Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood (2)

Grace says grace.  Mr. Smeath says, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,” and reaches for the baked beans.  Mrs. Smeath says, “Lloyd.”  Mr. Smeath says, “It’s harmless,” and shoots me a sideways grin.  Aunt Mildred contracts her whiskery mouth.  I chew away at the rubber-plant Smeath food.  Sunday goes on.

After the stewed pineapple Grace wants me to come down into the cellar with her to play School.  I do this, but I have to come up the stairs again to go to the bathroom.  Grace has given me permission, the same way the teachers in school give you permission.  As I come up the cellar stairs I can hear Aunt Mildred and Mrs. Smeath, who are in the kitchen doing the dishes.

“She’s exactly like a heathen,” says Aunt Mildred.  Because she’s been a missionary in China, she’s an authority.  “Nothing you’ve done has made a scrap of difference.”

“She’s learning her Bible, Grace tells me,”  Mrs. Smeath says, and then I know it’s me they’re discussing.

“They’ll learn all that”, says Aunt Mildred.  “Till you’re blue in the face.  But it’s all rote learning, it doesn’t sink in.  The minute your back is turned they’ll go right back the way they were.”

The unfairness of this hits me like a kick.

“What can you expect, with that family?” says Mrs. Smeath.  “It’s God’s punishment, It serves her right.”

A hot wave moves through my body.  This wave is shame, which I have felt before, but it is also hatred, which I have not, not in this pure form.

She moves away from the sink and walks to the kitchen table for another stack of dirty plates, into my line of vision.  I have a brief intense image of Mrs. Smeath going through the flesh-coloured wringer of my mother’s washing machine, legs first, bones cracking and flattening, skin and flesh squeezing up towards her head, which will pop in a minute like a huge balloon of blood.  If my eyes could shoot out fatal rays like the ones in comic books I would incinerate her on the spot.  She is right, I am a heathen.  I cannot forgive.

As if she can feel my stare she turns and sees me.  Our eyes meet: she knows I’ve heard.  But she doesn’t flinch, she isn’t embarrassed or apologetic. She gives me that smug smile, with the lips closed over the teeth.  What she says is not to me but to Aunt Mildred.  “Little pitchers have big ears.”

Her bad heart floats in her body like an eye, an evil eye, it sees me.

Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood (1)

CAT’S EYE

                                                      by Margaret Atwood

We sit around the table, eating our Christmas dinner.  There’s a student of my father’s, a young man from India who’s here to study insects and who’s never seen snow before.  We’re having him to Christmas dinner because he’s foreign, he’s far from home, he will be lonely, and they don’t even have Christmas in his country.  This has been explained to us in advance by our mother.  He’s polite and ill at ease and he giggles frequently, looking with what I sense is terror at the array of food spread out before him, the mashed potatoes, the gravy, the lurid green and red Jello salad, the enormous turkey.

My father sits at the end of the table, beaming like the Jolly Green Giant.  He lifts his glass, his gnome’s eyes twinkling.  “Mr Banerji, sir,” he says.  He always calls his students Mr. & Miss.  “YOu can’t fly on one wing.”

Mr Banerji giggles and says, “Very true, sir,” in his voice that sounds like the BBC News.  He lifts his own glass and sips.  My father ladles out the stuffing, deals the slices of dark and light; my mother adds the mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce and asks Mr. Banerji, enunciating carefully, whether they have turkeys in his country. He says he doesn’t believe so.  I sit across the table from him, my feet dangling, staring at him, enthralled.  I think he is very beautiful, with his brown skin and brilliant white teeth and his dark appalled eyes.  I can hardly believe he’s a man, he seems so unlike one.  He’s a creature more like myself: alien and apprehensive. He’s afraid of us. He has no idea what we will do next, what impossibilities we will expect of him, what we will make him eat. No wonder he bites his fingers.

“A little off the sternum, sir?” my father asks him, and Mr Banerji brightens at the word.

