Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [52]
But as soon as my father is out of the room Cordelia turns to face me. Her expression is sad rather than angry. She shakes her head. “How could you?” she says. “How could you be so impolite? You didn’t even answer him. You know what this means, don’t you? I’m afraid you’ll have to be punished. What do you have to say for yourself?” And I have nothing to say.
I’m standing outside the closed door of Cordelia’s room. Cordelia, Grace, and Carol are inside. They’re having a meeting. The meeting is about me. I am just not measuring up, although they are giving me every chance. I will have to do better. But better at what?
Perdie and Mirrie come up the stairs, along the hall, in their armor of being older. I long to be as old as they are. They’re the only people who have any real power over Cordelia, that I can see. I think of them as my allies; or I think they would be my allies if they only knew. Knew what? Even to myself I am mute.
“Hello, Elaine,” they say. Now they say, “What’s the little game today? Hide-and-seek?”
“I can’t tell,” I answer. They smile at me, condescending and kind, and head toward their room, to do their toenails and talk about older things.
I lean against the wall. From behind the door comes the indistinct murmur of voices, of laughter, exclusive and luxurious. Cordelia’s Mummie drifts by, humming to herself. She’s wearing her painting smock. There’s a smudge of apple-green on her cheek. She smiles at me, the smile of an angel, benign but remote. “Hello, dear,” she says. “You tell Cordelia there’s a cookie for you girls, in the tin.”
“You can come in now,” says the voice of Cordelia from inside the room. I look at the closed door, at the doorknob, at my own hand moving up, as if it’s no longer a part of me.
This is how it goes. It’s the kind of thing girls of this age do to one another, or did then, but I’d had no practice in it. As my daughters approached this age, the age of nine, I watched them anxiously. I scrutinized their fingers for bites, their feet, the ends of their hair. I asked them leading questions: “Is everything all right, are your friends all right?” And they looked at me as if they had no idea what I was talking about, why I was so anxious. I thought they’d give themselves away somehow: nightmares, moping. But there was nothing I could see, which may only have meant they were good at deception, as good as I was. When their friends arrived at our house to play, I scanned their faces for signs of hypocrisy. Standing in the kitchen, I listened to their voices in the other room. I thought I would be able to tell. Or maybe it was worse. Maybe my daughters were doing this sort of thing themselves, to someone else. That would account for their blandness, the absence of bitten fingers, their level blue-eyed gaze.
Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence, but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
• • •
It turns colder and colder. I lie with my knees up, as close to my body as I can get them. I’m peeling the skin off my feet; I can do it without looking, by touch. I worry about what I’ve said today, the expression on my face, how I walk, what I wear, because all of these things need improvement. I am not normal, I am not like other girls. Cordelia tells me so, but she will help me. Grace and Carol will help me too. It will take hard work and a long time.
In the mornings I get out of bed, put on my clothes, the stiff cotton waist with the garters, the ribbed stockings, the nubbled wool pullover, the plaid skirt. I remember these clothes as cold. Probably they were cold.
I put my shoes on, over my stockings and my peeled feet.
I go out to the kitchen, where my mother is cooking breakfast. There’s a pot with porridge in it, Red River cereal or oatmeal or