Cat's Eye

Chapter 28

Simpsons Basement used to be bargain clothes and wrenches. Now it’s resplendent. There are pyramids of imported chocolates, an ice cream counter, aisles and aisles of fancy cookies and canned gourmet food, ticking away like little clocks toward the obsolescence dates stamped on their packages. There’s even an espresso counter. It’s all very world-class down here, where I used to buy cheap nighties in high school with my tiny clothes allowance, on sale at that and a size too large. I’m overwhelmed by all the chocolates. Just looking at them reminds me of Christmas and the sticky feeling after eating too many, the surfeit and glut.

I sit at the espresso counter and have a cappuccino, to deal with the inertia that’s come over me at the sight of so much sugar-coated self-indulgence. The espresso counter is either fake or real dark-green marble; it has a cute canopy over it, someone’s idea of Italy, and little swivel stools. The view from here is the shoe repair counter, which is not very world-class but is reassuring to me. People still get their shoes repaired, despite all this chocolate, they don’t just toss them out at the first hint of wear. I think about the shoes of my childhood, the brown Oxfords scuffed at the toes, half-soled, new-heeled, the falling-apart grubby white running shoes, the brown sandals with two buckles that you wore with socks. Most shoes were brown. They went with the pot roast done in the pressure cooker along with the limp carrots and the flaccid potatoes and the onions with their slippery layers. The pressure cooker had a whistle-shaped thing on the top. If you forgot to pay attention to it the lid would blow off like a bomb, and the carrots and potatoes would be hurled to the ceiling, where they’d stick like mush. This happened to my mother once. Luckily she was not in the kitchen at the time and was not scalded. When she saw what had happened she did not swear. She laughed, and said, “Wouldn’t that take the gold-plated gingerbread.”

My mother did most of the cooking but it was not her favorite thing. She was not fond of housework generally. In the steamer trunk in the cellar, along with a cut-velvet evening gown from the twenties and a pair of riding jodhpurs, there were several things made of real silver, ornate salt and pepper shakers, sugar tongs in the shape of chickens’ feet, rose bowls lavish with silver flowers. They were down there, wrapped in tissue paper and turning black, because otherwise they would have to be polished. Our knives and forks and spoons had to be polished, with an old toothbrush for the decorations. The scrolled legs under the dining table were dust catchers, and so were the kinds of objects—doodads, my mother called them—other people kept on their mantelpieces. But she liked making cakes, though this may only be something I prefer to think.

What would I have done if I had been my mother? She must have realized what was happening to me, or that something was. Even toward the beginning she must have noted my silences, my bitten fingers, the dark scabs on my lips where I’d pulled off patches of the skin. If it were happening now, to a child of my own, I would know what to do. But then? There were fewer choices, and a great deal less was said. I once did a series about my mother. It was six images, six panels, like a double triptych or a comic book, arranged in two groups, three on top, three underneath. The first was my mother in colored pencil, in her city house kitchen and her late-forties dress. Even she had a bib apron, blue flowers with navy piping, even she wore it, from time to time. The second image was the same figure in collage, made from the illustrations from old Ladies’ Home Journals and Chatelaines, not the photos but the artwork, with those rancid greens and faded blues and dirty-looking pinks. The third was the same figure, white on white, the raised parts pipe cleaners contoured side by side and glued onto a white cloth-covered backing. Reading across from left to right it looked as if my mother was slowly dissolving, from real life into a Babylonian bas-relief shadow.

The bottom set of images went the other way: first the pipe-cleaners, then the same image in collage, then the final one in full-colored realistic detail But this time my mother was in her slacks and boots and her man’s jacket, making chokecherry jam over the outdoor fire. You could read it as a materialization, out of the white pipe cleaner mist into the solid light of day.

I called the whole series Pressure Cooker. Because of when it was done and what was going on in those years, some people thought it was about the Earth Goddess, which I found hilarious in view of my mother’s dislike of housework. Other people thought it was about female slavery, others that it was a stereotyping of women in negative and trivial domestic roles. But it was only my mother cooking, in the ways and places she used to cook, in the late forties.

I made this right after she died. I suppose I wanted to bring her back to life. I suppose I wanted her timeless, though there is no such thing on earth. These pictures of her, like everything else, are drenched in time.

I finish my cappuccino, pay for it, leave a tip for the imitation Italian waiter who served it to me. I know I won’t buy any food in the food hall, I’m too intimidated by it. Ordinarily, or in some other city, I would not be: I am a grown-up and used to shopping. But how could I find, down here, anything I want right now? I’ll stop in at some corner store on the way back, some place where they sell milk till midnight and slightly stale sliced white bread. Such stores are run, now, by people the color of Mr. Banerji, or by Chinese people. They aren’t necessarily any friendlier than the pasty-white people who used to run such stores, but the general content of their disapproval is more easily guessed; though not the details. I head back up the escalator, into the perfumed fug of the ground floor. The air is bad here, there’s too much musk, the overpowering scent of money. I make it into the open air and walk west, past the murderous mannequins in the windows, past the bivalvular City Hall.

