Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [28]
One day someone appears in the schoolyard with a bag of marbles, and the next day everyone has them. The boys desert the boys’ playground and throng into the common playground in front of the BOYS and GIRLS doors; they need to come to this side of the playground, because marbles have to be played on a smooth surface and the boys’ yard is all cinders.
For marbles you’re either the person setting up the target or the person shooting. To shoot you kneel down, sight, and roll your marble at the target marble like a bowling ball. If you hit it you keep it, and your own marble too. If you miss, you lose your marble. If you’re setting up, you sit on the cement with your legs spread open and put a marble on a crack in front of you. It can be an ordinary marble, but these don’t get many shooters, unless you offer two for one. Usually the targets are more valuable: cat’s eyes, clear glass with a bloom of colored petals in the center, red or yellow or green or blue; puries, flawless like colored water or sapphires or rubies; waterbabies, with undersea filaments of color suspended in them; metal bowlies; aggies, like marbles, only bigger. These exotics are passed from winner to winner. It’s cheating to buy them; they have to be won.
Those with target marbles call out the names of their wares: purie, purie, bowlie, bowlie, the two-syllable words drawn out into a singsong, the voice descending, the way you call dogs, or children when they’re lost. These cries are mournful, although they aren’t meant to be. I sit that way myself, the cold marbles rolling in between my legs, gathering in my outspread skirt, calling out cat’s eye, cat’s eye, in a regretful tone, feeling nothing but avarice and a pleasurable terror.
The cat’s eyes are my favorites. If I win a new one I wait until I’m by myself, then take it out and examine it, turning it over and over in the light. The cat’s eyes really are like eyes, but not the eyes of cats. They’re the eyes of something that isn’t known but exists anyway; like the green eye of the radio; like the eyes of aliens from a distant planet. My favorite one is blue. I put it into my red plastic purse to keep it safe. I risk my other cat’s eyes to be shot at, but not this one.
I don’t collect many marbles because I’m not a very good shot. My brother is deadly. He takes five common marbles to school with him in a blue Crown Royal Whisky bag and comes back with the bag and his pockets bulging. He keeps his winnings in screw-top Crown preserving jars, donated by my mother, which he lines up on his desk. He never talks about his skill though. He just lines up the jars.
One Saturday afternoon he puts all his best marbles—his puries, his waterbabies and cat’s eyes, his gems and wonders—into a single jar. He takes it down into the ravine somewhere, in under the wooden bridge, and buries it. Then he makes an elaborate treasure map of where it’s buried, puts it in another jar, and buries that one too. He tells me he’s done these things but he doesn’t say why, or where the jars are buried.
13
The raw house and its lawn of mud and the mountain of earth beside it recede behind us; I watch them out of the back window of the car, from where I sit jammed in among the boxes of food, the sleeping bags and raincoats. I’m wearing a blue-striped jersey of my brother’s, a worn pair of corduroy pants. Grace and Carol stand under the apple trees, in their skirts, waving, disappearing. They still have to go to school; I don’t. I envy them. Already the tarry, rubbery travel smell is wrapping itself around me, but I don’t welcome it. I’m being wrenched away from my new life, the life of girls.
I settle back into the familiar perspective, the backs of heads, the ears, and past them the white line of