Cat's Eye

by Margaret Atwood

  The man in the drugstore tells me the results are positive. "Congratulations," he says, with disapproving irony. He can see right through me.

  I'm afraid to tell Jon. He will expect me to go and have it out, like a tooth. He will say "it." Or he will want me to sit in the bathtub while he pours boiling water into it; he will want me to drink gin. Or else he will vanish. He's said, often enough, that artists can't live like other people, tied down to demanding families and expensive material possessions.

  I think about things I've heard: drinking a lot of gin, knitting needles, coat hangers; but what do you do with them? I think about Susie and her wings of red blood. Whatever it was she did, I will not do it. I am too frightened. I refuse to end up like her.

  I go back to my apartment, lie down on the floor. My body is numb, inert, without sensation. I can hardly move, I can hardly breathe. I feel as if I'm at the center of nothingness, of a black square that is totally empty; that I'm exploding slowly outward, into the cold burning void of space.

  When I wake up it's the middle of the night. I don't know where I am. I think I'm back in my old room with the cloudy light fixture, in my parents' house, lying on the floor because I've fallen out of bed, as I used to do when we had the army cots. But I know that the house has been sold, that my parents are no longer there. I have somehow been overlooked, left behind.

  This is only the end of a dream. I get up, turn on the lights, make myself some hot milk, sit at the kitchen table, shivering with cold.

  Until now I've always painted things that were actually there, in front of me. Now I begin to paint things that aren't there.

  I paint a silver toaster, the old kind, with knobs and doors. One of the doors is partly open, revealing the red-hot grill within. I paint a glass coffee percolator, with bubbles gathering in the clear water; one drop of dark coffee has fallen, and is beginning to spread.

  I paint a wringer washing machine. The washing machine is a squat cylinder of white enamel. The wringer itself is a disturbing flesh-tone pink.

  I know that these things must be memories, but they do not have the quality of memories. They are not hazy around the edges, but sharp and clear. They arrive detached from any context; they are simply there, in isolation, as an object glimpsed on the street is there.

  I have no image of myself in relation to them. They are suffused with anxiety, but it's not my own anxiety. The anxiety is in the things themselves.

  I paint three sofas. One of them is chintz, in dirty rose; one is maroon velvet, with doilies. The one in the middle is apple-green. On the middle cushion of the middle sofa is an egg cup, five times life-sized, with a broken eggshell in it.

  I paint a glass jar, with a bouquet of nightshade rising out of it like smoke, like the darkness from a genie's bottle. The stems twist and intertwine, the branches cluster with red berries, purple flowers. Scarcely visible, far back in the dense tangle of the glossy leaves, are the eyes of cats.

  In the daytime I go to work, come back, talk, and eat. Jon comes over, eats, sleeps, and goes away. I watch him with detachment; he notices nothing. Every move I make is sodden with unreality. When no one is around, I bite my fingers. I need to feel physical pain, to attach myself to daily life. My body is a separate thing. It ticks like a clock; time is inside it. It has betrayed me, and I am disgusted with it.

  I paint Mrs. Smeath. She floats up without warning, like a dead fish, materializing on a sofa I am drawing: first her white, sparsely haired legs without ankles, then her thick waist and potato face, her eyes in their steel rims. The afghan is draped across her thighs, the rubber plant rises behind her like a fan. On her head is the felt hat like a badly done-up package that she used to wear on Sundays.

  She looks out at me from the flat surface of paint, three-dimensional now, smiling her closed half-smile, smug and accusing. Whatever has happened to me is my own fault, the fault of what is wrong with me.

  Mrs. Smeath knows what it is. She isn't telling.

  *

  One picture of Mrs. Smeath leads to another. She multiplies on the walls like bacteria, standing, sitting, flying, with clothes, without clothes, following me around with her many eyes like those 3-D postcards of Jesus you can get in the cheesier corner stores. Sometimes I turn her faces to the wall.

