Cat's Eye: Parts 1–5

Cordelia sits with nonchalance, nudging me with her elbow now and then, staring blankly at the other people with her gray-green eyes, opaque and glinting as metal.

How we giggled, with repugnance and delight, when we found the wax her older sisters used on their legs, congealed in a little pot, stuck full of bristles.

Driving in from the airport yesterday in the taxi, past the flat neat factories and warehouses that were once flat neat farms, mile after mile of caution and utilitarianism, and then through the center of the city with the glitz and the European-style awnings and the paving stones, I could see it’s still the same.

Respectable people do not become painters: only overblown, pretentious, theatrical people.

An artist is a tawdry, lazy sort of thing to be, as most people in this country will tell you.

In any case he can’t whisper back, because he has to look straight ahead at the horizon, or at the white lines of the road that washes toward us, wave after slowly undulating wave.

His red and yellow and orange are worn to stubs, from the explosions, and his gold and silver are used up too, on the shining metal carapaces of the tanks and spaceships and on the helmets and the complicated guns.

There’s no shade on the light, just a bare bulb overhead, which makes my face look pallid and ill, with circles under the eyes.

From there we watch as people dressed like snowflakes, like elves, like rabbits, like sugar plum fairies, march past us, strangely truncated because we’re looking down on them.

If I ran a store like this I’d paint all the cubicles pink and put some money into the mirrors: whatever else women want to see, it’s not themselves; not in their worst light anyway.

We push messages under each other’s doors, written in the cryptic language of the aliens, which is filled with x’s and Z’s and must be decoded.

I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.

Her clothes smell faintly of the Smeaths’ house, a mixture of scouring powder and cooked turnips and slightly rancid laundry, and the earth under porches.

The air in the evening lamplight is coagulated, like a custard thickening; heavier sediments of light collect in the corners of the living room.

I sit that way myself, the cold marbles rolling in between my legs, gathering in my outspread skirt, calling out cat's eye, cat’s eye, in a regretful tone, feeling nothing but avarice and a pleasurable terror.

We prowl around among the trees, looking for bones, for hummocks in the earth that could mark diggings, the outlines of buildings, turning over logs and rocks to see what’s underneath them.

Her face is long, her mouth slightly lopsided; something about the top lip is a little skewed, as if it’s been cut open and sewn up crooked.

At recess, Cordelia doles out underwear: lavender frills for Miss Pigeon, who’s fat and saccharine; plaid for Miss Stuart, lace-edged to go with her hankies; red satin long johns for Miss Hatchett, who’s over sixty and wears garnet brooches.

In days of yore, from Britain’s shore,
Wolfe, the dauntless hero, came
And planted firm Britannia’s flag
On Canada’s fair domain.

It’s the carpets that do it to me, the hush, the sanctimoniousness of it all: galleries are too much like churches, there’s too much reverence, you feel there should be some genuflecting going on.

But it’s merely a civilized thing to do, having lunch with an ex-husband in a comradely way: a good coda to all that smashed crockery and mayhem.

She looks a bit scared, as if I’ve just resurrected from the dead, and incompletely at that.

When you’re grown up, then you can make up your own mind about religion, which has been responsible for a lot of wars and massacres in his opinion, as well as bigotry and intolerance.

Because it is Sunday, and because this is evidently a routine after-church Sunday event for the Smeaths, I have the idea that the train tracks and the lethargic, ponderous trains have something to do with God.

We read our Sunday school paper, which has the story of Joseph in it and a modern story about a boy who steals from the collection plate but repents and collects wastepaper and old bottles for the church, to make reparations.

A smell of loam and another, pungent scent rises from among the leaves, a smell of old things, dense and heavy, forgotten.

But the flowers, the smell, the movement of the leaves persist, rich, mesmerizing, desolating, infused with grief.

I want to believe in it, the creams, the rejuvenating lotions, the transparent unguents in vials that slick on like roll-top glue.

I believe each of these comments: my shoulders sag, my spine crumples, I exude the wrong kind of goodness; I see myself shambling crookedly, I make an effort to stand straighter, my body rigid with anxiety.

It’s Miss Lumley’s recipe for symmetry: everything has to be folded, everything has two halves, a left and a right, identical.

My father ladles out the stuffing, deals the slices of dark and light; my mother adds the mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce and asks Mr. Banerji, enunciating carefully, whether they have turkeys in his country.

He says that the wild turkey, once abundant in the deciduous forests in these regions, is far more intelligent and can elude even practiced hunters.

My father and brother, also wild; Mr. Banerji, wild also, but in a more skittish way.

I’ve read in the National Geographic about deep-sea diving and why you have to wear a thick metal suit or the invisible pressure of the heavy undersea water will crush you like mud in a fist, until you implode.

I can be free of words now, I can lapse back into wordlessness, I can sink back into the rhythms of transience as if into bed.