Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [161]
Really it’s like Sunnysides, done over as a museum. They could have Cordelia and me in here, in our bat-wing sleeves and cinch belts, stuffed and mounted or made of wax, drinking our milkshakes, looking as bored as we could.
The last time I saw Cordelia, she was going through the door of the rest home. That was the last time I talked to her. Although it wasn’t the last time she talked to me.
There are no avocado and sprout sandwiches, the coffee is not espresso, the pie is coconut cream and no worse than it was then. This is what I have, coffee and pie, sitting in one of the purple booths, watching young people exclaim over what they think is the quaintness of the past.
The past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as décor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into.
They have Elvis Presley zucchini molds now: you clamp them around your zucchini while it’s young, and as it grows it’s deformed into the shape of Elvis Presley’s head. Is this why he sang? To become a zucchini? Vegetarianism and reincarnation are in the air, but that’s taking it too far. I’d rather come back as a sow bug, myself; or a stir-fried shrimp. Though I suppose the whole idea’s more lenient than Hell.
“You’ve done it well,” I say to the waitress. “Of course the prices are wrong. It was ten cents for a coffee, then.”
“Really,” she says, not as a question. She gives me a dutiful smile: Boring old frump. She is half my age, living, already, a life I can’t imagine. Whatever her guilts are, her hates and terrors, they are not the same. What do they do about AIDS, these girls? They can’t just roll around in the hay, the way we did. Is there a courtship ritual that involves, perhaps, an exchange of doctors’ telephone numbers? For us it was pregnancy that was the scary item, the sexual booby trap, the thing that could finish you off. Not any more.
I pay the bill, overtip, gather up my packages, an Italian scarf for each of my daughters, a fountain pen for Ben. Fountain-pens are coming back. Somewhere in Limbo, all the old devices and appliances and costumes are lined up, waiting their turn for reentry.
• • •
I walk up the street, along to the corner. The next street is Josef’s. I count houses: this one must be his. The front’s been ripped out and glassed over, the lawn is paving stone. There’s an antique child’s rocking horse in the window, a threadbare quilt, a wooden-headed doll with a battered face. Onetime throwouts, recycled as money. Nothing so indiscreet as a price tag, which means outrageous.
I wonder what became of Josef, eventually. If he’s still alive he must be sixty-five, or more. If he was a dirty old man then, how dirty is he now?
He did make a film. I think it was him; in any case, the director’s name was the same. I saw it by accident, at a film festival. This was a lot later, when I was already living in Vancouver.
It was about two women with nebulous personalities and cloudy hair. They wandered through fields with the wind blowing their thin dresses against their thighs, and gazed inscrutably. One of them took apart a radio and dropped the pieces into a stream, ate a butterfly, and cut the throat of a cat, because she was deranged. These things wouldn’t have been as appealing if she had been ugly, instead of blond and ethereal. The other one made little slashes on the skin of her thigh, using an old-fashioned straight razor that had belonged to her grandfather. Toward the end she jumped off a railway overpass, into a river, her dress fluttering like a window curtain. Except for the colors of their hair, it was hard to tell the two of them apart.
The man in this film was in love with both of them and couldn’t make up his mind. Hence their craziness.