Cat's Eye

by Margaret Atwood

  I draw with colored pencils. Or I paint in egg tempera, the technique of monks. Nobody teaches this any more, so I hunt through the library, searching for instructions. Egg tempera is difficult and messy, painstaking and, at first, heartbreaking. I muck up my mother's kitchen floor and pots, cooking the gesso, and ruin panel after panel before I can work out how to paint it on for a smooth working surface. Or I forget about my bottles of egg yolk and water, which go bad and stink up the cellar with a smell like sulfur. I use up a lot of egg yolks. The whites I separate carefully, and take upstairs to my mother, who makes them into meringue cookies.

  I draw beside the picture window in the living room upstairs, when there is nobody home, or in the daylight from the cellar window. At night I use two gooseneck lamps, each of which takes three bulbs. None of this is adequate, but it's all I can manage. Later, I think, I will have a large studio, with skylights; though what I will paint in it is far from clear. Whatever it is will appear, even later, in colored plates, in books; like the work of Leonardo da Vinci, whose studies of hands and feet and hair and dead people I pore over.

  I become fascinated with the effects of glass, and of other light-reflecting surfaces. I study paintings in which there are pearls, crystals, mirrors, shiny details of brass. I spend a long time over Van Eyck's The Arnolfini Marriage, going over the inadequate color print of it in my textbook with a magnifying glass; what fascinates me is not the two delicate, pallid, shoulderless hand-holding figures, but the pier glass on the wall behind them, which reflects in its convex surface not only their backs but two other people who aren't in the main picture at all. These figures reflected in the mirror are slightly askew, as if a different law of gravity, a different arrangement of space, exists inside, locked in, sealed up in the glass as if in a paperweight. This round mirror is like an eye, a single eye that sees more than anyone else looking: over this mirror is written, Johannes de Eyck fuit hic. 1434. It's disconcertingly like a washroom scribble, something you'd write with spray paint on a wall.

  There is no pier glass in our house for me to practice on. So instead I paint ginger ale bottles, wineglasses, ice cubes from the refrigerator, the glazed teapot, my mother's fake pearl earrings. I paint polished wood, and metal: a copper-bottomed frying pan, as seen from the bottom, an aluminum double boiler. I fiddle over details, hunch over my pictures, dabbing at the highlights with tiny brushes.

  I'm aware that my tastes are not fashionable, and so I pursue them in secret. Jon, for instance, would call this illustration. Any picture that's a picture of something recognizable is illustration, as far as he's concerned. There is no spontaneous energy in this kind of work, he would say. No process. I might as well be a photographer, or Norman Rockwell. Some days I agree with him, because what have I done so far? Nothing that doesn't look like a random sampling from the Housewares Department of the Eaton's Catalogue. But I keep on.

  On Wednesday evenings I take another night course: not Life Drawing, which is taught this year by an excitable Yugoslavian, but Advertising Art. The students are quite different from the Life Drawing bunch. They're mostly from the Commercial division of the Art College, not the Fine Arts one. Again they're mostly boys. Some of them have serious artistic ambitions, but they don't drink as much beer. They're cleaner and more earnest, and they want paying jobs when they graduate. So do I.

  The teacher is an elderly man, thin and defeated-looking. He thinks he has failed in the real world, although he once created a famous illustration for canned pork and beans that I can remember from childhood. We ate a lot of canned pork and beans, during the war. His specialty is the rendering of smiles: the trick is to be able to do teeth, nice white even teeth, without putting in the separation between each tooth, which makes the smile appear too canine or too much like false teeth (which he himself has). He tells me I show ability in smiles, and that I could go far.

  Jon teases me a little about this night course, but not as much as I thought he would. He refers to the teacher as Mr. Beanie Weenie, and lets it go at that.

  59

  I graduate from university, and discover that there's nothing much I can do with my degree. Or nothing I want to do at any rate. I don't want to go on to graduate work, I don't want to teach high school or be a curator's flunky in a museum.

