Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [111]
But when Cordelia’s father is there, everything is different. There are flowers on the table, and candles. Mummie has on her pearls, the napkins are neatly rolled in the napkin rings instead of crumpled in under edges of the plates. Nothing is forgotten. There are no pin curls, no elbows on the table, even the spines are straighter.
Today is one of the candle days. Cordelia’s father sits at the head of the table, with his craggy eyebrows, his wolfish look, and bends upon me the full force of his ponderous, ironic, terrifying charm. He can make you feel that what he thinks of you matters, because it will be accurate, but that what you think of him is of no importance.
“I’m hag-ridden,” he says, pretending to be mournful. “The only man in a houseful of women. They won’t let me into the bathroom in the morning to shave.” Mockingly, he invites my sympathy and collusion. But I can think of nothing to say.
Perdie says, “He should consider himself lucky that we put up with him.” She can get away with a little impertinence, with coltish liberties. She has the haircut for it. Mirrie, when hard-pressed, looks reproachful. Cordelia is not good at either of these things. But they all play up to him.
“What are you studying these days?” he says to me. It’s a usual question of his. Whatever I say amuses him.
“The atom,” I say.
“Ah, the atom,” he says. “I remember the atom. And what does the atom have to say for itself these days?”
“Which one?” I say, and he laughs.
“Which one, indeed,” he says. “That’s very good.” This may be what he wants: a give and take, of sorts. But Cordelia can never come up with it, because she’s too frightened of him. She’s frightened of not pleasing him. And yet he is not pleased. I’ve seen it many times, her dithering, fumble-footed efforts to appease him. But nothing she can do or say will ever be enough, because she is somehow the wrong person.
I watch this, and it makes me angry. It makes me want to kick her. How can she be so abject? When will she learn?
Cordelia fails the mid-year Zoology test. She doesn’t seem to care. She has spent half the exam time drawing surreptitious cartoons of various teachers in the school, which she shows to me on the way home, laughing her exaggerated laugh.
Sometimes I dream about boys. These are wordless dreams, dreams of the body. They stay with me for minutes after I wake up and I luxuriate in them, but I forget them soon.
I have other dreams as well.
I dream that I can’t move. I can’t talk, I can’t even breathe. I’m in an iron lung. The iron is clenched around my body like a hard cylindrical skin. It’s this iron skin that is doing my breathing for me, in and out. I’m dense and heavy, I feel nothing other than this heaviness. My head sticks out the end of the iron lung. I’m looking up at the ceiling, on which there is a light fixture like yellowish cloudy ice.
I dream that I’m trying on a fur collar, in front of the mirror on my bureau. There’s someone standing behind me. If I move so that I can see into the mirror, I’ll be able to look over my own shoulder without turning around. I’ll be able to see who it is.
I dream that I’ve found a red plastic purse, hidden in a drawer or trunk. I know there is treasure inside it, but I can’t get it open. I try and try and finally it bursts, like a balloon. It’s full of dead frogs.
I dream that I’ve been given a head wrapped up in a white tea towel. I can see the outlines of the nose, the chin, the lips through the white cloth. I could unwrap the cloth to see whose head it is, but I don’t want to, because I know that if I do the head will come alive.
45
Cordelia tells me that when she was younger she broke a thermometer and ate some of the mercury in it to make herself sick so she wouldn’t have to go to school. Or she’d stick her finger down her throat and throw up, or she’d hold the thermometer near a light bulb