Cat's eye полностью

I don’t have occasion to use my mean mouth on boys, since they don’t say provoking things to me. Except for Stephen, of course. These days we trade verbal meannesses as a kind of game, like badminton. Got you. Got you back. I can usually silence him with, “Where’d you get that haircut?

Lawnmowerville?” He’s sensitive about the haircut. Or, when he’s all spiffed up in his private school gray flannels and jacket: “Hey, you look like a Simpsons Rep.” Simpsons Reps are sucky kids who appear in high school yearbooks wearing blazers with crests on the pockets, looking clean-cut, and advertising Simpsons.

My father says, “Your sharp tongue will get you in trouble some day, young lady.” Young lady is a sign that I’ve gone too daringly close to some edge or other, but although it silences me for the moment it doesn’t tone me down. I’ve come to enjoy the risk, the sensation of vertigo when I realize that I’ve shot right over the border of the socially acceptable, that I’m walking on thin ice, on empty air. The person I use my mean mouth on the most is Cordelia. She doesn’t even have to provoke me, I use her as target practice. We sit on the hill overlooking the football field, wearing our jeans, which are only allowed at school on the days of football games. We have our overlong pant cuffs pinned up with blanket pins, the latest thing. The cheerleaders leap around in their mid-thigh skirts, waving their paper pom-poms; they don’t look long-legged and golden, like the cheerleaders at the back of Life magazine, but ill-assorted, dumpy, and dark. However I still envy their calves. The football team jogs on. Cordelia says, “That Gregory! What a hunk,” and I say, “Of cheese.” Cordelia gives me a hurt look. “I think he’s a doll.” “If you like them covered with corn oil,” I say. When she says it’s a bad idea to sit down on the high school toilet seats without wiping them off first because you might get a disease, I say, “Who told you that? Your Mummie?”

I make fun of her favorite singers. “Love, love, love,” I say. “They’re always moaning.” I have developed a searing contempt for gushiness and schmaltz. Frank Sinatra is The Singing Marshmallow, Betty Hutton is The Human Grindstone. Anyway, these people are out of date, they are sentimental mushballs. The real truth is to be found in rock and roll: “Hearts Made of Stone” is more like it. Sometimes Cordelia can think of things to say back, but sometimes she can’t. She says, “That’s cruel.”

Or she sticks her tongue in the side of her mouth and changes the subject. Or she lights a cigarette. I sit in History class, doodling on the side of the page. We are taking the Second World War. The teacher is an enthusiast, he’s hopping around at the front of the room, waving his arms and his pointer. He’s a short man with an unruly strand of hair and a limp, who may have been in the war himself, or so rumor goes. On the board he’s drawn a large map of Europe, in white, with yellow dotted lines for the borders between countries. Hitler’s armies invade, by means of pink chalk arrows. Now it’s the Anschluss, and now Poland falls, and now France. I draw tulips and trees, putting a line for the ground and including the root systems in every case. Submarines appear in the English Channel, in green. I draw the face of the girl sitting across the aisle from me. The Blitz is on, bombs drift down through the air like sinister silver angels, London is disintegrating block by block, house by house, mantelpieces, chimneys, double beds hand-carved and passed down through the generations blasted into burning splinters, history reduced to shards. “It was the end of an era,” says the teacher. It’s hard for us to understand, he says, but nothing will ever be the same again. He is deeply moved by this, you can tell, it’s embarrassing. The same as what? I think.

It’s incredible to me that I myself was alive when all those chalk things were going on, all those statistical deaths. I was alive when women wore those ridiculous clothes with the big shoulder pads and the nipped-in waists, with peplums over their bums like backward aprons. I draw a woman with wide shoulders and a picture hat. I draw my own hand. Hands are the hardest. It’s difficult to keep them from looking like clumps of sausages.

I go out with boys. This is not part of a conscious plan, it just happens. My relationships with boys are effortless, which means that I put very little effort into them. It’s girls I feel awkward with, it’s girls I feel I have to defend myself against; not boys. I sit in my bedroom picking the pilly fuzzballs off my lambswool sweaters and the phone will ring. It will be a boy. I take the sweater into the hall, where the phone is, and sit on the hall chair with the receiver cradled between my ear and shoulder and continue to pick off the fuzzballs, while a long conversation goes on that is mostly silence.