Cat's Eye

Chapter 37

For a long time, I would go into churches. I told myself I wanted to see the art; I didn’t know I was looking for something. I wouldn’t seek these churches out, even if they were in a guidebook and of historic significance, and I would never go into them during services, in fact I disliked the idea: it was what was in them, not what went on in them, that interested me. Mostly I would just see them by accident and go into them on impulse.

Once in, I paid little attention to the architecture, although I knew the terms: clerestories and naves were things I’d written papers about. I would look at the stained-glass windows, if any. I preferred Catholic churches to Protestant ones, the more ornate the better, because there was more to look at. I liked the shameless extravaganza: gold leaf and baroque excesses did not put me off. I would read the inscriptions on walls, and carved into floors, a special foible of rich Anglicans who thought they’d get more points with God by being engraved. Anglicans too went in for tattered military flags, and war memorials of other kinds.

But especially I sought out statues. Statues of saints, and of crusaders on their biers, or those pretending to be crusaders; effigies of all kinds. Statues of the Virgin Mary I would save for last. I would approach them with hope, but I was always disappointed. The statues were of no one I recognized. They were dolls dressed up, insipid in blue and white, pious and lifeless. Then I would not know why I’d been expecting to see something else.

I went to Mexico the first time with Ben. It was also our first trip together, our first time together; I thought it might be only an interlude. I wasn’t even sure I wanted a man in my life again; by that time I’d exhausted the notion that the answer to a man is another man, and I was out of breath. But it was a relief to be with someone who was so uncomplicated, and easily pleased.

We were by ourselves, on a two-week excursion that turned out to have something to do with Ben’s business. Sarah was staying with her best friend. We began in Veracruz, checking out shrimp and the hotels and cockroaches, then took a car up into the hills, looking as always for something picturesque and undervisited.

There was a small town beside a lake. The place was subdued, for Mexico, which had struck me as visceral, like a body turned inside out so the blood was on the outside. Perhaps it was the coolness, the lake.

While Ben was inspecting the market, searching for things to take pictures of, I went into the church. It wasn’t large, and looked poor. There was nobody in it; it smelled of old stone, old neglect, mustiness. I wandered around the outside aisles, looking at the awkward Stations of the Cross, done in grubby oils, almost a paint by numbers. They were bad, but genuine: someone had meant them. Then I saw the Virgin Mary. I didn’t know it was her at first, because she was dressed not in the usual blue or white and gold, but in black. She didn’t have a crown. Her head was bowed, her face in shadow, her hands held out open at the sides. Around her feet were the stubs of candles, and all over her black dress were pinned what I thought at first were stars, but which were instead little brass or tin arms, legs, hands, sheep, donkeys, chickens, and hearts.

I could see what these were for: she was a Virgin of lost things, one who restored what was lost. She was the only one of these wood or marble or plaster Virgins who had ever seemed at all real to me. There could be some point in praying to her, kneeling down, lighting a candle. But I didn’t do it, because I didn’t know what to pray for. What was lost, what I could pin on her dress. Ben came after a while and found me. “What’s the matter?” he said. “What’re you doing down on the floor? Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Nothing. Just resting.”

I was chilled through from the stone, my muscles were cramped and stiff. I’d forgotten how I got down there.

My daughters, both of them, went through a phase when they would say So? Meaning So what. It was when the first one hit twelve or thirteen. They’d fold their arms and stare at me, or at their friends, or at each other. So?

“Don’t do that,” I’d say. “It’s driving me crazy.”

“So?”

Cordelia did the same thing, at the same age. The same folded arms, the same immobile face, the blank-eyed stare. Cordelia! Put on your gloves, it’s cold out. So? I can’t come over, I have to finish my homework. So?

Cordelia, I think. You made me believe I was nothing.

So?

To which there is no answer.

Chapter 38

The summer comes and goes and then it’s fall and then winter, and the King dies. I hear it on the news at lunchtime. I walk back to school along the snowy street, thinking, The King is dead. Now all the things that happened when he was alive are over and done with: the war, the planes with only one wing, the mud outside our house, a lot of things. I think of those heads of his, thousands of them, on the money, which are now the heads of a dead person instead of a living one. The money will have to be changed, and the postage stamps; they will have the Queen on them instead. The Queen used to be Princess Elizabeth. I remember seeing her in photos, when she was much younger. I have some other memory of her, but it’s indistinct and makes me faintly uneasy.

Cordelia and Grace have both skipped a grade. They’re now in Grade Eight, even though they’re only eleven and the other ones in Grade Eight are thirteen. Carol Campbell and I are merely in Grade Six. All of us are at a different school now, one that’s finally been built on our side of the ravine, so we don’t have to take the school bus in the mornings or eat our lunches in the cellar or walk home over the collapsing footbridge after school. Our new school is a modern one-story yellow brick building that looks like a post office. It has soft-textured, eye-saving green blackboards instead of screechy black ones, and tiled pastel floors instead of the old creaky wooden ones in Queen Mary. There are no BOYS and GIRLS doors, there are no separate playgrounds. Even the teachers are different: younger, more casual. Some of them are young men.

