Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [22]
I think Carol Campbell is a sissy. At the same time I find myself being a little proud of her delicacy. My brother looks at her in an odd way: with contempt, true, and if I myself said such a thing he would make fun of me. But there’s an undertone, like an invisible nod, as if something he wants to suspect has come true after all.
By rights he should ignore her after this, but he tries her out on the jars of lizards and ox eyeballs. “Ew,” she says. “What if they put one down your back?” My brother says how would she like some for dinner? He makes chewing and slurping noises.
“Ew,” says Carol, screwing up her face and wriggling all over. I can’t pretend to be shocked and disgusted too: my brother wouldn’t be convinced. Neither can I join in the game of making up revolting foods, such as toadburgers and leech chewing gum, although if we were alone or with other boys I would do it without a second thought. So I say nothing.
After we get back from the building I go to Carol’s house again. She asks me if I want to see her mother’s new twin set. I don’t know what this is, but it sounds intriguing, so I say yes. She takes me stealthily into her mother’s bedroom, saying that she’ll really get it if we’re caught, and shows me the twin set, folded on a shelf. The twin set is just two sweaters, both the same color, one with buttons down the front, the other without. I’ve already seen Mrs. Campbell wearing a different twin set, a beige one, her breasts pronging out, the buttoned sweater draped over her shoulders like a cape. So this is all twin sets are. I’m disappointed, because I was expecting something to do with twins.
Carol’s mother and father don’t sleep in one big bed, the way mine do. Instead they sleep in two little beds, exactly alike, with matching pink chenille bedspreads and matching night tables. These beds are called twin beds, which makes more sense to me than the twin set. Still, it’s strange to think of Mr. and Mrs. Campbell lying in them at night, with different heads—his with a mustache, hers without—but nevertheless twinlike, identical, under the sheets and blankets. It’s the matching bedspreads, the night tables, the lamps, the bureaus, the doubleness of everything in their room, that gives me this impression. My own parents’ room is less symmetrical, and also less neat.
Carol says her mother wears rubber gloves while washing the dishes. She shows me the rubber gloves and a spray thing attached to the water tap. She turns on the tap and sprays the inside of the sink, and part of the floor by accident, until Mrs. Campbell comes in, wearing her beige twin set and frowning, and says hadn’t we better go upstairs to play. Possibly she isn’t frowning. She has a mouth that turns slightly down even when she’s smiling, so it’s hard to tell whether she’s pleased or not. Her hair is the same color as Carol’s, but done in a cold wave all over her head. It’s Carol who points out that this is a cold wave. A cold wave has nothing to do with water. It’s like doll hair, very tidy and arranged, as if sewn into place.
Carol is more and more gratified the more bewildered I am. “You didn’t know what a cold wave is?” she says, delighted. She’s eager to explain things to me, name them, display them. She shows me around her house as if it’s a museum, as if she personally has collected everything in it. Standing in the downstairs hall, where there is a coat tree—“You’ve never seen a coat tree?”—she says I am her best friend.
Carol has another best friend, who is sometimes her best friend and sometimes not. Her name is Grace Smeath. Carol points her out to me, on the bus, the same way she’s pointed out the twin set and the coat tree: as an object