Cat's eye полностью

The Queen has had grandchildren since, discarded thousands of hats, grown a bosom and (heresy to think it) the beginning of a double chin. None of this fools me. She’s in there somewhere, that other one. I walk the next blocks, turn the corner, expecting to see the familiar dingy oblong of the school, in weathered red brick the color of dried liver. The cindered schoolyard, the tall thin windows with orange paper pumpkins and black cats stuck onto them for Hallowe’en, the graven lettering over the doors, BOYS and GIRLS, like the inscriptions on mausoleums of the late nineteenth century. But the school has disappeared. In its place a new school has risen instantly, like a mirage: light-colored, block-shaped, glossy and modern.

I feel hit, in the pit of the stomach. The old school has been erased, wiped from space. It’s as if it was never there at all. I lean against a telephone pole, bewildered, as if something has been cut out of my brain. Suddenly I’m bone tired. I would like to go to sleep.

After a while I approach the new school, go toward it through the gate, walk slowly around it. BOYS

and GIRLS have been abolished, that much is clear; though there’s still a chain-link fence. The schoolyard is dotted with swings, with climbing bars and slides, in bright primary colors; a few children have come back early from lunch and are clambering about.

It’s all so clean-cut, so open. Surely behind those glassy, candid doors there are no more long wooden pointers, no black rubber strap, no hard wooden desks in rows; no King and Queen in their stiff regalia, no inkwells; no sniggering about underpants; no bitter, whiskery old women. No cruel secrets. Everything like that is gone.

I come around the back corner, and there is the eroded hill, with its few sparse trees. That much is still the same, then.

No one’s up there.

I climb up the wooden steps, stand where I used to stand. Where I am still standing, never having been away. The voices of the children from the playground below could be any children’s voices, from any time, the light under the trees thickens, turns malevolent. Ill will surrounds me. It’s hard to breathe. I feel as if I’m pushing against something, a pressure on me, like opening the door against a snowstorm. Get me out of this, Cordelia. I’m locked in.

I don’t want to be nine years old forever.

The air is soft, autumnal, the sun shines. I am standing still. And yet I walk head down, into the unmoving wind.

Fourteen – Unified Field Theory

Chapter 71

I put on my new dress, cutting off the price tag with Jon’s wire cutters. I ended up with black, after all. Then I go into the bathroom to squint at myself in the inadequate, greasy mirror: now that I’ve got the thing on, it looks much the same as all the other black dresses I’ve ever owned. I check it for lint, apply my pink lipstick, and end up looking nice, as far as I can tell. Nice, and negligible. I could jazz myself up somehow. I ought to have some dangly earrings, some bangles, a silver bow tie on a little chain, an outsize Isadora Duncan strangle-yourself-by-mistake scarf, a rhinestone brooch of the thirties, in sly bad taste. But I don’t have any of these things, and it’s too late to go out and buy any. I will have to do. Come-as-you-are parties, they used to have. I will come as I am. I’m at the gallery an hour early. Charna is not here, or the others; they may have gone out to eat, or more likely to change. Everything is set up though, the rented thick-stemmed wineglasses, the bottles of mediocre hooch, the mineral water for teetotalers, because who would serve unadulterated chlorine from the tap? The cheeses hardening at the edges, the sulfur-drenched grapes, luscious and shiny as wax, plumped with blood from the dying field workers of California. It doesn’t pay to know too many of these things; eventually there’s nothing you can put into your mouth without tasting the death in it. The bartender, a severe-eyed young woman in gelled hair and unstructured black, is polishing glasses behind the long table that serves as the bar. I extract a glass of wine from her. She’s doing the bartending for money, her nonchalance implies: her true ambitions lie elsewhere. She tightens her lips while doling out my drink: she doesn’t approve of me. Possibly she wants to be a painter, and thinks I have compromised my principles, knuckled under to success. How I used to revel in such bitter little snobberies myself; how easy they were, once.