I’ve forgotten things, I’ve forgotten that I’ve forgotten them. I remember my old school, but only dimly, as if I was last there five years ago instead of five months. I remember going to Sunday school, but not the details. I know I don’t like the thought of Mrs. Smeath, but I’ve forgotten why. I’ve forgotten about fainting and about the stacks of plates, and about falling into the creek and also about seeing the Virgin Mary. I’ve forgotten all of the bad things that happened. Although I see Cordelia and Grace and Carol every day, I remember none of those things; only that they used to be my friends, when I was younger, before I had other friends. There’s something to do with them, something like a sentence in tiny dry print on a page, flattened out, like the dates of ancient battles. Their names are like names in a footnote, or names written in spidery brown ink in the fronts of Bibles. There is no emotion attached to these names. They’re like the names of distant cousins, people who live far away, people I hardly know. Time is missing.

Nobody mentions anything about this missing time, except my mother. Once in a while she says, “That bad time you had,” and I am puzzled. What is she talking about? I find these references to bad times vaguely threatening, vaguely insulting: I am not the sort of girl who has bad times, I have good times only. There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.

My parents labor away at our house. Rooms are being constructed in the cellar, gradually and with a lot of hammering and sawing, in my father’s spare time: a darkroom, a storeroom for jars and jellies and jams. The lawn is a lawn now. In the garden they’ve planted a peach tree, a pear tree, an asparagus bed, rows and rows of vegetables. The borders are lush with flowers: tulips and daffodils, irises, peonies, pinks, chrysanthemums, something for every season. Occasionally I have to help, but mostly I watch with detachment as they upend themselves in the mud, digging and weeding, clay stains on the knees of their pants. They’re like kids in a sandpile. I like the flowers, but know I would not go to such lengths, make such efforts, get myself so dirty to produce them.

The wooden footbridge over the ravine is torn down. Everyone says it’s about time, it was getting so unsafe. They’re going to replace it with a bridge made of concrete. I go one day and stand at the top of the hill on our side of the ravine, watching the bridge come down. There’s a pile of rotten boards down by the creek. The vertical piles are still standing, like the trunks of dead trees, and part of the cross-planking is attached to them, but the railings are gone. I have an uneasy feeling, as if something’s buried down there, a nameless, crucial thing, or as if there’s someone still on the bridge, left by mistake, up in the air, unable to get to the land. But it’s obvious there’s no one. Cordelia and Grace graduate and go elsewhere; Cordelia, it’s rumored, to St. Sebastian’s, a private school for girls, Grace to a high school farther north which emphasizes math. She’s good at adding things up in neat little rows. She still has her long braids when she graduates. Carol hangs around near the boys at recess, and is often chased by two or three of them. They like to throw her into snowbanks and rub snow into her face, or, when snow is lacking, to tie her up with skipping ropes. When she runs away from them she flings her arms around a lot. She runs in a funny wiggling way, slow enough to be caught, and screams loudly when she is. She wears a training bra. She isn’t much liked by the other girls. For Social Studies I do a project on Tibet, where there are prayer wheels and reincarnation and women have two husbands, and for Science I do different kinds of seeds. I have a boyfriend, as is the fashion. Occasionally he sends me a note across the aisle, written in very black pencil. Sometimes there are parties, with awkward dancing and clumsy guffaws and horseplay by the boys, and wet, inexpert, toothy kisses. My boyfriend carves my initials into the top of his new school desk and gets the strap for it. He gets the strap for other things too. This is admired. I see my first television set, which is like a small black-and-white puppet show of no great interest.

Carol Campbell moves away and I hardly notice. I skip Grade Seven and go straight into Grade Eight, missing the Kings of England in chronological order, missing the circulatory system, leaving my boyfriend behind. I get my hair cut. I want to do this. I’m tired of having long wavy hair that has to be held back by barrettes or hairbands, I’m tired of being a child. I watch with satisfaction as my hair falls away from me like fog and my head emerges, sharper-featured, more clearly defined. I’m ready for high school, I want to go there right away.

I reorganize my room in preparation. I clear old toys out of my cupboard, I empty out all the drawers in my bureau. I find a solitary cat’s eye marble rolling around at the back of the drawer, and some old dried-up chestnuts. Also a red plastic purse, which I remember getting for Christmas once. It’s a babyish purse. It rattles when I pick it up; inside there’s a nickel. I take the nickel out to spend, and put the marble inside the purse. I throw out the chestnuts.

I find my photo album with the black pages. I haven’t taken any pictures with my Brownie camera for a long time, so this album has slipped from view. Stuck into it with the black triangles there are pictures I can’t recall taking. For instance, there are several pictures of what look like large boulders, beside a lake. Underneath is printed, in white pencil: Daisy. Elsie. It’s my writing, but I don’t remember printing this. I take these things down to the cellar and put them into the trunk, where old things go that are not thrown out. My mother’s wedding dress is in there, several pieces of ornate silver, some sepia-toned portraits of people I don’t know, a packet of bridge tallies with silk tassels on them, left over from before the war. Some of our old drawings are in there, my brother’s spaceships and red and gold explosions, my delicate, old-fashioned little girls. I look at their pinafores and hair bows and their rudimentary faces and hands with distaste. I don’t like looking at things connected so closely with my life as a child. I think these drawings are inept: I can do much better now.

The day before the first day of high school the telephone rings. It’s Cordelia’s Mummie; she wants to speak to my mother. I assume it’s boring grown-ups’ business and go back to reading the newspaper on the living room floor. But after she puts the phone down, my mother comes into the room.

