheel Brian over the cindery snow, easing him around the potholes. He goggles up at me, his nose red, his tiny mouth unsmiling. Brian has a new dimension: he is a Jew. There is something extra and a little heroic about him; not even the blue ears of his bunny suit can detract from that. Jewish goes with the diapers, the oranges in the bowl, Mrs. Finestein’s gold earrings and her possibly real ear holes, but also with ancient, important matters. You wouldn’t expect to see a Jew every day. Cordelia and Grace and Carol are beside me. “How’s the little baby today?” asks Cordelia.

“He’s fine,” I say guardedly.

“I didn’t mean him, I meant you,” says Cordelia.

“Can I have a turn?” asks Carol.

“I can’t,” I tell her. If she does it wrong, if she upsets Brian Finestein into a snowbank, it will be my fault.

“Who wants an old Jew baby anyway,” she says.

“The Jews killed Christ,” says Grace primly. “It’s in the Bible.”

But Jews don’t interest Cordelia much. She has other things on her mind. “If a man who catches fish is a fisher, what’s a man who catches bugs?” she says.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“You are so stupid,” says Cordelia. “That’s what your father is, right? Go on. Figure it out. It’s really simple.”

“A bugger,” I say.

“Is that what you think of your own father?” Cordelia says. “He’s an entomologist, stupid. You should be ashamed. You should have your mouth washed out with soap.”

I know that bugger is a dirty word, but I don’t know why. Nevertheless I have betrayed, I have been betrayed. “I nave to go,” I say. Wheeling Brian back to Mrs. Finestein’s, I cry silently, while Brian watches me, expressionless. “Goodbye, Brian,” I whisper to him.

I tell Mrs. Finestein that I can’t do the job any more because I have too much schoolwork. I can’t tell her the real reason: that in some obscure way Brian is not safe with me. I have images of Brian headfirst in a snowbank; Brian hurtling in his carriage down the icy hill by the side of the bridge, straight toward the creek full of dead people; Brian tossed into the air, his bunny ears flung upwards in terror. I have only a limited ability to say no.

“Honey, that’s all right,” she says, looking into my raw, watery eyes. She puts her arm around me and gives me a hue and an extra nickel. No one has ever called me honey before this. I go home, knowing I have failed her, and also myself. Bugger, I think to myself. I say it over and over until it disappears into its own syllables. Erbug, erbug. It’s a word with no meaning, like kike, but it reeks of ill will, it has power. What have I done to my father?

I take all of Mrs. Finestein’s King’s-head nickels and spend them at the store on the way home from school. I buy licorice whips, jelly beans, many-layered blackballs with the seed in the middle, packages of fizzy sherbet you suck up through a straw. I dole them out equally, these offerings, these atonements, into the waiting hands of my friends. In the moment just before giving, I am loved.

Chapter 26

It’s Saturday. Nothing has happened all morning. Icicles form on the eaves trough above the south window, dripping in the sunlight with a steady sound like a leak. My mother is baking in the kitchen, my father and brother are elsewhere. I eat my lunch alone, watching the icicles. The lunch is crackers and orange cheese and a glass of milk, and a bowl of alphabet soup. My mother thinks of alphabet soup as a cheerful treat for children. The alphabet soup has letters floating in it, white letters: capital A’s and O’s and S’s and R’s, the occasional X or Z. When I was younger I would fish the letters out and spell things with them on the edge of the plate, or eat my name, letter by letter. Now I just eat the soup, taking no particular interest. The soup is orangey-red and has a flavor, but the letters themselves taste like nothing.

The telephone rings. It’s Grace. “You want to come out and play?” she says, in her neutral voice that is at the same time blank and unsoft, like glazed paper. I know Cordelia is standing beside her. If I say no, I will be accused of something. If I say yes, I will have to do it. I say yes.

“We’ll come and get you,” Grace says.

My stomach feels dull and heavy, as if it’s full of earth. I put on my snowsuit and boots, my knitted hat and mittens. I tell my mother I’m going out to play. “Don’t get chilled,” she says. The sun on the snow is blinding. There’s a crust of ice over the drifts, where the top layer of snow has melted and then refrozen. My boots make clean-edged footprints through the crust. There’s no one around. I walk through the white glare, toward Grace’s house. The air is wavery, filled with light, overfilled; I can hear the pressure of it against my eyes. I feel translucent, like a hand held over a flashlight or the pictures of jellyfish I’ve seen in magazines, floating in the sea like watery flesh balloons. At the end of the street I can see the three of them, very dark, walking toward me. Their coats look almost black. Even their faces when they come closer look too dark, as if they’re in shadow. Cordelia says, “We said we would come and get you. We didn’t say you could come here.”

I say nothing.

Grace says, “She should answer when we talk to her.”

