Cat's eye by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online Page B

houses. The name of it is Queen Mary Public School. In the mornings we walk across the freezing mud in our new winter overshoes, carrying our lunches in paper bags, and down through the remains of an orchard to the nearest paved road, where we wait for the school bus to come lurching toward us, up the hill and over the potholes. I wear my new snowsuit, my skirt wrapped around my legs and stuffed down into the bulgy legs of the snowpants, which whisk together as I walk. You can’t wear pants to school, you have to wear skirts. I’m not used to this, or to sitting still at a desk. We eat our lunches in the chilly dimly lit cellar of the schoolhouse, where we sit in supervised rows on long scarred wooden benches under a festoon of heating pipes. Most of the children go home for lunch, it’s only the school bus ones that have to stay. We’re issued small bottles of milk which we drink through straws stuck in through a hole in the cardboard bottle tops. These are my first drinking straws, and they amaze me.
    The school building itself is old and tall, made of liver-colored brick, with high ceilings, long ominous wood-floored hallways, and radiators that are either on full blast or not at all, so that we’re either shivering with cold or too hot. The windows are high and thin and many-paned, and decorated with cutouts made of construction paper; right now there are snowflakes, for winter. There’s a front door which is never used by children. At the back are two grandiose entranceways with carvings around them and ornate insets above the doors, inscribed in curvy, solemn lettering: GIRLS and BOYS. When the teacher in the yard rings her brass handbell we have to line up in twos by classrooms, girls in one line, boys in another, and file into our separate doors. The girls hold hands; the boys don’t. If you go in the wrong door you get the strap, or so everyone says.
    I am very curious about the BOYS door. How is going in through a door different if you’re a boy?
    What’s in there that merits the strap, just for seeing it? My brother says there’s nothing special about the stairs inside, they’re plain ordinary stairs. The boys don’t have a separate classroom, they’re in with us. They go in the BOYS door and end up in the same place we do. I can see the point of the boys’
    washroom, because they pee differently, and also the boys’ yard, because of all the kicking and punching that goes on among them. But the door baffles me. I would like to have a look inside. Just as there are separate doors for boys and girls, there are also separate parts of the schoolyard. At the front, outside the teachers’ entrance, is a dirt field covered with cinders, the boys’ playing field. At the side of the school facing away from the street is a hill, with wooden steps going up it and eroded runnels worn down the side, and a few stunted evergreens on top. By custom this is reserved for the girls, and the older ones stand around up there in groups of three or four, their heads bent inward, whispering, although boys sometimes make charges up the hill, yelling and waving their arms. The cement-paved area outside the BOYS and GIRLS is common territory, since the boys have to cross it in order to go in their door.
    Lining up is the only time I see my brother at school. At home we’ve rigged up a walkie-talkie with two tin cans and a piece of string, which runs between our two bedroom windows and doesn’t work very well. We push messages under each other’s doors, written in the cryptic language of the aliens, which is filled with x’s and z’s and must be decoded. We nudge and kick each other under the table, keeping our faces straight above the tablecloth; sometimes we tie our shoelaces together, for signaling. These are my main communications with my brother now, these raspy tin can words, sentences without vowels, the Morse of feet.
    But in the daytime I lose sight of him as soon as we go out the door. He’s up ahead, throwing