Ahead of me there’s a body lying on the sidewalk. People walk around it, look down, look away, keep going. I see their faces coming toward me bearing that careful rearrangement of the features that’s meant to say, This is none of my business.

When I get up even, I see that this person is a woman. She’s lying on her back, staring straight at me.

“Lady,” she says. “Lady. Lady.”

That word has been through a lot. Noble lady, Dark Lady, she’s a real lady, old-lady lace, Listen lady, Hey lady watch where you’re going, Ladies’ Room, run through with lipstick and replaced with Women. But still the final word of appeal. If you want something very badly you do not say Woman, Woman, you say Lady, Lady. As she is saying now.

I think, What if she’s bad a heart attack? I look: there’s blood on her forehead, not much, but a cut. She must have hit her head falling. And no one’s stopping, and she’s lying there on her back, a bulky fifty-odd woman in a poor-person green coat, gabardine, and lamentable shoes all cracked, her arms outflung. The tanned-looking skin around her brown eyes is red and puffy, her long black and gray hair is splayed across the sidewalk.

“Lady,” she says, or something, it’s a mumble, but she’s got me now.

I look over my shoulder to see if anyone else will do this, but there are no takers. I kneel, say to her,

“Are you all right?” What a stupid question, she so obviously isn’t. Vomit and alcohol are around here somewhere. I have visions of myself taking her for coffee, and then where? I won’t be able to get rid of her, she’ll follow me back to the studio, throw up in the bathtub, sleep on the futon. They get me every time, they can spot me coming, pick me out of the crowd no matter how hard I frown. Sidewalk rap artists, Moonies, guitar-playing young men who ask me for subway tokens. In the clutch of the helpless I am helpless.

“She’s only drunk,” a man says in passing. What does he mean, only? It’s hell enough.

“Here,” I say, “I’ll help you up.” Wimp, I tell myself. She’ll ask you for money and you’ll give it to her, and she’ll spend it on cheap sweet wine. But I have her on her feet now, she’s slumped against me. If I can lug her over to the nearest wall I can prop her up, dust her off a little, think how to get away.

“There,” I say. But she won’t lean against the wall, she’s leaning against me instead. Her breath smells like a bad accident. She’s crying now, the shameless abandoned weeping of a child; her fingers clutch my sleeve.

“Don’t leave me,” she says. “Oh God. Don’t leave me all alone.” Her eyes are closed, her voice is pure neediness, pure woe. It hits the weakest, most sorrowing part of me; but I am only a surrogate, for who knows what lack, what loss. There’s nothing I can do.

“Here,” I say. I fumble in my purse, find a ten, crumple it into her hand, paying her off. I’m a sucker, I’m a bleeding heart. There’s a cut in my heart, it bleeds money.

“Bless you,” she says. Her head rolls from side to side, back against the wall. “God bless you lady, Our Lady bless you.” It’s a slurred blessing, but who’s to say I don’t need it? She must be a Catholic. I could find a church, slide her in through the door like a packet. She’s theirs, let them deal with her.

“I have to go now,” I say. “You’ll be all right.” Lying through my teeth. She opens her eyes wide, trying to focus. Her face goes quiet.

“I know about you,” she says. “You’re Our Lady and you don’t love me.”

Full-blown booze madness, and absolutely the wrong person. I draw my hand back from her as if she’s a live socket. “No,” I say. She’s right, I don’t love her. Her eyes are not brown but green. Cordelia’s. I walk away from her, guilt on my hands, absolving myself: I’m a good person. She could have been dying. Nobody else stopped.

I’m a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good.

I know too much to be good. I know myself.

I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.

Chapter 29

We come back in September. In the north the nights are cold and the leaves are beginning to turn, but the city is still hot, still damp. It’s astonishingly noisy and stinks of gasoline and the tar of melting roads. The air inside our house is stale and flat, air that’s been locked up in the heat all summer. The water’s rusty at first, coming out of the taps. I take a bath in the reddish lukewarm water. Already my body is stiffening, emptying itself of feeling. The future is closing on me like a door.

Cordelia has been waiting for me. I know this as soon as I see her standing at the school bus stop. Before the summer she would alternate between kindness and malice, with periods of indifference; but now she’s harsher, more relentless. It’s as if she’s driven by the urge to see how far she can go. She’s backing me toward an edge, like the edge of a cliff: one step back, another step, and I’ll be over and falling.

Carol and I are in Grade Five now. We have a new teacher, Miss Stuart. She’s Scottish and has an accent. “Now gerruls,” she says. She has a little bunch of dried heather stuck into a jelly jar on her desk, and a miniature of Bonnie Prince Charlie who was ruined by the English and whose last name is the same as her own, and a bottle of hand lotion in her desk drawer. She cooks this hand lotion herself. In the afternoons she makes herself a cup of tea, which does not smell entirely like tea but of something else she puts into it, out of a small silver bottle. She has bluish-white hair, beautifully waved, and wears rustling, silky mauve dresses with a lace-edged handkerchief tucked into the sleeve. She often has a nurse’s white gauze mask over her nose and mouth because she’s allergic to chalk dust. This doesn’t stop her from throwing the blackboard brushes at boys who aren’t paying attention. Although she throws underhand and not hard, she never misses. After she hits the boy he has to bring the blackboard brush back to her. The boys don’t seem to resent this habit of hers; they take it as a mark of distinction to get hit.

