Cat's eye (5 page)

On the second floor there are corridors leading into other corridors, lined with shelves that contain jars full of dead lizards or pickled ox eyeballs. In one room there are glass cages with snakes in them, snakes bigger than any we’ve ever seen before. One is a tame boa constrictor, and if the man in charge of it is there he gets it out and winds it around his arm, so we can see how it crushes things to death in order to eat them. We’re allowed to stroke it. Its skin is cool and dry. Other cages have rattlesnakes, and the man shows us how he milks the venom out of their fangs. For this he wears a leather glove. The fangs are curved and hollow, the venom dripping from them is yellow.

In the same room is a cement pool filled with thick-looking greenish water in which large turtles sit and blink or clamber ponderously up onto the rocks provided for them, hissing if we get too close. This room is hotter and steamier than the others because the snakes and turtles need it to be; it smells musky. In yet another room is a cage full of gigantic African cockroaches, white-colored and so poisonous that their keeper has to gas them to make them unconscious every time he opens the cage to feed them or get one out.

Down in the cellar there are shelves and shelves of white rats and black mice, special ones that aren’t wild. They eat food pellets from hoppers in their cages and drink from bottles fitted with eyedroppers. They have chewed-newspaper nests full of pink hairless baby mice. They run over and under one another and sleep in heaps, and sniff one another with their quivering noses. The mouse feeder tells us that if you put a strange mouse into one of their cages, one with the wrong, alien scent, they will bite it to death. The cellar smells strongly of mouse droppings, a smell which wafts upward through the whole building, getting fainter as you go up, mingling with the smell of the green Dustbane used to clean the floors, and with the other smells, the floor polish and furniture wax and formaldehyde and snakes. We don’t find any of the things in the building repulsive. The general arrangements, though not the details, are familiar to us, though we’ve never seen so many mice in one place before and are awed by their numbers and stench. We would like to get the turtles out of their pool and play with them, but since they’re snapping turtles and bad-tempered and can take your fingers off, we know enough not to. My brother wants an ox eyeball out of one of the jars: it’s the sort of thing other boys find impressive. Some of the upstairs rooms are labs. The labs have vast ceilings and blackboards across the front. They contain rows and rows of large dark desks, more like tables than desks, with high stools to sit on. Each desk has two lamps with green glass shades, and two microscopes, old microscopes, with heavy thin tubing and brass fittings.

We’ve seen microscopes before, but not at such length; we can spend a lot of time with them before getting tired of them. Sometimes we’re given slides to look at: butterfly wings, cross-sections of worms, planaria stained with pink and purple dyes so you can see the different parts. At other times we put our fingers under the lenses and examine our fingernails, the pale parts curved like hills against their dark pink sky, the skin around them grainy and creased like the edge of a desert. Or we pull hairs out of our heads to look at them, hard and shiny like the bristles that grow out of the chitonous skins of insects, with the hair roots at the end like tiny onion bulbs.

We like scabs. We pick them off—there isn’t room for a whole arm or leg under the microscope—and turn the magnification up as high as it will go. The scabs look like rocks, bumpy, with a sheen like silica; or else like some kind of fungus. If we can get a scab off a finger we put the finger under and watch the place where the blood oozes out, bright red, in a round button, like a berry. Afterward we lick off the blood. We look at earwax, or snot, or dirt from our toes, checking first to see that there’s no one around: we know without asking that such things would not be approved of. Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly.

This is what we do on Saturday mornings, while our father attends to things in his office and our mother goes grocery shopping. She says it keeps us out of her hair.

The building overlooks University Avenue, which has lawns and some copper-green statues of men on horses. Right across the road is the Ontario Parliament Building, which is also old and dingy. I think it must be another building like the building, filled with long creaky corridors and shelves of pickled lizards and ox eyes.

