It’s Cordelia’s fault, for replacing the cabbage. She is mortified. “It was supposed to be rotten,” she wails backstage, where I have gone to congratulate her. “So now they tell me!” The actors have made light of it; they tell her it’s a novel effect. But although Cordelia laughs and blushes and tries to pass it off lightly, I can see she is almost in tears.
I ought to feel pity, but I do not. Instead, on the way home from school the next day, I say “Bumpity bumpity bump, plop,” and Cordelia says, “Oh, don’t.” Her voice is toneless, leaden. This is not a joke. I wonder, for an instant, how I can be so mean to my best friend. For this is what she is. Time passes and we are older, we are the oldest, we are in Grade Thirteen. We can look down on the incoming students, those who are still mere children as we were once. We can smile at them. We’re old enough to take Biology, which is taught in the Chemistry lab. For this we leave our homeroom group and meet with students from other homerooms. This is why Cordelia is my Biology lab partner, at the Chemistry lab table, which is black and has a sink. Cordelia doesn’t like Biology any more than she liked Physics, which she barely squeaked through, but she has to take something in the sciences and it’s easier, to her mind, than a number of the things she might have to take otherwise. We are given dissecting kits with scalpel-like knives that could be sharper, and trays with a coating of wax at the bottom, and a package of pins, as in sewing classes. First we have to dissect a worm. Each of us is given one of these. We look at the diagram of the inside of the worm, in the Zoology textbook: this is what we’re supposed to see once we get the worm open. The worms wriggle and twine in the wax-bottomed trays, and snout their way along the sides, trying to get out. They smell like holes in the ground.
I pin my worm at either end and make a slick vertical cut; the worm twists as they do on fishhooks. I pin the worm’s skin out to the sides. I can see its worm heart, which isn’t the shape of a heart, its central artery pumping worm blood, its digestive system, which is full or mud. “Oh,” says Cordelia. “How can you.” Cordelia is becoming mushier and mushier, I think. She is becoming a drip. I do her worm for her, when the teacher isn’t looking. Then I draw a diagram of the worm, cut open, beautifully labeled. After that comes the frog. The frog kicks and is more difficult than the worm, it looks a little too much like a person swimming. I conk the frog out with chloroform as directed and dissect it with flair, sticking in the pins. I make a drawing of the inside of the frog, with all its curlicues and bulbs, its tiny lungs, its cold-blooded amphibian heart.
Cordelia can’t do the frog either. She says she feels sick to her stomach just thinking about putting her dissecting knife through its skin. She looks at me, pale, her eyes big. The frog smell is getting to her. I do her frog for her. I’m good at this.
I memorize the statocysts of the crayfish, its gills and mouth parts. I memorize the circulatory system of the cat. The teacher, who is usually the boys’ football coach but who has recently taken a summer course in Zoology so he can teach us this, orders a dead cat for us, with its veins and arteries pumped full of blue and pink latex. He’s disappointed when it arrives, because the cat is definitely rancid, you can smell it even through the formaldehyde. So we don’t have to dissect it, we can just use the diagram in the book. But worms, frogs, and cats aren’t enough for me. I want more. I go down to the Zoology Building on Saturday afternoons to use the microscopes in the empty labs. I look at slides, planaria worms in section with their triangular heads and cross-eyes, bacteria colored with vivid dyes, hot pinks, violent purples, radiant blues. These are lit up from beneath, they’re breathtaking, like stained-glass windows. I draw them, delineating the structures with different colored pencils; though I can never get the same luminous brilliance.
Mr. Banerji, who is now Dr. Banerji, discovers what I’m doing. He brings me slides he thinks I would like to see and offers them to me shyly and eagerly, with a conspiratorial giggle, as if we are sharing a delicious, esoteric secret, or something religious. “Parasite of the tent caterpillar,” he says, depositing the slide with reverence on a clean piece of paper at my table. “Egg of the budworm.”
“Thank you,” I say, and he looks at my drawings, picking them up by the corners with his deft, bitten fingers. “Very good, very good, miss,” he says. “Soon you will take over my job.”
He has a wife now, who has come from India, and a little boy. I see them sometimes, looking in through the doorway of the lab, the child gentle and dubious, the wife anxious. She wears gold earrings and a scarf with spangles on it. Her red sari shows beneath her brown Canadian winter coat, her overshoes poking out beneath it.
Cordelia comes to my house and I help her with her Zoology homework, and she stays to dinner. My father, dishing out the beef stew, says that a species a day is becoming extinct. He says we are poisoning the rivers and ruining the gene pools of the planet. He says that when a species becomes extinct, some other species moves in to fill up the ecological niche, because Nature abhors a vacuum. He says that the things that move in are common weeds, and cockroaches and rats: soon all flowers will be dandelions. He says, waving his fork, that if we continue to overbreed as a species, a new epidemic will arise to redress the balance. All this will happen because people have neglected the basic lessons of Science, they have gone in for politics and religion and wars instead, and sought out passionate excuses for killing one another. Science on the other hand is dispassionate and without bias, it is the only universal language. The language is numbers. When at last we are up to our ears in death and garbage, we will look to Science to clean up our mess.
Cordelia listens to all of this, smirking a little. She thinks my father is quaint. I hear him the way she must: this is not what people are supposed to talk about at the dinner table. I go to dinner at Cordelia’s house. Dinners at Cordelia’s house are of two kinds: those when her father is there and those when he isn’t. When he isn’t there, things are slapdash. Mummie comes to the table absent-mindedly still in her painting smock, Perdie and Mirrie and also Cordelia appear in blue jeans with a man’s shirt over top and their hair in pin curls. They jump up from the table, saunter into the kitchen for more butter, or the salt, which has been forgotten. They talk all at once, in a languid, amused way, and groan when it’s their turn to clear the table, while Mummie says “Now girls,” but without conviction. She is losing the energy for disappointment.
But when Cordelia’s father is there, everything is different. There are flowers on the table, and candles. Mummie has on her pearls, the napkins are neatly rolled in the napkin rings instead of crumpled in under the edges of the plates. Nothing is forgotten. There are no pin curls, no elbows on the table, even the spines are straighten.
Today is one of the candle days. Cordelia’s father sits at the head of the table, with his craggy eyebrows, his wolvish look, and bends upon me the full force of his ponderous, ironic, terrifying charm. He can make you feel that what he thinks of you matters, because it will be accurate, but that what you think of him is of no importance.