Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [176]
I’m aware of a barrier between us. It’s been there for a long time. Something I have resented. I want to put my arms around her. But I am held back.
“What’s that?” she says.
“My old purse,” I say. “I used to take it to church.” I did. I can see the church now, the onion on the spire, the pews, the stained-glass windows. THE • KINGDOM • OF • GOD • IS • WITHIN • YOU.
“Well, what do you know. I don’t know why I saved that,” says my mother, with a little laugh. “Put it on the throw-out pile.” It’s squashed flat; the red plastic is split at the sides, where the sewing is. I pick it up, push at it to make it go back into shape. Something rattles. I open it up and take out my blue cat’s eye.
“A marble!” says my mother, with a child’s delight. “Remember all those marbles Stephen used to collect?”
“Yes,” I say. But this one was mine.
I look into it, and see my life entire.
70
Down this street is where the store was. We bought red licorice whips, bubble gum, orange Popsicles, black jawbreakers that faded to a seed. Things you could buy for a penny, with the King’s head on it. Georgius VI Dei Gratia.
I’ve never got used to the Queen being grown up. Whenever I see her cut-off head on the money, I think of her as fourteen years old, in her Girl Guide uniform, her back as straight as ours were supposed to be, looking down at me from the yellowing newspaper clippings on Miss Lumley’s Grade Four blackboard; standing in front of the clumsy diamond of a radio microphone, frowning with earnestness and well-concealed fear, rallying the forces as the bombs fell on London, as we sang “There’ll Always Be an England” to the waving of Miss Lumley’s life-threatening wooden pointer, in a time warp eight years later.
The Queen has had grandchildren since, discarded thousands of hats, grown a bosom and (heresy to think it) the beginning of a double chin. None of this fools me. She’s in there somewhere, that other one.
I walk the next blocks, turn the corner, expecting to see the familiar dingy oblong of the school, in weathered red brick the color of dried liver. The cindered schoolyard, the tall thin windows with orange paper pumpkins and black cats stuck onto them for Halloween, the graven lettering over the doors, BOYS and GIRLS, like the inscriptions on mausoleums of the late nineteenth century.
But the school has disappeared. In its place a new school has risen instantly, like a mirage: light-colored, block-shaped, glossy and modern.
I feel hit, in the pit of the stomach. The old school has been erased, wiped from space. It’s as if it was never there at all. I lean against a telephone pole, bewildered, as if something has been cut out of my brain. Suddenly, I’m bone tired. I would like to go to sleep.
After a while I approach the new school, go toward it through the gate, walk slowly around it. BOYS and GIRLS have been abolished, that much is clear; though there’s still a chain-link fence. The schoolyard is dotted with swings, with climbing bars and slides, in bright primary colors; a few children have come back early from lunch and are clambering about.
It’s all so clean-cut, so open. Surely behind those glassy, candid doors there are no more long wooden pointers, no black rubber strap, no hard wooden desks in rows; no King and Queen in their stiff regalia, no inkwells; no sniggering about underpants; no bitter, whiskery old women. No cruel secrets. Everything like that is gone.
I come around the back corner, and there is the eroded hill, with its few sparse trees. That much is still the same, then.
No one’s up there.
I climb up the wooden steps, stand where I used to stand. Where I am still standing, never having been away. The voices of the children from the playground below could be any children’s voices, from any time, the light under the trees thickens, turns malevolent. Ill will surrounds me. It’s hard to breathe. I feel as if I’m pushing against something, a pressure on me, like opening the door against a snowstorm.
Get me out