Cat's Eye

by Margaret Atwood

  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 Creamsicles, 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 breaks 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 fat, 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 same room with me at night. It's one thing to laugh at 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.

  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 nonmother, 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 hoot 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 edgs, 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 of 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 thi
nner: 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 pin-wheel 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 souffle 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 souffle, 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 litle 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 my
self from the mirror.

  He thinks I should develop my mind. In order to help me do this, he makes a Mobius strip for me by cutting out a long slip of paper, twisting it once and gluing the ends together. This Mobius 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 Mobius 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 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."