Cat's eye

“How would such a creature walk, sir?” asks Mr. Banerji, and my father, approving, says, “Well may you ask.” He tells Mr. Banerji that some darn fool scientists are working on a square tomato, which will supposedly pack more easily into crates than the round variety.

“All the flavor will be sacrificed, of course,” he says. “They care nothing for flavor. They bred a naked chicken, thinking they’d get more eggs by utilizing the energy saved from feather production, but the thing shivered so much they had to double-heat the coop, so it cost more in the end.”

“Fooling with Nature, sir,” says Mr. Banerji. I know already that this is the right response. Investigating Nature is one thing and so is defending yourself against it, within limits, but fooling with it is quite another. Mr. Banerji says he hears there is now a naked cat available, he’s read about it in a magazine, though he himself does not see the point of it at all. This is the most he has said so far. My brother asks if there are any poisonous snakes in India, and Mr. Banerji, now much more at ease, begins to enumerate them. My mother smiles, because this is going better than she thought it would. Poisonous snakes are fine with her, even at the dinner table, as long as they make people happy. My father has eaten everything on his plate and is dig ging for more stuffing in the cavity of the turkey, which resembles a trussed, headless baby. It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird. I’m eating a wing. It’s the wing of a tame turkey, the stupidest bird in the world, so stupid it can’t even fly any more. I am eating lost flight.

Chapter 25

A fter Christmas I’m offered a job. The job is wheeling Brian Finestein around the block in his baby carriage after school, for an hour or a little longer if it isn’t too cold, one day a week. For this I get twenty-five cents, which is a lot of money.

The Finesteins live in the house beside ours, the big house that was built suddenly where the mud mountain used to be. Mrs. Finestein is short for a woman, plump, with dark curly hair and lovely white teeth. These show often, as she laughs a lot, wrinkling up her nose like a puppy as she does it, shaking her head, which makes her gold earrings twinkle. I’m not sure, but I think these earrings actually go through little holes in her ears, unlike any earrings I have ever seen. I ring the doorbell and Mrs. Finestein opens the door. “My little lifesaver,” she says. I wait in the vestibule, my winter boots dripping onto the spread newspapers. Mrs. Finestein, wearing a flowered pink housecoat and slippers with high heels and real fur, bustles upstairs to get Brian. The vestibule smells of Brian’s ammonia-soaked diapers, which are in a pail waiting to be collected by the diaper company. I’m intrigued by the idea that someone else can come and take away your laundry. Mrs. Finestein always has a bowl of oranges out, on a table up a few steps from the vestibule; no one else leaves oranges lying around like that when it isn’t Christmas. There’s a gold-colored candlestick like a tree behind the bowl. These things—the sickly sweet baby shit smell of the festering diapers, the bowl of oranges and the gold tree—blend in my mind into an image of ultrasophistication.

Mrs. Finestein clops down the stairs carrying Brian, who is zipped into a blue bunny suit with ears. She gives him a big kiss on his cheek, joggles him up and down, tucks him into the carriage, snaps up the waterproof carriage cover. “There, Bry-Bry,” she says. “Now Mummy can hear herself think.” She laughs, wrinkles her nose, shakes her gold earrings. Her skin is rounded out, milky-smelling. She’s not like any mother I’ve ever seen.