Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [74]
“Oh, I’m so sick, oh, I’m so sick,” Carol moans, twisting her body on the bed. “Nurse, do something!”
“We have to listen to her heart,” says Cordelia. She pulls up Carol’s sweater, then her undershirt. We’ve all been to the doctor, we know about the brusque humiliations involved. “This won’t hurt.” There are the breasts, puffy-looking, their nipples bluish, like veins on a forehead. “Feel her heart,” Cordelia says to me.
I don’t want to. I don’t want to touch that swollen, unnatural flesh. “Go on,” says Cordelia. “Do as you’re told.”
“She’s being disobedient,” says Grace.
I reach out my hand, place it on the left breast. It feels like a balloon half filled with water, or like lukewarm oatmeal porridge. Carol giggles. “Oh, your hand’s so cold!” Nausea grips me.
“Her heart, stupid,” says Cordelia. “I didn’t say her tit. Don’t you know the difference?”
An ambulance comes and my mother is carried out to it on a stretcher. I don’t see this, Stephen tells me about it. It was in the middle of the night when I was asleep, but Stephen has taken to getting up secretly and looking out of his bedroom window at the stars. He says you can see the stars much better when most of the lights in the city are off. He says that the way to wake up at night without using an alarm clock is to drink two glasses of water before you go to bed. Then you have to concentrate on the hour you want to wake up. This is what the Indians used to do.
So he was awake, and listened, and snuck across to the other side of the house to look out the window there, where he could see what was going on out on the street. He says there were flashing lights but no siren, so it’s no wonder I didn’t hear anything.
When I get up in the morning my father is in the kitchen frying bacon. He knows how to do this, though he never does it in the city, only over campfires. In my parents’ bedroom there’s a pile of crumpled sheets on the floor, and the blankets are folded up on a chair; on the mattress there’s a huge oval splotch of blood. But when I come home from school the sheets are gone and the bed is made up, and there is nothing more to be seen.
My father says there has been an accident. But how can you have an accident lying in bed asleep? Stephen says it was a baby, a baby that came out too soon. I don’t believe him: women who are going to have babies have big fat stomachs, and my mother didn’t have one.
My mother comes back from the hospital and is weaker. She has to rest. No one is used to this, she isn’t used to it herself. She resists it, getting up as usual, putting her hand on the wall or on the edges of the furniture as she walks, standing hunched over at the kitchen sink, a cardigan over her shoulders. In the middle of something she’s doing she has to go and lie down. Her skin is pale and dry. She looks as if she’s listening to a sound, outside the house perhaps, but there is no sound. Sometimes I have to repeat things twice before she hears me. It’s as if she’s gone off somewhere else, leaving me behind; or forgotten I am there.
All of this is more frightening, even, than the splotch of blood. Our father tells us to help out more, which means that he’s frightened as well.
After she gets better I find a small knitted sock, pastel green, in my mother’s sewing basket. I wonder why she would have knitted only one sock. She doesn’t like knitting, so maybe she knitted one and then got tired of it.
I dream that Mrs. Finestein from next door and Mr. Banerji are my real parents.
I dream that my mother has had a baby, one of a set of twins. The baby is gray. I don’t know where the other twin is.
I dream that our house has burned down. Nothing of it remains; blackened stumps dot the place where it’s been, as if there has been a forest fire. A huge mountain of mud rises beside it.
My parents are dead but also alive. They’re lying side by side, in their summer clothes, and sinking down through the earth, which is hard but transparent, like ice. They look up at me sorrowfully as they recede.
32
It’s Saturday