Cat's eye

In the mornings we wrap blankets around our shoulders while we eat our breakfast. Sometimes we can see our own breath, even inside the cottage. All of this is irregular, and slightly festive. It isn’t just that we aren’t going to school. We’ve never gone to school for more than three or four months at a time anyway. I was in school the last time eight months ago and have only dim and temporary ideas of what it was like. In the mornings we do our schoolwork, in our workbooks. Our mother tells us which pages to do. Then we read our school readers. Mine is about two children who live in a white house with ruffled curtains, a front lawn, and a picket fence. The father goes to work, the mother wears a dress and an apron, and the children play ball on the lawn with their dog and cat. Nothing in these stories is anything like my life. There are no tents, no highways, no peeing in the bushes, no lakes, no motels. There is no war. The children are always clean, and the little girl, whose name is Jane, wears pretty dresses and patent-leather shoes with straps.

These books have an exotic appeal for me. When Stephen and I draw with our colored pencils, he draws wars, ordinary wars and wars in space. His red and yellow and orange are worn to stubs, from the explosions, and his gold and silver are used up too, on the shining metal carapaces of the tanks and spaceships and on the helmets and the complicated guns. But I draw girls. I draw them in old-fashioned clothing, with long skirts, pinafores and puffed sleeves, or in dresses like Jane’s, with big hairbows on their heads. This is the elegant, delicate picture I have in my mind, about other little girls. I don’t think about what I might say to them if I actually met some. I haven’t got that far. In the evenings we’re supposed to do the dishes—“Rattle them up,” our mother calls it. We squabble in whispers and monosyllables about whose turn it is to wash: drying with a clammy tea towel isn’t as good as washing, which warms up your hands. We float the plates and glasses in the dish pan and dive-bomb them with the spoons and knives, whispering “Bombs away.” We try to aim as close as possible without actually hitting them. They aren’t our dishes. This gets on our mother’s nerves. If it gets on her nerves enough, she will do the dishes herself, which is intended to be a rebuke. At night we lie in the saggy pull-out bed, head to toe, which is supposed to make us go to sleep sooner, and kick each other silently under the covers; or else we try to see how far we can get our sock feet up each other’s pajama legs. Once in a while the headlights of a passing car show through the window, moving first along one wall, then along the next wall, then fading away. There’s an engine sound, then the sizzle of tires on the wet road. Then silence.

Chapter 6

I don’t know who took that picture of me. It must have been my brother, because my mother is inside the cabin, behind the white door, wearing gray slacks and a dark-blue plaid shirt, packing our food into cardboard boxes and our clothes into suitcases. She has a system for packing; she talks to herself while she’s doing it, reminding herself of details, and she likes us out of the way. Right after the picture it begins to snow, small dry flakes falling singly out of the hard northern November sky. There’s a kind of hush and lassitude until that first snow, with the light waning and the last moose-maple leaves dangling from the branches like seaweed. We felt sleepy until it began to snow. Now we feel exhilarated.

We’re running around outside the motel, wearing nothing but our worn-out summer shoes, with our bare hands outstretched to the falling snowflakes, our heads thrown back, our mouths open, eating snow. If it were thick on the ground we would roll in it, like dogs in dirt. It fills us with the same kind of rapture. But our mother looks out the window and sees us, and the snow, and makes us come inside and dry our feet off with the skimpy towels. We have no winter boots that fit. While we’re inside, the snow turns to sleet. Our father is pacing the floor, jingling his keys in his pocket. He always wants things to happen sooner than they do, and now he wants to leave right away, but my mother says he’ll have to hold his horses. We go outside and help him scrape the crust of ice off the car windows and then we carry boxes, and finally we squeeze into the car ourselves and drive south. I know it’s south because of the direction of the sunlight, which is coming weakly through the clouds now, touching the icy trees with glitter, glaring off the ice patches at the sides of the road, making it hard to see.