Cordelia says, “What’s the matter, are you deaf?”

Their voices sound far away. I turn aside and throw up onto a snowbank. I didn’t mean to do it and didn’t know I was going to. I feel sick to my stomach every morning, I’m used to that, but this is the real thing, alphabet soup mixed with shards of chewed-up cheese, amazingly red and orange against the white of the snow, with here and there a ruined letter.

Cordelia doesn’t say anything. Grace says, “You better go home.” Carol, behind them, sounds as if she’s going to cry. She says, “It’s on her face.” I walk back toward my house, smelling the vomit on the front of my snow-suit, tasting it in my nose and throat. It feels like bits of carrot. I lie in bed with the scrub pail beside me, floating lightly on waves of fever. I throw up several times, until nothing but a little green juice comes out. My mother says, “I suppose we’ll all get it,” and she’s right. During the night I can hear hurrying footsteps and retching and the toilet flushing. I feel safe, small, wrapped in my illness as if in cotton wool.

I begin to be sick more often. Sometimes my mother looks into my mouth with a flashlight and feels my forehead and takes my temperature and sends me to school, but sometimes I’m allowed to stay home. On these days I feel relief, as if I’ve been running for a long time and have reached a place where I can rest, not forever but for a while. Having a fever is pleasant, vacant. I enjoy the coolness of things, the flat ginger ale I’m given to drink, the delicacy of taste, afterward.

I lie in bed, propped up on pillows, a glass of water on a chair beside me, listening to the faraway sounds coming from my mother: the eggbeater, the vacuum cleaner, music from the radio, the lakeshore sound of the floor polisher. Winter sunlight slants in through the window, between the half-drawn curtains. I now have curtains. I look at the ceiling light fixture, opaque yellowish glass with the shadows of two or three dead flies caught inside it showing through as if through cloudy jelly. Or I look at the doorknob. Sometimes I cut things out of magazines and paste them into a scrapbook with LePage’s mucilage, from the bottle that looks like a chess bishop. I cut out pictures of women, from Good Housekeeping, The Ladies’ Home Journal, Chatelaine. If I don’t like their faces I cut off the heads and glue other heads on. These women have dresses with puffed sleeves and full skirts, and white aprons that tie very tightly around their waists. They put germ killers onto germs, in toilet bowls; they polish windows, or clean their spotty complexions with bars of soap, or shampoo their oily hair; they get rid of their unwanted odors, rub hand lotion onto their rough wrinkly hands, hug rolls of toilet paper against their cheeks. Other pictures show women doing things they aren’t supposed to do. Some of them gossip too much, some are sloppy, others bossy. Some of them knit too much. “Walking, riding, standing, sitting, Where she goes, there goes her knitting,” says one. The picture shows a woman knitting on a streetcar, with the ends of her knitting needles poking into the people beside her and her ball of wool unrolling down the aisle. Some of the women have a Watchbird beside them, a red and black bird like a child’s drawing, with big eyes and stick feet. “This is a Watchbird watching a Busybody,” it says. “This is a Watchbird watching YOU.”

I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning. But it pleases me somehow to cut out all these imperfect women, with their forehead wrinkles that show how worried they are, and fix them into my scrapbook. At noon there’s the Happy Gang, on the radio, knocking at the door.

The Happy Gang fills me with anxiety. What happens to you if you aren’t happy and healthy? They don’t say. They themselves are always happy, or say they are; but I can’t believe anyone can be always happy. So they must be lying some of the time. But when? How much of their fake-sounding laughter is really fake?

A little later there’s the Dominion Observatory Official Time Signal: first a series of outer space beeps, then silence, then a long dash. The long dash means one o’clock. Time is passing; in the silence before the long dash the future is taking shape. I turn my head into the pillow. I don’t want to hear it.

Chapter 27

The winter melts, leaving a grubby scum of cinders, wet paper, soggy old leaves. A huge pile of topsoil appears in our backyard, then a pile of rolled-up squares of grass. My parents, in muddy boots and earth-stained pants, lay them over our mud like bathroom tiles. They pull out couch grass and dandelions, plant green onions and a row of lettuce. Cats appear from nowhere, scratching and squatting in the soft, newly planted earth, and my father throws clumps of dug-up dandelions at them. “Dad-ratted cats,” he says.

The buds turn yellow, the skipping ropes come out. We stand in Grace’s driveway, beside her dark pink crab apple tree. I turn the rope, Carol turns the other end, Grace and Cordelia skip. We look like girls playing.

We chant:

Grace, skipping in the middle, turns around, touches the driveway, kicks up one foot sedately, smiling her little smile. She rarely trips.

