Cat's eye полностью

But something about her makes boys uneasy. It’s as if she’s too attentive to them, too polite, studied and overdone. She laughs when she thinks they’ve made a joke and says, “That’s very witty, Stan.” She will say this even when they haven’t intended to be funny, and then they aren’t sure whether or not she’s making fun of them. Sometimes she is, sometimes she isn’t. Inappropriate words slip out of her. After we’ve finished our hamburgers and fries she turns to the boys and says brightly, “Are you sufficiently sophonsified?” and they gape at her. They are not the kind or boys who would have napkin rings. She asks them leading questions, tries to draw them into conversations, as a grown-up would do, not appearing to know that the best thing, with them, is to let them exist in their own silences, to look at them only out of the corners of the eyes. Cordelia tries to look at them sincerely, head-on; they are blinded by the glare, and freeze like rabbits in a headlight. When she’s in the back seat with them I can tell, from the breathing and gasps, that she’s going too far in that direction as well. “She’s kind of strange, your friend,”

the boys say to me, but they can’t say why. I decide it’s because she has no brother, only sisters. She thinks that what matters with boys is what you say; she’s never learned the intricacies, the nuances of male silence.

But I know Cordelia isn’t really interested in anything the boys themselves have to say, because she tells me so. Mostly she thinks they’re dim. Her attempts at conversation with them are a performance, an imitation. Her laugh, when she’s with them, is refined and low, like a woman’s laugh on the radio, except when she forgets herself. Then it’s too loud. She’s mimicking something, something in her head, some role or image that only she can see.

The Earle Grey Players come to our high school, as they do every year. They go from high school to high school, they are well known for this. Every year they do one play by Shakespeare; it’s always the play that’s on the province-wide Grade Thirteen Examinations, the ones you have to pass in order to get into university. There aren’t many theaters in Toronto, in fact there are only two, so many people go to these plays. The kids go to them because it’s on the exam and the parents go because they don’t often get a chance to see plays.

The Earle Grey Players are Mr. Earle Grey, who always plays the leads, Mrs. Earle Grey who plays the lead woman, and two or three other actors who are thought to be Earle Grey cousins and who are likely to double up and do two or more parts. The rest of the parts are played by students in whatever high school they’re performing at that week. Last year the play was Julius Caesar, and Cordelia got to be part of the crowd. She had to smear burnt cork on her face for dirt and wrap herself up in a bedsheet from home, and say rabble rabble during the crowd scene when Mark Antony was making his Ears speech.

This year the play is Macbeth. Cordelia is a serving woman, and also a soldier in the final battle scene. This time she has to bring a plaid car-rug from home. She’s lucky because she also has a kilt, an old one of Perdie’s from when she went to her girls’ private school. In addition to her parts, Cordelia is the props assistant. She’s in charge of tidying up the props after each performance, setting them in order, always the same order, so that the actors can grab them backstage and run on without a moment’s thought. During the three days of rehearsal Cordelia is very excited. I can tell by the way she chain-smokes on the way home and acts bored and nonchalant, referring, every once in a while, to the real, professional actors by their first names. The younger ones make such an effort to be funny, she says. They call the Witches The Three Wired Sisters; they call Cordelia a cream-faced loon, and they threaten to put eye of newt and toe of frog into her coffee. They say that when Lady Macbeth says, “Out, damned spot,” during the mad scene, she’s referring to her dog Spot, who has poo’ed on the carpet. She says real actors will never say the name Macbeth out loud, because it’s bad luck. They call it “The Tartans” instead.

“You just said it,” I say.

“What?”

“Macbeth,” I say.

Cordelia stops snort in the middle of the sidewalk. “Oh God,” she says. “I did, didn’t I?” She pretends to laugh it off, but it bothers her.