“Elaine,” she says. This is unusual, as she doesn’t often use my name. She sounds solemn. I look up from Mandrake the Magician. She looks down. “That was Cordelia’s mother,” she says.

“Cordelia will be going to your high school. Cordelia’s mother wonders whether you girls would like to walk to school together.”

“Cordelia?” I say. I haven’t seen or spoken to Cordelia for a whole year. She has vanished completely. I’ve chosen that school because I can walk to it, instead of going on a bus; so why not walk with Cordelia? “Okay,” I say.

“Are you sure you want to?” my mother says, a little anxiously. She doesn’t say why Cordelia will be coming to my school now and I don’t ask.

“Why wouldn’t I?” I say. I’m already sliding into flippancy, which goes with high school, but also I can’t see what she’s getting at. I’m being asked to do Cordelia, or Cordelia’s mother, some kind of a minor favor. My mother’s usual line is that you should do these favors when asked, so why is she hedging on this one?

She doesn’t answer this. Instead she hovers. I go back to reading the comics. “Shall I call her mother back, then, or would you like to speak with Cordelia yourself?” she says.

“You can call her,” I say. I add, “Please.” I have no particular wish to speak to Cordelia right now. The next morning I go to Cordelia’s house, which is on the way to school, to pick her up. The door opens and Cordelia is there, but she is no longer the same. She’s no longer angular and rangy; she’s grown full breasts and is heavier in the hips and face. Her hair is longer now, not a pageboy. She wears it in a ponytail with small white cloth lilies of the valley wired around the elastic band. She’s bleached a peroxide streak into the bangs. She has orange lipstick, and orange nail polish to match. My own lipstick is pale pink. Seeing Cordelia, I realize that I don’t look like a teenager, I look like a kid dressed up as one. I am still thin, still flat. I have a ferocious desire to be older. We walk to school together, not saying much at first, past a gas station, a funeral parlor, then a mile along a strip of shops, a Woolworth’s, an I.D.A. drugstore, a fruit and vegetable shop, a hardware store, all of them side by side in two-story flat-roofed yellow brick buildings. We hold our schoolbooks up against our chests, our full cotton skirts brushing against our bare legs. Right now it’s the end of summer, when all the lawns are dull green or yellow and used up.

I’ve assumed Cordelia would be a grade ahead of me. But she isn’t, she’s in the same grade now. She’s been expelled from St. Sebastian’s for drawing a penis on a bat. Or this is what she says. She says there was a large drawing of a bat on the blackboard, with its wings outspread and just a tiny bump between its legs. So she went up to the blackboard when the teacher was out of the room and rubbed out the little bump and made a bigger, longer one—“Not that much bigger”—and the teacher came into the room and caught her doing it.

“Is that all?” I say.

Not exactly. She also printed Mr. Malder, neatly, underneath the bump. Mr. Malder was the teacher’s name.

Probably this wasn’t all she did, but it’s all she’s telling about. As an afterthought she mentions that she failed her year. “I was too young for it,” she says. This sounds like something she’s been told by other people, her mother most likely. “I was only twelve. They shouldn’t have skipped me.”

Now she’s thirteen. I am twelve. I too have been skipped. I begin to wonder if I’ll end up the same way she has, drawing penises on bats, failing my year.

Chapter 39

The school we go to is called Burnham High School. It’s recently built, oblong in shape, flat-roofed, undecorated, unrevealing, sort of like a factory. It’s the latest thing in modern architecture. Inside, it has long corridors with mottled floors of something that looks like granite but is not. The yellowish walls are lined with dark-green lockers, and there’s an auditorium and a P.A. system. Every morning we have announcements over the P.A. system. First we have a Bible reading and prayers. I bow my head during the prayers but I refuse to pray, though I don’t know why I do this. After the prayers the principal tells us of coming events, and he also warns us to pick up our chewing gum wrappers and not to moon around in the halls like old married couples. His name is Mr. MacLeod, although everyone calls him Chrome Dome behind his back because he’s bald on top; and he’s a Scot by affiliation. Burnham High has a school plaid, a school crest with a thistle and a couple of those Scottish knives they stick in their socks, and a Gaelic motto. The plaid, the crest, the motto, and the school colors all belong to Mr. MacLeod’s personal clan.

In the front hall, alongside the Queen, hangs a portrait of Dame Flora MacLeod with her two bagpipe-playing grandsons, posed outside Dunvegan Castle. We are encouraged to think of this castle as our ancestral home, and of Dame Flora as our spiritual leader. In choir we learn “The Skye Boat Song,”

about Bonnie Prince Charlie escaping the genocidal English. We learn “Scots Wha‘ Hae,” and a poem about a mouse, which causes some snickering as it contains the word breast. I think all this Scottishness is normal for high schools, never having gone to one before; and even the several Armenians, Greeks, and Chinese in our school lose the edges of their differences, immersed as we all are in a mist of plaid. I don’t know many people at this school and neither does Cordelia. In my graduating class from public school there were only eight people, and in Cordelia’s there were four. So it’s a school full of strangers. In addition to that, we’re in different homerooms, so we don’t even have each other to rely on. Everyone in my homeroom is bigger than I am. This is to be expected, because everyone is also older. The girls have breasts and a drowsy, powdery, hot-day smell; the skin of their faces is slippery-looking, slick with oily juice. I’m wary of them and dislike the changing room where we have to put on the blue cotton bloomer-bottomed gym suits with our names embroidered on the pockets. In there I feel skinnier than ever; when I catch sight of myself in the mirror I can see the ribs below my collarbone. During volleyball games, these other girls lollop and thunder around me, their voices outsized and raucous, their new, extra flesh wobbling. I take care to keep out of their way, simply because they are bigger and might knock me over. But I’m not really afraid of them. In a way I despise them, because they are so much like Carol Campbell, squealing and flinging themselves around.

