Cat's Eye

  I have long since dismissed the idea of bad men in the ravine. I've considered them a scarecrow story, put up by mothers. But it appears they exist, despite me.

  This murdered girl troubles me. After the first shock, nobody at school says much about her. Even Cordelia does not want to talk about her. It's as if this girl has done something shameful, herself, by being murdered. So she goes to that place where all things go that are not mentionable, taking her blond hair, her angora sweater, her ordinariness with her. She stirs up something, like dead leaves. I think of a doll I had once, with white fur on the border of her skirt. I remember being afraid of this doll. I haven't thought about that in years.

  Cordelia and I sit at the dining table doing our homework. I am helping Cordelia, I'm trying to explain the atom to her, but she's refusing to take it seriously. The diagram of the atom has a nucleus, with electrons circling it. The nucleus looks like a raspberry, the electrons and their rings look like the planet Saturn. Cordelia sticks her tongue in the side of her mouth and frowns at the nucleus. "This looks like a raspberry," she says.

  "Cordelia," I say. "The exam is tomorrow." Molecules do not interest her, she doesn't seem able to grasp the Periodic Table. She refuses to understand mass, she refuses to understand why atom bombs blow up. There's a picture of one blowing up in the Physics book, mushroom cloud and all. To her it's just another bomb. "Mass and energy are different aspects," I tell her. "That's why E=mc2."

  "It would be easier if Percy the Prude weren't such a creep," she says. Percy the Prude is the Physics teacher. He has red hair that stands up at the top like Woody Woodpecker's, and he lisps.

  Stephen walks through the room, looks over our shoulders. "So they're still teaching you kiddie Physics," he says indulgently. "They've still got the atom looking like a raspberry."

  "See?" says Cordelia.

  I feel subverted. "This is the atom that's going to be on the exam, so you'd better learn it," I say to Cordelia. To Stephen I say, "So what does it really look like?"

  "A lot of empty space," Stephen says. "It's hardly there at all. It's just a few specks held in place by forces. At the subatomic level, you can't even say that matter exists. You can only say that it has a tendency to exist."

  "You're confusing Cordelia," I say. Cordelia has lit a cigarette and is looking out the window, where several squirrels are chasing one another around the lawn. She is paying no attention to any of this.

  Stephen considers Cordelia. "Cordelia has a tendency to exist," is what he says.

  Cordelia doesn't go out with boys the way I do, although she does go out with them. Once in a while I arrange double dates, through whatever boy I'm going out with. Cordelia's date is always a boy of lesser value, and she knows this and refuses to approve of him.

  Cordelia can't seem to decide what kind of boy she really does approve of. The ones with haircuts like my brother's are drips and pills, but the ones with ducktails are sleazy greaseballs, although sexy. She thinks the boys I go out with, who go no further than crewcuts, are too juvenile for her. She's abandoned her ultrared lipstick and nail polish and her turned-up collars and has taken up moderate pinks and going on diets, and grooming. This is what magazines call it: Good Grooming, as in horses. Her hair is shorter, her wardrobe more subdued.

  But something about her makes boys uneasy. It's as if she's too attentive to them, too polite, studied and overdone. She laughs when she thinks they've made a joke and says, "That's very witty, Stan." She will say this even when they haven't intended to be funny, and then they aren't sure whether or not she's making fun of them. Sometimes she is, sometimes she isn't. Inappropriate words slip out of her. After we've finished our hamburgers and fries she turns to the boys and says brightly, "Are you sufficiently sophonsified?" and they gape at her. They are not the kind of boys who would have napkin rings.

  She asks them leading questions, tries to draw them into conversations, as a grown-up would do, not appearing to know that the best thing, with them, is to let them exist in their own silences, to look at them only out of the corners of the eyes. Cordelia tries to look at them sincerely, head-on; they are blinded by the glare, and freeze like rabbits in a headlight. When she's in the back seat with them I can tell, from the breathing and gasps, that she's going too far in that direction as well. "She's kind of strange, your friend," the boys say to me, but they can't say why. I decide it's because she has no brother, only sisters. She thinks that what matters with boys is what you say; she's never learned the intricacies, the nuances of male silence.

