Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Modern, Contemporary, Feminism, Adult
ISBN: 9780307797964
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 1988-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Cordelia begins to pinch things from stores. She doesn’t call it stealing, she calls it pinching. She pinches tubes of lipstick from Woolworth’s, packets of licorice Nibs from the drugstore. She goes in and buys some small item, such as bobby pins, and when the salesgirl has her back turned getting the change out of the till she slips something off the counter and hides it under her coat or in her coat pocket. By this time it’s autumn, and we have long coats which flap against the backs of our legs, coats with baggy, outsized patch pockets, good for pinching. Outside the store she shows me what she’s gotten away with. She seems to think there’s nothing wrong in what she’s doing; she laughs with delight, her eyes sparkle, her cheeks are flushed. It’s as if she’s won a prize.

The Woolworth’s has old wooden floors, stained from years of winter slush on people’s boots, and dim overhead lights that hang down from the ceiling on metal stems. Nothing in it is anything we would really want, except maybe the lipsticks. There are photo frames with strangely tinted pictures of movie stars in them to show what the frame would look like with a photo in it; these stars have names like Ramon Novarro and Linda Darnell, stars from some remote period several years ago. There are cheesy hats, old-lady hats with veiling around them, and hair combs stuck with imitation rhinestones. Just about everything in here is imitation something else. We walk up and down the aisles, spraying ourselves from the cologne testers, rubbing the sample lipsticks on the backs of our hands, fingering the merchandise and disparaging it in loud voices, while the middle-aged salesladies glare at us.

Cordelia pinches a pink nylon scarf and thinks she’s been seen by one of the glaring salesladies, so we don’t go back there for a while. We go into the drugstore and buy Creamsicles, and while I’m paying for them Cordelia pinches two horror comics. As we walk the rest of the way home from school we take turns reading them out loud, dramatizing the parts like radio plays, pausing to shriek with laughter. We sit on the low stone wall in front of the funeral parlor so we can both see the pictures, reading and laughing.

The comic books are drawn in great detail and garishly colored, with green and purple and sulfur-yellow prevailing. Cordelia reads a story about two sisters, a pretty one and one who has a burn covering half her face. The burn is maroon-colored and wrinkled like a dead apple. The pretty one has a boyfriend and goes to dances, the burned one hates her and loves the boyfriend. The burned one hangs herself in front of a mirror, out of jealousy. But her spirit goes into the mirror, and the next time the pretty one is brushing her hair in front of that mirror, she looks up and there’s the burned one looking back at her.

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