Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [138]
I know more things about Josef now than I did then. I know them because I’m older. I know about his melancholy, his ambition, his desperation, the corners of emptiness in him that needed to be filled. I know the dangers.
What for instance was he doing with two women fifteen years younger than himself? If one of my daughters fell in love with such a man, I’d be frantic. It would be like the time Sarah and her best friend came rushing home from school, to tell me they’d seen their first flasher in the park. “Mummy, Mummy, a man had his pants down!”
To me it meant fear, and a ferocious anger. Touch them and I’ll kill you. But to them it was merely noteworthy, and hilarious.
Or the first time I saw my own kitchen, after I had Sarah. I brought her home from the hospital and thought: All those knives. All those sharp things and hot things. All I could see was what might hurt her.
Maybe one of my daughters has a man like Josef, or a man like Jon, hidden away in her life, in secret. Who knows what grubby or elderly boys they are bending to their own uses, or to counterpoint me? All the while protecting me from themselves, because they know I would be horrified.
I see words on the front pages of newspapers that never used to be said out loud, much less printed—sexual intercourse, abortion, incest—and I want to hide their eyes, even though they are grown-up, or what passes for it. Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one.
I should get a little present for each of them, as I always did when they were younger and I went away. Once I knew by instinct what they would like. I don’t any more. It’s hard for me to remember exactly what age they’ve reached. I used to resent it when my mother would forget I was an adult, but I’m approaching the maundering phase myself, digging out the yellowing baby pictures, mooning over locks of hair.
I’m squinting into a window at some Italian silk scarves, wonderful indeterminate colors, gray-blue, sea-green, when I feel a touch on my arm, a chilly jump of the heart.
“Cordelia,” I say, turning.
But it’s not Cordelia. It’s nobody I know. It’s a woman, a girl really, Middle Eastern of some kind: a long full skirt to above the ankles, printed cotton, Canadian gum-soled boots incongruous beneath; a short jacket buttoned up, a kerchief folded straight across the forehead with a pleat at either side, like a wimple. The hand that touches me is lumpy in its northern mitten, the skin of the wrist between mitten and jacket cuff brownish, like coffee with double cream. The eyes are large, as in painted waifs.
“Please,” she says. “They are killing many people.” She doesn’t say where. It could be a lot of places, or in between places; homelessness is a nationality now. Somehow the war never ended after all, it just broke up into pieces and got scattered, it gets in everywhere, you can’t shut it out. Killing is endless now, it’s an industry, there’s money in it, and the good side and the bad side are pretty hard to tell apart.
“Yes,” I say. This is the war that killed Stephen.
“Some are here. They have no, they have nothing. They would be killed …”
“Yes,” I say. “I see.” This is what I get for walking. In a car you’re more insulated. And how do I know she is what she purports to be? She could be a dope addict. In the soft touch market, scams abound.
“I have with me a family of four. Two children. They are with me, it is my, it is my own responsibility.” She stumbles a little on responsibility, but she gets it out. She’s shy, she doesn’t like what she’s doing, this grabbing people on the street.
“Yes?”
“I am doing it.” We look at each other. She is doing it. “Twenty-five dollars can feed a family of four for a month.”
What can they be eating?