Among the boys there are a few pipsqueaks whose voices have not yet changed, but many of the boys are gigantic. Some are fifteen, almost sixteen. They have hair that’s long at the sides and greased back into ducktails, and they shave. Some of them look as if they shave a lot. They sit at the back of the room and stick their long legs out into the aisle. They’ve already failed a grade, at least once; they’ve given up and been given up on, and they’re doing time until they can leave. Although they call remarks at other girls in the halls and make kissing sounds at them, or dangle around their lockers, they pay no attention at all to me. To them I’m just a child.

But I don’t feel younger than these people. In some ways I feel older. In our Health book there’s a chapter on teenage emotions. According to this book, I’m supposed to be caught in a whirlwind of teenage emotions, laughing one minute, crying the next, zooming around on a roller coaster, which is their term. However, this description does not apply to me. I am calm; I regard the antics of my fellow students, who act like the textbook, with a combination of scientific curiosity and almost matronly indulgence. When Cordelia says, “Don’t you think he’s a dreamboat?” I have a hard time understanding what she means. Occasionally I do cry for no reason, as it says you’re supposed to. But I can’t believe in my own sadness, I can’t take it seriously. I watch myself crying in the mirror, intrigued by the sight of tears.

At lunchtime I sit with Cordelia in the cafeteria, which is pale-colored, with long whitish tables. We eat the lunches that have been sweltering in our school lockers all morning and which taste faintly of gym shoes, and drink chocolate milk through straws, and make what we consider to be witty, sarcastic remarks to each other, about the other kids at the school, about the teachers. Cordelia has been to high school for a year already and knows how to do this. She wears the collar of her blouse turned up and affects a derisive laugh. “He’s a pill,” she says; or, “What a creep.” These are words that apply only to boys. Girls can be tough, stuck-up or cheap, mousy or boy-crazy; or they can be brains and sucks and brownnosers, like boys, if they are thought to study too much. But they can’t be pills and creeps. I like the word pill. I think it refers to the little balls of wool that form on sweaters. Boys who are pills have sweaters like that. I take care to pick all such woolen balls off of my own sweaters. Cordelia collects glossy photos of movie stars and singers, which she sends away for, finding the addresses of the fan clubs in movie magazines that advertise Frederick‘s of Hollywood peekaboo lingerie at the back, and chocolate-flavored tablets you chew to lose weight. She thumbtacks the photos to the bulletin board over her desk and Scotch tapes them to the walls of her room. Whenever I’m in there I feel as if there’s a crowd watching me, their glossy black-and-white eyes following me around the room. Some of these pictures have signatures on them, and we examine them under the light to see if the pen has dented the paper. If not, they’re only printed on. Cordelia likes June Allyson, but she also likes Frank Sinatra and Betty Hutton. Burt Lancaster is the sexiest, according to Cordelia. On the way home from school we go to the record store and try out 78 records in the tiny cork-lined booth. Sometimes Cordelia will buy a record with her allowance, which is larger than mine, but most of the time she just tries them out. She expects me to roll my eyes in ecstasy, the way she does; she expects me to groan. She knows the rituals, she knows how we’re supposed to be behaving, now that we’re in high school. But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can’t do them without feeling I’m acting.

We take the records back to Cordelia’s house and put them on the record player in the living room, and turn up the sound. Frank Sinatra appears, a disembodied voice, sliding around on the tune like someone slipping on a muddy sidewalk. He slithers up to a note, hits it, flails, recovers, oozes in the direction of another note.

“Don’t you just love the way he does that?” says Cordelia. She flings herself onto the chesterfield, legs across the arm, head hanging upside-down. She’s eating a doughnut covered with powdered sugar; the sugar has come off on her nose. “I feel as if he’s right here, running his hand up and down my spine.”

“Yeah,” I say.

Perdie and Mirrie come in, and Perdie says, “Not mooning over him again,” and Mirrie says, “Cordelia dear, would you mind turning down the sound?” These days she speaks to Cordelia in tones of extra sweetness and calls her dear a lot.

Perdie is in university now. She goes to frat parties. Mirrie’s in the last year of high school, though not our high school. They are both more charming and beautiful and sophisticated than ever. They wear cashmere sweaters and pearl button earrings, and smoke cigarettes. They call them ciggie-poos. They call eggs eggie-poos, and breakfast brekkers. If someone is pregnant they say preggers. They call their mother Mummie, still. They sit and smoke their cigarettes and talk casually and with amused, semi-contemp tuous irony about their friends, who have names like Mickie and Bobbie and Poochie and Robin. It’s hard to figure out from the names whether these people are boys or girls.

“Are you sufficiently sophonsified?” Perdie asks Cordelia. This is a new thing they’ve taken to saying. It means, have you had enough to eat? “Those were supposed to be for dinner.” She means the doughnuts.

“There’s a lot left,” says Cordelia, still upside-down, wiping her nose.

“Cordelia,” says Perdie. “Don’t turn your collar up like that. It’s cheap.”

