Cat's Eye

Elaine, 13, tells her friend Cordelia that time is a dimension as they ride the streetcar to downtown Toronto. They make fun of the bodies and clothes of the older women on the streetcar.

The narrative skips to the present, where Elaine considers her own middle-aged body, which she considers and judges as she did those other women. She wonders where Cordelia is now and what she looks like, picturing her with sagging breasts and graying hair. She catches imagined glimpses of this Cordelia on every street corner. She imagines with satisfaction terrible things that might happen to Cordelia: a man attacking her in the street, her body lying unconscious in a hospital bed, or her trapped in an iron lung in a room with Elaine, who can both move and speak. She knows that Cordelia must be living somewhere and that they could easily bump into each other on the street, but she is uncertain how she would react if they did. Elaine walks for hours through Toronto and notes the changes that have occurred in the city. She has started to chew her fingers again, and the taste of blood in her mouth fills her with nostalgia.

In her ex-husband Jon’s Toronto apartment, the adult Elaine thinks about Stephen and rising prices. She thinks she has reached the middle of her life, which she imagines as the middle of a bridge spanning a river.

Elaine hates Toronto; she feels lost there. Now she lives in British Columbia in a landscape that feels unreal. Her second husband, Ben, runs a travel agency. She has two grown-up daughters, Sarah and Anne, who have “sensible names” and sensible lives, unlike Cordelia. Elaine identifies as a painter rather than an artist, a title she finds embarrassing. She is in Toronto because a gallery is running a retrospective of her work.

Elaine remembers the last time she saw Jon, at her daughter’s college graduation. They snuck out and got drunk together, to the bemusement of her current husband. Jon is an artist too and used to construct pieces out of found objects. Now he makes special effects for horror movies, and his apartment is filled with models of dismembered body parts.

Elaine dresses in a blue sweatsuit and leaves to visit the gallery, feeling disguised. She sees a flier for her retrospective pasted onto a wall. Someone has drawn a joke mustache on the flier, making her think about the many ways that men can disguise themselves. She wonders if Cordelia will see the poster and if she would recognize Elaine. She wonders whether Cordelia will come to the gallery show.

Elaine remembers her childhood before she moved to Toronto. Her family moved constantly, driving along roads that were mostly empty because of WWII, which Elaine registers only as this emptiness and as a scarcity of meat and cheese. Elaine and her brother walk with their father through the woods. They help him collect caterpillars in bottles of alcohol that smell, Elaine imagines, like the stars. Overnight, they camp or sleep in motels or abandoned logging cabins, and in the winter they unpack furniture from storage into strange apartments. Stephen ropes Elaine into games of war, enthusiastic about the violence he imagines overseas. He sings a song about the war called “Wing and a Prayer” (25), which Elaine imagines is about birds with one wing that can’t fly: The prayer in the song, she thinks, is useless. Stephen wins both the games and their fights, which they keep secret from their parents. One night, Stephen teaches Elaine to see in the dark. In the present, Elaine thinks of these memories as “pictures of the dead” (27).

Elaine spends her eighth birthday in a motel cabin. She receives a camera—in retrospect she is unsure whether she wanted it—and the first picture taken is of her outside the motel room wearing Stephen’s hand-me-down clothes. Elaine wants friends who are girls, like she has read about. The family lives in the hotel for weeks, and Elaine and Stephen do their schoolwork in books. Elaine draws girls and pictures what other little girls are like.

Winter arrives at the cabin, and Elaine and Stephen play together in the snow. Eventually, the family leaves the motel and moves to a new house in Toronto with a muddy garden. The house is unfinished and filled with dead flies, cigarette butts, and dust. Elaine feels trapped and misses the impermanence of their previous existence. Her father works on the house, but it still feels nothing like the picket fences and white curtains she reads about in books.

Both Elaine’s parents have new clothes, and her father has a new job at a university. Their house begins to fill with drawings of insects done by his students; Elaine examines these carefully. On Saturdays Elaine and Stephen go with their father to the university’s zoology building and see snakes, turtles, and rodents, as well as jars of dead animals. In the upstairs labs, they look at slides under microscopes, sometimes secretly putting their fingers, hairs, earwax, or scabs under the lens. Elaine watches the Santa Claus Parade from the lab window and from then on associates Santa Claus with the smell of formaldehyde and mice.

Back in Jon’s apartment, Elaine admits how difficult she finds it to get out of bed sometimes. She remembers Cordelia demanding what she had to say for herself; her answer was always “nothing,” and she felt as if she too was nothing.

The previous night, she tried to call Ben but couldn’t reach him. She wanders around the studio, dresses in the same blue sweatsuit, and goes out. Deciding she no longer likes the black dress she brought with her for the gallery opening, she goes to the fashion district to browse for a new, more colorful one. At one boutique, a teenage girl tries to steal her wallet under the dressing room door. She stamps on the girl’s wrist and imagines it was Cordelia.

Young Elaine and Stephen attend Queen Mary Public School, where girls and boys are segregated. Elaine rarely sees her brother and knows she shouldn’t talk to him at school, as he will get teased. At home, they have a makeshift walkie-talkie system and a language of coded messages that they exchange between their rooms and under the table at dinner. Their relationship has become almost entirely non-verbal, but they are close.

