Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [95]
His school is a private school for brainy boys, though not an expensive one: you get in by passing tough exams. My parents asked me, a little anxiously, if I wanted to go to a private school for girls; they thought I’d feel left out if they didn’t make the effort for me too. I know about these schools, where you have to wear kilts and play field hockey. I said they were for snobs and had low academic standards, which was true. But in fact I wouldn’t be caught dead in a girls’ school. The idea fills me with claustrophobic panic: a school with nothing in it but girls would be like a trap.
My brother is listening to Jack Benny too. As he listens, he stuffs the cheese squares into his mouth with his left hand, but his right hand holds a pencil, and this hand is never still. He hardly looks at the scrap pad on which he’s doodling, but once in a while he tears off a sheet and crumples it up. These crumpled notes land on the floor. When I gather them up to put them into the wastebasket after the show, I see that they’re covered with numbers, long lines of numbers and symbols that go on and on, like writing, like a letter in code.
My brother sometimes has friends over. They sit in his room with the chess table between them, not moving except for their hands, which lift, hover over the board, plunge down. Sometimes they grunt or say “Aha” or “Trade you” or “Got you back”; or they exchange new, obscure good-natured insults: “You surd!” “You square root!” “You throwback!” The captured chess pieces, knights and pawns and bishops, line up on the outskirts of the board. Once in a while, to see how the game is going, I bring in glasses of milk and vanilla-chocolate pin-wheel cookies which I’ve made out of the Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook. This is a form of showing-off on my part, but it doesn’t get much response. They grunt, drink the milk with their left hands, stuff in the cookies, their eyes never leaving the board. The bishops topple, the queen falls, the king is encircled. “Mate in two,” they say. A finger comes down, knocks over the king. “Best of five.” And they start again.
In the evenings my brother studies. Sometimes he does this in a curious way. He stands on his head, to improve the circulation to his brain, or he throws spitballs at the ceiling. The area around his ceiling light fixture is pimply with little wads of once-chewed paper. At other times he indulges in manic bouts of physical activity: he splits huge piles of kindling, much more than is needed, or goes running down in the ravine, wearing disgraceful baggy pants and a forest-green sweater even more unraveled than his maroon one, and frayed gray running shoes that look like the kind you see one of in vacant lots. He says he’s training for the marathon.
A lot of the time my brother doesn’t seem aware of me. He’s thinking about other things, solemn things that are important. He sits at the dinner table, his right hand moving, pinching a breadcrust into pellets, staring at the wall behind my mother’s head, on which there is a picture of three milkweed pods in a vase, while my father explains why the human race is doomed. This time it’s because we’ve discovered insulin. All the diabetics aren’t dying the way they used to, they’re living long enough so that they’re passing the diabetes on to their children. Soon, by the law of geometric progression, we’ll all be diabetics, and since insulin is made from cows’ stomachs the whole world will be covered with insulin-producing cows, the parts