Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [113]
I don’t want to know. Whatever it is, it’s nothing I need or want. I want to be here, on Tuesday, in May, sitting in the red-topped booth at Sunnysides, watching Cordelia as she delicately slurps the last of her milkshake up through the straws. She’s noticed nothing.
“I’ve got one,” I say. “Why did the unwashed chicken cross the road twice?”
“Why?” says Cordelia.
“Because it was a dirty double-crosser,” I say.
Cordelia rolls her eyes, like Perdie. “Very funny,” she says.
I close my eyes. In my head there’s a square of darkness, and of purple flowers.
46
I begin to avoid Cordelia. I don’t know why.
I no longer arrange double dates with her. I tell her that the boy I’m going out with doesn’t have any suitable friends. I say I have to stay after school, which is true: I’m painting the decorations for the next dance, palm trees and girls in hula skirts.
Some days Cordelia waits for me, so I have to walk home with her anyway. She talks and talks as if there’s nothing wrong, and I say little; but then I’ve never said a lot anyway. After a while she’ll say, overly brightly, “But here I’ve been going on and on about me. What’s doing with you?” and I smile and say “Nothing much.” Sometimes she makes a joke of it and says, “But that’s enough about me. What do you think of me?” and I add to the joke by saying, “Nothing much.”
• • •
Cordelia is failing more and more tests. It doesn’t seem to bother her, or at any rate she doesn’t want to talk about it. I no longer help her with her homework, because I know she won’t pay attention even if I do. She has trouble concentrating on anything. Even when she’s just talking, on the way home, she changes the subject in the middle of a sentence so it’s hard to follow what she’s saying. She’s slipping up on the grooming too, reverting to her old sloppy ways of years ago. She’s let her bleached strip grow out, so it’s disconcertingly two-toned. There are runs in her nylons, buttons popped off her blouses. Her lipstick doesn’t seem to fit her mouth.
It is decided that it would be best for Cordelia to change schools again, so she does. After this she phones me frequently, but then less frequently. She says we should get together soon. I never deny this, but I never set a time either. After a while I say, “I have to go now.”
Cordelia’s family moves to a different, larger house, in a ritzier neighborhood farther north. Some Dutch people move into her old house. They plant a lot of tulips. That seems to be the end of her.
I write the final Grade Thirteen exams, subject after subject, day after day, sitting at a desk in the gymnasium. The leaves are fully out, the irises are in bloom, there’s a heat wave; the gymnasium heats up like an oven and we all sit in there, superheated, writing away, while the gymnasium exudes its smell of bygone athletes. The teachers police the aisles. Several girls faint. One boy keels over and is found afterward to have drunk a pitcher of tomato juice out of the refrigerator which was really Bloody Marys for his mother’s bridge club. As the bodies are carried out I scarcely look up from the page.
I know I’ll do well in the two Biology exams. I can draw anything: the insides of crayfish ears, the human eye, frogs’ genitalia, the blossom of the snapdragon (Antirrhinum majus) in cross section. I know the difference between a raceme and a rhizome, I explicate photosynthesis, I can spell Scrofulariaciae. But in the middle of the Botany examination it comes to me, like a sudden epileptic fit, that I’m not going to be a biologist, as I have thought. I am going to be a painter. I look at the page, where the life cycle of the mushroom from spore to fruiting body is taking shape, and I know this with absolute certainty. My life has been changed, soundlessly, instantaneously. I continue my explication of tubers, bulbs, and legumes, as if nothing has happened.
One night, just after the exams have finished,