Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [145]
The teacher is an elderly man, thin and defeated-looking. He thinks he has failed in the real world, although he once created a famous illustration for canned pork and beans that I can remember from childhood. We ate a lot of canned pork and beans, during the war. His specialty is the rendering of smiles: the trick is to be able to do teeth, nice white even teeth, without putting in the separation between each tooth, which makes the smile appear too canine or too much like false teeth (which he himself has). He tells me I show ability in smiles, and that I could go far.
Jon teases me a little about this night course, but not as much as I thought he would. He refers to the teacher as Mr. Beanie Weenie, and lets it go at that.
59
I graduate from university, and discover that there’s nothing much I can do with my degree. Or nothing I want to do at any rate. I don’t want to go on to graduate work, I don’t want to teach high school or be a curator’s flunky in a museum.
By this time I’ve accumulated five night courses from the Art College, four of them in the Commercial area, and I trot them and my portfolio of smiles and dishes of caramel pudding and canned peach halves around to various ad agencies. For these purposes I buy a beige wool suit (on sale), medium-heel pumps to match, some pearl button earrings and a tasteful silk scarf (on sale) at Simpsons; this on the recommendation of my last night course instructor, in Layout and Design, who was a woman. She also recommended a haircut, but I would only go so far as a French roll, engineered with the help of some big rollers and hair-setting gel and a lot of bobby pins. Eventually I get a menial job doing mock-ups, and a small furnished two-bedroom apartment with kitchenette and separate entrance in a large crumbling house in the Annex, north of Bloor. I use the second bedroom for painting, and keep the door to it closed.
This place has a real bed, and a real kitchen sink. Jon comes for dinner and teases me about the towels I’ve bought (on sale), the ovenproof dishes I’ve acquired, my shower curtain. “Better Homes and Gardens, eh?” he says. He teases me about the bed, but he likes sleeping in it. He comes to my place, now, more often than I go to his.
My parents sell their house and move up north. My father has left the university and has gone back to research; he’s now head of the Forest Insect Laboratory at Sault Ste. Marie. He says Toronto is getting overpopulated, and also polluted. He says the lower Great Lakes are the world’s largest sewer and that if we knew what was going into the drinking water we would all become alcoholics. As for the air, it’s so full of chemicals we should be wearing gas masks. Up north you can still breathe.
My mother was not too happy to leave her garden, but made the best of it: “At least it’s a chance to throw out a lot of that junk in the cellar,” she said. They’ve started another garden in the Soo, although the growing season is shorter. In the summers, though, they’re mostly on the road, driving from infestation to infestation. There is no shortage of insect life.
I don’t miss my parents. Not yet. Or rather I don’t want to be living with them. I am happy to be left to my own devices, my own messes. I can eat haphazardly now, snack on junk food and takeouts without worrying about balanced meals, go to bed when I like, let my dirty laundry rot, neglect the dishes.
I get a promotion. After a time I move to the art department of a publishing company, where I design book covers. At night, when Jon is not there, I paint. Sometimes I forget to go to bed, and find that it has become dawn and I have to change into my work clothes and go to work. I am groggy on those days, and have trouble