Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [54]
But these times don’t last long. Carol cries too easily and noisily, she gets carried away with her own crying. She draws attention, she can’t be depended on not to tell. There’s a recklessness in her, she can be pushed just so far, she has a weak sense of honor, she’s reliable only as an informer. If this is obvious to me, it must be even more obvious to Cordelia.
Other days appear normal. Cordelia seems to forget about improving anybody, and I think she may have given up on it. I’m expected to behave as if nothing has ever happened. But it’s hard for me to do this, because I feel I’m always being watched. At any time I may step over some line I don’t even know is there.
Last year I was hardly ever home, by myself, after school or on weekends. Now I want to be. I make excuses so I won’t have to go out and play. I still call it playing.
“I have to help my mother,” I say. This has a ring of truth to it. Girls do have to help their mothers, sometimes; Grace in particular has to help her mother. But it’s less true than I would like it to be. My mother doesn’t linger over housework, she’d rather be outside raking up leaves in the fall, shoveling snow in the winter, pulling weeds in the spring. When I help her I slow her down. But I dangle around the kitchen, saying, “Can I help?” until she gives me a duster and has me dust the scrolled legs of the dining table, or the edges of the bookcases; or I cut up dates, chop nuts, grease the muffin cups with a corner of waxed paper torn from the inside wrapper of the Crisco box; or I rinse the wash.
I like rinsing the wash. The laundry room is small and enclosed, secret, underground. On the shelves there are packages of odd, power-filled substances: laundry starch in white twisted shapes like bird droppings, bluing to make the whites look whiter, Sunlight soap in bars, Javex bleach with a skull and crossbones on it, reeking of sanitation and death.
The washing machine itself is tubular white enamel, a hulk on four spindly legs. It dances slowly across the floor, chug-lug, chug-lug, the clothes and the soapy water moving as if boiling sluggishly, like cloth porridge. I watch it, hands on the edge of the tub, chin on hands, my body dragging downward from this ledge, not thinking about anything. The water turns gray and I feel virtuous because of all the dirt that’s coming out. It’s as if I myself am doing this just by looking.
My job is to run the washed clothes through the wringer into the laundry sink full of clean water and then into the second laundry sink for the second rinse, and after that into the creaky laundry basket. After that my mother takes the clothes outside and hangs them onto the clothesline with wooden clothespins. Sometimes I do this too. In the cold the clothes freeze stiff, like plywood. One day a small neighborhood boy collects horse buns, from the milk wagon horse, and puts them along the bottom folds of the freshly washed double-hung white sheets. All sheets are white, all milk comes from horses.
The wringer is two rubber rollers, the color of pale flesh, that revolve around and around, the clothes squeezing in between them, water and suds squooshing out like juice. I roll up my sleeves, stand on tiptoe, rummage in the tub and haul up the sopping underpants and slips and pajamas, which feel like something you might touch just before you know it’s a drowned person. I poke the corners of the clothes in between the wringers and they are grabbed and dragged through, the arms of the shirts ballooning with trapped air, suds dripping from the cuffs. I’ve been told to be very careful when doing this: women can get their hands caught in wringers, and other parts of their bodies, such as hair. I think about what would happen to my hand if it did get caught: the blood and flesh squeezing up my arm like a traveling bulge, the hand coming out the other side flat as a glove, white as paper. This would