  By this time I've accumulated five night courses from the Art College, four of them in the Commercial area, and I trot them and my portfolio of smiles and dishes of caramel pudding and canned peach halves around to various ad agencies. For these purposes I buy a beige wool suit (on sale), medium-heel pumps to match, some pearl button earrings and a tasteful silk scarf (on sale) at Simpsons; this on the recommendation of my last night course instructor, in Layout and Design, who was a woman. She also recommended a haircut, but I would only go so far as a French roll, engineered with the help of some big rollers and hair-setting gel and a lot of bobby pins. Eventually I get a menial job doing mock-ups, and a small furnished two-bedroom apartment with kitchenette and separate entrance in a large crumbling house in the Annex, north of Bloor. I use the second bedroom for painting, and keep the door to it closed.

  This place has a real bed, and a real kitchen sink. Jon comes for dinner and teases me about the towels I've bought (on sale), the ovenproof dishes I've acquired, my shower curtain. "Better Homes and Gardens, eh?" he says. He teases me about the bed, but he likes sleeping in it. He comes to my place, now, more often than I go to his.

  My parents sell their house and move up north. My father has left the university and has gone back to research; he's now head of the Forest Insect Laboratory at Sault Ste. Marie. He says Toronto is getting overpopulated, and also polluted. He says the lower Great Lakes are the world's largest sewer and that if we knew what was going into the drinking water we would all become alcoholics. As for the air, it's so full of chemicals we should be wearing gas masks. Up north you can still breathe.

  My mother was not too happy to leave her garden, but made the best of it: "At least it's a chance to throw out a lot of that junk in the cellar," she said. They've started another garden in the Soo, although the growing season is shorter. In the summers, though, they're mostly on the road, driving from infestation to infestation. There is no shortage of insect life.

  I don't miss my parents. Not yet. Or rather I don't want to be living with them. I am happy to be left to my own devices, my own messes. I can eat haphazardly now, snack on junk food and takeouts without worrying about balanced meals, go to bed when I like, let my dirty laundry rot, neglect the dishes.

  I get a promotion. After a time I move to the art department of a publishing company, where I design book covers. At night, when Jon is not there, I paint. Sometimes I forget to go to bed, and find that it has become dawn and I have to change into my work clothes and go to work. I am groggy on those days, and have trouble hearing what is said to me; but nobody seems to notice.

  *

  I get postcards and the occasional short letter from my mother, sent from places like Duluth and Kapuskasing. She says the roads are getting too crowded. "Too many trailers," she says. I reply with news about my job, my apartment, and the weather. I don't mention Jon, because there is no news. News would be something definite and respectable, such as an engagement.

  My brother Stephen is here and there. He has become more taciturn: he too now communicates by postcard. One comes from Germany, with a man in short leather pants on it and the message: Great particle accelerator; one from Nevada, with a cactus and the note, Interesting life forms. He goes to Bolivia on what I suppose to be a holiday, and sends a cigar-smoking woman in a high-crowned hat: Excellent butterflies. Hope you are well. At one point he gets married, which is announced by a postcard from San Francisco, with the Golden Gate Bridge and a sunset on it, and Got married. Annette sends regards. This is all I hear about it until several years later, when he sends a postcard of the Statue of Liberty from New York, which says: Got divorced. I assume he has been puzzled by both events, as if they're not something he's done him
self, on purpose, but things that have happened to him accidentally, like stubbing your toe. I think of him as walking into marriage as into a park, in a foreign country, at night, unaware of the possibilities for damage.

  He turns up in Toronto to give a lecture, at a conference, notifying me in advance with a postcard of a statue of Paul Revere, from Boston: Arrive Sun. 12th. My paper is on Mon. See you.

  I attend the lecture, not because I have high hopes for it on my own account--the title of it is "The First Picoseconds and the Quest for a Unified Field Theory: Some Minor Speculations"--but because he is my brother. I sit nibbling my fingers as the university auditorium fills with the audience, which is composed largely of men. Most of them look like people I wouldn't have gone out with in high school.

