Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [55]
“You coming out to play?” says Cordelia, on our way home from school.
“I have to help my mother,” I say.
“Again?” says Grace. “How come she does that so much? She never used to do it.” Grace has begun talking about me in the third person, like one grown-up to another, when Cordelia is there.
I think of saying my mother is sick, but my mother is so obviously healthy I know I won’t get away with this.
“She thinks she’s too good for us,” says Cordelia. Then, to me: “Do you think you’re too good for us?”
“No,” I say. Thinking you are too good is bad.
“We’ll come and ask your mother if you can play,” says Cordelia, switching back to her concerned, friendly voice. “She won’t make you work all the time. It isn’t fair.”
And my mother smiles and says yes, as if she’s pleased that I’m so much in demand, and I am pried away from the muffin cups and the washing machine wringer, expelled into the outside air.
On Sundays I go to the church with the onion on top of it, crammed into the Smeaths’ car with all the Smeaths, Mr. Smeath, Mrs. Smeath, Aunt Mildred, Grace’s younger sisters, whose nostrils in the winter season are forever plugged with yellowy-green snot. Mrs. Smeath seems pleased about this arrangement, but she is pleased with herself, for going out of her way, for displaying charity. She’s not especially pleased with me. I can tell this by the line between her eyebrows when she looks at me, although she smiles with her closed lips, and by the way she keeps asking whether I wouldn’t like to bring my brother next time, or my parents? I focus on her chest, on her single breast that goes all the way down to her waist, with her dark-red, black-spotted heart beating within it, gasping in out, in out, out of breath like a fish on shore, and shake my head, ashamed. My failure to produce these other members of my family tells against me.
I have memorized the names of all the books of the Bible, in order, and the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, and most of the Beatitudes. I’ve been getting ten out of ten on my Bible quizzes and my memory work, but I’m beginning to falter. In Sunday school we have to stand up and recite, out loud, in front of the others, and Grace watches me. She watches everything I do on Sundays, and reports on me, matter-of-factly, to Cordelia.
“She didn’t stand up straight in Sunday school yesterday.” Or: “She was a goody-goody.” I believe each of these comments: my shoulders sag, my spine crumples, I exude the wrong kind of goodness; I see myself shambling crookedly, I make an effort to stand straighter, my body rigid with anxiety. And it’s true that I got ten out of ten, again, and Grace only got nine. Is it wrong to be right? How right should I be, to be perfect? The next week I put five wrong answers, deliberately.
“She only got five out of ten on Bible,” Grace says on Monday.
“She’s getting stupider,” Cordelia says. “You aren’t really that stupid. You’ll have to try harder than that!”
Today is White Gift Sunday. We have all brought cans of food from home for the poor, wrapped up in white tissue paper. Mine are Habitant pea soup and Spam. I suspect they are the wrong things, but they’re what my mother had in the cupboard. The idea of white gifts bothers me: such hard gifts, made uniform, bleached of their identity and colors. They look dead. Inside those blank, sinister bundles of tissue paper piled up at the front of the church there could be anything.
Grace and I sit on the wooden benches in the church basement, watching the illuminated slides on the wall, singing the words to the songs, while the piano plods onward in the darkness.
Jesus bids us shine
With a pure, clear light,
Like a little candle
Burning in the night:
In this world is darkness;
So let us shine,
You in your small corner,
And I in mine.
I want to shine like a candle. I want to be good, to follow instructions, to do what