“It’s not cheap,” says Cordelia. “It’s sharp.”

“Sharp,” says Perdie, rolling her eyes, blowing smoke from her nose. Her mouth is little and plump and curly at the edges. “That sounds like a hair oil ad.”

Cordelia sits around right side up and sticks her tongue in the corner of her mouth and looks at Perdie.

“So?” she says at last. “What do you know? You’re already over the hill.”

Perdie, who’s old enough to drink cocktails with the grown-ups before dinner although she’s not supposed to do it in bars, curls up her mouth. “I think high school’s bad for her,” she says to Mirrie.

“She’s turning into a hardrock.” She pronounces this word in a mocking drawl, to show that it’s the sort of word she herself has outgrown. “Pull up your socks, Cordelia, or you’ll flunk your year again. You know what Daddy said last time.”

Cordelia flushes, and can’t think what to say back.

Cordelia begins to pinch things from stores. She doesn’t call it stealing, she calls it pinching. She pinches tubes of lipstick from Woolworth’s, packets of licorice Nibs from the drugstore. She goes in and buys some small item, such as bobby pins, and when the salesgirl has her back turned getting the change out of the till she slips something off the counter and hides it under her coat or in her coat pocket. By this time it’s autumn, and we have long coats which flap against the backs of our legs, coats with baggy, outsize patch pockets, good for pinching. Outside the store she shows me what she’s gotten away with. She seems to think there’s nothing wrong in what she’s doing; she laughs with delight, her eyes sparkle, her cheeks are flushed. It’s as if she’s won a prize.

The Woolworth’s has old wooden floors, stained from years of winter slush on people’s boots, and dim overhead lights that hang down from the ceiling on metal stems. Nothing in it is anything we would really want, except maybe the lipsticks. There are photo frames with strangely tinted pictures of movie stars in them to show what the frame would look like with a photo in it; these stars have names like Raymon Novarro and Linda Darnell, stars from some remote period several years ago. There are cheesy hats, old-lady hats with veiling around them, and hair combs stuck with imitation rhinestones. Just about everything in here is imitation something else. We walk up and down the aisles, spraying ourselves from the cologne testers, rubbing the sample lipsticks on the backs of our hands, fingering the merchandise and disparaging it in loud voices, while the middle-aged salesladies glare at us. Cordelia pinches a pink nylon scarf and thinks she’s been seen by one of the glaring salesladies, so we don’t go back there for a while. We go into the drugstore and buy Cream-sicles, and while I’m paying for them Cordelia pinches two horror comics. As we walk the rest of the way home from school we take turns reading them out loud, dramatizing the parts like radio plays, pausing to shriek with laughter. We sit on the low stone wall in front of the funeral parlor so we can both see the pictures, reading and laughing. The comic books are drawn in great detail and garishly colored, with green and purple and sulfur-yellow prevailing. Cordelia reads a story about two sisters, a pretty one and one who has a burn covering half her face. The burn is maroon-colored and wrinkled like a dead apple. The pretty one has a boyfriend and goes to dances, the burned one hates her and loves the boyfriend. The burned one hangs herself in front of a mirror, out of jealousy. But her spirit goes into the mirror, and the next time the pretty one is brushing her hair in front of that mirror, she looks up and there’s the burned one looking back at her. This is a shock and she faints, and the burned one gets out of the mirror and into the pretty one’s body. She takes over the body and fools the boyfriend, she even gets him to kiss her, but although her face is now perfect, her reflection in that one mirror still shows her real, ruined face. The boyfriend sees it. Luckily he knows what to do. He freaks the mirror.

“Sob, sob,” says Cordelia. “Oh, Bob…it was…horrible. Never mind, my darling, it’s all over now. She’s gone… back… to where she came from… forever. Now we can truly be together, without fear. Clinch. The End. Oh, puke!”

I read one about a man and a woman who drown at sea but find they aren’t dead exactly. Instead they are enormously bloated and far, and living on a desert island. They don’t love each other any more because of being so fat. Along comes a ship and they wave to it. “They don’t see us! They’re passing right through us! Oh no…that must mean…we’re condemned to be this way forever! Is there no way out?”

In the next picture they’ve hanged themselves. The fat bodies are dangling from one of the palm trees, and their previous thin bodies, wispy-looking and dressed in falling-apart bathing suits, are holding hands and walking into the ocean. “Clinch. The End.”

“Oh, double puke,” says Cordelia.

Cordelia reads one about a dead man coming back out of a swamp, covered with dripping, peeling-off flesh, to strangle the brother who pushed him into the swamp in the first place, and I read one about a man picking up a beautiful girl hitchhiker who turns out to have been dead for ten years. Cordelia reads one about a man who gets cursed by a voodoo witch doctor and grows a big red lobster claw on his hand, which turns on him and attacks him.

When we get to Cordelia’s house, Cordelia doesn’t want to take the horror comics inside with her. She says someone might find them and wonder where she got them. Even if they think she bought them, she’ll be in trouble. So I end up taking them home with me. It doesn’t occur to either of us to throw them out. Once I get them home, I realize I don’t want them in them in the daylight, but I don’t like the idea of them lying there, right in my bedroom, while I’m asleep. I think of them glowing in the dark, with a lurid sulfur-yellow light; I think of curling wisps of mist coming out of them and materializing on top of my bureau. I’m afraid I’ll find out that there’s someone else trapped inside my body; I’ll look into the bathroom mirror and see the face of another girl, someone who looks like me but has half of her face darkened, the skin burned away.

