Cat's eye (20 page)

“When I was little and the kids called names, we used to say, ”Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me,“” she says. Her arm goes vigorously around, mixing, efficient and strong.

“They don’t call me names,” I say. “They’re my friends.” I believe this.

“You have to learn to stand up for yourself,” says my mother. “Don’t let them push you around. Don’t be spineless. You have to have more backbone.” She dollops the batter into the tins. I think of sardines and their backbones. You can eat their backbones. The bones crumble between your teeth; one touch and they fall apart. This must be what my own backbone is like: hardly there at all. What is happening to me is my own fault, for not having more backbone.

My mother sets down the bowl and puts her arms around me. “I wish I knew what to do,” she says. This is a confession. Now I know what I’ve been suspecting: as far as this thing is concerned, she is powerless.

I know that muffins have to be baked right away, right after they’ve been ladled out, or they’ll be flat and ruined. I can’t afford the distraction of comfort. If I give in to it, what little backbone I have left will crumble away to nothing.

I pull away from her. “They need to go into the oven,” I say.

C
ordelia brings a mirror to school. It’s a pocket mirror, the small plain oblong kind without any rim. She takes it out of her pocket and holds the mirror up in front of me and says, “Look at yourself! Just look!”

Her voice is disgusted, fed up, as if my face, all by itself, has been up to something, has gone too far. I look into the mirror but I don’t see anything out of the ordinary. It’s just my face, with the dark blotches on the lips where I’ve bitten off the skin.

My parents have bridge parties. They push the furniture in the living room to the walls and unfold two metal bridge tables and eight bridge chairs. In the middle of each table there are two china dishes, one with salted nuts, the other with mixed candies. These candies are called “bridge mixture.” There are also two ashtrays on each table.

Then the doorbell begins to ring and the people come in. The house fills with the alien scent of cigarettes, which will still be there in the morning along with a few uneaten candies and salted nuts, and with bursts of laughter that get louder as time passes. I lie in my bed listening to the bursts of laughter. I feel isolated, left out. Also I don’t understand why this activity, these noises and smells, is called “bridge.” It is not like a bridge.

Sometimes Mr. Banerji comes to these bridge parties. I lurk in the corner of the hallway in my flannelette pajamas, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. I don’t have a crush on him or anything like that. My wish to see him is anxiety, and fellow feeling. I want to see how he is managing, how he is coping with his life, with having to eat turkeys, and with other things. Not very well, judging from his dark, haunted-looking eyes and slightly hysterical laughter. But if he can deal with whatever it is that’s after him, and something is, then so can I. Or this is what I think.

Princess Elizabeth is coming to Toronto. She’s visiting Canada with her husband, who is a Duke. It’s a Royal Visit. On the radio there are cheering crowds, and solemn voices describing what color she’s wearing, a different color every day. I crouch on the living room floor with the Maritimes fiddle music going on in the background, the
Toronto Star
spread out underneath my elbows, studying the picture of her on the front page. She’s older than she should be and more ordinary: no longer in a Girl Guide uniform as in the days of the Blitz, but not in an evening gown and a tiara either, like the Queen at the back of the classroom. She’s wearing a plain suit and gloves and carrying a handbag, like anyone, and she has on a ladies’ hat. But still she’s a Princess. On the inside of the paper there’s a full page of her, with women curtsying to her, little girls presenting bouquets of flowers. She smiles down upon them, always the same benevolent smile, and is described as radiant.

Day after day, crouching on the floor, turning the pages of the newspapers, I watch her make her way across the map, by plane, by train, by car, from city to city. I memorize the diagrams of her proposed route through Toronto. I’ll get a good chance to see her, because she’s supposed to drive right by our house, along the raw, potholed road that runs between the cemetery, with its spindly new trees and heaps of bulldozed earth, and the line of five new mud mountains.

The mud mountains are on our side of the road. They have recently appeared, replacing the strip of weedy field that used to be there before. Each mountain stands beside its own hole, roughly cellar-shaped, with a slop of muddy water at the bottom. My brother has claimed one of them for his own; he plans to excavate it, tunneling down from the top, then in from the side to make a side entrance. What he wishes to do in there is unknown.

