Cat's Eye

As a child, Cordelia looks down on the Smeaths for buying all their clothes from catalogs. She fixates on the brassiere section of the catalog and is fascinated by the way her sisters’ bodies have changed as they get older. Elaine has never thought about her body in relation to the bodies of adult women before. She and her friends know they can’t ask their mothers about these things.

Cordelia speaks with authority about childbirth, whereas Grace tells her friends that babies come from God. Elaine struggles with both of these explanations, which conflict with and complicate her knowledge of insect anatomy. She imagines Mr. and Mrs. Smeath mating like insects. She wonders about asking her brother but instinctively feels like she shouldn’t.

Mrs. Smeath invites Elaine to church, and though Elaine’s parents attempt to dissuade her, she accepts. In church, Elaine tries to follow what Grace does. After Sunday school, she feels sure that God loves her and resents that her parents have kept things like church from her. When she looks at the stars that night, they no longer seem cold like the bottling alcohol but warm and watchful.

At school the division between the boys and the girls grows. Stephen gets a secret girlfriend whom he tells Elaine about; she feels important to be let in on the secret but resentful of the power it gives her over him. He tells Elaine about constellations made up of hundreds of stars and shows her their light in the sky—light from hundreds and thousands of years ago.

When Remembrance Day arrives, Elaine finds it difficult to imagine the dead soldiers since she has never known any dead people. The girls pretend that Elaine is Mary, Queen of Scots and lower her into a hole that Cordelia dug. Later Elaine will find it hard to remember what it was like in that hole. She cannot remember if she was crying when she finally was let out.

Elaine cannot remember her ninth birthday either. All she can bring to mind is the scent of nightshade, but she knows nightshade does not flower in November, so the memory must be false.

The adult Elaine gets lost in a department store that has been rearranged since she last went there. She imagines the cosmetics products as a kind of religion. In the children’s section, she sees plaid party dresses and wonders why people want to clothe little girls in the color of the Scots, given the associations of “slaughter, treachery and murder” (119).

Elaine remembers that she used to peel the skin off her feet at night. She also chewed the ends of her hair and bit her cuticles off. When her daughters were born, Elaine wished they were boys: She was wary of bitten nails, but her daughters seemed immune to what she suffered as a child.

The narrative jumps back to Elaine in the zoology building watching the Santa Claus parade. The other girls sit separately: They are not speaking to her because she said something wrong. Later, Elaine stands outside Cordelia’s room while the other girls are inside having a meeting about her and how she can do better. Remembering games like this one makes adult Elaine anxious about her own children. She thinks that little girls are small only to adults; to each other, “they are life-sized” (125).

The young Elaine tries to slow time to delay going outside to play with the girls, who are constantly watching her and telling her to stand straight and act differently. Elaine does not think Cordelia is her enemy. She views Cordelia as her best friend and wants to please her.

Sometimes, Carol is the subject of Cordelia’s “improvement.” However, Carol cries and draws attention to herself.

Elaine tries to avoid playing with the girls by lying that she has to help her mother with chores. One of Elaine’s favorite chores is using the wringer to dry the laundry. She imagines putting a whole person through the wringer and how they would come out “flat, neat, completed” (129)—like a pressed flower.

Elaine continues to go to church with the Smeaths. At Sunday school, Grace watches Elaine and reports back to Cordelia how she has performed in memorization. Although Elaine wants to be good and follow Jesus’s instructions, she finds it harder and harder to do so. One night at dinner Mr. Smeath makes a joke about farting that Elaine doesn’t understand, and when Grace reports this to Cordelia they mock her. Elaine feels an affinity for Mr. Smeath.

Cordelia is in a play and Elaine can’t differentiate her from the other children on the stage. The feeling that she could be anywhere is terrifying.

Elaine feels like she is sleepwalking. She gets a doll for Christmas that she hides away because she feels like it is watching her. At Christmas dinner, Mr. Banerji, a student of her father’s, joins Elaine’s family. He seems afraid and sad: Elaine has realized she can sense these things in other people with ease. Elaine divides the people she knows into categories of “tame” and “wild”: Her family members and Cordelia are wild, while Carol and Grace are tame. Mr. Banerji and Elaine’s father discuss the genetic modification of turkeys. To Elaine, the turkey on the table seems less and less like a meal and more like a dead bird. She realizes she is eating the wing of a bird that cannot fly.

Elaine gets a job after school looking after their neighbor Mrs. Finestein’s baby, Brian. She likes that he never cries or laughs. One day, Cordelia and the other girls see her out walking with Brian, and they make fun of him for being Jewish.

Another day, Carol asks for a turn walking the baby. Elaine refuses and Grace tells her that the Jews killed Christ. Cordelia asks Elaine what a man who catches bugs is called to trick her into saying “bugger.” Although Elaine doesn’t know the meaning of the word she has spoken, she feels dirty. She quits her job walking Brian to protect him and spends all the money she has earned on candy that she shares with her friends.