I know these things won’t really happen, but I don’t like the thought. Nor do I want to throw the comics away; that would be letting them loose, they might go out of control. So I take them into Stephen’s room and slide them in among his own old comic books, which are still there, stacked up under his bed. He never reads them any more, so he won’t find these ones. Whatever emanations may seep from them at night, he will be impervious to them. In my opinion he is up to things, which includes things of this kind.

Chapter 40

It’s Sunday evening. There’s a fire in the fireplace; the drapes are drawn against the heavy November darkness. My father sits in the easy chair marking drawings of spruce budworms cut open to show their digestive systems, my mother has made grilled cheese squares with bacon on them. We’re listening to

“The Jack Benny Show” on the radio, which is punctuated by singing commercials for Lucky Strike cigarettes. On this show there is a man who talks in a raspy voice and another one who says “Pickle in the middle and the mustard on top.” I have no idea that the first one is supposed to be black and the second one Jewish; I think they just have funny voices.

Our old radio with the green eye has vanished, and a new, blond one has appeared, in a smooth unornamented cabinet that holds a long-playing record player as well. We have little wooden nesting tables for our plates with the cheese squares; these tables are blond also, with legs that are wide at the top and taper down without a bump or curlicue, no dust catchers. They look like the legs of fat women as they appear in comic books: no knees, no ankles. All this blond wood is from Scandinavia. Our silverware has descended to the steamer trunk. In its place there is new silverware, which is not silver but stainless steel.

These items have been chosen, not by my mother, but by my father. He picks out my mother’s dressing-up clothes as well; my mother, laughing, says that all her taste is in her mouth. As far as she is concerned a chair is there to sit down on, and she couldn’t care less whether it has pink petunias on it or purple polka dots, as long as it doesn’t collapse. It’s as if, like a cat, she cannot see things unless they are moving. She is becoming even more indifferent to fashion, and strides around in improvised getups, a ski jacket, an old scarf, mitts that don’t match. She says she doesn’t care what it looks like as long as it keeps out the wind.

Worse, she’s taken up ice dancing; she goes to classes at the local indoor rink, and tangos and waltzes in time to tinny music, holding hands with other women. This is mortifying but at least she does it indoors, where no one can see her. I can only hope she won’t take to practicing, later when it’s really winter, on the outdoor rink, where somebody I might know could see her. But she isn’t even aware of the chagrin this could cause. She never says, What will people think? the way other mothers do, or are supposed to. She says she doesn’t give a hoot.

I think this is irresponsible of her. At the same time, the word hoot pleases me. It makes my mother into a non-mother, a sort of mutant owl. I have become picky about my own clothes, and given to looking at myself from behind with the aid of a hand mirror: although I may appear all right from the front, treachery could sneak up on me: a loose thread, a dropped hem. Not giving a boot would be a luxury. It describes the fine, irreverent carelessness I myself would like to cultivate, in these and other matters. My brother sits in one of the taper-legged blond chairs that go with the tables. He has become bigger and older, all of a sudden, when I wasn’t looking. He has a razor now. Because it’s the weekend and he hasn’t shaved, he has a line of fine bristles poking out of the skin around his mouth. He’s got on his moccasins, old ones he wears around the house, with holes worn under the big toes, and his V-neck maroon sweater with the ravels coming off the elbows. He resists my mother’s efforts to mend this sweater or replace it. My mother says frequently that she doesn’t give a hoot about clothes, but this indifference does not extend to holes, frayed edges, or dirt.

My brother’s ragged sweater and sievelike moccasins are the clothes he studies in. On weekdays he has to wear a jacket and tie and gray flannels, all or which are required at his school. He can’t have a ducktail, like the boys at my school, or even a crewcut: his hair is shaved up the back of the neck and parted at one side, like the hair of English choirboys. This too is a school requirement. With his hair cut this way he looks like an illustration from an adventure book of the 1920s or earlier, of which there are a number in our cellar, or like an Allied air officer from a comic book. He has that kind of nose, that kind of chin, although thinner: clean-cut, good-looking, old-fashioned. His eyes are like that too, a piercing, slightly fanatical blue. His scorn for boys who give a hoot about how they look is devastating. He calls them fruity clothes horses.

His school is a private school for brainy boys, though not an expensive one: you get in by passing tough exams. My parents asked me, a little anxiously, if I wanted to go to a private school for girls; they thought I’d feel left out if they didn’t make the effort for me too. I know about these schools, where you have to wear kilts and play field hockey. I said they were for snobs and had low academic standards, which was true. But in fact I wouldn’t be caught dead in a girls’ school. The idea fills me with claustrophobic panic: a school with nothing in it but girls would be like a trap.

My brother is listening to Jack Benny too. As he listens, he stuffs the cheese squares into his mouth with his left hand, but his right hand holds a pencil, and this hand is never still. He hardly looks at the scrap pad on which he’s doodling, but once in a while he tears off a sheet and crumples it up. These crumpled notes land on the floor. When I gather them up to put them into the wastebasket after the show, I see that they’re covered with numbers, long lines of numbers and symbols that go on and on, like writing, like a letter in code.