Everyone loves Miss Stuart. Carol says we are lucky to be in her class. I would love her too, if I had the energy. But I am too numb, too enthralled.

I keep my cat’s eye in my pocket, where I can hold on to it. It rests in my hand, valuable as a jewel, looking out through bone and cloth with its impartial gaze. With the help of its power I retreat back into my eyes. Up ahead of me are Cordelia, Grace, and Carol. I look at their shapes as they walk, the way shadow moves from one leg to another, the blocks of color, a red square of cardigan, a blue triangle of skirt. They’re like puppets up ahead, small and clear. I could see them or not, at will. I reach the path to the bridge, start down, past the nightshade vines with their red berries, past the undulating leaves, the lurking cats. The three of them are already on the bridge but they’ve stopped, they’re waiting for me. I look at the ovals of their faces, the outline of hair around each one. Their faces are like moldy eggs. My feet move down the hill.

I think about becoming invisible. I think about eating the deadly nightshade berries from the bushes beside the path. I think about drinking the Javex out of the skull and crossbones bottle in the laundry room, about jumping off the bridge, smashing down there like a pumpkin, half of an eye, half of a grin. I would come apart like that, I would be dead, like the dead people.

I don’t want to do these things, I’m afraid of them. But I think about Cordelia telling me to do them, not in her scornful voice, in her kind one. I hear her kind voice inside my head. Do it. Come on. I would be doing these things to please her.

I consider telling my brother, asking him for help. But tell him what exactly? I have no black eyes, no bloody noses to report: Cordelia does nothing physical. If it was boys, chasing or teasing, he would know what to do, but I don’t suffer from boys in this way. Against girls and their indirectness, their whisperings, he would be helpless.

Also I’m ashamed. I’m afraid he’ll laugh at me, he’ll despise me for being, a sissy about a bunch of girls, for making a fuss about nothing.

I’m in the kitchen, greasing muffin tins for my mother. I see the patterns the grease leaves on the metal, I see the moons of my nails, the raggedy flesh. My fingers go around and around. My mother makes the batter for the muffins, measuring the salt, sifting the flour. The sifter sounds dry, like sandpaper. “You don’t have to play with them,” my mother says. “There must be other little girls you can play with instead.”

I look at her. Misery washes over me like a slow wind. What has she noticed, what has she guessed, what is she about to do? She might tell their mothers. This would be the worst thing she could do. Also I can’t imagine it. My mother is not like the other mothers, she doesn’t fit in with the idea of them. She does not inhabit the house, the way the other mothers do; she’s airy and hard to pin down. The others don’t go skating on the neighborhood rink, or walk in the ravine by themselves. They seem to me grown-up in a way that my own mother is not. I think of Carol’s mother in her twin set, her skeptical smile, Cordelia’s with her glasses on a chain and her vagueness, Grace’s and her hairpins and drooping apron. My mother will turn up on their doorsteps, wearing slacks, carrying a bouquet of weeds, incongruous. They won’t believe her.

“When I was little and the kids called names, we used to say, ”Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me,“” she says. Her arm goes vigorously around, mixing, efficient and strong.

“They don’t call me names,” I say. “They’re my friends.” I believe this.

“You have to learn to stand up for yourself,” says my mother. “Don’t let them push you around. Don’t be spineless. You have to have more backbone.” She dollops the batter into the tins. I think of sardines and their backbones. You can eat their backbones. The bones crumble between your teeth; one touch and they fall apart. This must be what my own backbone is like: hardly there at all. What is happening to me is my own fault, for not having more backbone.

My mother sets down the bowl and puts her arms around me. “I wish I knew what to do,” she says. This is a confession. Now I know what I’ve been suspecting: as far as this thing is concerned, she is powerless.

I know that muffins have to be baked right away, right after they’ve been ladled out, or they’ll be flat and ruined. I can’t afford the distraction of comfort. If I give in to it, what little backbone I have left will crumble away to nothing.

I pull away from her. “They need to go into the oven,” I say.

Chapter 30

Cordelia brings a mirror to school. It’s a pocket mirror, the small plain oblong kind without any rim. She takes it out of her pocket and holds the mirror up in front of me and says, “Look at yourself! Just look!”

Her voice is disgusted, fed up, as if my face, all by itself, has been up to something, has gone too far. I look into the mirror but I don’t see anything out of the ordinary. It’s just my face, with the dark blotches on the lips where I’ve bitten off the skin.

My parents have bridge parties. They push the furniture in the living room to the walls and unfold two metal bridge tables and eight bridge chairs. In the middle of each table there are two china dishes, one with salted nuts, the other with mixed candies. These candies are called “bridge mixture.” There are also two ashtrays on each table.