  But I know Cordelia isn't really interested in anything the boys themselves have to say, because she tells me so. Mostly she thinks they're dim. Her attempts at conversation with them are a performance, an imitation. Her laugh, when she's with them, is refined and low, like a woman's laugh on the radio, except when she forgets herself. Then it's too loud. She's mimicking something, something in her head, some role or image that only she can see.

  The Earle Grey Players come to our high school, as they do every year. They go from high school to high school; they are well known for this. Every year they do one play by Shakespeare; it's always the play that's on the provincewide Grade Thirteen Examinations, the ones you have to pass in order to get into university. There aren't many theaters in Toronto, in fact there are only two, so many people go to these plays. The kids go to them because it's on the exam and the parents go because they don't often get a chance to see plays.

  The Earle Grey Players are Mr. Earle Grey, who always plays the leads, Mrs. Earle Grey, who plays the lead woman, and two or three other actors who are thought to be Earle Grey cousins and who are likely to double up and do two or more parts. The rest of the parts are played by students in whatever high school they're performing at that week. Last year the play was Julius Caesar, and Cordelia got to be part of the crowd. She had to smear burnt cork on her face for dirt and wrap herself up in a bedsheet from home, and say rabble rabble during the crowd scene when Mark Antony was making his Ears speech.

  This year the play is Macbeth. Cordelia is a serving woman, and also a soldier in the final battle scene. This time she has to bring a plaid car rug from home. She's lucky because she also has a kilt, an old one of Perdie's from when she went to her girls' private school. In addition to her parts, Cordelia is the props assistant. She's in charge of tidying up the props after each performance, setting them in order, always the same order, so that the actors can grab them backstage and run on without a moment's thought.

  During the three days of rehearsal Cordelia is very excited. I can tell by the way she chain-smokes on the way home and acts bored and nonchalant, referring, every once in a while, to the real, professional actors by their first names. The younger ones make such an effort to be funny, she says. They call the Witches The Three Wired Sisters; they call Cordelia a cream-faced loon, and they threaten to put eye of newt and toe of frog into her coffee. They say that when Lady Macbeth says, "Out, damned spot," during the mad scene, she's referring to her dog Spot, who has poo'ed on the carpet. She says real actors will never say the name Macbeth out loud, because it's bad luck. They call it "The Tartans" instead.

  "You just said it," I say.

  "What?"

  "Macbeth," I say.

  Cordelia stops short in the middle of the sidewalk. "Oh God," she says. "I did, didn't I?" She pretends to laugh it off, but it bothers her.

  At the end of the play Macbeth's head gets cut off and Macduff has to bring it onto the stage. The head is a cabbage wrapped up in a white tea towel; Macduff throws it onto the stage, where it hits with an impressive, flesh-and-bone thud. Or this is what has happened in rehearsal. But the night before the first performance --there are to be three--Cordelia notices that the cabbage is going bad, it's getting soft and squooshy and smells like sauerkraut. She replaces it with a brand-new cabbage.

  The play is put on in the school auditorium, where the school assemblies are, and the choir practice. Opening night is packed. Things go without much mishap,
apart from the sniggers in the wrong places and the anonymous voice that says, "Go on, do it!" when Macbeth is hesitating outside Duncan's chamber, and the catcalls and whistles from the back of the auditorium when Lady Macbeth appears in her nightgown. I watch for Cordelia in the battle scene, and there she is, running across backstage in her kilt with a wooden sword, her car rug thrown over her shoulder. But when Macduff comes in at the end and tosses down the cabbage in the tea towel, it doesn't hit once and lie still. It bounces, bumpity-bump, right across the stage like a rubber ball, and falls off the edge. This dampens the tragic effect, and the curtain comes down on laughter.