My brother sometimes has friends over. They sit in his room with the chess table between them, not moving except for their hands, which lift, hover over the board, plunge down. Sometimes they grunt or say “Aha” or “Trade you” or “Got you back”; or they exchange new, obscure good-natured insults:

“You surd!” “You square root!” “You throwback!” The captured chess pieces, knights and pawns and bishops, line up on the outskirts of the board. Once in a while, to see how the game is going, I bring in glasses of milk and vanilla-chocolate pinwheel cookies which I’ve made out of the Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook. This is a form of showing-off on my part, but it doesn’t get much response. They grunt, drink the milk with their left hands, stuff in the cookies, their eyes never leaving the board. The bishops topple, the queen falls, the king is encircled. “Mate in two,” they say. A finger comes down, knocks over the king. “Best of five.” And they start again.

In the evenings my brother studies. Sometimes he does this in a curious way. He stands on his head, to improve the circulation to his brain, or he throws spitballs at the ceiling. The area around his ceiling light fixture is pimply with little wads of once-chewed paper. At other times he indulges in manic bouts of physical activity: he splits huge piles of kindling, much more than is needed, or goes running down in the ravine, wearing disgraceful baggy pants and a forest-green sweater even more unraveled than his maroon one, and frayed gray running shoes that look like the kind you see one of in vacant lots. He says he’s training for the marathon.

A lot of the time my brother doesn’t seem aware of me. He’s thinking about other things, solemn things that are important. He sits at the dinner table, his right hand moving, pinching a breadcrust into pellets, staring at the wall behind my mother’s head, on which there is a picture of three milkweed pods in a vase, while my father explains why the human race is doomed. This time it’s because we’ve discovered insulin. All the diabetics aren’t dying the way they used to, they’re living long enough so that they’re passing the diabetes on to their children. Soon, by the law of geometric progression, we’ll all be diabetics, and since insulin is made from cows’ stomachs the whole world will be covered with insulin-producing cows, the parts that aren’t covered with human beings, who are reproducing much too rapidly for their own good anyway. The cows burp methane gas. Far too much methane gas is entering the atmosphere already, it will choke out the oxygen and perhaps cause the entire earth to become a giant greenhouse. The polar seas will melt and New York will be under six feet of water, not to mention many another coastal city. Also we have to worry about deserts, and erosion. If we don’t get burped to death by the cows we’ll end up like the Sahara Desert, says my father cheerfully, finishing up the meatloaf. My father has nothing against diabetics, or cows either. He just likes following chains of thought to their logical conclusions. My mother says it’s coffee soufflé for dessert.

Once my brother would have been more interested in the fate of the human race. Now he says that if the sun went supernova it would be eight minutes before we’d see it. He’s taking the long-range view. Sooner or later we’re going to be a cinder anyway, he implies, so why worry about a few cows more or less? Although he still collects butterfly sightings, he’s moving farther and farther away from biology. In the larger picture, we’re just a little green scuzz on the surface, says my brother. My father eats his coffee soufflé, frowning a little. My mother tactfully pours him a cup of tea. I see that the future of the human race is a battleground, that Stephen has won a point and my father has lost one. Whoever cares the most will lose.

I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort. How spruce budworms could be essential to the war effort I have not yet figured out, but apparently they were. Maybe this is why he always drives so fast, maybe he’s heading for takeoff.

I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn’t have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things: everyone there could use an ax and a saw. He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the light of a kerosene lamp; he put himself through university by working in lumber camps and cleaning out rabbit hutches, and was so poor that he lived in a tent in the summers to save money. He used to play country fiddle at square dances and was twenty-two before he heard an orchestra. All this is known, but unimaginable. Also I wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

I harden my heart toward the fate of the human race, and calculate in my head how much money I’ll need to save to buy a new lamb’s-wool sweater. In Home Economics, which really means cooking and sewing, I’ve learned how to install a zipper and make a flat-fell seam, and now I make a lot of my clothes myself because it’s cheaper, although they don’t always turn out exactly like the picture on the front of the pattern. I get very little help from my mother on the fashion front, because whatever I wear she says it looks lovely, as long as it has no visible rents.

For advice I turn to Mrs. Finestein next door, for whom I baby-sit on weekends. “Blue is your color, honey,” she says. “Very gorgeous. And cerise. You’d look stunning in cerise.” Then she goes out for the evening with Mr. Finestein, her hair upswept, her mouth vivid, teetering in her tiny shoes with high heels, jingling with bracelets and dangly gold earrings, and I read The Little Engine That Could to Brian Finestein and tuck him into bed.

Sometimes Stephen and I still get stuck doing the dishes together, and then he remembers he’s my brother. I wash, he dries, and he asks me benign, avuncular, maddening questions, such as how do I like Grade Nine. He is in Grade Eleven, stairways and stairways above me; he doesn’t have to rub it in. But on some of these dish-drying nights he reverts to what I consider to be his true self. He tells me the nicknames of the teachers at his school, all of which are rude, such as The Armpit or The Human Stool. Or we invent new swearwords together, words that suggest an unspecific dirtiness. “Frut,” he says. I counter with “pronk,” which I tell him is a verb. We lean against the kitchen counter, doubled over with laughter, until our mother comes into the kitchen and says, “What are you two kids up to?”

Sometimes he decides that it’s his duty to educate me. He has a low opinion of most girls, it seems, and doesn’t want me turning into one of the ordinary kind. He doesn’t want me to be a pin-headed fuzzbrain. He thinks I’m in danger of becoming vain. In the mornings he stands outside the bathroom door and asks if I can bear to unstick myself from the mirror.