Then the doorbell begins to ring and the people come in. The house fills with the alien scent of cigarettes, which will still be there in the morning along with a few uneaten candies and salted nuts, and with bursts of laughter that get louder as time passes. I lie in my bed listening to the bursts of laughter. I feel isolated, left out. Also I don’t understand why this activity, these noises and smells, is called “bridge.” It is not like a bridge.

Sometimes Mr. Banerji comes to these bridge parties. I lurk in the corner of the hallway in my flannelette pajamas, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. I don’t have a crush on him or anything like that. My wish to see him is anxiety, and fellow feeling. I want to see how he is managing, how he is coping with his life, with having to eat turkeys, and with other things. Not very well, judging from his dark, haunted-looking eyes and slightly hysterical laughter. But if he can deal with whatever it is that’s after him, and something is, then so can I. Or this is what I think.

Princess Elizabeth is coming to Toronto. She’s visiting Canada with her husband, who is a Duke. It’s a Royal Visit. On the radio there are cheering crowds, and solemn voices describing what color she’s wearing, a different color every day. I crouch on the living room floor with the Maritimes fiddle music going on in the background, the Toronto Star spread out underneath my elbows, studying the picture of her on the front page. She’s older than she should be and more ordinary: no longer in a Girl Guide uniform as in the days of the Blitz, but not in an evening gown and a tiara either, like the Queen at the back of the classroom. She’s wearing a plain suit and gloves and carrying a handbag, like anyone, and she has on a ladies’ hat. But still she’s a Princess. On the inside of the paper there’s a full page of her, with women curtsying to her, little girls presenting bouquets of flowers. She smiles down upon them, always the same benevolent smile, and is described as radiant.

Day after day, crouching on the floor, turning the pages of the newspapers, I watch her make her way across the map, by plane, by train, by car, from city to city. I memorize the diagrams of her proposed route through Toronto. I’ll get a good chance to see her, because she’s supposed to drive right by our house, along the raw, potholed road that runs between the cemetery, with its spindly new trees and heaps of bulldozed earth, and the line of five new mud mountains.

The mud mountains are on our side of the road. They have recently appeared, replacing the strip of weedy field that used to be there before. Each mountain stands beside its own hole, roughly cellar-shaped, with a slop of muddy water at the bottom. My brother has claimed one of them for his own; he plans to excavate it, tunneling down from the top, then in from the side to make a side entrance. What he wishes to do in there is unknown.

I don’t know why the Princess is going to be driven past these mud mountains. I don’t think of them as anything she would necessarily want to see, but I’m not sure, because she’s seeing a lot of other things that don’t seem to be of more interest. There’s a picture of her outside a city hall, another beside a fish-canning factory. But whether she wants to see them or not, the mud mountains will be a good place to stand.

I am looking forward to this visit. I expect something from it, although I’m not sure what. This is the same Princess that defied the bombs in London, the one that is brave and heroic. I think something will happen for me on that day. Something will change.

The Royal Visit finally reaches Toronto. The day is overcast, with pinpoints of rain; spitting, they call it. I go out early and stand on the top of the middle mud mountain. There’s a straggly line of people, adults and children, along the roadside among the draggled weeds. Some of the children have small Union Jacks. I have one as well: they were handed out at school. There’s not much of a crowd, because not that many people live around here and some of them have probably gone farther downtown, to where there are sidewalks. I can see Grace and Carol and Cordelia, along the road towards Grace’s house. I hope they will not see me.

I stand on the mud mountain with my Union Jack hanging slack from its stick. It gets later and nothing happens. I think maybe I should go back to our house and listen to the radio, to see how far away the Princess is, but suddenly there’s a police car, to the left, coming along by the cemetery. It begins to drizzle. In the distance there’s cheering.

There are some motorcycles, then some cars. I can see the arms of the people along the road going up into the air, hear scattered hoorays. The cars are going too fast, despite the potholes. I can’t see which car is the right one.

Then I do see. It’s the car with the pale glove coming out the window, waving back and forth. Already it’s opposite me, already it’s passing. I don’t wave my Union Jack or cheer, because I see that it’s too late, I won’t have time for what I’ve been waiting for, which has only now become clear to me. What I must do is run down the mountain with my arms stretched out to either side, for balance, and throw myself in front of the Princess’s car. In front of it, or onto it, or into it. Then the Princess will tell them to stop the car. She’ll have to, in order to avoid running over me. I don’t picture myself being driven away in the royal car, I’m more realistic than that. Anyway I don’t want to leave my parents. But things will change, they will be different, something will be done.

The car with the glove is moving away, it’s turned the corner, it’s gone, and I haven’t moved.

