Cat's Eye

The narrative returns to the Smeaths’ house, where Elaine is having dinner after church. She overhears Mrs. Smeath deriding Elaine’s family and calling Elaine a heathen. She knows how the other girls are treating Elaine and thinks God is punishing her. Mrs. Smeath notices Elaine listening but just smiles. Elaine pictures Mrs. Smeath’s bad heart floating in her body like an evil eye.

Elaine stops praying and singing along to the hymns. She feels like God is not on her side and can’t help her. When Grace notices she isn’t praying, she tells her to ask God for forgiveness as Grace herself does every night. Elaine is surprised because Grace never seems to feel sorry for her actions.

Elaine finds a piece of paper with a picture of the Virgin Mary on it and decides to pray to her instead. She tries to picture her and momentarily sees a face, a splash of blue, and a heart that looks similar to her red plastic purse.

Cordelia makes a snow angel. For a moment she looks to Elaine like a stranger or a victim of a traffic accident. They are late returning home and start to run. They laugh, exhilarated, until Cordelia falls. Cordelia is furious that Elaine was laughing, apparently at her; she throws Elaine’s hat off the bridge into the ravine and demands she go and get it. Elaine considers refusing but doesn’t want to have to explain to her mother why she lost her hat.

Elaine goes down into the ravine and steps into the creek, where she is swallowed by the freezing water. The other girls have run away. Elaine manages to pull herself out but feels like she might never make it home. She turns numb and sees someone on the bridge. At first she thinks Cordelia has come back for her but then realizes it must be the Virgin Mary telling her to go home.

Elaine’s mother finds her and asks if Cordelia and Grace were with her. Elaine lies. She stays home with a fever and receives a get-well card from Carol and a telephone call from Cordelia. When she returns to school, Cordelia accuses her of telling her mother what happened and says that she should be punished. Elaine stands up for herself and eventually turns around and walks away from Cordelia. She finally realizes Cordelia and the other girls’ treatment of her was a game, and as the girls follow her, she hears hatred and need in their voices.

Elaine quits Sunday school and refuses to play with the girls anymore.

Elaine recalls a period when she visited churches to look at statues of the Virgin Mary. She remembers that on a trip to Mexico she visited an empty church and sat in front of the Virgin Mary statue for a long time.

She remembers that her daughters both went through a phrase of answering “So?” to all of her questions. She hated it because Cordelia did the same thing and made her believe she was nothing.

Cordelia and Grace skip a grade. A new school is built on their side of the ravine, so they no longer walk over the footbridge on their way home. Elaine forgets much of her time as Cordelia’s friend. Eventually, the old bridge is torn down and replaced by a concrete one. Watching the bridge being taken down, Elaine feels strange, as if someone were buried underneath the bridge or left on it.

Cordelia and Grace graduate from junior high, and Elaine gets a boyfriend, skips a grade, breaks up with her boyfriend, and gets a haircut. One day she reorganizes her room and finds her cat’s eye marble, the red purse, and some dried-up horse chestnuts. She finds her old photo album but can’t remember taking the pictures inside. She hides these relics in a trunk in her parents’ basement.

The day before Elaine begins high school, Cordelia’s mother phones her mother and asks if the two girls can walk to school together. Elaine agrees, unsure why her mother is reluctant.

Elaine notices changes in Cordelia. Elaine herself feels numb and unemotional, making her feel more mature than the other girls. Cordelia’s sisters are much older now and smoke and use strange slang phrases. They leave Cordelia out and criticize her. She begins shoplifting, which makes Elaine uncomfortable. One day Cordelia steals two horror comics, and the girls read them to each other. They give Elaine nightmares, and she hides them in Stephen’s room.

Elaine’s house is different from when they first arrived: It now has a radio, record player, and stainless-steel cutlery. Elaine’s mother does ice dancing, and Elaine longs to similarly disregard what other people think. Stephen now goes to a private school. In response to their father’s concerns about the changing climate and the doom of humanity, he responds that humans are insignificant.

As an adult, Elaine knows more about her father than she did as a child, including that he wanted to be a pilot in the war. This knowledge is strange to Elaine. She thinks knowing too much about people makes them have power over you because you have to be understanding of their motivations.

Stephen tries to teach Elaine about space-time, making a Möbius strip out of paper. He tells her that if you took one identical twin and put them in a high-speed rocket for a week, they would return to find their twin 10 years older. Elaine simply thinks this would be sad. Stephen tells her that if only humans could travel fast enough, they could travel backwards in time. This finally piques her interest, as she’d like to travel to the past. She tells Cordelia about it and she laughs.

