Cat's eye полностью

“School!” says Cordelia. “Was I glad to see the end of school. God, what boredom.” Stratford is only on in the summers, though. She will have to think of something else for the winter. Maybe the Earle Grey Players, going around to high schools. Maybe she will be ready for that. She got the job at Stratford with the help of one of the Earle Grey cousins, who remembered her from her bedsheet days at Burnham. “People who know people,” she says. She is one of Prospero’s attendant spirits in The Tempest, and has to wear a body stocking, with a gauzy costume over top, sprinkled with dried leaves and spangles. “Obscene,” she says. She’s also a mariner in the first scene; she can get away with this because of her height. She’s a court lady in Richard III, and she’s the chief nun in Measure for Measure. In this one she actually speaks some lines. She recites for me, in a honey-colored Englishy voice:

Then, if you speak, you must not show your face,

Or, if you show your face, you must not speak.

“At rehearsal I kept getting mixed up,” she says. She counts on her fingers. “Speak, hide face, show face, shut up.” She puts her hands together in an attitude of prayer, bows forward, lowering her head. Then she gets up and does a full court curtsy out of Richard III, with the women shoppers having tea in Murray‘s gawking at her. “What I’d like to do next year is the First Witch in ”The Tartans.“ ”When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?“ The Old Man says I might be ready for it. He thinks it would be brilliant to have a young First Witch.”

The Old Man, it turns out, is Tyrone Guthrie the director, from England and so famous I can’t pretend not to have heard of him. “That’s great,” I say.

“Remember ”The Tartans’ at Burnham? Remember that cabbage?“ she says. ”I was so humiliated.“

I don’t want to remember. The past has become discontinuous, like stones skipped across water, like postcards: I catch an image of myself, a dark blank, an image, a blank. Did I ever wear bat-wing sleeves and velveteen slippers, did I wear dresses like tinted marshmallows to formal dances, shuffle around the floor with some stranger’s groin digging into mine? The dried corsages were thrown out long ago, the diplomas and class pins and photos must be down in my mother’s cellar, in the steamer trunk along with the tarnishing silver. I glimpse those photos, rows and rows of lipsticked, spit-curled children. I would never smile, for those pictures. I would gaze stony-faced into the distance, beyond such adolescent diversions.

I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise.

“Remember how we used to pinch things?” says Cordelia. “That was the only thing I really liked about that whole time.”

“Why?” I say. I had not liked it much. I was always afraid of getting caught.

“It was something I could have,” she says, and I’m not sure what she means. Cordelia takes her sunglasses out of her shoulder bag and puts them on. There I am in her mirror eyes, in duplicate and monochrome, and a great deal smaller than life-size.

Cordelia gets me a free ticket to Stratford, so I can see her in action. I go on the bus. It’s a matinee: I can get there, see the show, then take the bus back in time for my evening shift at the Swiss Chalet. The play is The Tempest. I watch for Cordelia, and when Prospero’s attendants come on, with music and jittery lighting effects, I peer hard, trying to see which one she is, behind the disguise of costume. But I can’t tell.

Chapter 55

J osef is rearranging me. “You should wear your hair loose,” he says, unpinning it from its ramshackle bun, running his hands through it to make it fluff out. “You look like a marvelous gypsy.” He presses his mouth to my collarbone, untucks the bedsheet he’s draped me in.

I stand still and let him do this. I let him do what he likes. It’s August and too hot to move. Haze hangs over the city like wet smoke; it covers my skin with an oily film, seeps into my flesh. I move through the days like a zombie, going from one hour to the next without direction. I’ve stopped drawing the furniture at the apartment; I fill the bathtub with cool water and get into it, but I no longer read in there. Soon it will be time to go back to school. I can hardly think about it.