Chapter 31

Miss Stuart likes art. She has us bring old shirts of our fathers from home so we can do messier art without getting our clothes dirty. While we scissor and paint and paste she walks the aisles in her nurse’s mask, looking over our shoulders. But if anyone, a boy, draws a silly picture on purpose, she holds the page up in mocking outrage. “This lad here thinks he’s being smarrut. You’ve got more between the ears than that!” And she flicks him on the ear with her thumb and fingernail. For her we make the familiar paper objects, the pumpkins, the Christmas bells, but she has us do other things too. We make complicated floral patterns with a compass, we glue odd substances to cardboard backings: feathers, sequins, pieces of macaroni garishly dyed, lengths of drinking straw. We do group murals on the blackboards or on large rolls of brown paper. We draw pictures about foreign countries: Mexico with cactuses and men in enormous hats, China with cones on the heads and seeing-eye boats, India with what we intend to be graceful, silk-draped women balancing copper urns, and jewels on their foreheads.

I like these foreign pictures because I can believe in them. I desperately need to believe that somewhere else these other, foreign people exist. No matter that at Sunday school I’ve been told such people are either starving or heathens or both. No matter that my weekly collection goes to convert them, feed them, smarten them up. Miss Lumley saw them as crafty, given to the eating of outlandish or disgusting foods and to acts of treachery against the British, but I prefer Miss Stuart’s versions, in which the sun above their heads is a cheerful yellow, the palm trees a clearg reen, the clothing they wear is floral, their folksongs gay. The women chatter together in quick incomprehensible languages, they laugh, showing perfect, pure-white teeth. If these people exist I can go there sometime. I don’t have to stay here. Today, says Miss Stuart, we are going to draw what we do after school. The others hunch over their desks. I know what they will draw: skipping ropes, jolly snowmen, listening to the radio, playing with a dog. I stare at my own paper, which remains blank. Finally I draw my bed, with myself in it. My bed has a dark wooden headboard with curlicues on it. I draw the window, the chest of drawers. I color in the night. My hand holding the black crayon presses down, harder and harder, until the picture is almost entirely black, until only a faint shadow of my bed and my head on the pillow remains to be seen.

I look at this picture with dismay. It isn’t what I meant to draw. It’s unlike everyone else’s picture, it’s the wrong thing. Miss Stuart will be disappointed in me, she’ll tell me I have more between the ears than that. I can feel her standing behind me now, looking over my shoulder; I can smell her smell of hand lotion, and the other smell that is not tea. She moves around so I can see her, her bright blue wrinkly eyes looking at me over the top of her nurse’s mask.

For a moment she says nothing. Then she says, not harshly, “Why is your picture so darruk, my dear?”

“Because it’s night,” I say. This is an idiotic answer, I know that as soon as it’s out of my mouth. My voice is almost inaudible, even to me.

“I see,” she says. She doesn’t say I’ve drawn the wrong thing, or that surely there’s something else I do after school besides going to bed. She touches me on the shoulder, briefly, before continuing down the aisle. Her touch glows briefly, like a blown-out match.

In the schoolroom windows the paper hearts are blossoming. We make a huge Valentine’s Day postbox out of a cardboard box covered with pink crepe paper and red hearts with paper doily edging. Into the slot at the top we slip our valentines, cut from books of them you can buy at Woolworth’s, with special, single ones for the people we especially like.

On the day itself the whole afternoon is a party. Miss Stuart loves parties: She’s brought dozens of heart-shaped shortbread cookies she’s made herself, with pink icing and silver balls on them, and there are tiny cinnamon hearts and pastel hearts with messages on them, messages from some earlier era which is not ours. “Hubba Hubba,” they say. “She’s My Baby.” “Oh You Kid!”

Miss Stuart sits at her desk, supervising, while several girls open the box and deliver the valentines. On my desk the cards pile up. Most of them are from boys. I can tell this because of the sloppy writing, and because a lot of them aren’t signed. Others have only initials or Guess Who? Some have x’s and o’s. The cards from girls are all neatly signed, with their full names, so there will be no mistake about who gave what.

On the way home from school Carol giggles and shows off her cards from boys. I have more cards from boys than Carol has, more than Cordelia and Grace have collected in their Grade Six classroom. Only I know this. I’ve hidden the cards in my desk so they won’t be seen on the way home. When questioned I say I didn’t get many. I hug my knowledge, which is new but doesn’t surprise me: boys are my secret allies.

Carol is only ten and three quarters but she’s growing breasts. They aren’t very big, but the nipples are no longer flat, they’re pointed, and there’s a swelling behind them. It’s easy to see this because she sticks out her chest, she wears sweaters, pulling them down tightly so the breasts poke out. She complains about these breasts at recess: they hurt, she says. She says she will have to get a bra. Cordelia says, “Oh shut up about your stupid tits.” She’s older, but she doesn’t have any yet. Carol pinches her lips and cheeks to make them red. She finds a worn-down tube of lipstick in her mother’s wastepaper basket and hides it away, and takes it to school in her pocket. Using the tip of her little finger, she rubs some of it on her lips after school. She wipes it off with a Kleenex before we get to her house but she doesn’t do a good enough job.

We play upstairs in her room. When we go down to the kitchen for a glass of milk, her mother says,

“What’s that on your face, young lady?” Right in front of us she scrubs Carol’s face with the dirty dishcloth. “Don’t let me catch you doing such a cheap thing again! At your age, the idea!” Carol wriggles, cries and screams, abandoning herself. We watch, horrified and thrilled. “Just wait till your father gets home!” her mother says in a cold, furious voice. “Making a spectacle of yourself,” as if there’s something wrong in the mere act of being looked at. Then she remembers we’re still here. “Off you go!”