One day, Cordelia makes fun of Elaine and she throws up into the snow. She begins to be sick more frequently and is sometimes allowed to stay home from school. She enjoys being ill and feels safe at home, cutting pictures out of magazines. The magazines often suggest the women they depict are somehow doing things wrong, and Elaine begins to think that even when she grows up she will always be imperfect. She listens to the Happy Gang, a radio show, which has a theme song that insists, “Keep happy” (149).

In the spring, the girls jump rope. The chant they sing while doing so—about robbers making demands of a woman—seems threatening. When Elaine crosses the wooden bridge, walking behind the three girls, she remembers the jar of marbles her brother buried. She likes that she is the only one who knows about it. She secretly retrieves her blue cat’s eye marble and takes it to school in her pocket, feeling like it protects her from Cordelia.

Elaine’s family rent a cabin for the summer, and Elaine takes pictures of boulders. In the woods she finds a dead raven and thinks it is lucky to be dead. Elaine dreams of the dead raven, of the cat’s eye marble, of the wooden bridge falling into the ravine, and of nightshade berries. She does not dream about Cordelia.

Back in the department store, adult Elaine is comforted by the presence of the shoe repair counter and thinks about the sturdy, brown shoes of her childhood. She thinks about how her mother did the housework even though she didn’t like it and wonders whether she knew at the time what was happening to her daughter.

Elaine describes a double triptych that she once did of her mother entitled Pressure Cooker. The paintings showed her mother in a bib apron, depicted first in colored pencil, then in collaged illustrations from women’s magazines, and finally in white pipe cleaners so that it seemed like she was dissolving. The second triptych showed her mother cooking jam on an outdoor fire. The order of the mediums was reversed so that she appeared to be materializing.

Leaving the food hall, Elaine finds a woman lying on the sidewalk asking for help. She gives her some money. She has Cordelia’s eyes. Walking away from the woman, Elaine realizes she is not a good person just because she stopped when no one else did.

Cordelia’s cruelty has become relentless, and Elaine feels like she is being backed towards the edge of a cliff. Elaine keeps the cat’s eye marble in her pocket and considers suicide by eating nightshade berries or drinking bleach. She doesn’t want to do these things, but she hears Cordelia’s voice in her head telling her to. She considers asking her brother for help but worries he’ll make fun of her.

One day, Elaine is helping in the kitchen when her mother tells her she doesn’t have to play with her friends; she could play with other girls instead. Elaine is devastated that her mother knows what has been happening and worries what might happen if she tells the other girls’ mothers. Her mother tells her to stand up for herself and to have more backbone. To Elaine, this confirms that what is happening must be her fault.

Cordelia brings a mirror to school and makes Elaine look at herself in it. Elaine’s parents start to host bridge parties, and Elaine lies in bed feeling left out. Mr. Banerji visits sometimes, and Elaine feels like so long as he is coping, she can too.

Princess Elizabeth plans a royal visit to Toronto and Elaine memorizes the route, which will pass by her own house. When the day arrives, Elaine stands opposite her house and watches a glove wave from a car window. She realizes she hoped to jump in front of the car, but instead she does nothing.

Elaine’s teacher assigns art projects, including a drawing of what the children do after school. Elaine draws herself lying in bed and then colors the whole picture with black crayons.

On Valentine’s Day, Elaine gets the most cards from the boys at school, but she hides them. Carol is growing breasts, and Cordelia is jealous. When Carol is caught wearing lipstick, her father beats her. Elaine finds it difficult to imagine Mr. Campbell as a violent man. Carol also shows the girls the contraceptives in her mother’s drawer. They play a game where Carol lies in bed and pretends to be sick. Cordelia tells Elaine to listen to her heart and then makes fun of her for touching Carol’s breast.

Elaine’s mother is taken to the hospital, and Elaine sees blood on her parents’ mattress. When Elaine’s mother returns she is quiet and needs rest. Later Elaine finds a small knitted sock in her sewing basket and wonders why her mother knitted only one.

Elaine dreams that Mrs. Finestein and Mr. Banerji are her real parents and that her mother has had twins: one gray and one missing. She dreams her house burned down and that her parents are dead but also alive, sinking into the earth.

Elaine goes to a Conversat at the zoology building with her father, Stephen, and Stephen’s friend Danny. The boys talk in pig Latin to each other. The Conversat is busy, and Elaine visits a display of chicken embryos and a fingerprinting demonstration. In one room, a turtle has been cut open, but its heart is still beating. Elaine is overwhelmed and faints. She realizes that fainting lets her step out of her own body while time goes on without her.

Cordelia makes up a game in which Elaine must picture 10 stacks of plates, each of which represents one of her chances: When she does something wrong, one stack of plates falls. Elaine teaches herself to faint on command and begins to do it often. Cordelia realizes she is doing it on purpose, and Elaine learns to almost faint: She stays standing up but is hardly present in her own body.