Cat's eye

“I almost died” they say. Or, “I look like the wrath of God.” Sometimes they say, “I look like an absolute hag,” and sometimes, “I look like Haggis McBaggis.” This is an ugly old woman they seem to have made up. But they don’t really believe they almost died, or that they look ugly. Both of them are beautiful: one dark and intense, the other blond and kind-eyed and soulful. Cordelia is not beautiful in the same way. Cordelia’s two older sisters are Perdita and Miranda, but nobody calls them that. They’re called Perdie and Mirrie. Perdie is the dark one; she takes ballet, and Mirrie plays the viola. The viola is kept in the coat closet, and Cordelia takes it out and shows it to us, lying there mysterious and important in its velvet-lined case. Perdie and Mirrie make drawling, gentle fun of each other and of themselves for doing these things, but Cordelia says they are gifted. This sounds like vaccinated, something that’s done to you and leaves a mark. I ask Cordelia if she is gifted, but she puts her tongue in the corner of her mouth and turns away, as if she’s concentrating on something else.

Cordelia ought to be Cordie, but she’s not. She insists, always, on being called by her full name: Cordelia. All three of these names are peculiar; none of the girls at school have names like that. Cordelia says they’re out of Shakespeare. She seems proud of this, as though it’s something we should all recognize. “It was Mummie’s idea,” she says.

All three of them call their mother Mummie, and speak of her with affection and indulgence, as if she’s a bright but willful child who has to be humored. She’s tiny, fragile, absent-minded; she wears glasses on a silver chain around her neck and takes painting classes. Some of her paintings hang in the upstairs hall, greenish paintings of flowers, of lawns, of bottles and vases.

The girls have spun a web of conspiracy around Mummie. They agree not to tell her certain things.

“Mummie isn’t supposed to know that,” they remind one another. But they don’t like to disappoint her. Perdie and Mirrie try to do what they like as much as they can, but without disappointing Mummie. Cordelia is less agile at this: less able to do what she likes, more disappointing. This is what Mummie says when she’s angry: “I am disappointed in you.” If she gets very disappointed, Cordelia’s father will be called into it, and that is serious. None of the girls jokes or drawls when mentioning him. He is large, craggy, charming, but we have heard him shouting, upstairs.

We sit in the kitchen, avoiding the dust mop of the woman, waiting for Cordelia to come down to play. She has been disappointing again, she has to finish tidying her room. Perdie strolls in, her camel’s-hair coat thrown loosely, gracefully over one shoulder, her schoolbooks balanced on one hip. “Do you know what Cordelia says she wants to be when she grows up?” she says, in her husky, mock-serious, confiding voice. “A horse!” And we can’t tell at all whether or not it’s true. Cordelia has a whole cupboard filled with dress-up costumes: old dresses of Mummie’s, old shawls, old sheets you can cut up and drape around yourself. These used to be Perdie’s and Mirrie’s, but they’ve outgrown them. Cordelia wants us to act out plays, with her dining room and its curtain for the stage. She has an idea that we’ll put these plays on and charge money for them. She turns out the lights, holds a flashlight under her chin, laughs in an eerie manner: this is how such things are done. Cordelia has been to plays, and even the ballet, once: Giselle, she says, offhand, as if we know. But somehow these plays never take shape the way she wants them to. Carol giggles and can’t remember what she’s supposed to say. Grace doesn’t like being told what to do, and says she has a headache. Made-up stories don’t interest her unless they contain a lot of real things: toasters, ironing boards, the wardrobes of movie stars. Cordelia’s melodramas are beyond her.

“Now you kill yourself,” says Cordelia.

“Why?” says Grace.

“Because you’ve been deserted,” says Cordelia.

“I don’t want to,” says Grace. Carol, who is playing the maid, starts to giggle. So we merely dress up and then trail down the stairs and out across the newly sodded front lawn, our shawls dragging behind us, uncertain what’s supposed to happen next. Nobody wants to take boys’

parts because there are no good clothes for them, though from time to time Cordelia draws a mustache on herself with Perdie’s eyebrow pencil and wraps herself up in an old velvet curtain, in a last-ditch attempt at plot.