Two days later Carol says her father has given it to her good, with his belt, buckle end, right across the bare bum. She says she can hardly sit down. She sounds proud of this. She shows us, after school, up in her room: she pulls up her skirt, pulls down her underpants, and sure enough there are the marks, almost like scratch marks, not very red but there.

It’s difficult to match this evidence with Carol’s father, nice Mr. Campbell, who has a soft mustache and calls Grace Beautiful Brown Eyes and Cordelia Miss Lobelia. It’s strange to imagine him hitting anyone with a belt. But fathers and their ways are enigmatic. I know without being told, for instance, that Mr. Smeath lives a secret life of trains and escapes in his head. Cordelia’s father is charming to us on the rare occasions when he is seen, he makes wry jokes, his smile is like a billboard, but why is she afraid of him?

Because she is. All fathers except mine are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to them than meets the eye. And so we believe the belt.

Carol says she’s seen a wet spot on the sheet of her mother’s twin bed, in the morning, before the bed was made. We tiptoe into her parents’ room. The bed with its tufty chenille bedspread is so neatly made up we’re afraid to turn down the covers to look. Carol opens the drawer of her mother’s bedside table and we peer in. There’s a rubber thing like the top of a mushroom, and a tube of toothpaste that isn’t toothpaste. Carol says these things are to keep you from having babies. Nobody giggles, nobody scoffs. Instead we read the label. Somehow the red marks on Carol’s, bum have given her a credibility she lacked before.

Carol lies on top of her own bed, which has a white ruffled spread that matches the curtains. She’s pretending to be sick, with an unspecified illness. We’ve dampened a washcloth, draped it over her forehead, brought her a glass of water. Illness is now a game we play.

“Oh, I’m so sick, oh, I’m so sick,” Carol moans, twisting her body on the bed. “Nurse, do something!”

“We have to listen to her heart,” says Cordelia. She pulls up Carol’s sweater, then her undershirt. We’ve all been to the doctor, we know about the brusque humiliations involved. “This won’t hurt.” There are the breasts, puffy-looking, their nipples bluish, like veins on a forehead. “Feel her heart,” Cordelia says to me.

I don’t want to. I don’t want to touch that swollen, unnatural flesh. “Go on,” says Cordelia. “Do as you’re told.”

“She’s being disobedient,” says Grace.

I reach out my hand, place it on the left breast. It feels like a balloon half filled with water, or like lukewarm oatmeal porridge. Carol giggles. “Oh, your hand’s so cold!” Nausea grips me.

“Her heart, stupid,” says Cordelia. “I didn’t say her tit. Don’t you know the difference?”

An ambulance comes and my mother is carried out to it on a stretcher. I don’t see this, Stephen tells me about it. It was in the middle of the night when I was asleep, but Stephen has taken to getting up secretly and looking out of his bedroom window at the stars. He says you can see the stars much better when most of the lights in the city are off. He says that the way to wake up at night without using an alarm clock is to drink two glasses of water before you go to bed. Then you have to concentrate on the hour you want to wake up. This is what the Indians used to do.

So he was awake, and listened, and snuck across to the other side of the house to look out the window there, where he could see what was going on out on the street. He says there were flashing lights but no siren, so it’s no wonder I didn’t hear anything.

When I get up in the morning my father is in the kitchen frying bacon. He knows how to do this, though he never does it in the city, only over campfires. In my parents’ bedroom there’s a pile of crumpled sheets on the floor, and the blankets are folded up on a chair; on the mattress there’s a huge oval splotch of blood. But when I come home from school the sheets are gone and the bed is made up, and there is nothing more to be seen.

My father says there has been an accident. But how can you have an accident lying in bed asleep?

Stephen says it was a baby, a baby that came out too soon. I don’t believe him: women who are going to have babies have big fat stomachs, and my mother didn’t have one.

My mother comes back from the hospital and is weaker. She has to rest. No one is used to this, she isn’t used to it herself. She resists it, getting up as usual, putting her hand on the wall or on the edges of the furniture as she walks, standing hunched over at the kitchen sink, a cardigan over her shoulders. In the middle of something she’s doing she has to go and lie down. Her skin is pale and dry. She looks as if she’s listening to a sound, outside the house perhaps, but there is no sound. Sometimes I have to repeat things twice before she hears me. It’s as if she’s gone off somewhere else, leaving me behind; or forgotten I am there.

All of this is more frightening, even, than the splotch of blood. Our father tells us to help out more, which means that he’s frightened as well.

After she gets better I find a small knitted sock, pastel green, in my mother’s sewing basket. I wonder why she would have knitted only one sock. She doesn’t like knitting, so maybe she knitted one and then got tired of it.

I dream that Mrs. Finestein from next door and Mr. Banerji are my real parents. I dream that my mother has had a baby, one of a set of twins. The baby is gray. I don’t know where the other twin is.

