Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [51]
As for the girls, my girls at any rate, they seem to have been born with some kind of protective coating, some immunity I lacked. They look you in the eye, level and measuring, they sit at the kitchen table and the air around lights up with their lucidity. They are sane, or so I like to think. My saving graces.
They amaze me, they always have. When they were little I felt I had to protect them from certain things about myself, the fear, the messier parts of the marriages, the days of nothing. I didn’t want to pass anything on to them, anything of mine they would be better off without. At those times I would lie on the floor in the dark, with the curtains drawn and the door closed. I would say, Mummy has a headache. Mummy’s working. But they didn’t seem to need that protection, they seemed to take everything in, look at it straight, accept everything. “Mummy’s in there lying on the floor. She’ll be fine tomorrow,” I heard Sarah tell Anne when one was ten and the other was four. And so I was fine. Such faith, like the faith in sunrise or the phases of the moon, sustained me. It must be this sort of thing that keeps God going.
Who knows what they’ll make of me later on, who knows what they’ve already made of me? I would like them to be the happy end of my story. But of course they are not the end of their own.
Someone comes up behind me, a sudden voice out of thin air. She startles me. “May I help you?” It’s a saleslady, an older woman this time. Middle-aged. My age, I then think, discouraged. Mine and Cordelia’s.
I’m standing among the plaid dresses, fingering a sleeve. God knows how long I’ve been doing it. Have I been talking out loud? My throat feels tight and my feet hurt. But whatever else may be in store for me, I do not intend to slide off my trolley tracks in the middle of Simpsons Girlswear.
“The food hall,” I say.
She smiles gently. She is tired, and I am a disappointment to her, I don’t want any plaid. “Oh, you need to be right downstairs,” she says, “in the cellar.” Kindly, she directs me.
22
The black door opens. I’m sitting in the mouse-dropping and formaldehyde smell of the building, on the window ledge, with the heat from the radiator going up my legs, watching out the window as the fairies and gnomes and snowballs below me slog through the drizzle to the tune of “Jingle Bells” played by a brass band. The fairies look foreshortened, damaged, streaked by the dust and rain on the window glass; my breath makes a foggy circle. My brother isn’t here, he’s too old for it. This is what he said. I have the whole window ledge to myself.
On the window ledge beside mine, Cordelia and Grace and Carol are sitting, jammed in together, whispering and giggling. I have to sit on a window ledge by myself because they aren’t speaking to me. It’s something I said wrong, but I don’t know what it is because they won’t tell me. Cordelia says it will be better for me to think back over everything I’ve said today and try to pick out the wrong thing. That way I will learn not to say such a thing again. When I’ve guessed the right answer, then they will speak to me again. All of this is for my own good, because they are my best friends and they want to help me improve. So this is what I’m thinking about as the pipe band goes past in sodden fur hats, and the drum majorettes with their bare wet legs and red smiles and dripping hair: what did I say wrong? I can’t remember having said anything different from what I would ordinarily say.
My father walks into the room, wearing his white lab coat. He’s working in another part of the building, but he’s come to check on us. “Enjoying the parade, girls?” he says.
“Oh yes, thank you,” Carol says, and giggles. Grace says, “Yes, thank you.” I say nothing. Cordelia gets down off her windowsill and slides up onto mine, sitting close beside me.
“We’re enjoying it extremely, thank you very much,” she says in her voice for adults. My parents think she has beautiful manners. She puts an arm around me, gives me a little squeeze, a squeeze of complicity,