He thinks I should develop my mind. In order to help me do this, he makes a Möbius strip for me by cutting out a long slip of paper, twisting it once and gluing the ends together. This Möbius strip has only one side, you can prove it by running your finger along the surface. According to Stephen, this is a way of visualizing infinity. He draws me a Klein bottle, which has no outside and no inside, or rather the outside and the inside are the same. I have more trouble with the Klein bottle than the Möbius strip, probably because it’s a bottle, and I can’t think of a bottle that isn’t intended to contain something. I can’t see the point of it.

Stephen says he’s interested in the problems of two-dimensional universes. He wants me to imagine what a three-dimensional universe would look like to someone who was perfectly flat. If you stood in a two-dimensional universe you would only be perceived at the point of intersection, you’d be perceived as two oblong discs, two two-dimensional cross sections of your own feet. Then there are five-dimensional universes, seven-dimensional ones. I try very hard to picture these but I can’t seem to get past three.

“Why three?” says Stephen. This is a favorite technique of his, asking me questions to which he knows the answers, or other answers.

“Because that’s how many there are,” I say.

“That’s how many we perceive, you mean,” he says. “We’re limited by our own sensory equipment. How do you think a fly sees the world?” I know how a fly perceives the world, I’ve seen many flies’ eyes, through microscopes. “In facets,” I say. “But each facet would still have only three dimensions.”

“Point taken,” he says, which makes me feel grown-up, worthy of this conversation. “But actually we perceive four.”

“Four?” I say.

“Time is a dimension,” he says. “You can’t separate it from space. Space-time is what we live in.” He says there are no such things as discrete objects which remain unchanged, set apart from the flow of time. He says space-time is curved and that in curved space-time the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line but a line following the curve. He says that time can be stretched or shrunk, and that it runs faster in some places than in others. He says that if you put one identical twin in a high-speed rocket for a week, he’d come back to find his brother ten years older than he is himself. I say I think that would be sad.

My brother smiles. He says the universe is like a dot-covered balloon that’s being blown up. The dots are the stars; they’re moving farther and farther away from one another all the time. He says that one of the really interesting questions is whether the universe is infinite and unbounded, or infinite but bounded, like the balloon idea. All I can think of in connection with a balloon is the explosion when it breaks. He says that space is mostly empty and that matter is not really solid. It’s just a bunch of widely spaced atoms moving at greater or lesser speeds. Anyway, matter and energy are aspects of each other. It’s as if everything is made of solid light. He says that if we knew enough we could walk through walls as if they were air, if we knew enough we could go faster than light, and at that point space would become time and time would become space and we would be able to travel through time, back into the past. This is the first of these ideas of his that has really interested me. I’d like to see dinosaurs and a good many other things, such as the Ancient Egyptians. On the other hand there’s something menacing about this notion. I’m not so sure I want to travel back into the past. I’m not so sure I want to be that impressed, either, by everything he says. It gives him too much of an advantage. Anyway it isn’t a sensible way to talk. A lot of it sounds like comic books, the kind with ray guns. So I say, “What good would that be?”

He smiles. “If you could do it, you’d know you could do it,” is what he says. I tell Cordelia that Stephen says we could walk through walls if we knew enough. This is the only one of his latest ideas I can trust myself to expound, at the moment. The rest are too complicated, or bizarre. Cordelia laughs. She says that Stephen is a brain and that if he weren’t so cute he’d be a pill. Stephen has a summer job this summer, teaching canoeing at a boys’ camp, but I don’t, because I’m only thirteen. I go with my parents up to the north, near Sault Ste. Marie, where my father is overseeing an experimental colony of tent caterpillars in screened-in cages.

Stephen writes me letters, in pencil, on pages torn from lined workbooks, in which he ridicules everything he can get his hands on, including his fellow camp instructors and the girls they go drooling around after on their days off. He describes these instructors with pimples popping from their skins, fangs sprouting in their mouths, their tongues hanging out like those of dogs, their eyes crossed in permanent, girl-inspired imbecility. This makes me think I have power, of a sort. Or will have it: I too am a girl. I go fishing by myself, mostly so I’ll have something to put in my letters to him. Other than that I don’t have much to tell. Cordelia’s letters are in real ink, black in color. They are full of superlatives and exclamation marks. She dots her I’s with little round circles, like Orphan Annie eyes, or bubbles. She signs them with things like,

“Yours till Niagara Falls,” “Yours till the cookie crumbles,” or “Yours till the sea wears rubber pants to keep its bottom dry.”

“I am so bored!!! ” she writes, with triple underlining. She sounds enthusiastic even about boredom. And yet her burbly style does not ring true. I have seen her, sometimes, when she thinks I’m not looking: her face goes still, remote, unreflecting. It’s as if she’s not inside it. But then she’ll turn and laugh. “Don’t you just love it when they roll up their sleeves and tuck the cigarette pack inside?” she’ll say. “That takes biceps!” And she will be back to normal.

I feel as if I’m marking time. I swim in the lake provided, and eat raisins and crackers spread thickly with peanut butter and honey while reading detective stories, and sulk because there’s no one my age around. My parents’ relentless cheer is no comfort. It would almost be better if they could be as surly as I am, or surlier; this would make me feel more ordinary.