This chant is menacing to me. It hints at an obscure dirtiness. Something is not understood: the robbers and their strange commands, the lady and her gyrations, the tricks she’s compelled to perform, like a trained dog. And what does “twenty-four skiddoo” mean, at the end of it? Is she scooted out the door of her house while the robbers remain inside, free to take anything they like, break anything, do whatever they want? Or is it the end of her altogether? I see her dangling from the crab apple tree, the skipping rope noosed around her neck. I am not sorry for her.

The sun shines, the marbles return, from wherever they’ve been all winter. The voices of the children rise in the schoolyard: purie, purie, bowlie, bowlie, two for one. They sound to me like ghosts, or like animals caught in a trap: thin wails of exhausted pain.

We cross the wooden bridge on the way home from school. I am walking behind the others. Through the broken boards I can see the ground below. I remember my brother burying his jar full of puries, of waterbabies and cat’s eyes, a long time ago, down there somewhere under the bridge. The jar is still there in the earth, shining in the dark, in secret. I think about myself going down there alone despite the sinister unseen men, digging up the treasure, having all that mystery in my hands. I could never find the jar, because I don’t have the map. But I like to think about things the others know nothing about. I retrieve my blue cat’s eye from where it’s been lying all winter in the corner of my bureau drawer. I examine it, holding it up so the sunlight burns through it. The eye part of it, inside its crystal sphere, is so blue, so pure. It’s like something frozen in the ice. I take it to school with me, in my pocket, but I don’t set it up to be shot at. I hold on to it, rolling it between my fingers.

“What’s that in your pocket?” says Cordelia.

“Nothing,” I say. “It’s only a marble.”

It’s marble season; everyone has marbles in their pockets. Cordelia lets it pass. She doesn’t know what power this cat’s eye has, to protect me. Sometimes when I have it with me I can see the way it sees. I can see people moving like bright animated dolls, their mouths opening and closing but no real words coming out. I can look at their shapes and sizes, their colors, without feeling anything else about them. I am alive in my eyes only.

We stay in the city later than we’ve ever stayed before. We stay until school ends for the summer and the daylight lasts past bedtime and wet heat descends over the streets like a steaming blanket. I drink grape Freshie, which does not taste like grapes but like something you might use to kill insects, and wonder when we’re going to leave for the north. I tell myself it will be never, so I won’t be disappointed. But despite my cat’s eye I know I can’t stand to be here in this place much longer. I will burst inward. I’ve read in the National Geographic about deepsea diving and why you have to wear a thick metal suit or the invisible pressure of the heavy undersea water will crush you like mud in a fist, until you implode. This is the word: implode. It has a dull final sound to it, like a lead door closing. I sit in the car, packed into the back seat like a parcel. Grace and Cordelia and Carol are standing among the apple trees, watching. I hunch down, avoiding them. I don’t want to pretend, to undergo goodbyes. As the car moves away they wave.

We drive north. Toronto is behind us, a smear of brownish air on the horizon, like smoke from a distant burning. Only now do I turn and look.

The leaves get smaller and yellower, folding back toward the bud, and the air crisps. I see a raven by the side of the road, picking at a porcupine that’s been run over by a car, its quills like a huge burr, its guts pink and scrambled like eggs. I see the northern granite rock rising straight up out of the ground with the road cut through it. I see a raggedy lake with dead trees stuck into the marsh around the edges. A sawdust burner, a fire tower.

Three Indians stand beside the road. They aren’t selling anything, no baskets and it’s too early for blueberries. They just stand there as if they’ve been doing it for a long time. They’re familiar to me but only as scenery. Do they see me as I stare at them out of the car window? Probably not. I’m a blur to them, one more face in a car that doesn’t stop. I have no claim on them, or on any of this. I sit in the back seat of the car that smells of gasoline and cheese, waiting for my parents, who are buying groceries. The car is beside a wooden general store, saggy and weathered gray, stuck together by the signs nailed all over the outside of it: BLACK CAT CIGARETTES, PLAYERS, COCA-COLA. This isn’t even a village, just a wide place in the highway, beside a bridge beside a river. Once I would have wanted to know the river’s name. Stephen stands on the bridge, dropping pieces of wood upstream, timing how long it takes them to come out the other side, calculating the rate of flow. The blackflies are out. Some of them are in the car, crawling up the window, jumping, crawling up again. I watch them do this: I can see their hunched backs, their abdomens like little black-red bulbs. I squash them against the glass, leaving red smears of my own blood.

I’ve begun to feel not gladness, but relief. My throat is no longer tight, I’ve stopped clenching my teeth, the skin on my feet has begun to grow back, my fingers have healed partially. I can walk without seeing how I look from the back, talk without hearing the way I sound. I go for long periods without saying anything at all. I can be free of words now, I can lapse back into wordlessness, I can sink back into the rhythms of transience as if into bed.