Carol Campbell, who also rides the school bus, becomes Elaine’s friend. She tells Elaine about hairdressers and church and shows her the chintz living room furniture in her house and her father’s false teeth. When Carol visits Elaine, she is incredulous at the army cots her family sleep on, the card table they eat off, and Elaine’s few, old clothes. Carol tells people at school about Elaine’s family, hoping they will admire her for telling these stories.

Elaine and Stephen take Carol to the lab one Saturday. She is afraid of the snakes and the strange animal parts in jars. Elaine feels estranged from her new friend but also from her brother, who delights in Carol’s discomfort. At Carol’s house, Elaine learns about her new friend’s life, including her mother’s twin set, her parents’ twin beds, the rubber gloves for washing up, and the coat tree in the hall.

Through Carol, Elaine meets Grace Smeath, who is a year older and lives in a red brick house that smells, like her, of scouring powder and cooked turnips. Instead of going to the zoology building with Stephen on Saturdays, Elaine plays with her two friends, although sometimes she feels she is only imitating a girl playing. Grace is in charge of the games, which are mostly coloring, playing school, or looking through catalogs, cutting the figures out, and sticking them in scrapbooks. Elaine feels exhausted by the objects in the catalogs but nevertheless begins to want things of her own. The world of girls feels like an easy one in which to participate.

For Christmas, Elaine receives a red plastic purse and a photo album. She takes pictures for it carefully, wary of wasting them.

Grace begins excluding Carol, using her mother’s bad heart as an excuse. Mrs. Smeath is very different from Mrs. Campbell and does not wear makeup or twin sets but house dresses and bibbed aprons. In school, when Elaine has to cut out hearts from red construction paper for Valentine’s Day, she thinks of Mrs. Smeath’s bad heart, imagining a bruised, rotten patch like an apple.

In the present, Elaine realizes she is 10 years older now than Mrs. Smeath was when she was a child. Elaine wonders why she hates Mrs. Smeath so much.

As spring arrives, Stephen and his new friends play in the garden or read comic books in his room. Grace teaches Elaine to skip rope and play ball. New houses are being built in their neighborhood and the girls play in them, although Carol and Grace are afraid to climb into the rafters with Elaine. Everyone begins collecting marbles at school, gambling for the higher value puries, waterbabies, metal bowlies, and cat’s eyes. Elaine loves the cat’s eye marbles and keeps her favorite blue one in her red plastic purse. Stephen collects enough marbles to fill a preserving jar, which he then buries in the ravine near their house, under the wooden foot bridge. Separately he buries another jar with a treasure map. He never tells anyone where they are.

In the summer, Elaine and her family travel north into the wilderness. Elaine feels wrenched away from her new life, but after a while she settles back into the familiarity of solitude with Stephen. They go fishing, and when they catch a fish, Elaine holds it down while Stephen kills it. There is an infestation of forest tent caterpillars that Elaine’s father describes with a reverence usually reserved for “forest fires, or the war” (70). As he expounds on the future demise of humankind, Elaine thinks about Carol and Grace and struggles to remember what they look like.

When Elaine and the family return to Toronto in September, Grace and Carol are standing where they were when she left, but they look different. There is another girl with them.

The third girl introduces herself to Elaine as Cordelia with an adult-like handshake. Elaine feels self-conscious of her disheveled appearance, and Cordelia points out “dog poop” on her shoe, which Elaine protests is only a rotten apple. Cordelia tells her the two are the same color, and Elaine feels taken in by her confiding tone.

Cordelia’s house is bright and new; her mother buys flowers that she puts in vases and employs a cleaner. Elaine realizes for the first time that her family is not rich. Cordelia has two older sisters, Perdie and Mirrie, who play the viola, do ballet, and are, according to Cordelia, “gifted,” which Elaine imagines must be like “vaccinated.” Unlike her sisters, Cordelia refuses a nickname, but they all call their mother “Mummie” and are intimidated by their father. Cordelia wants the other girls to perform plays with her.

On school days, the girls walk home together across the wooden footbridge over the ravine. The water in the ravine flows out of the nearby cemetery, so Cordelia says it is made of dead people. She dares them to go into the water and they refuse, even though Elaine knows her mother goes down into the ravine for walks; the girls are not supposed to enter the ravine because “danger men” are said to lurk there. Instead, they pick flowers and deadly nightshade berries and make pretend meals that Cordelia tells them the dead people will eat.

Because she has to wear a skirt at school rather than the pants she wore over the summer, Elaine has to relearn all the etiquette and rules regarding skirts and underwear. There is much speculation amongst the children about the underwear of female teachers. Miss Lumley, Elaine’s mean teacher, is presumed to wear bloomers. Miss Lumley is enthusiastic in her support of the British Empire; her class sings “God Save the King,” learns the names of the countries in the empire, and looks at pictures of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret in Girl Guide uniforms.

Elaine is not afraid of snakes or worms, but she is afraid of Miss Lumley’s bloomers. She is afraid of the category of “Girls,” which Miss Lumley is part of, too.