The Books: “Cat’s Eye” (Margaret Atwood)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

n30451.jpgHere is a second excerpt from Cat’s Eye – by Margaret Atwood.

Grace Smeath’s mother (the one with the bad heart) is one of Atwood’s most haunting characterizations. I remember my response to her when I first read the book (my only time reading the book) … I was scared of her. She was so glum, so grotesque – Atwood really points up the disgusting nature of her appearance … she was just a BLANK. Now what is interesting about the book (and someday I really have to go back and read it) is that … Atwood describes this person from a child’s point of view. Elaine is our “way in” – so we see the world through her eyes. We are afraid of Grace Smeath’s dumpy unsmiling mother. She seems like every humorless grownup we have ever known. But then, at some point … as Elaine gets older, as Elaine becomes an adult – and there’s that whole section of the book where everything washes away, and she becomes suicidal – a terrifying section … anyway, Elaine grows older, has disappointments, setbacks – she loses things, and loses BIG … and at some point, as an adult woman, she asks the question that she could never have asked as a child: What had happened to Grace Smeath’s mother to make her so unhappy? This is the empathic response. This is when you truly become human. When you can look at someone who seems incomprehensible, vehemently unpleasant … and wonder: Why? But Elaine still has this hatred towards her … perhaps that is the “no no no that has nothing to do with me” kneejerk response of true identification. She sees herself in Grace Smeath’s mother, and it represents everything she despises.

Grace Smeath’s mother was a woman. Elaine is a woman, too. There is a similarity of experience with all of us … that’s what the sisterhood is all about. Elaine can no longer put Grace Smeath’s mother in a box, labeled: Mean Lady. She feels compassion … she feels indentification … she looks back on the image of Grace Smeath’s mother lying all day on a couch … and thinks: Things must have been really awful for that woman.

And I guess as I read the book – I moved from disgust and fear to identification. I could be Grace Smeath’s mother. I could be that prone woman, laid low by … a crushing depression … unable to cope with life, using the excuse of a bad heart to get me out of living.

It’s very moving. But our first meeting with this woman has none of that empathy. Because Elaine is just a little girl.


Excerpt # 2 from Cat’s Eye – by Margaret Atwood.

It’s the darkest time of the year. Even in the daytime it seems dark; and at night, when the lights are on, this darkness pervades everything, like a fog. Outside there are only a few streetlights, and they’re far apart and not very bright. The lamps in people’s houses cast a yellowish light, not cold and greenish but a buttery dim yellow with a tinge of brown. The colors of things in houses have a darkness mixed into them: maroon, mushroom beige, a muted green, a dusty rose. These colors look a little dirty, like the squares on a paint box when you forget to rinse the brush.

We have a maroon chesterfield which has come out of storage, with an oriental-style maroon and purple rug in front of it. We have a tri-light floor lamp. The air in the evening lamplight is coagulated, like a custard thickening; heavier sediments of light collect in the corners of the living room. The drapes are kept closed at night, folds and folds of cloth drawn against the winter, hoarding the dim heavy light, keeping it in.

In the light I spread the evening paper out on the polished hardwood floor and rest on my knees and elbows, reading the comics. In the comics there are people with round holes for eyes, others who can hypnotize you instantly, others with secret identities, others who can stretch their faces into any shape at all. Around me is the scet of newsprint and floor wax, the bureau drawer smell of my itchy stockings mingled with that of grimy knees, the scratchy hot smell of wool plaid and the cat box aroma of cotton underpants. Behind me the radio plays square dance music from the Maritimes, Don Messer and His Islanders, in preparation for the six o’clock news. The radio is of dark varnished wood with a single green eye that moes along the dial as you turn the knob. Between the stations this eye makes eerie noises from outer space. Radio waves, says Stephen.

***

Often, now, Grace Smeath asks me over to her house after school without asking Carol. She tells Carol there’s a reason why she isn’t invited: it’s because of her mother. Her mother is tired, so Grace can only have one best friend over that day.

