Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [170]
Toronto lies behind it, at a great distance, burning in thought like Gomorrah. At which I dare not look.
PART
THIRTEEN
PICOSECONDS
67
I wake late. I eat an orange, some toast, an egg, mushing it up in a teacup. The hole poked in the bottom of the eggshell was not to keep the witches from going to sea, as Cordelia said. It’s to break the vacuum between shell and egg cup, so the shell can be extracted. Why did it take me forty years to figure that out?
I put on my other jogging suit, the cerise one, and do some desultory stretching exercises on Jon’s floor. It’s Jon’s floor again, not mine. I feel I’ve returned it to him, along with whatever fragments of his own life, or of our life together, I’ve been keeping back till now. I remember all those mediaeval paintings, the hand raised, open to show there is no weapon: Go in peace. Dismissal, and blessing. My way of doing this was not exactly the way of the saints, but seems to have worked just as well. The peace was for the bestower of it, also.
I go down to get the morning paper. I leaf through it, without reading much. I know I’m killing time. I’ve almost forgotten what I’m supposed to be doing here, and I’m impatient to be gone, back to the west coast, back to the time zone where I live my life now. But I can’t do that yet. I’m suspended, as in airports or dentists’ waiting rooms, expecting yet another interlude that will be textureless and without desire, like a painkiller or the interiors of planes. This is how I think of the coming evening, the opening of the show: something to get through without disaster.
I should go to the gallery, check to see that everything’s in order. I should perform at least that minimal courtesy. But instead I take the subway, get off near the main gate of the cemetery, wander south and east, scuffing through the fallen leaves, scanning the gutters; looking down at the sidewalk, for silver paper, nickels, windfalls. I still believe such things exist, and that I could find them.
With a slight push, a slip over some ill-defined edge, I could turn into a bag lady. It’s the same instinct: rummaging in junk heaps, pawing through discards. Looking for something that’s been thrown away as useless, but could still be dredged up and reclaimed. The collection of shreds, of space in her case, time in mine.
This is my old route home from school. I used to walk along this sidewalk, behind or in front of the others. Between these lampposts my shadow on the winter snow would stretch ahead of me, double, shrink again and disappear, the lamps casting their haloes around them like the moon in fog. Here is the lawn where Cordelia fell down backward, making a snow angel. Here is where she ran.
The houses are the same houses, though no longer trimmed in peeling white winter-grayed paint, no longer down-at-heels, postwar. The sandblasters have been here, the skylight people; inside, the benjamina trees and tropical climbers have taken over, ousting the mangy African violets once nurtured on kitchen windowsills. I can see through these houses, to what they used to be; I can see the colors that used to cover the walls, dusty rose, muddy green, mushroom, and the chintz curtains no longer there. What time do they really belong in, their own or mine?
I walk along the street, slightly uphill, against a scattered traffic of small children going home for lunch. Although the girls wear jeans, denoting freedom, they aren’t as noisy as they used to be; there are no chants, no catcalls. They trudge along doggedly, or so it seems to me. Maybe that’s because I’m not at their level any more: I’m higher, so the sound comes up to me filtered. Or maybe it’s me, the presence among them of someone they think is an adult, and