Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [160]
And there’s Sarah to think of. Would she take to this Auntie Cordelia? How is Cordelia with small children? And exactly how sick in the head is she, anyway? How long before I’d come back and find her out cold on the bathroom floor, or worse? In the middle of a bright red sunset. Jon’s work table is an arsenal, there are little saws lying around, little chisels. Maybe it would just be melodrama, a skin-deep slash or two, her old theatricality; though perhaps theatrical people are not less risky, but more. In the interests of the role they’ll sacrifice anything.
“I can’t Cordelia,” I say gently. But I don’t feel gentle toward her. I am seething, with a fury I can neither explain nor express. How dare you ask me? I want to twist her arm, rub her face in the snow.
The waitress brings the bill. “Are you sufficiently sophonsified?” I say to Cordelia, trying for lightness, and a change of subject. But Cordelia has never been stupid.
“So you won’t,” she says. And then, forlornly: “I guess you’ve always hated me.”
“No,” I say. “Why would I? No!” I am shocked. Why would she say such a thing? I can’t remember ever hating Cordelia.
“I’ll get out anyway,” she says. Her voice is not thick now, or hesitant. She has that stubborn, defiant look, the one I remember from years ago. So?
I walk her back, deposit her. “I’ll come to visit you,” I say. I intend to, but know at the same time that the chances are slim. She’ll be all right, I tell myself. She was like this at the end of high school, and then things got better. They could again.
On the streetcar going back, I read the advertisements: a beer, a chocolate bar, a brassiere turning into a bird. I imitate relief. I feel free, and weightless.
But I am not free, of Cordelia.
I dream Cordelia falling, from a cliff or bridge, against a background of twilight, her arms outspread, her skirt open like a bell, making a snow angel in the empty air. She never hits or lands; she falls and falls, and I wake with my heart pounding and gravity cut from under me, as in an elevator plummeting out of control.
I dream her standing in the old Queen Mary schoolyard. The school is gone, there is nothing but a field, and the hill behind with the scrawny evergreen trees. She is wearing her snowsuit jacket, but she is not a child, she’s the age she is now. She knows I have deserted her, and she is angry.
After a month, two months, three, I write Cordelia a note, on flowered notepaper of the sort that doesn’t leave much space for words. I purchase this notepaper specially. My note is written with such false cheerfulness I can barely stand to lick the flap of the envelope. In it I propose another visit.
But my note comes back in the mail, with address unknown scrawled across it. I examine this writing from every angle, trying to figure out if it could be Cordelia’s, disguised. If it isn’t, if she’s no longer at the rest home, where has she gone? She could ring the doorbell at any minute, call on the phone. She could be anywhere.
I dream a mannequin statue, like one of Jody’s in the show, hacked apart and glued back together. It’s wearing nothing but a gauze costume, covered with spangles. It ends at the neck. Underneath its arm, wrapped in a white cloth, is Cordelia’s head.
PART
TWELVE
ONE
WING
64
In the corner of a parking lot, among the sumptuous boutiques, they’ve reconstructed a forties diner. 4-D’s Diner, it’s called. Not a renovation, brand-new.
They couldn’t tear this stuff down fast enough, once.
Inside it’s pretty authentic, except that it looks too clean; and it’s less forties than early fifties. They have a soda fountain countertop, with stools along it topped in acid lime-green, and vinyl-padded booths in a shade of shiny purple that looks like the skin of an early shark-finned convertible. A jukebox, chrome coat trees, grainy black-and-white photos on the walls, of real forties diners. The waitresses have white