Grace’s mother has a bad heart. Grace doesn’t treat this as a secret, as Carol would. She says it unemotionally, politely, as if requesting you to wipe your feet on the mat; but also smugly, as if she has something, some privilege or moral superiority that the two of us don’t share. It’s the attitude she takes toward the rubber plant that stands on the landing halfway up her stairs. This is the only plant in Grace’s house, and we aren’t allowed to touch it. It’s very old and has to be wiped off leaf by leaf with milk. Mrs. Smeath’s bad heart is like that. It’s because of this heart that we have to tiptoe, walk quietly, stifle our laughter, do what Grace says. Bad hearts have their uses; even I can see that.

Every afternoon Mrs. Smeath has to take a rest. She does this, not in her bedroom, but on the chesterfield in the living room, stretched out with her shoes off and a knitted afghan covering her. That is how she is always to be found when we go there to play after school. We come in through the side door, up the steps to the kitchen, trying to be as quiet as possible, and into the dining room as far as the double French doors, where we peer in through the glass panes, trying to see whether her eyes are open or closed. She’s never asleep. But there’s always the possibility – put into our heads by Grace, in the same factual way – that on any given day she may be dead.

Mrs. Smeath is not like Mrs. Campbell. For instance, she has no twin sets, and views them with contempt. I know this because once, when Carol was bragging about her mother’s twin sets, Mrs. Smeath said, “Is that so,” not as a question but as a way of making Carol shut up. She doesn’t wear lipstick or face powder, even when she goes out. She has big bones, square teeth witih little gaps between them so that you can see each tooth distinctly, skin that looks rubbed raw as if scrubbed with a potato brush. Her face is rounded and bland, with that white skin of Grace’s, though without the freckles. She wears glasses like Grace’s too, but hers have steel rims instead of brown ones. Her hair is parted down the middle and graying at the temples, braided and wound over her head into a flat hair crown crisscrossed with hairpins.

She wears print housedresses, not only in the mornings but most of the time. Over the dresses she wears bibbed aprons that sag at the bosom and make it look as if she doesnt’ have two breasts but only one, a single breast that goes all the way across her front and continues down until it joins her waist. She wears lisle stockings with seams, which make her legs look stuffed and sewn up the backs. She wears brown Oxfords. Sometimes, instead of the stockings, she has thin cotton socks, above which her legs rise white and sparsely haired, like a woman’s mustache. She has a mustache too, though not very much of one, just a sprinkling of hairs around the corners of the mouth. She smiles a lot, with her lips closed over her large teeth; but, like Grace, she does not laugh.

She has big hands, knuckly and red from the wash. There’s a lot of wash, because Grace has two younger sisters who get her skirts and blouses and also her underpants passed down to them. I’m used to getting my brother’s jerseys, but not his underpants. It’s these underpants, thin and gray with use, that hang dripping on the line over our heads as we sit in Grace’s cellar pretending to be schoolchildren.

Before Valentine’s Day we have to cut out hearts of red construction paper at school and decorate them with pieces of paper doily to stick on the tall thin windows. While I am cutting mine I think about Mrs. Smeath’s bad heart. What exactly is wrong with it? I picture it hidden, underneath her woolen afghan and the billow of her apron bib, pumping in the thick fleshy darkness of the inside of her body: something taboo, intimate. It would be red, but with a reddish-black patch on it, like rot in an apple or a bruise. It hurts when I think about it. A little sharp wince of pain goes through me, as it did when I watched my brother cut his finger once on a pane of glass. But the bad heart is also compelling. It’s a curiosity, a deformity. A horrible treasure.

Day after day I press my nose against the glass of the French doors, trying to see if Mrs. Smeath is still alive. This is how I will see her forever: lying unmoving, like something in a museum, with her head on the antimacassar pinned to the arm of the chesterfield, a bed pillow under her neck, the rubber plant on the landing visible behind her, turning her head to look at us, her scrubbed face, without her glasses, white and strangely luminouse in the dim space, like a phosphorescent mushroom. She is ten years younger than I am now. Why do I hate her so much? Why do I care, in any way, what went on in her head?

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