I don’t know why the Princess is going to be driven past these mud mountains. I don’t think of them as anything she would necessarily want to see, but I’m not sure, because she’s seeing a lot of other things that don’t seem to be of more interest. There’s a picture of her outside a city hall, another beside a fish-canning factory. But whether she wants to see them or not, the mud mountains will be a good place to stand.

I am looking forward to this visit. I expect something from it, although I’m not sure what. This is the same Princess that defied the bombs in London, the one that is brave and heroic. I think something will happen for me on that day. Something will change.

The Royal Visit finally reaches Toronto. The day is overcast, with pinpoints of rain; spitting, they call it. I go out early and stand on the top of the middle mud mountain. There’s a straggly line of people, adults and children, along the roadside among the draggled weeds. Some of the children have small Union Jacks. I have one as well: they were handed out at school. There’s not much of a crowd, because not that many people live around here and some of them have probably gone farther downtown, to where there are sidewalks. I can see Grace and Carol and Cordelia, along the road towards Grace’s house. I hope they will not see me.

I stand on the mud mountain with my Union Jack hanging slack from its stick. It gets later and nothing happens. I think maybe I should go back to our house and listen to the radio, to see how far away the Princess is, but suddenly there’s a police car, to the left, coming along by the cemetery. It begins to drizzle. In the distance there’s cheering.

There are some motorcycles, then some cars. I can see the arms of the people along the road going up into the air, hear scattered hoorays. The cars are going too fast, despite the potholes. I can’t see which car is the right one.

Then I do see. It’s the car with the pale glove coming out the window, waving back and forth. Already it’s opposite me, already it’s passing. I don’t wave my Union Jack or cheer, because I see that it’s too late, I won’t have time for what I’ve been waiting for, which has only now become clear to me. What I must do is run down the mountain with my arms stretched out to either side, for balance, and throw myself in front of the Princess’s car. In front of it, or onto it, or into it. Then the Princess will tell them to stop the car. She’ll have to, in order to avoid running over me. I don’t picture myself being driven away in the royal car, I’m more realistic than that. Anyway I don’t want to leave my parents. But things will change, they will be different, something will be done.

The car with the glove is moving away, it’s turned the corner, it’s gone, and I haven’t moved.

Mi
ss Stuart likes art. She has us bring old shirts of our fathers from home so we can do messier art without getting our clothes dirty. While we scissor and paint and paste she walks the aisles in her nurse’s mask, looking over our shoulders. But if anyone, a boy, draws a silly picture on purpose, she holds the page up in mocking outrage. “This lad here thinks he’s being smarrut. You’ve got more between the ears than that!” And she flicks him on the ear with her thumb and fingernail. For her we make the familiar paper objects, the pumpkins, the Christmas bells, but she has us do other things too. We make complicated floral patterns with a compass, we glue odd substances to cardboard backings: feathers, sequins, pieces of macaroni garishly dyed, lengths of drinking straw. We do group murals on the blackboards or on large rolls of brown paper. We draw pictures about foreign countries: Mexico with cactuses and men in enormous hats, China with cones on the heads and seeing-eye boats, India with what we intend to be graceful, silk-draped women balancing copper urns, and jewels on their foreheads.

I like these foreign pictures because I can believe in them. I desperately need to believe that somewhere else these other, foreign people exist. No matter that at Sunday school I’ve been told such people are either starving or heathens or both. No matter that my weekly collection goes to convert them, feed them, smarten them up. Miss Lumley saw them as crafty, given to the eating of outlandish or disgusting foods and to acts of treachery against the British, but I prefer Miss Stuart’s versions, in which the sun above their heads is a cheerful yellow, the palm trees a clearg reen, the clothing they wear is floral, their folksongs gay. The women chatter together in quick incomprehensible languages, they laugh, showing perfect, pure-white teeth. If these people exist I can go there sometime. I don’t have to stay here. Today, says Miss Stuart, we are going to draw what we do after school. The others hunch over their desks. I know what they will draw: skipping ropes, jolly snowmen, listening to the radio, playing with a dog. I stare at my own paper, which remains blank. Finally I draw my bed, with myself in it. My bed has a dark wooden headboard with curlicues on it. I draw the window, the chest of drawers. I color in the night. My hand holding the black crayon presses down, harder and harder, until the picture is almost entirely black, until only a faint shadow of my bed and my head on the pillow remains to be seen.