It’s from the building that we watch our first Santa Claus Parade. We’ve never seen a parade before. You can listen to this parade on the radio, but if you want to actually see it you have to bundle up in your winter clothes and stand on the sidewalk, stomping your feet and rubbing your hands to keep warm. Some people climb up onto the horse statues to get a better view. We don’t have to do this, as we can sit on the window ledge of one of the main labs in the building, separated from the weather by a pane of dusty glass, with blasts of heat from the iron radiator going up our legs. From there we watch as people dressed like snowflakes, like elves, like rabbits, like sugar plum fairies, march past us, strangely truncated because we’re looking down on them. There are bands of bagpipers in kilts, and things like big cakes, with people on them waving, that slide past on wheels. It’s begun to drizzle. Everyone down there looks cold.

Santa Claus is at the end, smaller than expected. His voice and his loudspeaker jingle bells are muted by the dusty glass; he rocks back and forth behind his mechanical reindeer, looking soggy, blowing kisses to the crowd.

I know he isn’t the real Santa Claus, just someone dressed up like him. Still, my idea of Santa Claus has altered, has acquired a new dimension. After this it becomes hard for me to think of him without thinking also of the snakes and the turtles and the pickled eyes, and the lizards floating in their yellow jars, and of the vast, echoing, spicy, ancient and forlorn but also comforting smell of old wood, furniture polish, formaldehyde and distant mice.

Three – Empire Bloomers

T
here are days when I can hardly make it out of bed. I find it an effort to speak. I measure progress in steps, the next one and the next one, as far as the bathroom. These steps are major accomplishments. I focus on taking the cap off the toothpaste, getting the brush up to my mouth. I have difficulty lifting my arm to do even that. I feel I am without worth, that nothing I can do is of any value, least of all to myself.
What do you have to say for yourself?
Cordelia used to ask.
Nothing,
I would say. It was a word! I came to connect with myself, as if I was nothing, as if there was nothing there at all. Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow. I wanted to talk to Ben. I phoned the house but he was out, the machine was on. It was my own voice I heard, cheerful and in control.
Hi there. Ben and I can’t
come to the phone at the moment, but leave a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we
can.
Then a beep.

A disembodied voice, an angel voice, wafting through the air. If I died this minute it would go on like that, placid and helpful, like an electronic afterlife. Hearing it made me want to cry.

“Big hugs,” I said into the empty space. I closed my eyes, thought about the mountains on the coast. That’s home, I told myself. That’s where you really live. Among all that stagey scenery, too beautiful, like a cardboard movie backdrop. It’s not real, it’s not drab, not flat, not grubby enough. They’re working on it though. Go a few miles here, a few miles there, out of sight of the picture windows, and you come to the land of stumps.

Vancouver is the suicide capital of the country. You keep going west until you run out. You come to the edge. Then you fall off.

I crawl out from under the duvet. I am a busy person, in theory. There are things to be done, although none of them are things I want to do. I check through the refrigerator in the kitchenette, dig out an egg, boil it, dump it into a teacup, mush it up. I don’t even glance at the herbal teas, I go straight for the real, vile coffee. Jitter in a cup. It cheers me up to know I’ll soon be so tense. I pace among the severed arms and hollow feet, drinking blackness. I like this studio, I could work here. There’s the right amount of makeshift and dinginess for me. Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I’m in better shape than they are.

Today we hang. An unfortunate term.

I tuck myself into my clothes, handling my arms and legs as if they’re someone else’s, someone not very big or not very well. It’s the powder-blue sweatsuit again today; I didn’t bring very much clothing with me. I don’t like to check things, I like to jam it all under the airplane seat. At the back of my mind is the idea that if something goes wrong, up there in the air, I’ll be able to grab my bag out from under the seat and jump out the window, gracefully, without leaving any of my possessions behind. I head out into the open, walk quickly along the street, mouth slightly open, keeping time in my head.
Keep happy with the nappy Gang.
I used to jog but it’s bad for the knees. Too much beta carotene turns you orange, too much calcium gives you kidney stones. Health kills. The old emptiness of Toronto is gone. Now it’s chock-full: Toronto‘s bloating itself to death, that much is clear. The traffic is astonishing, there’s honking and barging, people drive right out to the middle of the intersections and sit there when the light changes. I’m glad I’m on foot. Every building I pass down here among the warehouses seems to cry
Renovate me! Renovate me!
The first time I saw the word
Reno
in the real estate section I thought it meant the gambling resort. Language is leaving me behind. I hit the corner of King and Spadina, walk north. This used to be where you came to get wholesale clothing, and it still is; but the old Jewish delis are disappearing, replaced by Chinese emporia, wicker furniture, cutwork tablecloths, bamboo wind chimes. Some of the street signs are subtitled in Chinese, multiculturalism on the march, others have
Fashion District
underneath the names. Everything is a district now. There never used to be districts.

