Cat's eye (19 page)

I sit at the espresso counter and have a cappuccino, to deal with the inertia that’s come over me at the sight of so much sugar-coated self-indulgence. The espresso counter is either fake or real dark-green marble; it has a cute canopy over it, someone’s idea of Italy, and little swivel stools. The view from here is the shoe repair counter, which is not very world-class but is reassuring to me. People still get their shoes repaired, despite all this chocolate, they don’t just toss them out at the first hint of wear. I think about the shoes of my childhood, the brown Oxfords scuffed at the toes, half-soled, new-heeled, the falling-apart grubby white running shoes, the brown sandals with two buckles that you wore with socks. Most shoes were brown. They went with the pot roast done in the pressure cooker along with the limp carrots and the flaccid potatoes and the onions with their slippery layers. The pressure cooker had a whistle-shaped thing on the top. If you forgot to pay attention to it the lid would blow off like a bomb, and the carrots and potatoes would be hurled to the ceiling, where they’d stick like mush. This happened to my mother once. Luckily she was not in the kitchen at the time and was not scalded. When she saw what had happened she did not swear. She laughed, and said, “Wouldn’t that take the gold-plated gingerbread.”

My mother did most of the cooking but it was not her favorite thing. She was not fond of housework generally. In the steamer trunk in the cellar, along with a cut-velvet evening gown from the twenties and a pair of riding jodhpurs, there were several things made of real silver, ornate salt and pepper shakers, sugar tongs in the shape of chickens’ feet, rose bowls lavish with silver flowers. They were down there, wrapped in tissue paper and turning black, because otherwise they would have to be polished. Our knives and forks and spoons had to be polished, with an old toothbrush for the decorations. The scrolled legs under the dining table were dust catchers, and so were the kinds of objects—doodads, my mother called them—other people kept on their mantelpieces. But she liked making cakes, though this may only be something I prefer to think.

What would I have done if I had been my mother? She must have realized what was happening to me, or that something was. Even toward the beginning she must have noted my silences, my bitten fingers, the dark scabs on my lips where I’d pulled off patches of the skin. If it were happening now, to a child of my own, I would know what to do. But then? There were fewer choices, and a great deal less was said. I once did a series about my mother. It was six images, six panels, like a double triptych or a comic book, arranged in two groups, three on top, three underneath. The first was my mother in colored pencil, in her city house kitchen and her late-forties dress. Even she had a bib apron, blue flowers with navy piping, even she wore it, from time to time. The second image was the same figure in collage, made from the illustrations from old
Ladies’ Home Journals
and
Chatelaines,
not the photos but the artwork, with those rancid greens and faded blues and dirty-looking pinks. The third was the same figure, white on white, the raised parts pipe cleaners contoured side by side and glued onto a white cloth-covered backing. Reading across from left to right it looked as if my mother was slowly dissolving, from real life into a Babylonian bas-relief shadow.

The bottom set of images went the other way: first the pipe-cleaners, then the same image in collage, then the final one in full-colored realistic detail But this time my mother was in her slacks and boots and her man’s jacket, making chokecherry jam over the outdoor fire. You could read it as a materialization, out of the white pipe cleaner mist into the solid light of day.

I called the whole series
Pressure Cooker.
Because of when it was done and what was going on in those years, some people thought it was about the Earth Goddess, which I found hilarious in view of my mother’s dislike of housework. Other people thought it was about female slavery, others that it was a stereotyping of women in negative and trivial domestic roles. But it was only my mother cooking, in the ways and places she used to cook, in the late forties.

I made this right after she died. I suppose I wanted to bring her back to life. I suppose I wanted her timeless, though there is no such thing on earth. These pictures of her, like everything else, are drenched in time.

I finish my cappuccino, pay for it, leave a tip for the imitation Italian waiter who served it to me. I know I won’t buy any food in the food hall, I’m too intimidated by it. Ordinarily, or in some other city, I would not be: I am a grown-up and used to shopping. But how could I find, down here, anything I want right now? I’ll stop in at some corner store on the way back, some place where they sell milk till midnight and slightly stale sliced white bread. Such stores are run, now, by people the color of Mr. Banerji, or by Chinese people. They aren’t necessarily any friendlier than the pasty-white people who used to run such stores, but the general content of their disapproval is more easily guessed; though not the details. I head back up the escalator, into the perfumed fug of the ground floor. The air is bad here, there’s too much musk, the overpowering scent of money. I make it into the open air and walk west, past the murderous mannequins in the windows, past the bivalvular City Hall.