I look at this picture with dismay. It isn’t what I meant to draw. It’s unlike everyone else’s picture, it’s the wrong thing. Miss Stuart will be disappointed in me, she’ll tell me I have more between the ears than that. I can feel her standing behind me now, looking over my shoulder; I can smell her smell of hand lotion, and the other smell that is not tea. She moves around so I can see her, her bright blue wrinkly eyes looking at me over the top of her nurse’s mask.

For a moment she says nothing. Then she says, not harshly, “Why is your picture so darruk, my dear?”

“Because it’s night,” I say. This is an idiotic answer, I know that as soon as it’s out of my mouth. My voice is almost inaudible, even to me.

“I see,” she says. She doesn’t say I’ve drawn the wrong thing, or that surely there’s something else I do after school besides going to bed. She touches me on the shoulder, briefly, before continuing down the aisle. Her touch glows briefly, like a blown-out match.

In the schoolroom windows the paper hearts are blossoming. We make a huge Valentine’s Day postbox out of a cardboard box covered with pink crepe paper and red hearts with paper doily edging. Into the slot at the top we slip our valentines, cut from books of them you can buy at Woolworth’s, with special, single ones for the people we especially like.

On the day itself the whole afternoon is a party. Miss Stuart loves parties: She’s brought dozens of heart-shaped shortbread cookies she’s made herself, with pink icing and silver balls on them, and there are tiny cinnamon hearts and pastel hearts with messages on them, messages from some earlier era which is not ours. “Hubba Hubba,” they say. “She’s My Baby.” “Oh You Kid!”

Miss Stuart sits at her desk, supervising, while several girls open the box and deliver the valentines. On my desk the cards pile up. Most of them are from boys. I can tell this because of the sloppy writing, and because a lot of them aren’t signed. Others have only initials or
Guess Who?
Some have x’s and o’s. The cards from girls are all neatly signed, with their full names, so there will be no mistake about who gave what.

On the way home from school Carol giggles and shows off her cards from boys. I have more cards from boys than Carol has, more than Cordelia and Grace have collected in their Grade Six classroom. Only I know this. I’ve hidden the cards in my desk so they won’t be seen on the way home. When questioned I say I didn’t get many. I hug my knowledge, which is new but doesn’t surprise me: boys are my secret allies.

Carol is only ten and three quarters but she’s growing breasts. They aren’t very big, but the nipples are no longer flat, they’re pointed, and there’s a swelling behind them. It’s easy to see this because she sticks out her chest, she wears sweaters, pulling them down tightly so the breasts poke out. She complains about these breasts at recess: they hurt, she says. She says she will have to get a bra. Cordelia says, “Oh shut up about your stupid tits.” She’s older, but she doesn’t have any yet. Carol pinches her lips and cheeks to make them red. She finds a worn-down tube of lipstick in her mother’s wastepaper basket and hides it away, and takes it to school in her pocket. Using the tip of her little finger, she rubs some of it on her lips after school. She wipes it off with a Kleenex before we get to her house but she doesn’t do a good enough job.

We play upstairs in her room. When we go down to the kitchen for a glass of milk, her mother says,

“What’s that on your face, young lady?” Right in front of us she scrubs Carol’s face with the dirty dishcloth. “Don’t let me catch you doing such a cheap thing again! At your age, the idea!” Carol wriggles, cries and screams, abandoning herself. We watch, horrified and thrilled. “Just wait till your father gets home!” her mother says in a cold, furious voice. “Making a spectacle of yourself,” as if there’s something wrong in the mere act of being looked at. Then she remembers we’re still here. “Off you go!”

Two days later Carol says her father has given it to her good, with his belt, buckle end, right across the bare bum. She says she can hardly sit down. She sounds proud of this. She shows us, after school, up in her room: she pulls up her skirt, pulls down her underpants, and sure enough there are the marks, almost like scratch marks, not very red but there.