Cat's eye by Margaret Atwood Page B

mother’s new twin set. I don’t know what this is, but it sounds intriguing, so I say yes. She takes me stealthily into her mother’s bedroom, saying that she’ll really get it if we’re caught, and shows me the twin set, folded on a shelf. The twin set is just two sweaters, both the same color, one with buttons down the front, the other without. I’ve already seen Mrs. Campbell wearing a different twin set, a beige one, her breasts pronging out, the buttoned sweater draped over her shoulders like a cape. So this is all twin sets are. I’m disappointed, because I was expecting something to do with twins. Carol’s mother and father don’t sleep in one big bed, the way mine do. Instead they sleep in two little beds, exactly alike, with matching pink chenille bedspreads and matching night tables. These beds are called twin beds, which makes more sense to me than the twin set. Still, it’s strange to think of Mr. and Mrs. Campbell lying in them at night, with different heads—his with a mustache, hers without—but nevertheless twinlike, identical, under the sheets and blankets. It’s the matching bedspreads, the night tables, the lamps, the bureaus, the doubleness of everything in their room, that gives me this impression. My own parents’ room is less symmetrical, and also less neat.
    Carol says her mother wears rubber gloves while washing the dishes. She shows me the rubber gloves and a spray thing attached to the water tap. She turns on the tap and sprays the inside of the sink, and part of the floor by accident, until Mrs. Campbell comes in, wearing her beige twin set and frowning, and says hadn’t we better go upstairs to play. Possibly she isn’t frowning. She has a mouth that turns slightly down even when she’s smiling, so it’s hard to tell whether she’s pleased or not. Her hair is the same color as Carol’s, but done in a cold wave all over her head. It’s Carol who points out that this is a cold wave. A cold wave has nothing to do with water. It’s like doll hair, very tidy and arranged, as if sewn into place.
    Carol is more and more gratified the more bewildered I am. “You didn’t know what a cold wave is?”
    she says, delighted. She’s eager to explain things to me, name them, display them. She shows me around her house as if it’s a museum, as if she personally has collected everything in it. Standing in the downstairs hall, where there is a coat tree— “You’ve never seen a coat tree? ”—she says I am her best friend. Carol has another best friend, who is sometimes her best friend and sometimes not. Her name is Grace Smeath. Carol points her out to me, on the bus, the same way she’s pointed out the twin set and the coat tree: as an object to be admired.
    Grace Smeath is a year older and in the next grade up. At school she plays with the other girls in her class. But after school and on Saturdays she plays with Carol. There are no girls in her class on our side of the ravine.
    Grace lives in a two-story shoebox-shaped red brick house with a front porch that has two thick round white pillars holding it up. She’s taller than Carol, with dark thick coarse hair done into two braids. Her skin is extremely pale, like a body under a bathing suit, but covered with freckles. She wears glasses. Usually she wears a gray skirt with two straps over the shoulders, and a red sweater pebbled with little balls of wool. Her clothes smell faintly of the Smeaths’ house, a mixture of scouring powder and cooked turnips and slightly rancid laundry, and the earth under porches. I think she is beautiful. On Saturdays I no longer go to the building. Instead I play with Carol and Grace. Because it’s winter, we play mostly inside. Playing with girls is different and at first I feel strange as I do it, self-conscious, as if I’m only doing an imitation of a girl. But I soon get more used to it. The things we play are mostly Grace’s ideas, because if we try to play anything she doesn’t like she