Ahead of me there’s a body lying on the sidewalk. People walk around it, look down, look away, keep going. I see their faces coming toward me bearing that careful rearrangement of the features that’s meant to say,
This is none of my business.

When I get up even, I see that this person is a woman. She’s lying on her back, staring straight at me.

“Lady,” she says. “Lady. Lady.”

That word has been through a lot. Noble lady, Dark Lady, she’s a real lady, old-lady lace, Listen lady, Hey lady watch where you’re going, Ladies’ Room, run through with lipstick and replaced with Women. But still the final word of appeal. If you want something very badly you do not say
Woman, Woman,
you say
Lady, Lady.
As she is saying now.

I think,
What if she’s bad a heart attack?
I look: there’s blood on her forehead, not much, but a cut. She must have hit her head falling. And no one’s stopping, and she’s lying there on her back, a bulky fifty-odd woman in a poor-person green coat, gabardine, and lamentable shoes all cracked, her arms outflung. The tanned-looking skin around her brown eyes is red and puffy, her long black and gray hair is splayed across the sidewalk.

“Lady,” she says, or something, it’s a mumble, but she’s got me now.

I look over my shoulder to see if anyone else will do this, but there are no takers. I kneel, say to her,

“Are you all right?” What a stupid question, she so obviously isn’t. Vomit and alcohol are around here somewhere. I have visions of myself taking her for coffee, and then where? I won’t be able to get rid of her, she’ll follow me back to the studio, throw up in the bathtub, sleep on the futon. They get me every time, they can spot me coming, pick me out of the crowd no matter how hard I frown. Sidewalk rap artists, Moonies, guitar-playing young men who ask me for subway tokens. In the clutch of the helpless I am helpless.

“She’s only drunk,” a man says in passing. What does he mean,
only?
It’s hell enough.

“Here,” I say, “I’ll help you up.” Wimp, I tell myself. She’ll ask you for money and you’ll give it to her, and she’ll spend it on cheap sweet wine. But I have her on her feet now, she’s slumped against me. If I can lug her over to the nearest wall I can prop her up, dust her off a little, think how to get away.

“There,” I say. But she won’t lean against the wall, she’s leaning against me instead. Her breath smells like a bad accident. She’s crying now, the shameless abandoned weeping of a child; her fingers clutch my sleeve.

“Don’t leave me,” she says. “Oh God. Don’t leave me all alone.” Her eyes are closed, her voice is pure neediness, pure woe. It hits the weakest, most sorrowing part of me; but I am only a surrogate, for who knows what lack, what loss. There’s nothing I can do.

“Here,” I say. I fumble in my purse, find a ten, crumple it into her hand, paying her off. I’m a sucker, I’m a bleeding heart. There’s a cut in my heart, it bleeds money.

“Bless you,” she says. Her head rolls from side to side, back against the wall. “God bless you lady, Our Lady bless you.” It’s a slurred blessing, but who’s to say I don’t need it? She must be a Catholic. I could find a church, slide her in through the door like a packet. She’s theirs, let them deal with her.

“I have to go now,” I say. “You’ll be all right.” Lying through my teeth. She opens her eyes wide, trying to focus. Her face goes quiet.

“I know about you,” she says. “You’re Our Lady and you don’t love me.”

Full-blown booze madness, and absolutely the wrong person. I draw my hand back from her as if she’s a live socket. “No,” I say. She’s right, I don’t love her. Her eyes are not brown but green. Cordelia’s. I walk away from her, guilt on my hands, absolving myself: I’m a good person. She could have been dying. Nobody else stopped.

I’m a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good.

I know too much to be good. I know myself.

I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly.

W
e come back in September. In the north the nights are cold and the leaves are beginning to turn, but the city is still hot, still damp. It’s astonishingly noisy and stinks of gasoline and the tar of melting roads. The air inside our house is stale and flat, air that’s been locked up in the heat all summer. The water’s rusty at first, coming out of the taps. I take a bath in the reddish lukewarm water. Already my body is stiffening, emptying itself of feeling. The future is closing on me like a door.