Stephen works at a summer camp and Elaine travels to the wilderness with her parents. She gets letters from Stephen and Cordelia, who are both bored. Elaine feels like she is just “marking time.”

In the present, Andrea’s article has made the front page under the headline “CROTCHETY ARTIST STILL HAS POWER TO DISTURB” (241). This makes Elaine feel old. A photo of her and two of her paintings accompanies the article. The first painting depicts Mrs. Smeath flying naked through the air with Mr. Smeath clinging to her back like a mating insect. The second shows Mrs. Smeath alone with a knife and a potato, naked above and below the waist.

Elaine feels like her interview is reduced to provocative one-liners. She hopes Cordelia will read the article and thinks of the one painting she did of Cordelia, called Half a Face. In it, half Cordelia’s face is visible and she looks afraid of Elaine. In reality, Elaine is afraid of Cordelia and afraid of being Cordelia.

After the summer, Elaine has grown. She gets her period and starts shaving her legs. This makes her feel good. At school, she is quiet and hardworking whereas Cordelia is disruptive. One day they start to make fun of Grace, calling her family the “Lump-lump family” (246). Elaine is surprised at how much Cordelia remembers about the Smeaths and at how savage their mockery becomes. They break into the cemetery and smoke cigarettes, and Elaine concocts a story about both she and Mrs. Smeath being vampires. Cordelia is suddenly uncomfortable. Elaine is happy that she seems stronger than Cordelia now.

Now in grade 11, Elaine has become feared and respected and enjoys pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable to say. Cordelia is the prime victim of Elaine’s sharp tongue: Elaine mocks boys and singers she likes and makes fun of her stupidity. At school they learn about the war, and Elaine hardly recognizes it as a time she lived through. She mostly draws during class, though she struggles to draw hands.

Elaine starts dating boys. She seems to understand them and what they want. She understands that they lash out at women out of fear of ridicule and doesn’t feel like the denigrating words they use about other women apply to her. Her parents begin to be concerned about her behavior, but she dismisses and mocks their concerns. The boys she dates are not serious, but she is entranced by their bodies: Her “love for them is visual” (257).

A girl is found dead in the ravine near Elaine’s house. Elaine long ago dismissed the specter of the bad men in the ravine but suddenly realizes they are real. The murder brings up the ghost of memories for Elaine, who remembers a doll she had once and was afraid of.

One day she and Cordelia are sitting at the dining table doing homework. Cordelia refuses to focus. Unlike Elaine, Cordelia has little success with boys. She seems to make them uneasy, as if her personality is an act. An acting troupe visits the school, and Cordelia is given a part as a serving woman in the performance of Macbeth. Although it is a small role, in her excitement she ruins the performance: She replaces a rotting cabbage wrapped in cloth, intended to hit the stage like a severed head, with a new cabbage that instead comically bounces away.

In biology, Cordelia and Elaine have to perform dissections. Elaine is adept at this and dissects Cordelia’s frogs and worms for her. Elaine starts to draw anatomical images from slides she finds at her father’s zoology building. Dr. Banerji compliments her work.

One night, Cordelia stays at Elaine’s for dinner. She finds Elaine’s father, who wants to discuss extinction, poisoned rivers, and epidemics, peculiar. Dinner at Cordelia’s is either “slapdash” when her father isn’t home or formal when he is.

Elaine dreams about boys, about being trapped in an iron lung, and about standing in front of a mirror with someone else behind her. She dreams of finding a red plastic purse hidden in a trunk with unknown treasure inside. When the trunk opens, it is instead full of dead frogs. Finally, she dreams of a head wrapped in cloth.

Cordelia tells Elaine how she used to fake being ill to get off school, once eating some mercury from a thermometer to make herself sick. She says that the reason she used to dig holes in the garden was because she wanted a space where she could be alone and away from everyone else, particularly her father. She tells Elaine that she was her only real friend. Elaine sees Cordelia’s face overlaid with her nine-year-old face and feels physically sick. When she closes her eyes, she sees darkness and purple flowers.

Elaine tries to avoid spending time with Cordelia, although she is still not sure why. Cordelia starts to fail tests at school without Elaine’s help; her appearance also starts getting messier. She eventually changes schools and her family moves away.

Elaine takes her exams and realizes that she doesn’t want to be a biologist but a painter. Cordelia phones Elaine and asks her to visit, which Elaine does. Cordelia looks unkempt and messy and eats a case of doughnuts while smoking a cigarette. Cordelia tells Elaine she isn’t planning to go to university, and Elaine tells her she has to do something with her life. Cordelia wants to talk about their childhood together, but Elaine is reluctant to look into the past. Even though it is clear Cordelia needs her help, Elaine leaves.