It comes over me that I need a new dress for the opening. I’ve brought one with me, of course; I’ve already pressed it with my travel iron, clearing a corner of Jon’s workbench for the ironing board, folding a towel across it. This dress is black, because black is the best thing for such occasions: a simple, sober black dress, like those of the women who play cellos in symphony orchestras. It doesn’t do to outdress the clients.

But the thought of this dress is depressing to me now. Black attracts lint, and I’ve forgotten my clothes brush. I remember the Scotch tape ads from the forties: mummify your hand in inside-out Scotch tape, defuzz your clothing. I think of myself standing there in the gallery, surrounded by one-of-a-kind boutique wear and real pearls, widow-colored and linty where the Scotch tape has missed. There are other colors, pink for instance: pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it’s used for baby girls. It’s a wonder the military hasn’t got onto this. Pale-pink helmets, with rosettes, a whole battalion, onto the beachhead, over the top in pink. Now is the time for me to make the switch, I could use a little pink right now.

I cruise the cut-rate windows. Each one is like a shrine, lit up from within, its goddess on display, hand on hip or leg thrust out, the faces beige and inaccessible. Party dresses have come back, bows and flamenco ruffles, straplessness and crinolines, puffed sleeves like cloth marshmallows: everything I thought was left behind forever. And miniskirts too, as bad as ever, but I draw the line at those. I didn’t like them the last time around either: too much underpants. I can’t wear the ruffled things, I’d look like a cabbage, and not the strapless ones either, not with my collarbone high and dry, my hen’s-foot elbows sticking out. What I need is something vertical, maybe a little draped.

A SALE sign lures me in. The name of this store is The Sleek Boutique, though it’s not really a boutique: it’s crammed full of ends-or-line, low on overhead. It’s crowded, which pleases me. Salesladies intimidate me, I don’t like to be caught shopping. I riffle furtively through the SALE rack, bypassing sequins, angora roses, gold thread, grubby white leather, looking for something. What I’d like is to be transformed, which becomes less possible. Disguise is easier when you’re young. I take three things to the fitting room: salmon with dollar-sized white polka dots, electric blue with satin inserts, and, to be on the safe side, something in black that will do if all else fails. The salmon is what I’d really like, but can I handle the dots? I slip it on, zipper and hook it, turn this way and that, in front of the mirror which is as usual badly lit. If I ran a store like this I’d paint all the cubicles pink and put some money into the mirrors: whatever else women want to see, it’s not themselves; not in their worst light anyway.

I crane my neck, trying to get the rear view. Maybe with different shoes, or different earrings? The price tag dangles, pointing to my rump. There are the polka dots, rolling across a broad expanse. It’s amazing how much bigger you always look from the back. Maybe because there are fewer distracting features to break up the wide monotony of hill and plane.

As I turn back, I see my purse, lying on the floor where I put it, and after all these years I should know better. It’s open. The cubicle wall only comes down to a foot above the floor, and back through the gap a noiseless arm is retreating, the hand clutching my wallet. The fingernails are painted Day-Glo green. I bring my shoeless foot down hard on the wrist. There’s a shriek, some loud plural giggling: youth on the fast track, schoolgirls on the prowl. My wallet is dropped, the hand shoots back like a tentacle. I jerk open the door.
Damn you, Cordelia!
I think.

But Cordelia is long gone.