At any rate she’ll see this. She’ll know it’s Mrs. Smeath, she’ll get a kick out of that. She’ll know it’s me, and she’ll come. She’ll come in the door and she’ll see herself, titled, framed, and dated, hanging on the wall. She will be unmistakable: the long line of jaw, the slightly crooked lip. She appears to be in a room, alone; a room with walls of a pastel green.
This is the only picture I ever did of Cordelia, Cordelia by herself. Half a Face, it’s called: an odd title, because Cordelia’s entire face is visible. But behind her, hanging on the wall, like emblems in the Renaissance, or those heads of animals, moose or bear, you used to find in northern bars, is another face, covered with a white cloth. The effect is of a theatrical mask. Perhaps. I had trouble with this picture. It was hard for me to fix Cordelia in one time, at one age. I wanted her about thirteen, looking out with that defiant, almost belligerent stare of hers. So?
But the eyes sabotaged me. They aren’t strong eyes; the look they give the face is tentative, hesitant, reproachful. Frightened.
Cordelia is afraid of me, in this picture.
I am afraid of Cordelia.
I’m not afraid of seeing Cordelia. I’m afraid of being Cordelia. Because in some way we changed places, and I’ve forgotten when.
Chapter 42
After the summer I’m in Grade Ten. Although I’m still shorter, still younger, I have grown. Specifically, I’ve grown breasts. I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse’s for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood. There are satisfactions in this. I shave my legs, not because there’s much to shave but because it makes me feel good. I sit in the bathtub, scraping away at my calves, which I wish were thicker, bulgier, like the calves of cheerleaders, while my brother mutters outside.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most beautiful of all?” he says.
“Go away,” I say tranquilly. I now have that privilege.
In school I am silent and watchful. I do my homework. Cordelia plucks her eyebrows into two thin lines, thinner than mine, and paints her nails Fire and Ice. She loses things, such as combs and also her French homework. She laughs raucously in the halls. She comes up with new, complicated swearwords: excrement of the ungulate, she says, meaning bullshit, and great flaming blue-eyed bald-headed Jesus. She takes up smoking and gets caught doing it in the girls’ washroom. It must be hard for the teachers, looking, to figure out why we are friends, what we’re doing together. Today on the way home it snows. Big soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers. Cordelia and I are elated, we racket along the sidewalk through the twilight while the cars drift past us, hushed and slowed by the snow. We sing:
This is a singing commercial from the radio. We don’t know what Lydia Pinkham’s remedies are, but anything that says “for women” on it has to do with monthly blood or some equally unspeakable female thing, and so we think it’s funny. Also we sing:
Or else:
We sing these, and other parodies of popular songs, all of which we think are very witty. We run and slide, in our rubber boots with the tops turned down, and make snowballs which we throw at lampposts, at fire hydrants, bravely at passing cars, and as close as we dare at people walking on the sidewalk, women most of them, with shopping bags or dogs. We have to set our school books down to make the snowballs. Our aim is poor and we don’t hit much of anything, though we hit a woman in a fur coat, from behind, by mistake. She turns and scowls at us and we run away, around a corner and up a side street, laughing so much with terror and embarrassment we can hardly stand up. Cordelia throws herself backward onto a snow-covered lawn. “The evil eye!” she shrieks. For some reason I don’t like the sight of her lying there in the snow, arms spread out.
“Get up,” I say. “You’ll catch pneumonia.”
“So?” says Cordelia. But she gets up.
The streetlights come on, though it isn’t yet dark. We reach the place where the cemetery begins, on the other side of the street.
“Remember Grace Smeath?” Cordelia says.
I say yes. I do remember her, but not clearly, not continuously. I remember her from the time I first knew her, and later, sitting in the apple orchard with a crown of flowers on her head; and much later, when she was in Grade Eight and about to go off to high school. I don’t even know what high school she went to. I remember her freckles, her little smile, her coarse horsehair braids.
“They rationed their toilet paper,” Cordelia says. “Four squares a time, even for Number Two. Did you know that?”
“No,” I say. But it seems to me that I did know it, once.
“Remember that black soap they had?” says Cordelia. “Remember? It smelled like tar.”
I know what we’re doing now: we’re making fun of the Smeath family. Cordelia remembers all kinds of things: the greying underwear dripping on the clothesline in the cellar, the kitchen paring knife that was worn right down to a sliver, the winter coats from the Eaton’s Catalogue. Simpsons is the right place to shop, according to Cordelia. That’s where we go now on Saturday mornings, bareheaded, jerking downtown stop by stop on the streetcar. And shopping from the Eaton’s Catalogue is much worse than shopping at Eaton’s.
“The Lump-lump Family!” Cordelia shouts into the snowy air. It’s cruel and appropriate; we snort with laughter, “What does the Lump-lump Family have for dinner? Plates of gristle!”
Now it’s a full-blown game. What color is their underwear? Grunt color. Why did Mrs. Lump-lump have a Band-Aid on her face? Cut herself shaving. Anything can be said about them, invented about them. They’re defenseless, they’re at our mercy. We picture the two adult Lump-lumps making love, but this is too much for us, it can’t be done, it’s too vomit-making. Vomit-making is a new word, from Perdie.
“What does Grace Lump-lump do for fun? Pops her pimples!” Cordelia laughs so hard she doubles over and almost falls down. “Stop, stop, you’ll make me pee,” she says. She says that Grace started to grow pimples in Grade Eight: by now they must have increased in number. This is not made up but true. We relish the thought.
The Smeaths in our rendition of them are charmless, miserly, heavy as dough, boring as white margarine, which we claim they eat for dessert. We ridicule their piety, their small economies, the size of their feet, their rubber plant, which sums them up. We speak of them in the present tense, as if we still know them. This for me is a deeply satisfying game. I can’t account for my own savagery; I don’t question why I’m enjoying it so much, or why Cordelia is playing it, insists on playing it, whips it to life again when it seems to be flagging. She looks at me sideways, as if estimating how far, how much farther I’ll go in what we both know, surely, is base treachery. I have a fleeting image of Grace once more, disappearing into her house through the front door, in her skirt with the straps, her pilly sweater. She was adored, by all of us. But she is not any more. And in Cordelia’s version, now, she never was. We run across the street in the falling snow, open the small wrought-iron gate in the cemetery fence, go in. We’ve never done this before.