This summer we’re in a rented cabin on the north shore of Lake Superior. There are a few other cottages around, most of them empty; there are no other children. The lake is huge and cold and blue and treacherous. It can sink freighters, drown people. In a wind the waves roll in with the crash of oceans. Swimming in it doesn’t frighten me at all. I wade into the freezing water, watching my feet and then my legs go down into it, long and white and thinner than on land.

There’s a wide beach, and to one end of it a colony of boulders. I spend time among them. They’re rounded, like seals, only hard; they heat up in the sun, and stay warm in the evening when the air cools. I take pictures of them with my Brownie camera. I give them the names of cows. Above the beach, on the dunes, there are beach plants, fuzzy mulleins and vetch with its purple flowers and tiny bitter peapods, and grasses that will cut your legs; and behind that the forest, oak and moose maple and birch and poplar, with balsam and spruce among them. There’s poison ivy sometimes. It’s a secretive, watchful forest, though hard to get lost in, so close to the shore. Walking in the forest I find a dead raven. It’s bigger than they look alive. I poke it with a stick, turning it over, and see the maggots. It smells like rot, like rust, and, more strangely, like some sort of food I’ve eaten once but can’t remember. It’s black, but not like a color; more like a hole. Its beak is dingy, horn-colored, like old toenails. Its eyes are shriveled up.

I’ve seen dead animals before, dead frogs, dead rabbits, but this raven is deader. It looks at me with its shriveled-up eye. I could poke this stick right through it. No matter what I do to it, it won’t feel a thing. No one can get at it.

It’s hard to fish from the shore of this lake. There’s nowhere to stand, no dock. We aren’t allowed out in a boat by ourselves because of the currents; anyway we have no boat. Stephen is doing other things. He makes a collection of the boat funnels from the lake freighters, checking them through binoculars. He sets up chess problems and works them out, or splits kindling, or goes for long walks by himself with a butterfly book. He isn’t interested in catching the butterflies and mounting them on a board with pins; he just wants to see them, identify them, count them. He writes them down in a list at the back of the book. I like looking at the pictures of butterflies in his book. My favorite is the luna moth, huge and pale green, with crescents on the wings. My brother finds one of these, and shows it to me. “Don’t touch it,” he says.

“Or the dust will come off its wings, and then it can’t fly.”

But I don’t play chess with him. I don’t start my own list of boat funnels or butterflies. I’m ceasing to be interested in games I can’t win.

Along the edges of the forest, where there’s open sunlight, there are chokecherry trees. The red chokecherries ripen and turn translucent. They’re so sour they dry up the inside of your mouth. I pick them into a lard pail, then sort out the dead twigs and leaves, and my mother makes jelly from them, boiling them up, straining the pits out through a cloth jelly bag, adding sugar. She pours the jelly into hot jars, capping them with paraffin wax. I count the beautiful red jars. I helped make them. They look poisonous.

As if I’ve been given permission I begin to dream. My dreams are brightly colored and without sound. I dream that the dead raven is alive, only it looks the same, it still looks dead. It hops around and flaps its decaying wings and I wake up, my heart beating fast.

I dream I’m putting on my winter clothes, in Toronto, but my dress doesn’t fit. I pull it on over my head and struggle to get my arms into the sleeves. I’m walking along the street and parts of my body are sticking out through the dress, parts of my bare skin. I am ashamed.

I dream that my blue cat’s eye is shining in the sky like the sun, or like the pictures of planets in our book on the solar system. But instead of being warm, it’s cold. It starts to move nearer, but it doesn’t get any bigger. It’s falling down out of the sky, straight toward my head, brilliant and glassy. It hits me, passes right into me, but without hurting, except that it’s cold. The cold wakes me up. My blankets are on the floor.

I dream that the wooden bridge over the ravine is falling apart. I’m standing on it, the boards crack and separate, the bridge sways. I walk along what’s left, clinging to the railing, but I can’t get onto the hill where the other people are standing because the bridge isn’t attached to anything. My mother is on the hill, but she’s talking to the other people.

I dream I’m picking the chokecherries off the chokecherry tree and putting them into the lard pail. Only they aren’t chokecherries. They’re deadly nightshade berries, translucent, brilliantly red. They’re filled with blood, like the bodies of blackflies. As I touch them they burst, and the blood runs over my hands. None of my dreams is about Cordelia.

Our father plays touch tag with us on the beach in the evenings, running lumberingly like a bear, laughing at the same time, wuff wuff wuff. Pennies and dimes fall out of his pockets into the sand. The lake boats go slowly by in the distance, their smoke trailing behind them, the sun sets to the left, pink and tranquil. I look in the mirror over the washbasin: my face is brown and rounder. My mother smiles at me, in the little kitchen with the woodstove, and hugs me with one arm. She thinks I am happy. Some nights we have marshmallows, for a treat.