  It's Cordelia's fault, for replacing the cabbage. She is mortified. "It was supposed to be rotten," she wails backstage, where I have gone to congratulate her. "So now they tell me!" The actors have made light of it; they tell her it's a novel effect. But although Cordelia laughs and blushes and tries to pass it off lightly, I can see she is almost in tears.

  I ought to feel pity, but I do not. Instead, on the way home from school the next day, I say "Bumpity-bumpity-bump, plop," and Cordelia says, "Oh, don't." Her voice is toneless, leaden. This is not a joke. I wonder, for an instant, how I can be so mean to my best friend. For this is what she is.

  Time passes and we are older, we are the oldest, we are in Grade Thirteen. We can look down on the incoming students, those who are still mere children as we were once. We can smile at them. We're old enough to take Biology, which is taught in the Chemistry lab. For this we leave our homeroom group and meet with students from other homerooms. This is why Cordelia is my Biology lab partner, at the Chemistry lab table, which is black and has a sink. Cordelia doesn't like Biology any more than she liked Physics, which she barely squeaked through, but she has to take something in the sciences and it's easier, to her mind, than a number of the things she might have to take otherwise.

  We are given dissecting kits with scalpel-like knives that could be sharper, and trays with a coating of wax at the bottom, and a package of pins, as in sewing classes. First we have to dissect a worm. Each of us is given one of these. We look at the diagram of the inside of the worm, in the Zoology textbook: this is what we're supposed to see once we get the worm open. The worms wriggle and twine in the wax-bottomed trays, and snout their way along the sides, trying to get out. They smell like holes in the ground.

  I pin my worm at either end and make a slick vertical cut; the worm twists as they do on fishhooks. I pin the worm's skin out to the sides. I can see its worm heart, which isn't the shape of a heart, its central artery pumping worm blood, its digestive system, which is full of mud. "Oh," says Cordelia. "How can you." Cordelia is becoming mushier and mushier, I think. She is becoming a drip. I do her worm for her, when the teacher isn't looking. Then I draw a diagram of the worm, cut open, beautifully labeled.

  After that comes the frog. The frog kicks and is more difficult than the worm, it looks a little too much like a person swimming. I conk the frog out with chloroform as directed and dissect it with flair, sticking in the pins. I make a drawing of the inside of the frog, with all its curlicues and bulbs, its tiny lungs, its cold-blooded amphibian heart.

  Cordelia can't do the frog either. She says she feels sick to her stomach just thinking about putting her dissecting knife through its skin. She looks at me, pale, her eyes big. The frog smell is getting to her. I do her frog for her. I'm good at this.

  I memorize the statocysts of the crayfish, its gills and mouth parts. I memorize the circulatory system of the cat. The teacher, who is usually the boys' football coach but who has recently taken a summer course in Zoology so he can teach us this, orders a dead cat for us, with its veins and arteries pumped full of blue and pink latex. He's disappointed when it arrives, because the cat is definitely rancid, you can smell it even through the formaldehyde. So we don't have to dissect it, we can just use the diagram in the book.

  But worms, frogs, and cats aren't enough for me. I want more. I go down to the Zoology Building on Saturday afternoons to use the microscopes in the empty labs. I look at slides, planaria worms in section with their triangular heads and cross-eyes, bacteria colored with vivid dyes, hot pinks, violent purples, radiant blues. These are lit up from beneath, they're breathtaking, like stained-glass windows. I draw them, delineating the structures with different colored pencils, though I can never get the same luminous brillance.

  Mr. Banerji, who is now Dr. Banerji, discovers what I'm doing. He brings me slides he thinks I would like to see and offers them to me shyly and eagerly, with a conspiratorial giggle, as if we are sharing a delicious, esoteric secret, or something religious. "Parasite of the tent caterpillar," he says, depositing the slide with reverence on a clean piece of paper at my table. "Egg of the budworm."

  "Thank you," I say, and he looks at my drawings, picking them up by the corners with his deft, bitten fingers. "Very good, very good, miss," he says. "Soon you will take over my job."

