Cat’s Eye: Part 12 Summary & Analysis

Elaine goes to 4-D Diner, a new and fake version of the diners of her childhood. It reminds her of Sunnysides but done up as a museum, and feels like they could have included wax versions of her and Cordelia drinking milkshakes and looking bored. She hasn’t seen Cordelia since she said goodbye to her at the door of the rest home, but she has heard Cordelia talking to her ever since. Elaine orders coffee and pie and watches young people enjoying the quaintness of the past—she thinks the past was not quaint when it was “the shape her life was squeezed into,” and only “becomes so with the passage of time.” Elaine picks up the gifts she had bought her family on the way, which included fountain pens, only recently back in fashion. Elaine reflects on all the old objects that must exist somewhere in limbo, just waiting for re-entry into usage.

Elaine walks past Josef’s old apartment and wonders what became of him. He made a film once that seemed to be about Elaine and Susie, but Elaine feels like she can’t blame him because she was unfair to him; she does not regret her unfairness, because she sees unfairness as one of the only defenses that young women have, because they are “walking in the dark on the edge of high cliffs thinking themselves invulnerable.” She also does not begrudge him developing his own versions of the past, because made a painting called Life Drawing about him and Jon—both naked and painting a model, who has a marble-like sphere of bluish glass for a head.

Elaine meets Jon at the roof bar of the Park Plaza Hotel, where she used to go with Josef. They don’t speak much at dinner, unlike at lunch, because they both already know why they are there. In the elevator on the way down, Elaine catches sight of herself in “the dark glass obscured by time”; she could be any age. They go home together and sleep together with the lights off, for the comfort of it. Elaine does not feel she is being disloyal to Ben, only loyal to something that predates him; she also knows she will never do it again. She invites Jon to the opening, but he does not want to go.

The narrative skips back to earlier in their relationship, when Elaine realized that Jon was having affairs. She collects evidence, but does not confront him at once.  Jon confronts her about her previous relationship with Josef, and they fight. Elaine starts to get sick more often and paint less. She does tend to Sarah, but does not manage to do anything else because she feels like a failure and like she would be unable to live up to any of the suggestions made by her feminist circle friends.

Elaine lies alone in her bedroom and “feels nothingness wash over her,” and thinks that whatever is wrong with her is her fault. She thinks she has done something wrong, “something so huge that she can’t see it.” She feels like she might as well be dead. One night, when Jon does not come home, she hears a voice and cuts herself with an Exacto knife; Jon finds her in her blood, but she claims it was an accident. She feels cleansed; she feels like “she heard the treasured secret voice of a nine-year-old child.”

Elaine decides to leave Toronto after the snow melts, because she feels like it is the city that is killing her as much as Jon. She takes Sarah, and writes a note to leave him, then makes a peanut butter sandwich and calls a taxi. Jon comes home before the taxi arrives, but says that he can’t stop her when she says that she’s going to Vancouver, so she gets in the car and moves to Vancouver. She sees herself as being good at leaving, because “the trick is to close oneself off and not look back.”

Elaine finds Vancouver both worse and better than she expected, and changes her opinion day to day. She freelances and refinishes furniture for an antiques dealer. She sees a therapist but stops going when it seems like he just wants to ask if she has orgasms. She shows her art sometimes in group showings of women artists, but feels like she is too privileged to fit in. She envies their conviction, but does not share it. Elaine also makes several women friends who are also single mothers—the relationships are not close, because they avoid each other’s “deeper wounds,” but they complain together, and it reminds Elaine of the friendship between Babs and Marjorie in her Life Drawing class

Eventually, Jon comes to visit as a move towards reconciliation, and Elaine’s parents also come to visit because they miss Sarah. Stephen continues to send postcards and a stuffed dinosaur for Sarah, as well as a water pistol, a counting book, and a plastic mobile of the solar system. Suddenly, Elaine’s art starts to sell—two galleries represent her, and she travels and wears black.

Elaine has tentative and rushed affairs with men that she meets periodically, but there are long intervals between these encounters because she finds it difficult to balance relationships with her life as a single parent to Sarah. One day, Elaine meets Ben at the supermarket. She finds him simple and romantic, and he takes her to Mexico and seems delighted with her. They end up combining their households, and Elaine enjoys how oddly conventional her life has become. Ben is ten years older than her and has already been divorced once and has a grown son. They have a daughter together, Anne, and Ben builds an ordinary and good life with Elaine—he sees her as a little fragile but ultimately takes care of her and helps take care of the business end of her art. While she enjoys her life in Vancouver, she feels like she can’t look back.