Cat's eye полностью

I find my photo album with the black pages. I haven’t taken any pictures with my Brownie camera for a long time, so this album has slipped from view. Stuck into it with the black triangles there are pictures I can’t recall taking. For instance, there are several pictures of what look like large boulders, beside a lake. Underneath is printed, in white pencil: Daisy. Elsie. It’s my writing, but I don’t remember printing this. I take these things down to the cellar and put them into the trunk, where old things go that are not thrown out. My mother’s wedding dress is in there, several pieces of ornate silver, some sepia-toned portraits of people I don’t know, a packet of bridge tallies with silk tassels on them, left over from before the war. Some of our old drawings are in there, my brother’s spaceships and red and gold explosions, my delicate, old-fashioned little girls. I look at their pinafores and hair bows and their rudimentary faces and hands with distaste. I don’t like looking at things connected so closely with my life as a child. I think these drawings are inept: I can do much better now.

The day before the first day of high school the telephone rings. It’s Cordelia’s Mummie; she wants to speak to my mother. I assume it’s boring grown-ups’ business and go back to reading the newspaper on the living room floor. But after she puts the phone down, my mother comes into the room.

“Elaine,” she says. This is unusual, as she doesn’t often use my name. She sounds solemn. I look up from Mandrake the Magician. She looks down. “That was Cordelia’s mother,” she says.

“Cordelia will be going to your high school. Cordelia’s mother wonders whether you girls would like to walk to school together.”

“Cordelia?” I say. I haven’t seen or spoken to Cordelia for a whole year. She has vanished completely. I’ve chosen that school because I can walk to it, instead of going on a bus; so why not walk with Cordelia? “Okay,” I say.

“Are you sure you want to?” my mother says, a little anxiously. She doesn’t say why Cordelia will be coming to my school now and I don’t ask.

“Why wouldn’t I?” I say. I’m already sliding into flippancy, which goes with high school, but also I can’t see what she’s getting at. I’m being asked to do Cordelia, or Cordelia’s mother, some kind of a minor favor. My mother’s usual line is that you should do these favors when asked, so why is she hedging on this one?

She doesn’t answer this. Instead she hovers. I go back to reading the comics. “Shall I call her mother back, then, or would you like to speak with Cordelia yourself?” she says.

“You can call her,” I say. I add, “Please.” I have no particular wish to speak to Cordelia right now. The next morning I go to Cordelia’s house, which is on the way to school, to pick her up. The door opens and Cordelia is there, but she is no longer the same. She’s no longer angular and rangy; she’s grown full breasts and is heavier in the hips and face. Her hair is longer now, not a pageboy. She wears it in a ponytail with small white cloth lilies of the valley wired around the elastic band. She’s bleached a peroxide streak into the bangs. She has orange lipstick, and orange nail polish to match. My own lipstick is pale pink. Seeing Cordelia, I realize that I don’t look like a teenager, I look like a kid dressed up as one. I am still thin, still flat. I have a ferocious desire to be older. We walk to school together, not saying much at first, past a gas station, a funeral parlor, then a mile along a strip of shops, a Woolworth’s, an I.D.A. drugstore, a fruit and vegetable shop, a hardware store, all of them side by side in two-story flat-roofed yellow brick buildings. We hold our schoolbooks up against our chests, our full cotton skirts brushing against our bare legs. Right now it’s the end of summer, when all the lawns are dull green or yellow and used up.

I’ve assumed Cordelia would be a grade ahead of me. But she isn’t, she’s in the same grade now. She’s been expelled from St. Sebastian’s for drawing a penis on a bat. Or this is what she says. She says there was a large drawing of a bat on the blackboard, with its wings outspread and just a tiny bump between its legs. So she went up to the blackboard when the teacher was out of the room and rubbed out the little bump and made a bigger, longer one—“Not that much bigger”—and the teacher came into the room and caught her doing it.

“Is that all?” I say.

Not exactly. She also printed Mr. Malder, neatly, underneath the bump. Mr. Malder was the teacher’s name.

Probably this wasn’t all she did, but it’s all she’s telling about. As an afterthought she mentions that she failed her year. “I was too young for it,” she says. This sounds like something she’s been told by other people, her mother most likely. “I was only twelve. They shouldn’t have skipped me.”