Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [12]
I want some more cards from the Nabisco Shredded Wheat boxes, the gray cards with pictures on them that you color, cut out, and fold to make the houses in a town. Also I want some pipe cleaners. We have a book called Rainy Day Hobbies that shows how to make a walkie-talkie out of two cans and a piece of string, or how to make a boat that will go forward if you drop lubricating oil into a hole in it; also how to make a doll’s chest of drawers out of miniature matchboxes, and how to make various animals—a dog, a sheep, a camel—out of pipe cleaners. The boat and the chest of drawers don’t appeal to me, only the pipe cleaners. I’ve never seen a pipe cleaner.
I want some silver paper out of cigarette packages. I have several pieces already, but I want more. My parents don’t smoke cigarettes, so I have to collect this paper where I can find it, on the edges of gas stations, in the weedy grass near motels. I am in the habit of scavenging along the ground this way. When I find some I clean it off and flatten it out and store it between the pages of my school reader. I don’t know what I’ll do with it when I have enough, but it will be something amazing.
I want a balloon. Balloons are coming back, now that the war is over. When I was sick with the mumps, once in the winter, my mother found one at the bottom of her steamer trunk. She must have tucked it away there before the war, suspecting perhaps that there would not be any more for a while. She blew it up for me. It was blue, translucent, round, like a private moon. The rubber was old and rotting and the balloon burst almost at once, and I was heartbroken. But I want another balloon, one that will not break.
I want some friends, friends who will be girls. Girl friends. I know that these exist, having read about them in books, but I’ve never had any girl friends because I’ve never been in one place long enough.
Much of the time it’s raw and overcast, the low metallic sky of late autumn; or else it rains and we have to stay inside the motel. The motel is the kind we’re used to: a row of cottages, flimsily built, strung together with Christmas tree lights, yellow or blue or green. These are called “housekeeping cottages,” which means they have some kind of a stove in them, a pot or two and a tea kettle, and a table covered with oilcloth. The floor of our housekeeping cottage is linoleum, with a faded pattern of floral squares. The towels are skimpy and thin, the sheets have worn places in the middles, rubbed there by other people’s bodies. There’s a framed print of the woods in winter and another of ducks in flight. Some motels have outhouses, but this one has a real though smelly flush toilet, and a bathtub.
We’ve been living in this motel for weeks, which is unusual: we never stay in motels for more than a night at a time. We eat cans of Habitant pea soup, heated up on the two-burner stove in a dented pot, and slices of bread spread with molasses, and hunks of cheese. There’s more cheese, now that the war is over. We wear our outdoor clothes indoors, and socks at night, because these cottages with their one-layer walls are supposed to be for summer tourists. The hot water is never more than lukewarm, and our mother heats water in the tea kettle and pours it into the tub for our baths. “Just to get the crust off,” she says.
In the mornings we wrap blankets around our shoulders while we eat our breakfast. Sometimes we can see our own breath, even inside the cottage. All of this is irregular, and slightly festive. It isn’t just that we aren’t going to school. We’ve never gone to school for more than three or four months at a time anyway. I was in school the last time eight months ago and have only dim and temporary ideas of what it was like.
In the mornings we do our schoolwork, in our workbooks. Our mother tells us which pages to do. Then we read our school readers. Mine is about two children who live in a white house with ruffled curtains, a front lawn, and a picket fence. The father goes to work, the mother wears a dress and an apron, and the children