Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [127]
I feel that Mr. Hrbik needs protecting, or even rescuing. I don’t yet know that a man can be admirable in many ways but a jerk in others. Also I haven’t yet learned that chivalry in men is idiocy in women: men can get out of a rescue a lot more easily, once they get into it.
52
I am still living at home, which is humiliating; but why should I pay extra to live in a dormitory, when the university is in the same city? This is my father’s view, and the reasonable one. Little does he know it isn’t a dormitory I have in mind, but a crumbling walk-up above a bakery or cigar store, with streetcars rumbling by outside and the ceilings covered with egg cartons painted black.
But I no longer sleep in my childhood room with the vanilla-colored light fixture and the window curtains. I’ve retreated to the cellar, claiming I can study better. Down there in a dim storage room adjacent to the furnace I’ve set up a realm of ersatz squalor. From the cupboardful of old camping equipment I’ve excavated one of the army surplus cots and a lumpy khaki sleeping bag, short-circuiting my mother’s plans to move my bed down to the cellar so I can have a proper mattress. On the walls I’ve taped theater posters, from local productions—Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Sartre’s No Exit—with deliberate fingerprints and inkstain-black lettering on them, and shadowy figures that look as if they’ve run in the wash; also several of my careful drawings of feet. My mother thinks the theater posters are gloomy, and doesn’t understand the feet at all: feet should have a body. I narrow my eyes at her, knowing better.
As for my father, he thinks my talent for drawing is impressive, but wasted. It would have been better applied to cross sections of stems and the cells of algae. For him I am a botanist manqué.
His view of life has darkened since Mr. Banerji returned to India. There is some obscurity around this: it is not talked of much. My mother says he was homesick, and hints at a nervous breakdown, but there was more to it than that. “They wouldn’t promote him,” says my father. There’s a lot behind they (not we), and wouldn’t (not didn’t). “He wasn’t properly appreciated.” I think I know what this means. My father’s view of human nature has always been bleak, but scientists were excluded from it, and now they aren’t. He feels betrayed.
My parents’ footsteps pace back and forth above my head; the sounds of the household, the Mixmaster and the telephone and the distant news, filter down to me as if in illness. I emerge, blinking, for meals and sit in stupor and demi-silence, picking at my chicken fricassee and mashed potatoes, while my mother comments on my lack of appetite and pallor and my father tells me useful and interesting things as if I am still young. Do I realize that nitrogen fertilizers are destroying fish life by fostering an overgrowth of algae? Have I heard of the new disease which will turn us all into deformed cretins unless the paper companies are forced to stop dumping mercury into the rivers? I do not realize, I have not heard.
“Are you getting enough sleep, dear?” says my mother.
“Yes,” I say untruthfully.
My father has noticed an ad in the paper, for an atomic radiation monster insect movie. “As you know,” he says, “those giant grasshoppers could never actually exist. At that size their respiratory systems would collapse.”
I do not know.
• • •
In April, while I’m studying for exams and before the buds come out, my brother Stephen gets arrested. This happens the way it would.
Stephen has not been here as he should have been to help me out at the dinner table, he hasn’t been home all year. Instead he’s running around loose in the world. He’s studying Astrophysics at a university in California, having finished his undergraduate degree in two years instead of four. Now he is doing graduate work.
I have no clear picture of California, having never been