Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [61]
I tell Mrs. Finestein that I can’t do the job any more because I have too much schoolwork. I can’t tell her the real reason: that in some obscure way Brian is not safe with me. I have images of Brian headfirst in a snowbank; Brian hurtling in his carriage down the icy hill by the side of the bridge, straight toward the creek full of dead people; Brian tossed into the air, his bunny ears flung upwards in terror. I have only a limited ability to say no.
“Honey, that’s all right,” she says, looking into my raw, watery eyes. She puts her arm around me and gives me a hug and an extra nickel. No one has ever called me honey before this.
I go home, knowing I have failed her, and also myself. Bugger, I think to myself. I say it over and over until it disappears into its own syllables. Erbug, erbug. It’s a word with no meaning, like kike, but it reeks of ill will, it has power. What have I done to my father?
I take all of Mrs. Finestein’s King’s-head nickels and spend them at the store on the way home from school. I buy licorice whips, jelly beans, many-layered blackballs with the seed in the middle, packages of fizzy sherbet you suck up through a straw. I dole them out equally, these offerings, these atonements, into the waiting hands of my friends. In the moment just before giving, I am loved.
26
It’s Saturday. Nothing has happened all morning. Icicles form on the eaves trough above the south window, dripping in the sunlight with a steady sound like a leak. My mother is baking in the kitchen, my father and brother are elsewhere, I eat my lunch alone, watching the icicles.
The lunch is crackers and orange cheese and a glass of milk, and a bowl of alphabet soup. My mother thinks of alphabet soup as a cheerful treat for children. The alphabet soup has letters floating in it, white letters: capital A’s and O’s and S’s and R’s, the occasional X or Z. When I was younger I would fish the letters out and spell things with them on the edge of the plate, or eat my name, letter by letter. Now I just eat the soup, taking no particular interest. The soup is orangey-red and has a flavor, but the letters themselves taste like nothing.
The telephone rings. It’s Grace. “You want to come out and play?” she says, in her neutral voice that is at the same time blank and unsoft, like glazed paper. I know Cordelia is standing beside her. If I say no, I will be accused of something. If I say yes, I will have to do it. I say yes.
“We’ll come and get you,” Grace says.
My stomach feels dull and heavy, as if it’s full of earth. I put on my snowsuit and boots, my knitted hat and mittens. I tell my mother I’m going out to play. “Don’t get chilled,” she says.
The sun on the snow is blinding. There’s a crust of ice over the drifts, where the top layer of snow has melted and then refrozen. My boots make clean-edged footprints through the crust. There’s no one around. I walk through the white glare, toward Grace’s house. The air is wavery, filled with light, overfilled; I can hear the pressure of it against my eyes. I feel translucent, like a hand held over a flashlight or the pictures of jellyfish I’ve seen in magazines, floating in the sea like watery flesh balloons.
At the end of the street I can see the three of them, very dark, walking toward me. Their coats look almost black. Even their faces when they come closer look too dark, as if they’re in shadow.
Cordelia says, “We said we would come and get you. We didn’t say you could come here.”
I say nothing.
Grace says, “She should answer when we talk to her.”
Cordelia says, “What’s the matter, are you deaf?”
Their voices sound far away. I turn aside and throw up onto a snowbank. I didn’t mean to do it and didn’t know I was going to. I feel sick to my stomach every morning, I’m used to that, but this is the real thing, alphabet soup mixed with shards of chewed-up