  61

  I wheel Sarah along the street in her stroller, avoiding the mounds of melting slush. Although she is over two, she still can't walk fast enough in her red rubber boots to keep up when we go shopping. Also this way I can hang the grocery bags from the stroller handle, or tuck them in around her. I know a great many such minor tricks now, involving objects and gadgets and the rearrangement of space, that I didn't need to know before.

  We're living in a larger place now, the three of us: the upper two stories of a red brick semidetached house with a sagging wooden square-pillared porch, on a side street west along Bloor. There are a lot of Italians around here. The older women, the married ones and the widows, wear black clothes and no makeup, as I used to do. When I was in the later months of pregnancy, they would smile at me, as if I was almost one of them. Now they smile at Sarah first.

  I myself wear miniskirts in primary colors, with tights underneath and boots, and an ankle-length coat over top. I am not entirely satisfied with this clothing. It's hard to sit down in. Also I've put on some weight, since having Sarah. These skimpy skirts and tiny bodices were designed for women a lot skinnier than I am, of which there now seem to be dozens, hundreds: weasel-faced girls with long hair hanging to the place where their bums ought to be, their chests flat as plywood, making me feel bulbous by comparison.

  A new vocabulary has come with them. Far out, they say. Cosmic. Blew my mind. Uptight. Let it all bang out. I consider myself too old for such words: they are for young people, and I am no longer young. I have found a gray hair behind my left ear. In a couple of years I will be thirty. Over the hill.

  I wheel Sarah up the walk, unbuckle her, set her at the foot of the porch steps, unhook and lift out the grocery bags, fold up the stroller. I walk Sarah up the steps to the front door: these steps can be slippery. I go back for the bags and the stroller, lug them up the steps, fumble in my purse for the key, open the door, lift Sarah inside, then the bags and stroller, close and lock the door. I walk Sarah up the inside stairs, open the inside door, put her inside, close the baby gate, go back down for the bags, carry them up, open the gate, go in, close the gate, go into the kitchen, set the bags on the table, and begin to unpack: eggs, toilet paper, cheese, apples, bananas, carrots, hot dogs, and buns. I worry about serving too many hot dogs: when I was young they were carnival food, and supposed to be bad for you. You might get polio from them.

  Sarah is hungry, so I stop unpacking the groceries to get her a glass of milk. I love her ferociously, and am frequently irritated by her.

  For the first year I was tired all the time, and fogged by hormones. But I'm coming out of it now. I'm looking around me.

  Jon comes in, scoops Sarah up, gives her a kiss, tickles her face with his beard, carries her squealing off into the living room. "Let's hide on Mummy," he says. He has a way of putting the two of them into the same camp, in pretended league against me, that annoys me more than it should. Also I don't like it when he calls me Mummy. I am not his mummy, but hers. But he too loves her. This was a surprise, and I'm not finished being grateful for it. I don't yet see Sarah as a gift I have given him, but one he has allowed me. It's because of her that we got married, at City Hall, for the oldest of reasons. One that was nearly obsolete. But we didn't know that.

  Jon, who is a lapsed Lutheran from Niagara Falls, thought we should go there for our honeymoon. He broke up over the word honeymoon. He thought it would be a sort of joke: self-conscious corniness, like a painting of a giant Coke bottle. "Amazing visuals," he said. He wanted to take me to the waxworks, the flower clock, the Maid of the Mist. He wanted us to get satin shirts with our names embroidered on the pockets and NIAGARA FALLS across the back. But I was silently offen
ded by this approach to our marriage. Whatever else we were getting into as the weeks passed one another and my body swelled like a slow flesh balloon, it was not a joke. So we ended by not going.

  Right after we were married, I lapsed into a voluptuous sloth. My body was like a feather bed, warm, boneless, deeply comforting, in which I lay cocooned. It may have been the pregnancy, sponging up my adrenaline. Or it may have been relief. Jon glowed for me then like a plum in sunlight, richly colored, perfect in form. I would lie in bed beside him or sit at the kitchen table, running my eyes over him like hands. My adoration was physical, and wordless. I would think Ah, nothing more. Like a breath breathed out. Or I would think, like a child, Mine. Knowing it wasn't true. Stay that way, I would think. But he could not.

