He smiles. “If you could do it, you’d know you could do it,” is what he says. I tell Cordelia that Stephen says we could walk through walls if we knew enough. This is the only one of his latest ideas I can trust myself to expound, at the moment. The rest are too complicated, or bizarre. Cordelia laughs. She says that Stephen is a brain and that if he weren’t so cute he’d be a pill. Stephen has a summer job this summer, teaching canoeing at a boys’ camp, but I don’t, because I’m only thirteen. I go with my parents up to the north, near Sault Ste. Marie, where my father is overseeing an experimental colony of tent caterpillars in screened-in cages.
Stephen writes me letters, in pencil, on pages torn from lined workbooks, in which he ridicules everything he can get his hands on, including his fellow camp instructors and the girls they go drooling around after on their days off. He describes these instructors with pimples popping from their skins, fangs sprouting in their mouths, their tongues hanging out like those of dogs, their eyes crossed in permanent, girl-inspired imbecility. This makes me think I have power, of a sort. Or will have it: I too am a girl. I go fishing by myself, mostly so I’ll have something to put in my letters to him. Other than that I don’t have much to tell. Cordelia’s letters are in real ink, black in color. They are full of superlatives and exclamation marks. She dots her I’s with little round circles, like Orphan Annie eyes, or bubbles. She signs them with things like,
“Yours till Niagara Falls,” “Yours till the cookie crumbles,” or “Yours till the sea wears rubber pants to keep its bottom dry.”
“I am so bored!!! ” she writes, with triple underlining. She sounds enthusiastic even about boredom. And yet her burbly style does not ring true. I have seen her, sometimes, when she thinks I’m not looking: her face goes still, remote, unreflecting. It’s as if she’s not inside it. But then she’ll turn and laugh. “Don’t you just love it when they roll up their sleeves and tuck the cigarette pack inside?” she’ll say. “That takes biceps!” And she will be back to normal.
I feel as if I’m marking time. I swim in the lake provided, and eat raisins and crackers spread thickly with peanut butter and honey while reading detective stories, and sulk because there’s no one my age around. My parents’ relentless cheer is no comfort. It would almost be better if they could be as surly as I am, or surlier; this would make me feel more ordinary.
Nine — Leprosy
Chapter 41
In late morning the phone wakes me. It’s Charna. “Hey,” she says. “We made the front page of Entertainment, and three, count them, three pictures! It’s a real rave!”
I shudder at her idea of a rave; and what does she mean, we? But she’s pleased: I’ve graduated from Living to Entertainment, this is a good sign. I remember when I had ideas about eternal greatness, when I wanted to be Leonardo da Vinci. Now I’m in with the rock groups and the latest movie. Art is what you can get away with, said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shoplifting or some other minor crime. And maybe that’s all it ever was, or is: a kind of stealing. A hijacking of the visual. I know it will be bad news. Still, I can’t resist. I pull on my clothes, go down in search of the nearest paper box. I do have the decency to wait until I get upstairs before I open the paper. The bold print says: CROTCHETY ARTIST STILL HAS POWER TO DISTURB. I take note: artist instead of painter, the foreboding still, sign-pointing the way to senility. Andrea the acorn-headed ingénue getting her own back. I’m surprised she’d use an old-fashioned word like crotchety. It manages to suggest both crotches and crocheting, both of which seem appropriate. But probably she didn’t write the headline.
There are indeed three photos. One is of my head, shot a little from beneath so it looks as if I have a double chin. The other two are of paintings. One is of Mrs. Smeath, bare-naked, flying heavily through the air. The church spire with the onion on it is in the distance. Mr. Smeath is stuck to her back like an asparagus beetle, grinning like a maniac; both of them have shiny brown insect wings, done to scale and meticulously painted. Erbug, The Annunciation, it’s called. The other is of Mrs. Smeath by herself, with a sickle-moon paring knife and a skinless potato, unclad from the waist up and the thighs down. This is from the Empire Bloomers series. The newspaper photos don’t do these paintings justice, because there’s no color. They look too much like snapshots. I know that in real life the bloomers on Mrs. Smeath are an intense indigo blue that took me weeks to get right, a blue that appears to radiate a dark and stifling light.
I scan the first paragraph: “Eminent artist Elaine Risley returns to hometown Toronto this week for a long overdue retrospective.” Eminent, the mausoleum word. I might as well climb onto the marble slab right now and pull the bedsheet over my head. There are the usual misquotations, nor does my blue jogging suit escape comment. “Elaine Risley, looking anything but formidable in a powder-blue jogging suit that’s seen better days, nevertheless can come out with a few pungent and deliberately provocative comments on women today.”
I suck in some coffee, skip to the last paragraph: the inevitable eclectic, the obligatory post-feminist, a however and a despite. Good old Toronto bet hedging and qualification. A blistering attack would be preferable, some flying fur, a little fire and brimstone. That way I would know I’m still alive. I think savagely of the opening. Perhaps I should be deliberately provocative, perhaps I should confirm their deepest suspicions. I could strap on some of Jon’s axmurder special effects, the burnt face with its one peeled bloodshot eye, the plastic blood-squirting arm. Or slip my feet into the hollow casts of feet and lurch in like something from a mad scientist movie.
I won’t do these things, but thinking about them is soothing. It distances the entire thing, reduces it to a farce or prank, in which I have no involvement aside from mockery.
Cordelia will see this piece in the paper, and maybe she will laugh. Even though she’s not in the phone book, she must still be around here somewhere. It would be like her to have changed her name. Or maybe she’s married; maybe she’s married more than once. Women are hard to keep track of, most of them. They slip into other names, and sink without a trace.