Cordelia has been waiting for me. I know this as soon as I see her standing at the school bus stop. Before the summer she would alternate between kindness and malice, with periods of indifference; but now she’s harsher, more relentless. It’s as if she’s driven by the urge to see how far she can go. She’s backing me toward an edge, like the edge of a cliff: one step back, another step, and I’ll be over and falling.

Carol and I are in Grade Five now. We have a new teacher, Miss Stuart. She’s Scottish and has an accent. “Now gerruls,” she says. She has a little bunch of dried heather stuck into a jelly jar on her desk, and a miniature of Bonnie Prince Charlie who was ruined by the English and whose last name is the same as her own, and a bottle of hand lotion in her desk drawer. She cooks this hand lotion herself. In the afternoons she makes herself a cup of tea, which does not smell entirely like tea but of something else she puts into it, out of a small silver bottle. She has bluish-white hair, beautifully waved, and wears rustling, silky mauve dresses with a lace-edged handkerchief tucked into the sleeve. She often has a nurse’s white gauze mask over her nose and mouth because she’s allergic to chalk dust. This doesn’t stop her from throwing the blackboard brushes at boys who aren’t paying attention. Although she throws underhand and not hard, she never misses. After she hits the boy he has to bring the blackboard brush back to her. The boys don’t seem to resent this habit of hers; they take it as a mark of distinction to get hit.

Everyone loves Miss Stuart. Carol says we are lucky to be in her class. I would love her too, if I had the energy. But I am too numb, too enthralled.

I keep my cat’s eye in my pocket, where I can hold on to it. It rests in my hand, valuable as a jewel, looking out through bone and cloth with its impartial gaze. With the help of its power I retreat back into my eyes. Up ahead of me are Cordelia, Grace, and Carol. I look at their shapes as they walk, the way shadow moves from one leg to another, the blocks of color, a red square of cardigan, a blue triangle of skirt. They’re like puppets up ahead, small and clear. I could see them or not, at will. I reach the path to the bridge, start down, past the nightshade vines with their red berries, past the undulating leaves, the lurking cats. The three of them are already on the bridge but they’ve stopped, they’re waiting for me. I look at the ovals of their faces, the outline of hair around each one. Their faces are like moldy eggs. My feet move down the hill.

I think about becoming invisible. I think about eating the deadly nightshade berries from the bushes beside the path. I think about drinking the Javex out of the skull and crossbones bottle in the laundry room, about jumping off the bridge, smashing down there like a pumpkin, half of an eye, half of a grin. I would come apart like that, I would be dead, like the dead people.

I don’t want to do these things, I’m afraid of them. But I think about Cordelia telling me to do them, not in her scornful voice, in her kind one. I hear her kind voice inside my head.
Do it. Come on.
I would be doing these things to please her.

I consider telling my brother, asking him for help. But tell him what exactly? I have no black eyes, no bloody noses to report: Cordelia does nothing physical. If it was boys, chasing or teasing, he would know what to do, but I don’t suffer from boys in this way. Against girls and their indirectness, their whisperings, he would be helpless.

Also I’m ashamed. I’m afraid he’ll laugh at me, he’ll despise me for being, a sissy about a bunch of girls, for making a fuss about nothing.

I’m in the kitchen, greasing muffin tins for my mother. I see the patterns the grease leaves on the metal, I see the moons of my nails, the raggedy flesh. My fingers go around and around. My mother makes the batter for the muffins, measuring the salt, sifting the flour. The sifter sounds dry, like sandpaper. “You don’t have to play with them,” my mother says. “There must be other little girls you can play with instead.”

I look at her. Misery washes over me like a slow wind. What has she noticed, what has she guessed, what is she about to do? She might tell their mothers. This would be the worst thing she could do. Also I can’t imagine it. My mother is not like the other mothers, she doesn’t fit in with the idea of them. She does not inhabit the house, the way the other mothers do; she’s airy and hard to pin down. The others don’t go skating on the neighborhood rink, or walk in the ravine by themselves. They seem to me grown-up in a way that my own mother is not. I think of Carol’s mother in her twin set, her skeptical smile, Cordelia’s with her glasses on a chain and her vagueness, Grace’s and her hairpins and drooping apron. My mother will turn up on their doorsteps, wearing slacks, carrying a bouquet of weeds, incongruous. They won’t believe her.