  Jon and I have begun to have fights. Our fights are secret fights, conducted at night, when Sarah is asleep: a squabbling in undertones. We keep them from her, because if they are frightening to us--as they are--how much more frightening will they be to her?

  We thought we were running away from the grown-ups, and now we are the grown-ups: this is the crux of it. Neither of us wants to take it on, not the whole thing. We compete, for instance, over which of us is in worse shape. If I get a headache, he gets a migraine. If his back hurts, my neck is killing me. Neither one of us wants to be in charge of the Band-Aids. We fight over our right to remain children.

  At first I do not win these fights, because of love. Or so I say to myself. If I were to win them, the order of the world would be changed, and I am not ready for that. So instead I lose the fights, and master different arts. I shrug, tighten my mouth in silent rebuke, turn my back in bed, leave questions unanswered. I say, "Do it however you like," provoking sullen fury from Jon. He does not want just capitulation, but admiration, enthusiasm, for himself and his ideas, and when he doesn't get it he feels cheated.

  Jon has a job now, supervising part-time at a co-op graphics studio. I am part-time as well. Between the two of us, we can manage to cover the rent.

  Jon is no longer painting on canvas, or on anything flat. In fact he is no longer painting. Flat surfaces with paint on them he calls "art-on-the-wall." There is no reason for art to be on the wall, there's no reason for it to have a frame around it or paint on it. Instead he is making constructions, out of things he gathers from junk heaps or finds here and there. He makes wooden boxes with compartments, each containing a different item: three pairs of outsized ladies' panties in fluorescent colors, a plaster hand with long false nails glued onto it, an enema bag, a toupee. He makes a motorized furry bedroom slipper that runs around on the floor by itself, and a family of diaphragms fitted up with monster movie eyes and mouths and jumping legs underneath that hop around on the table like radiation-damaged oysters. He's decorated our bathroom in red and orange, with purple mermaids swimming on the walls, and hooked up the toilet seat so that it plays "Jingle Bells" when it's raised. This is for Sarah's benefit. He makes toys for her as well, and lets her play with ends of wood and leftover pieces of cloth and some of his less dangerous tools, while he's working.

  That's when he's here. Which is by no means most of the time.

  For the first year after Sarah was born I didn't paint at all. I was freelancing then, working at home, and just keeping up with the few book cover assignments I'd taken on was a major effort. I felt clogged, as if swimming with my clothes on. Now that I'm half a day at work, it's better.

  I've done some of what I call my own work as well, although hesitantly: my hands are out of practice, my eyes disused. Most of what I do is drawing, because the preparation of the surface, the laborious underpainting and detailed concentration of egg tempera are too much for me. I have lost confidence: perhaps all I will ever be is what I am now.

  I'm sitting on a wooden folding chair, on a stage. The curtains are open and I can see the auditorium, which is small, battered, and empty. Also on the stage is a stage set, not yet dismantled, for a play which has just closed. The set consists of the future, which will be sparsely furnished, but will contain a good many cylindrical black columns and several austere flights of stairs.

  Arranged around the columns on other wooden chairs, and sitting here and there on the stairs, are seventeen women. Every one of them is an artist, or something like it. There are several actresses, two dancers, three painters besides me. There's one magazine writer, and an editor from my own publishing company. One woman is a radio announcer (daytime classical music), one does puppet shows for children, one is a professional clown. One is a set designer, which is why we're here: she got us the space for this meeting. The reason I know all of this is that we had to say our names, going around the circle, and what we do. Not for a living: for a living is different, especially for the actresses. Also for me.

  This is a meeting. It's not the first such meeting I've been to, but I still find it startling. For one thing, it's all women. That in itself is unusual, and has an air of secrecy about it, and an unfocused, attractive dirtiness: the last all-women gathering I was at was Health Class in high school, where the girls were separated off from the boys so they could be told about the curse. Not that the word was used. "Those days" was the accepted, official phrase. It was explained that tampons, although not recommended for young girls, which we knew meant virgins, could not get lost inside you and end up in your lung. There was considerable giggling, and when the teacher spelled blood--"B-L-O-O-D"--one girl fainted.