  Then my brother comes in, with the man who will introduce him. I haven't seen my brother for years; he's thinner, and his hair is beginning to recede. He needs glasses to read his text; I can see them poking out of his breast pocket. Someone has upgraded his wardrobe for him and he's wearing a suit and tie. These alterations don't make him appear more normal, however, but more anomalous, like a creature from an alien planet disguised in human clothing. He has a look of amazing brilliance, as if at any minute his head will light up and become transparent, disclosing a huge brightly colored brain inside. At the same time he looks rumpled and bewildered, as if he's just wakened from a pleasant dream to find himself surrounded by Munchkins.

  The man introducing my brother says he needs no introduction, then goes on to list the papers he has written, the awards he has won, the contributions he has made. There is clapping, and my brother goes to the podium. He stands in front of a white projection screen, clears his throat, shifts from one foot to the other, puts on his glasses. Now he looks like someone who will turn up, later, on a stamp. He is ill at ease and I am nervous for him. I think he will mumble. But once he begins he is fine.

  "When we gaze at the night sky," he says, "we are looking at fragments of the past. Not only in the sense that the stars as we see them are echoes of events that occurred light-years distant in time and space: everything up there and indeed everything down here is a fossil, a leftover from the first picoseconds of creation, when the universe crystallized out from the primal homogeneous plasma. In the first picosecond, conditions were scarcely imaginable. If we could travel in a time machine back toward this explosive moment, we would find ourselves in a universe replete with energies we do not understand and strangely behaving forces distorted beyond recognition. The farther back we probe, the more extreme these conditions become. Current experimental facilities can take us only a short way along this path. Beyond that point, theory is our only guide." After this he continues, in a language that sounds like English but is not, because I can't understand one word of it.

  Luckily there is something to look at. The room darkens and the screen lights up, and there is the universe, or parts of it: the black void punctuated by galaxies and stars, white-hot, blue-hot, red. An arrow moves among them on the screen, searching and finding. Then there are diagrams and strings of numbers, and references to things that everyone here seems to recognize except me. There are, apparently, a great many more dimensions than four.

  Murmurs of interest ripple through the room; there are whisperings, the rustling of paper. At the end, when the lights have come on again, my brother returns to language. "But what of the moment beyond the first moment?" he says. "Or does it even make sense to use the word before, since time cannot exist without space and space-time without events and events without matter-energy? But there is something that must have existed before. That something is the theoretical framework, the parameters within which the laws of energy must operate. Judging from the scanty but mounting evidence now available to us, if the universe was created with a fiat lux, that fiat must have been expressed, not in Latin, but in the one truly universal language: mathematics." This sounds a lot like metaphysics to me, but the men in the audience don't seem to take it amiss. There is applause.

  I go to the reception afterward, which offers the usual university fare: bad sherry, thick tea, cookies out of a package. The numbers men murmur in groups, shake one another's hands. Among them I feel overly visible, and out of place.

  I locate my brother. "That was great," I say to him.

  "Glad you got something out of it," he says with irony.

  "Well, math was never my totally strong point," I say. He smiles benignly.

  We exchange news of our parents, who when last I heard from them were in Kenora, and heading west. "Still counting the old budworms, I guess," says my brother.

  I remember how he used to throw up by the side of the road, and his smell of cedar pencils. I remember our life in tents and logging camps, the scent of cut lumber and gasoline and crushed grass and rancid cheese, the way we used to sneak around in the dark. I remember his wooden swords with the orange blood, his comic book collection. I see him crouching on the swampy ground, calling Lie down, you're dead. I see him dive-bombing the dishes with forks. All my early images of him are clear and sharp and Technicolor: his baggy-legged shorts, his striped T-shirt, his raggedy hair bleached by the sun, his winter breeches and leather helmet. Then there is a gap, and he appears again on the other side of it, unaccountably two years older.

