Cat's eye

But her mouth evens out when she smiles. She has a smile like a grown-up’s, as if she’s learned it and is doing it out of politeness. She holds out her hand. “Hi, I’m Cordelia. And you must be…”

I stare at her. If she were an adult, I would take the hand, shake it, I would know what to say. But children do not shake hands like this.

“Elaine,” Grace says.

I feel shy with Cordelia. I’ve been riding in the back of the car for two days, sleeping in a tent; I’m conscious of my grubbiness, my unbrushed hair. Cordelia is looking past me to where my parents are unloading the car. Her eyes are measuring, amused. I can see, without turning around, my father’s old felt hat, his boots, the stubble on his face, my brother’s uncut hair and seedy sweater and baggy knees, my mother’s gray slacks, her manlike plaid shirt, her face blank of makeup.

“There’s dog poop on your shoe,” Cordelia says.

I look down. “It’s only a rotten apple.”

“It’s the same color though, isn’t it?” Cordelia says. “Not the hard kind, the soft squooshy kind, like peanut butter.” This time her voice is confiding, as if she’s talking about something intimate that only she and I know about and agree on. She creates a circle of two, takes me in. Cordelia lives farther east than I do, in a region of houses even newer than ours, with the same surrounding mud. But her house is not a bungalow, it has two stories. It has a dining room separated by a curtain which you can pull back to make the living room and the dining room into one big room, and a bathroom on the ground floor with no bathtub in it which is called the powder room. The colors in Cordelia’s house are not dark, like those in other houses. They’re light grays and light greens and whites. The sofa, for instance, is apple-green. There’s nothing flowered or maroon or velvet. There’s a picture, framed in light gray, of Cordelia’s two older sisters, done in pastels when they were younger, both wearing smocked dresses, their hair feathery, their eyes like mist. There are real flowers, several different kinds at once, in chunky, flowing vases of Swedish glass. It’s Cordelia who tells us the glass is Swedish. Swedish glass is the best kind, she says.

Cordelia’s mother arranges the flowers herself, wearing gardening gloves. My own mother doesn’t arrange flowers. Sometimes she sticks a few into a pot and puts them on the dinner table, but these are flowers she picks herself, during her exercise walks, in her slacks, along the road or in the ravine. Really they are weeds. She would never think of spending money on flowers. It occurs to me for the first time that we are not rich.

Cordelia’s mother has a cleaning lady. She is the only one of our mothers who has one. The cleaning lady is not called the cleaning lady, however. She is called the woman. On the days when the woman comes, we have to stay out of her way.

“The woman before this one,” Cordelia tells us, in a hushed, scandalized voice, “was caught stealing potatoes. She put her bag down and they rolled out, all over the floor. It was so embarrassing.” She means for them, not for the woman. “Of course we had to let her go.”

Cordelia’s family does not eat boiled eggs mushed up in a bowl but out of egg cups. Each egg cup has an initial on it, one for each person in the family. There are napkin rings too, also with initials. I have never heard of an egg cup before and I can tell Grace hasn’t either, by the way she keeps silent about it. Carol says uncertainly that she has them at home.

“After you eat the egg,” Cordelia tells us, “you have to put a hole in the bottom of the shell.”

“Why?” we say.

“So the witches can’t put out to sea.” She says this lightly but scornfully, as if only a fool would need to ask. But there’s the possibility she’s joking, or teasing. Her two older sisters have this habit also. It’s hard to tell when they mean to be taken seriously. They have an extravagant, mocking way of talking, which seems like an imitation of something, only it’s unclear what they’re imitating.