I dream that our house has burned down. Nothing of it remains; blackened stumps dot the place where it’s been, as if there has been a forest fire. A huge mountain of mud rises beside it. My parents are dead but also alive. They’re lying side by side, in their summer clothes, and sinking down through the earth, which is hard but transparent, like ice. They look up at me sorrowfully as they recede.

Chapter 32

It’s Saturday afternoon. We’re going down to the building, to something called a Conversat. I don’t know what a Conversat is but I’m relieved to be going to the building, where there are mice and snakes and experiments and no girls. My father asked if I wanted to bring a friend. I said no. My brother is bringing Danny, whose nose runs all the time, who wears knitted vests in diamond patterns, who has a stamp collection. They sit in the back seat—my brother no longer gets carsick—and talk in pig Latin.

“Or-yay ose-nay is-ay unning-ray.”

“O-say ut-whay? Awnt-way oo-tay eat-ay ome-say?”

“Um-yay um-yay.”

I know that some of this, at least on Danny’s part, is for my benefit. He has confused me with other girls, girls who wriggle and shriek. Once I would have replied with something equally disgusting, but I have lost interest in such things as eating snot. I look out the car window, pretending not to hear. The Conversat turns out to be sort of like a museum. The Zoology Department is throwing itself open to the public, to give people a crack at Science and improve their minds. This is what my father said, grinning the way he does when he’s partly joking. He said people’s minds could use some improving. My mother said she doesn’t think her mind is capable of further improvement, so she’s going grocery shopping instead.

There are a lot of people at the Conversat. There isn’t that much to do for entertainment on the weekends in Toronto. The building has a festive air: its usual smells of Dustbane and furniture polish and mouse droppings and snakes mingle with other smells, of winter clothing, cigarette smoke, and women’s perfume. Streamers of colored paper are taped to the walls, with arrows of construction paper at intervals, along the halls and up and down the stairs and into the different rooms, to show the way. Each room has its own displays, grouped according to what you are supposed to learn. In the first room there are chicken embryos at various stages of development, from a red dot to a big-headed, bulgy-eyed, pin-feathered chick, looking not fluffy and cute the way they do on Easter cards, but slimy, its claws curled under, its eyelids a slit open, showing a crescent of agate-blue eye. The embryos have been pickled; the scent of formaldehyde is very strong. In another display there’s a jar of twins, real dead identical human twins with their placenta attached, gray-skinned, floating in something that looks like dishwater. Their veins and arteries have been injected with colored rubber, blue for the veins, purple for the arteries, so we can see that their blood systems are connected. There’s a human brain in a bottle, like a giant flabby gray walnut. I can’t believe there is such a thing inside my head. In another room there’s a table where you can get your fingerprints taken, so you can see they aren’t the same as anyone else’s. There’s a large piece of Bristol board with enlarged photographs of people’s fingerprints pinned up on it. My brother and Danny and I all get our fingerprints taken. Danny and my brother have made light of the chickens and the twins—“Awnt-way any-nay icken-chay or-fay upper-say?” “Ow-hay about-way ome-say ewed-stay in-tway?”—but they weren’t in any hurry to stay in that room. Their enthusiasm for the fingerprints is boisterous. They make fingerprints in the centers of each other’s foreheads with their inky fingers, saying, “The Mark of the Black Hand!” in loud, ominous voices, until our father passes nearby and tells them to pipe down. Beautiful Mr. Banerji from India is with him. He smiles nervously at me and says, “How are you, miss?” He always calls me “miss.” Among all these winter-white faces he looks darker than usual; his teeth shine and shine. In the same room with the fingerprints they’re handing out pieces of paper; you’re supposed to taste them and say whether they taste bitter, like peach pits, or sour, like lemons. This proves that some things are inherited. There’s also a mirror where you can do tongue exercises, to see if you can roll your tongue up at the sides or into a cloverleaf shape. Some people can’t do either. Danny and my brother hog the mirror and make gruesome faces by sticking their thumbs into the sides of their mouths and pulling the edges of their eyelids down so that the red shows.

Some of the Conversat is less interesting, with too much writing, and some of it is only charts on the wall or looking through microscopes, which we can do whenever we want to anyway. It’s crowded as we shuffle along the halls, following the paper streamers, baby-blue and yellow, in our winter overshoes. We haven’t taken our coats off. It’s very warm. The clanking radiators are going full-blast, and the air is filling with other people’s breath.

We come to a room where there’s a cut-open turtle. It’s in a white enamel tray, like the ones in butcher shops. The turtle is alive; or it’s dead, but its heart is alive. This turtle is an experiment to show how the heart of a reptile can keep on going after the rest of it is dead.

The turtle’s bottom shell has a hole sawed into it. The turtle is on its back so you can see down into it, right to the heart, which is beating away slowly, glistening dark red down there in its cave, wincing like the end of a touched worm, lengthening again, wincing. It’s like a hand, clenching and unclenching. It’s like an eye.