  "Remember that song you used to sing?" I say. "During the war. Sometimes you whistled it. 'Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer'?"

  He looks perplexed, frowns a little. "I can't say I do," he says.

  "You used to draw all those explosions. You borrowed my red pencil, because yours was used up."

  He looks at me, not as if he doesn't remember these things himself, but as if he's puzzled that I do. "You can't have been very old then," he says.

  I wonder what it was like for him, having a little sister tagging along. For me, he was a given: there was never a time when he didn't exist. But I was not a given, for him. Once he was singular, and I was an intrusion. I wonder if he resented me when I was born. Maybe he thought I was a pain in the bum; there's no doubt that he thought this sometimes. Considering everything and on the whole though, he made the best of me.

  "Remember that jar of marbles you buried, under the bridge?" I say. "You would never tell me why you did it." The best ones, the red and blue puries, the waterbabies and cat's eyes, put into the ground, out of reach. He would have stamped the dirt down on top of the jar, and scattered leaves.

  "I think I recall that," he says, as if not entirely willing to be reminded of his former, younger self. It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he's lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?

  "Maybe they're still down there," I say. "I wonder if anyone ever found them, when they built that new bridge. You buried the map too."

  "So I did," he says, smiling in his old, secret, maddening way. He still isn't telling, and I am reassured: despite his changed facade, his thinning hair and provisional suit, he is still the same person underneath.

  After he has gone back, to wherever he's going next, I think of getting him a star named after himself, for his birthday. I have seen an advertisement for these: you send in your money, and you get a certificate with a star map, your own star marked on it. Possibly he would find this amusing. But I'm not sure that the word birthday, for him, would still have meaning.

  60

  Jon has given up his eye-damaging geometrical shapes and is painting pictures that look like commercial illustrations: huge Popsicles, giant salt and pepper shakers, peach halves in syrup, paper dishes overflowing with french fries. He does not talk about purity any more but of the necessity of using common cultural sign systems to reflect the iconic banality of our times. I think I could give him a few tips from my own professional experience: his peach halves could be glossier, for instance. But I don't say this.

  Increasingly, Jon paints these things in my living room. He's been gradually moving in his thin
gs, beginning with the paints and canvas. He says he can't paint at his place because there are too many people in it, which is true: the front room is silting up with American draft dodgers, a shifting population, all of whom seem to be friends of friends. Jon has to step over them to get to the walls, because they lie around on their sleeping bags, forlorn and smoking dope, wondering what to do next. They are depressed because Toronto isn't the United States without a war on, as they thought it would be, but some limbo they have strayed into by accident and can't get out of. Toronto is nowhere, and nothing happens in it.

  Jon stays over three or four nights a week. I don't ask what he does on the other nights.

  He thinks he is making a large concession, to something he assumes I want. And maybe I do want it. When I'm alone, I let the dishes accumulate in the sink, I allow colored fur to grow in jars of leftovers, I use up all my underpants before washing any of them. But Jon turns me into a model of tidiness and efficiency. I get up in the morning and make coffee for him, I set two places at the table, with my newly acquired ovenproof earthenware in off-white, with speckles. I don't even mind doing his laundry at the Laundromat, along with my own.

  Jon is not used to having all these clean clothes. "You're the sort of girl who should get married," he says one day, when I appear with a pile of folded shirts and jeans. I think this may be an insult, but I'm not sure.

  "Do your own laundry then," I say.

  "Hey," he says, "don't be like that."

  On Sundays we sleep late, make love, go for walks, holding hands.

  One day, when nothing has changed, nothing has been done or happened that is any different from usual, I discover I am pregnant. My first reaction is unbelief. I count and recount, wait another day, then another, listening to the inside of my body as if for a footfall. Finally I slink off to the drugstore with some pee in a bottle, feeling like a criminal. Married women go to their doctors. Unmarried women do this.