Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [47]
He still trades comic books, but effortlessly, absentmindedly. Because he cares less about them he makes better trades. The comic books pile up under his bed, stacks and stacks of them, but he seldom reads them any more when the other boys aren’t around.
• • •
My brother exhausts the chemistry set. Now he has a star map, pinned to the wall of his room, and at night he turns out the lights and sits beside the darkened open window, in the cold, with his maroon sweater pulled on over his pajamas, gazing skyward. He has a pair of my father’s binoculars, which he’s allowed to use as long as he keeps the strap around his neck so he won’t drop them. What he really wants next is a telescope.
When he allows me to join him, and when he feels like talking, he teaches me new names, charts the reference points: Orion, the Bear, the Dragon, the Swan. These are constellations. Every one of them is made up of a huge number of stars, hundreds of times bigger and hotter than our own sun. These stars are light-years away, he says. We aren’t really seeing them at all, we’re just seeing the light they sent out years, hundreds of years, thousands of years ago. The stars are like echoes. I sit there in my flannelette pajamas, shivering, the back of my neck hurting from the upward tilt, squinting into the cold and the infinitely receding darkness, into the black caldron where the fiery stars boil and boil. His stars are different from the ones in the Bible: they’re wordless, they flame in an obliterating silence. I feel as if my body is dissolving and I am being drawn up and up, like thinning mist, into a vast emptying space.
“Arcturus,” my brother says. It’s a foreign word, one I don’t know, but I know the tone of his voice: recognition, completion, something added to a set. I think of his jars of marbles in the spring, the way he dropped the marbles into the jar, one by one, counting. My brother is collecting again; he’s collecting stars.
20
Black cats and paper pumpkins gather on the school windows. On Halloween, Grace wears an ordinary lady’s dress, Carol a fairy outfit, Cordelia a clown suit. I wear a sheet, because that’s what there is. We walk from door to door, our brown paper grocery bags filling with candy apples, popcorn balls, peanut brittle, chanting at each door: Shell out! Shell out! The witches are out! In the front windows, on the porches, the large orange heads of the pumpkins float, glowing, unbodied. The next day we take our pumpkins to the wooden bridge and throw them over the edge, watching them smash open on the ground below. Now it’s November.
Cordelia is digging a hole, in her back garden where there’s no sod. She has started several holes before, but they have been unsuccessful, they struck rock. This one is more promising. She digs with a pointed shovel; sometimes we help her. It isn’t a small hole but a large, square hole; it gets deeper and deeper as the dirt piles up around it. She says we can use it for a clubhouse, we can put chairs down in the hole and sit on them. When it’s deep enough she wants to cover it over with boards, for a roof. She’s already collected the boards, scrap boards from the two new houses they’re building near her house. She’s very wrapped up in this hole, it’s hard to get her to play anything else.
On the darkening streets the poppies blossom, for Remembrance Day. They’re made of fuzzy cloth, red like valentine hearts, with a black spot and a pin through the center. We wear them on our coats. We memorize a poem about them:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow,
Between the crosses row on row
That mark our place.