Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [49]
PART
FIVE
WRINGER
21
I leave the gallery, walk east. I need to go shopping, get some decent food, organize. When I’m by myself I revert to the times when I would forget about eating, stay up all night working, go until I felt an odd sensation I’d identify after some thought as hunger. Then I’d go through the refrigerator like a vacuum cleaner, sucking in whatever there was. Leftovers.
This morning there were eggs, but there are no more eggs. There’s no more bread, there’s no more milk. Why were there eggs and bread and milk in the first place? It must have been a stash of Jon’s, he must eat there sometimes. Or could it have been that he got this stuff for me? It’s hardly believable.
I will buy oranges, yogurt without the jam. I will have a positive attitude, take care of myself, I’ll feed myself enzymes, and friendly bacteria. These good thoughts carry me until I’m right downtown.
• • •
This is where Eaton’s used to be, here on this corner, yellow and foursquare. Now there’s a huge building in its place, what they call a shopping complex, as if shopping were a psychic disease. It’s glassy and be-tiled, green as an iceberg.
Across the street from it is known territory: Simpsons department store. I know it has a food hall somewhere. In the plate-glass windows there are heaps of bath towels, overstuffed sofas and chairs, sheets in modern prints. I wonder where all this cloth ends up. People cart it away, stuff it into their houses: the nesting instinct. A less attractive concept if you’ve ever seen a nest up close. There must be a limit to how much cloth you can cram into any one house, but of course it’s disposable. You used to buy for quality, things that would last. You kept your clothes until they were part of you, you checked the hemlines, the way the buttons were sewed on, you rubbed the cloth between your finger and thumb.
The next windows contain disgruntled mannequins, their pelvises thrust out, their shoulders flung this way and that, making them look like hunchbacked ax murderers. I guess this is the look now: surly aggression. On the sidewalks there are a lot of androgynes, in the flesh, the girls in the black leather jackets and tough boots of boys, crewcuts, ducktails, the boys with the sullen pouty look of those women on the front covers of fashion magazines, their hair gelled into quills. At a distance I can’t tell the difference, though they themselves probably can. They make me feel outmoded.
What are they aiming for? Is each an imitation of the other? Or does it only seem that way to me because they’re all so alarmingly young? Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.
But I suppose that’s what Cordelia and I looked like then, to older people, crossing the street right here with our collars turned up and our eyebrows plucked into sceptical arches, swaggering in our rubber boots and straining for nonchalance, on our way down to Union Station where the trains came in, to put our quarters into the photo machine, four shots in monochrome, wallet-sized. Cordelia with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, her eyelids half closed, trying for sultry. Ultrasharp.
• • •
I revolve through the revolving doors into Simpsons, where I become lost immediately. They’ve changed the whole thing over. It used to be sedate wood-rimmed glass counters, with gloves in standard models, appropriate wristwatches, accent scarves in floral prints. Serious-minded good taste. Now it’s a cosmetic fairground: silver trim, gold pillars, marquee lights, brand-name letters the size of a human head. The air is saturated with the stink of perfumes at war. There are video screens on which flawless complexions turn, preen, sigh through their parted lips, are caressed. On other screens are close-ups of skin pores, before and after, details of regimes for everything, your hands, your neck, your thighs. Your elbows, especially your elbows: aging begins at the elbows and metastasizes.
This is religion. Voodoo and spells.