Cat's eye полностью

I think this is irresponsible of her. At the same time, the word hoot pleases me. It makes my mother into a non-mother, a sort of mutant owl. I have become picky about my own clothes, and given to looking at myself from behind with the aid of a hand mirror: although I may appear all right from the front, treachery could sneak up on me: a loose thread, a dropped hem. Not giving a boot would be a luxury. It describes the fine, irreverent carelessness I myself would like to cultivate, in these and other matters. My brother sits in one of the taper-legged blond chairs that go with the tables. He has become bigger and older, all of a sudden, when I wasn’t looking. He has a razor now. Because it’s the weekend and he hasn’t shaved, he has a line of fine bristles poking out of the skin around his mouth. He’s got on his moccasins, old ones he wears around the house, with holes worn under the big toes, and his V-neck maroon sweater with the ravels coming off the elbows. He resists my mother’s efforts to mend this sweater or replace it. My mother says frequently that she doesn’t give a hoot about clothes, but this indifference does not extend to holes, frayed edges, or dirt.

My brother’s ragged sweater and sievelike moccasins are the clothes he studies in. On weekdays he has to wear a jacket and tie and gray flannels, all or which are required at his school. He can’t have a ducktail, like the boys at my school, or even a crewcut: his hair is shaved up the back of the neck and parted at one side, like the hair of English choirboys. This too is a school requirement. With his hair cut this way he looks like an illustration from an adventure book of the 1920s or earlier, of which there are a number in our cellar, or like an Allied air officer from a comic book. He has that kind of nose, that kind of chin, although thinner: clean-cut, good-looking, old-fashioned. His eyes are like that too, a piercing, slightly fanatical blue. His scorn for boys who give a hoot about how they look is devastating. He calls them fruity clothes horses.

His school is a private school for brainy boys, though not an expensive one: you get in by passing tough exams. My parents asked me, a little anxiously, if I wanted to go to a private school for girls; they thought I’d feel left out if they didn’t make the effort for me too. I know about these schools, where you have to wear kilts and play field hockey. I said they were for snobs and had low academic standards, which was true. But in fact I wouldn’t be caught dead in a girls’ school. The idea fills me with claustrophobic panic: a school with nothing in it but girls would be like a trap.

My brother is listening to Jack Benny too. As he listens, he stuffs the cheese squares into his mouth with his left hand, but his right hand holds a pencil, and this hand is never still. He hardly looks at the scrap pad on which he’s doodling, but once in a while he tears off a sheet and crumples it up. These crumpled notes land on the floor. When I gather them up to put them into the wastebasket after the show, I see that they’re covered with numbers, long lines of numbers and symbols that go on and on, like writing, like a letter in code.

My brother sometimes has friends over. They sit in his room with the chess table between them, not moving except for their hands, which lift, hover over the board, plunge down. Sometimes they grunt or say “Aha” or “Trade you” or “Got you back”; or they exchange new, obscure good-natured insults:

“You surd!” “You square root!” “You throwback!” The captured chess pieces, knights and pawns and bishops, line up on the outskirts of the board. Once in a while, to see how the game is going, I bring in glasses of milk and vanilla-chocolate pinwheel cookies which I’ve made out of the Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook. This is a form of showing-off on my part, but it doesn’t get much response. They grunt, drink the milk with their left hands, stuff in the cookies, their eyes never leaving the board. The bishops topple, the queen falls, the king is encircled. “Mate in two,” they say. A finger comes down, knocks over the king. “Best of five.” And they start again.

In the evenings my brother studies. Sometimes he does this in a curious way. He stands on his head, to improve the circulation to his brain, or he throws spitballs at the ceiling. The area around his ceiling light fixture is pimply with little wads of once-chewed paper. At other times he indulges in manic bouts of physical activity: he splits huge piles of kindling, much more than is needed, or goes running down in the ravine, wearing disgraceful baggy pants and a forest-green sweater even more unraveled than his maroon one, and frayed gray running shoes that look like the kind you see one of in vacant lots. He says he’s training for the marathon.