“Ah, the sternum,” he says, and I know they have entered together the shared world of biology, which offers refuge from the real, awkward world of manners and silences we’re sitting in at the moment. As he slices away with the carving knife my father indicates to all of us, but especially to Mr. Banerji, the areas where the flight muscles attach, using the carving fork as a pointer.  Of course, he says, the domestic turkey has lost the ability to fly.

“Meleagris gallopavo,” he says, and Mr. Banerji leans forward; the Latin perks him up. “A pea-brained animal, or bird-brained you might say, bred for its ability to put on weight, especially on the drumsticks” – he points these out – “certainly not for intelligence.  It was originally domesticated by the Mayans.” He tells a story of a turkey farm where the turkeys all died because they were too stupid to go into their shed during a thunderstorm.  Instead they stood around outside, looking up at the sky with their beaks wide open and the rain ran down their throats and drowned them. He says this is a story told by farmers and probably not true, although the stupidity of the bird is legendary. He says that the wild turkey, once abundant in the deciduous forests in these regions, is far more intelligent and can elude even practiced hunters. Also it can fly.

My brother asks if there are any poisonous snakes in India, and Mr. Banerji, now much more at ease, begins to enumerate them. My mother smiles, because this is going better than she thought it would. Poisonous snakes are fine with her, even at the dinner table, as long as they make people happy.

My father has eaten everything on his plate and is digging for more stuffing in the cavity of the turkey, which resembles a trussed, headless baby.  It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird. I’m eating a wing. It’s the wing of a tame turkey, the stupidest bird in the world, so stupid it can’t even fly even more. I am eating lost flight.

Who Has Seen the Wind by W.O. Mitchell

The first excitement over, Brian began to find school a rather disappointing affair.  Forbsie sat across from him, Artie two rows over.  He would go over and see Artie for a while, brian decided;  he got up and started down the aisle.  Miss MacDonald, at the board, turned and saw him.  “Sit down, Brian”. 

         “I’m just going over to see Artie.”

         “You’ll have to sit down.” She turned back too the board.

         Brian continued on his journey to Artie.  She wasn’t his mother; he wasn’t hurting anything; he wasn’t doing anything wrong.

         “I said to sit down!”

         ‘He stopped at the end of the aisle. “I just want to see Artie for a minute.”

         “You must put up your hand if you want something. Then I’ll give you permission to see Artie.”

         He stood watching her.

         “Sit down in your seat!”

         He continued to stand. Miss MacDonald’s thin face reddened slightly. She bit her lip. “Sit down!”

         Brian stood. Utter classroom quiet had descended. Outside the window a meadow lark went up his bright scale with a one-two-three-and-here-I-go. Miss MacDonald began to walk down the aisle in which Brian was standing. He reached into his hip pocket and felt the comfort of the water pistol there. Miss MacDonald stopped three seats ahead of him. “Will you sit down!”

         Wordlessly he drew the pistol out, being careful not to squeeze the butt.  He held it behind his back.  Miss MacDonald reached out her hand to guide him back to his seat. It paused in mid-air as Brian brought the water pistol to view. One clear drop of water hung from the end pointing at Miss MacDonald’s midriff. Her mouth flew open. She stared at the pistol and at the slight drip of water from the small hand holding it.

         “I filled it,” Brian assured her, “out of the fountain.”

         Her face flamed. “Give me that pistol!”

         He made no move to hand it to her.

         Her hand darted out to the water pistol.  Startled, Brian squeezed.  The pistol squirted. Miss MacDonald, with her dripping hand, jerked the pistol from his grasp.  She propelled him from the room.

         As he walked ahead of her to the end of the hall where the Principal’s office was, Brian’s heart pounded; he was in for it. The front of heer dress dripping, Miss MacDonald knocked on the Principal’s door.  It opened, and Mr. Digby, tall and sandy-haired, a questioning look upon his rough face, stood there.

         With emotion poorly concealed, Miss MacDonald told him what had happened, the indignant spray of saliva from her thin lips unheeded, the corners of her mouth quivering. When she had finished, Digby said:

         “You’d better let your classes go. Miss Spencer has, hers. I’ll attend to Brian.”

         The door closed on Miss MacDonald’s outraged back.