  He has a wife now, who has come from India, and a little boy. I see them sometimes, looking in through the doorway of the lab, the child gentle and dubious, the wife anxious. She wears gold earrings and a scarf with spangles on it. Her red sari shows beneath her brown Canadian winter coat, her overshoes poking out beneath it.

  Cordelia comes to my house and I help her with her Zoology homework, and she stays to dinner. My father, dishing out the beef stew, says that a species a day is becoming extinct. He says we are poisoning the rivers and ruining the gene pools of the planet. He says that when a species becomes extinct, some other species moves in to fill up the ecological niche, because Nature abhors a vacuum. He says that the things that move in are common weeds, and cockroaches and rats: soon all flowers will be dandelions. He says, waving his fork, that if we continue to overbreed as a species, a new epidemic will arise to redress the balance. All this will happen because people have neglected the basic lessons of Science, they have gone in for politics and religion and wars instead, and sought out passionate excuses for killing one another. Science on the other hand is dispassionate and without bias, it is the only universal language. The language is numbers. When at last we are up to our ears in death and garbage, we will look to Science to clean up our mess.

  Cordelia listens to all of this, smirking a little. She thinks my father is quaint. I hear him the way she must: this is not what people are supposed to talk about at the dinner table.

  I go to dinner at Cordelia's house. Dinners at Cordelia's house are of two kinds: those when her father is there and those when he isn't. When he isn't there, things are slapdash. Mummie comes to the table absentmindedly still in her painting smock, Perdie and Mirrie and also Cordelia appear in blue jeans with a man's shirt over top and their hair in pin curls. They jump up from the table, saunter into the kitchen for more butter, or the salt, which has been forgotten. They talk all at once, in a languid, amused way, and groan when it's their turn to clear the table, while Mummie says "Now girls," but without conviction. She is losing the energy for disappointment.

  But when Cordelia's father is there, everything is different. There are flowers on the table, and candles. Mummie has on her pearls, the napkins are neatly rolled in the napkin rings instead of crumpled in under edges of the plates. Nothing is forgotten. There are no pin curls, no elbows on the table, even the spines are straighter.

  Today is one of the candle days. Cordelia's father sits at the head of the table, with his craggy eyebrows, his wolfish look, and bends upon me the full force of his ponderous, ironic, terrifying charm. He can make you feel that what he thinks of you matters, because it will be accurate, but that what you think of him is of no importance.

  "I'm hag-ridden," he says, pretending to be mournful. "The only man in a houseful of women. They won't let me into the bathroom in the morning to shave." Mockingly, he invites my sympathy and collusion. But I can think of nothing to say.

  Perdie says, "He should consider himself lucky that we put up with him." She can get away with a little impertinence, with coltish liberties. Sh
e has the haircut for it. Mirrie, when hard-pressed, looks reproachful. Cordelia is not good at either of these things. But they all play up to him.

  "What are you studying these days?" he says to me. It's a usual question of his. Whatever I say amuses him.

  "The atom," I say.

  "Ah, the atom," he says. "I remember the atom. And what does the atom have to say for itself these days?"

  "Which one?" I say, and he laughs.

  "Which one, indeed," he says. "That's very good." This may be what he wants: a give and take, of sorts. But Cordelia can never come up with it, because she's too frightened of him. She's frightened of not pleasing him. And yet he is not pleased. I've seen it many times, her dithering, fumble-footed efforts to appease him. But nothing she can do or say will ever be enough, because she is somehow the wrong person.

  I watch this, and it makes me angry. It makes me want to kick her. How can she be so abject? When will she learn?

  Cordelia fails the mid-year Zoology test. She doesn't seem to care. She has spent half the exam time drawing surreptitious cartoons of various teachers in the school, which she shows to me on the way home, laughing her exaggerated laugh.

  Sometimes I dream about boys. These are wordless dreams, dreams of the body. They stay with me for minutes after I wake up and I luxuriate in them, but I forget them soon.