  Today there is no giggling or fainting. This meeting is about anger.

  Things are being said that I have never consciously thought about before. Things are being overthrown. Why, for instance, do we shave our legs? Wear lipstick? Dress up in slinky clothing? Alter our shapes? What is wrong with us the way we are?

  It's Jody asking these questions, one of the other painters. She does not dress up or alter her shape. She wears workboots, and striped coveralls, one leg of which she hauls up to show us the real leg underneath, which is defiantly, resplendently hairy. I think of my own cowardly, naked legs, and feel brainwashed, because I know I cannot go all the way. I draw the line at armpits.

  What is wrong with us the way we are is men.

  Many things are said about men. Two of these women have been raped, for instance. One has been beaten up. Others have been discriminated against at work, passed over or ignored; or their art has been ridiculed, dismissed as too feminine. Others have begun to compare their salaries with those of men, and have found them to be less.

  I have no doubt that all of these things are true. Rapists exist, and those who molest children and strangle girls. They exist in the shadows, like the sinister men who lurk in ravines, not one of whom I have ever seen. They are violent, wage wars, commit murders. They do less work and make more money. They shove the housework off on women.

  They are insensitive and refuse to confront their own emotions. They are easily fooled, and wish to be: for instance, with a few gasps and wheezes they can be conned into thinking they are sexual supermen. There are giggles of recognition over this. I begin to wonder if I've been faking orgasm without knowing it.

  But I am on shaky ground, in this testifying against men, because I live with one. Women like me, with a husband, a child, have been referred to with some scorn as nukes, for nuclear family. Pronatalist is suddenly a bad word. There are some other nukes in this group, but they are not in the majority and say nothing in their own defence. It seems to be worthier to be a woman with a child but no man. That way you've paid your dues. If you stay with the man, whatever problems you are having are your own fault.

  None of this is actually said.

  These meetings are supposed to make me feel more powerful, and in some ways they do. Rage can move mountains. In addition, they amaze me: it's shocking, and exciting, to hear such things emerging from the mouths of women. I begin to think that women I have thought were stupid, or wimps, may simply have been hiding things, as I was.

  But these meetings also make me nervous, and I don't understand why. I don't say
much, I am awkward and uncertain, because whatever I do say might be the wrong thing. I have not suffered enough, I haven't paid my dues, I have no right to speak. I feel as if I'm standing outside a closed door while decisions are being made, disapproving judgments are being pronounced, inside, about me. At the same time I want to please.

  Sisterhood is a difficult concept for me, I tell myself, because I never had a sister. Brotherhood is not.

  I work at night, when Sarah is asleep, or in the early morning. Right now I am painting the Virgin Mary. I paint her in blue, with the usual white veil, but with the head of a lioness. Christ lies in her lap in the form of a cub. If Christ is a lion, as he is in traditional iconography, why wouldn't the Virgin Mary be a lioness? Anyway it seems to me more accurate about motherhood than the old bloodless milk-and-water Virgins of art history. My Virgin Mary is fierce, alert to danger, wild. She stares levelly out at the viewer with her yellow lion's eyes. A gnawed bone lies at her feet.

  I paint the Virgin Mary descending to the earth, which is covered with snow and slush. She is wearing a winter coat over her blue robe, and has a purse slung over her shoulder. She's carrying two brown paper bags full of groceries. Several things have fallen from the bags: an egg, an onion, an apple. She looks tired.

  Our Lady of Perpetual Help, I call her.

  Jon does not like me painting at night. "When else can I do it?" I say. "You tell me." There is only one answer, one that would not involve the loss of his own time: Don't do it at all. But he doesn't say this.

  He doesn't say what he thinks of my paintings, but I know anyway. He thinks they are irrelevant. In his mind, what I paint is lumped in with the women who paint flowers. Lumped is the word. The present tense is moving forward, discarding concept after concept, and I am off to the side somewhere, fiddling with egg tempera and flat surfaces, as if the twentieth century has never happened.