They’ve attached a wire to the heart, which runs to a loudspeaker, so you can hear the heart beating throughout the entire room, agonizingly slow, like an old man walking up stairs. I can’t tell if the heart is going to make it to the next beat, or not. There’s a footstep, a pause, then a crackling like the kind of static on the radio that my brother says comes from outer space, then another pulse, a gasp of air sucked in. Life is flowing out of the turtle, I can hear it over the loudspeaker. Soon the turtle will be empty of life. I don’t want to stay in this room but there’s a lineup, in front of me and behind. All of the people are grown-ups; I’ve lost sight of Danny and my brother. I’m hemmed in by tweed coats, my eyes as high as their second buttons. I hear another sound, coming over the sound of the heart like an approaching wind: a rustling, like poplar leaves, only smaller, drier. There’s black around the edges of my eyes and it closes in. What I see is like the entrance to a tunnel, rushing away from me; or I am rushing away from it, away from that spot of daylight. After that I’m looking at a lot of overshoes, and the floorboards, stretching into the distance, at eye level. My head hurts.

“She fainted,” somebody says, and then I know what I have done.

“It must have been the heat.”

I am carried out into the cold gray air; it’s Mr. Banerji who carries me, making sounds of distress. My father hurries out and tells me to sit with my head down between my knees. I do this, looking at the tops of my overshoes. He asks if I’m going to be sick and I say no. My brother and Danny come out and stare at me, not saying anything. Finally my brother says, “Eee-shay ainted-fay,” and they go back in. I stay outside until my father brings the car around and we drive home. I’m beginning to feel that I’ve discovered something worth knowing. There’s a way out of places you want to leave, but can’t. Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of time or into another time. When you wake up it’s later. Time has gone on without you.

Cordelia says, “Think of ten stacks of plates. Those are your ten chances.” Every time I do something wrong, a stack of plates comes crashing down. I can see these plates. Cordelia can see them too, because she’s the one who says Crash! Grace can see them a little, but her crashes are tentative, she looks to Cordelia for confirmation. Carol tries a crash once or twice but is scoffed at: “That wasn’t a crash!”

“Only four left,” says Cordelia. “You better watch yourself. Well?”

I say nothing.

“Wipe that smirk off your face,” says Cordelia.

I say nothing.

“Crash!” says Cordelia. “Only three left.”

Nobody ever says what will happen if all of the stacks of plates fall down. I’m standing against the wall, near the GIRLS door, the cold creeping up my legs and in under the edges of my sleeves. I’m not supposed to move. Already I’ve forgotten why. I’ve discovered that I can fill my head up with music, Coming in on a wing and a prayer, Keep happy with the Happy Gang, and forget almost anything.

It’s recess. Miss Lumley patrols the playground with her brass bell, her face clamped against the cold, minding her own business. I’m still just as afraid of her, although she’s no longer my teacher. Chains of girls careen past, chanting We don’t stop for anybody. Other girls promenade more sedately, arms linked two by two. They look at me curiously, then away. It’s like the people in cars, on the highway, who slow down and look out the window when there’s a car accident by the side of the road. They slow down but they don’t stop. They know when there’s trouble, they know when to keep out of it. I’m standing a little out from the wall. I put my head back and stare up into the gray sky and hold my breath. I’m making myself dizzy. I can see a stack of plates as it sways, begin to topple over, into a silent explosion of china shards. The sky closes to a pinpoint and a wave of dry leaves sweeps over my head. Then I can see my own body lying on the ground, just lying there. I can see the girls pointing and gathering, I can see Miss Lumley stalking over, bending with difficulty to look at me. But I’m seeing all this from above, as if I’m in the air, somewhere near the GIRLS sign over the door, looking down like a bird.

I come to with Miss Lumley’s face looming inches away from me, scowling more than ever, as if I’ve made a mess, with a ring of girls around her jostling for a better look. There’s blood, I’ve cut my forehead. I am taken off to the nurse’s office. The nurse wipes off the blood and sticks a wad of gauze onto me with a Band-Aid. The sight of my own blood on the wet white washcloth is deeply satisfying to me.

Cordelia is subdued: blood is impressive, even more impressive than vomit. She and Grace are solicitous on the way home, linking their arms through mine, asking me how I feel. This kind of attention from them makes me tremulous. I’m afraid I will cry, great sopping tears of reconciliation. But I’m far too wary for that by now.

The next time Cordelia tells me to stand against the wall I faint again. Now I can do it almost whenever I want to. I hold my breath and hear the rustling noise and see the blackness and then I slip sideways, out of my body, and I’m somewhere else. But I can’t always watch from above, like the first time. Sometimes there’s just black.

I begin to be known as the girl who faints.

“She’s doing it on purpose,” Cordelia says. “Go ahead, let’s see you faint. Come on. Faint.” But now, when she tells me to, I can’t.

I begin to spend time outside my body without falling over. At these times I feel blurred, as if there are two of me, one superimposed on the other, but imperfectly. There’s an edge of transparency, and beside it a rim of solid flesh that’s without feeling, like a scar. I can see what’s happening, I can hear what’s being said to me, but I don’t have to pay any attention. My eyes are open but I’m not there. I’m off to the side.