Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [134]
“What do your parents think?” I say. This has been on my own mind lately: what parents think.
Her face closes down for a moment. “They’re pleased I’m doing something,” she says.
“What about Perdie and Mirrie?”
“You know Perdie,” she says tightly. “Always the little put-downs. But that’s enough about me. What do you think of me?” This is an old joke of hers, and I laugh. “Seriously, what are you up to these days?” It’s the tone I remember: polite but not too interested. “Since the last time I saw you.”
I remember this last time with guilt. “Oh, nothing much,” I say. “Going to school. You know.” Right now it does look like nothing much. What have I really done all year? A smattering of art history, messing around with charcoal. There’s nothing to show. There’s Josef, but he’s not exactly an accomplishment and I decide not to mention him.
“School!” says Cordelia. “Was I glad to see the end of school. God, what boredom.” Stratford is only on in the summers, though. She will have to think of something else for the winter. Maybe the Earle Grey Players, going around to high schools. Maybe she will be ready for that.
She got the job at Stratford with the help of one of the Earle Grey cousins, who rememered her from her bedsheet days at Burnham. “People who know people,” she says. She is one of Prospero’s attendant spirits in The Tempest, and has to wear a body stocking, with a gauzy costume over top, sprinkled with dried leaves and spangles. “Obscene,” she says. She’s also a mariner in the first scene; she can get away with this because of her height. She’s a court lady in Richard III, and she’s the chief nun in Measure for Measure. In this one she actually speaks some lines. She recites for me, in a honey-colored Englishy voice:
Then, if you speak, you must not show your face,
Or, if you show your face, you must not speak.
“At rehearsal I kept getting mixed up,” she says. She counts on her fingers. “Speak, hide face, show face, shut up.” She puts her hands together in an attitude of prayer, bows forward, lowering her head. Then she gets up and does a full court curtsy out of Richard III, with the women shoppers having tea in Murray’s gawking at her. “What I’d like to do next year is the First Witch in ‘The Tartans.’ ‘When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?’ The Old Man says I might be ready for it. He thinks it would be brilliant to have a young First Witch.”
The Old Man, it turns out, is Tyrone Guthrie the director, from England and so famous I can’t pretend not to have heard of him. “That’s great,” I say.
“Remember ‘The Tartans’ at Burnham? Remember that cabbage?” she says. “I was so humiliated.”
I don’t want to remember. The past has become discontinuous, like stones skipped across water, like postcards: I catch an image of myself, a dark blank, an image, a blank. Did I ever wear bat-wing sleeves and velveteen slippers, did I wear dresses like tinted marshmallows to formal dances, shuffle around the floor with some stranger’s groin digging into mine? The dried corsages were thrown out long ago, the diplomas and class pins and photos must be down in my mother’s cellar, in the steamer trunk along with the tarnishing silver. I glimpse those photos, rows and rows of lipsticked, spit-curled children. I would never smile, for those pictures. I would gaze stony-faced into the distance, beyond such adolescent diversions.
I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise.
“Remember how we used to pinch things?” says Cordelia. “That was the only thing I really liked about that whole time.”
“Why?” I say. I had not liked it much. I was always afraid of getting caught.
“It was something I could have,” she says, and I’m not sure what she means.
Cordelia takes her sunglasses out of her shoulder bag and puts them on. There I am in her