The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  Charis remembers this place from the sixties. It was called The Blown Mind Shoppe then, and had hash pipes and psychedelic posters and roach clips and tie-dyed undershirts and dashikis. In the seventies it was called Okkult, and had books on demonology, as well as on women's ancient religions and Wicca and the lost kingdoms of Atlantis and Mu, and some unappealing bone artefacts, and smelly - and in Charis's opinion, fraudulent - bundles of ground-up animal parts. There was a stuffed alligator in its window then, and for a while it even sold fright wigs and horror makeup kits, with fake blood and glue-on scars. That was a low point for it, although popular with the punk set.

  It changed again in the early eighties. That was when Shanita took over, when it was still Okkult. She quickly got rid of the stuffed alligator and the bones and the demonology books - why borrow trouble, she says, and she didn't want any run-ins with the animal-rights folks, or any Christian weirdos spray-painting the window. It was her idea to start up the crystals, and to change the name to Radiance.

  It was the name that attracted Charis. First she was just a customer: she came in for the herbal teas. But then the sales position came open, and since she was tired of her job filing reports at the Ministry of Natural Resources - too impersonal, too much pressure, and besides she wasn't very good at it - she applied. Shanita hired her because she had the right look, or so Shanita told her.

  "You won't bug the customers," said Shanita. "They don't like to be pushed. They like to just sort of float around in here, know what I mean?"

  Charis did. She likes to float around in Radiance herself. She likes the way it smells, and she likes the things in it. Sometimes she does a trade, taking goods - at a discount price - instead of pay, much to Augusta's disgust. More of that junk? she says. She does not see how many more Japanese lacquered bowls and tapes of loon calls Charis really needs. Charis says it isn't a matter of need, material need that is. It's a matter of spiritual need. Right now she has her eye on a truly lovely amethyst geode, from Nova Scotia. She will keep it in her bedroom, to ward off bad dreams.

  She can picture Augusta's response to this geode. Mom! What's this hunk of rock doing in your bed? She can picture Tony's interested scepticism - Does it really work? - and Roz's maternal indulgence - Honey, if it makes you happy I'm all for it! This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people's responses. She's too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone - other people's reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands - but somehow they don't reciprocate. Maybe they can't. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.

  Charis walks away from the ferry dock, up to King and then Queen, sniffing the turgid city air, so different from the air on the Island. This air is full of chemicals, and also of breath, the breath of other people. There are too many people breathing in this city. There are too many people breathing on this planet; maybe it would be beneficial if a few million of them would make the transition. But this is an appallingly selfish thought, so Charis stops thinking it. Instead she thinks about sharing. Every single molecule that Charis is taking into her lungs has been sucked in and out of the lungs of countless thousands of other people, many times. Come to that, every single molecule in her body has once been part of someone else's body, of the bodies of many others, going back and back, and then past human beings, all the way to the dinosaurs, all the way to the first planktons. Not to mention vegetation. We are all a part of everybody else, she muses. We are all a part of everything.

  That's a cosmic insight, if you can keep it at arm's length. But then Charis has an unpleasant idea. If everyone is part of everyone else, then she herself is a part of Zenia. Or the other way around. Zenia may be what she's breathing in. The part of Zenia that went up in smoke, that is. Not her astral body, which is still hovering near earth, and not the ashes either, which are safely in that canister under the mulberry tree.

  Maybe that's what Zenia wants! Maybe she's bothered by her partial state, some of her energy in the canister and some wafting around. Maybe she wants to be let out. Maybe Charis should go to the cemetery some night, with a shovel and a can-opener, and dig her up and sprinkle her. Mingle her with the Universe. That would be a kindly thing to do.

  She reaches Radiance at ten to ten, early for once, and lets herself in with her key, and puts on the mauve-and-aqua smock that Shanita designed for them so the customers will know they aren't customers themselves.

  Shanita is already there. "Hi, Charis, how're you doing?" she calls out, from the stockroom at the back. It's Shanita who does all the ordering. She has a knack for it; she goes to crafts fairs and takes trips to little-known corners, and finds things, wonderful things that no other store in town has. She seems to know in advance what people will want.

  Charis admires Shanita a lot. Shanita is smart and practical, as well as being psychic. Also she's strong, and also she's one of the most beautiful women Charis has ever seen. Though she isn't young - she must be well over forty. She refuses to tell her age - the one time Charis asked her, she only laughed, and said age was in the mind and in her mind she was two thousand - but she's getting a white streak in her hair. That's another thing Charis admires: Shanita doesn't dye.

  The hair itself is black, neither curly nor frizzy but wavy, thick and shining and luscious, like pulled taffy or lava. Like hot black glass. Shanita coils it, and winds it here and there on her head: sometimes on top, sometimes on one side. Or else she lets it hang down her back in one thick curl. She has wide cheekbones, a trim high-bridged nose, full lips, and large darkly fringed eyes, which are a startling shade that shifts from brown to green, depending on what colour she's wearing. Her skin is smooth and unwrinkled, an indeterminate colour, neither black nor brown nor yellow. A deep beige; but beige is a bland word. Nor is it chestnut, nor burnt sienna, nor umber. It's some other word.

  People coming into the store frequently ask Shanita where she's from. "Right here," she says, smiling her ultra-bright smile. "I was born right in this very city!" She's nice about it to their faces, but it's a question that bothers her a lot.

  "I think they mean, where were your parents from," says Charis, because that's what Canadians usually mean when they ask that question.

  "That's not what they mean," says Shanita. "What they mean is, when am I leaving."

  Charis cannot see why anyone would want Shanita to leave, but when she says so, Shanita laughs. "You," she says, "have led one damn sheltered life." Then she tells Charis about the rudeness of white streetcar conductors towards her. "Move to the back, they tell me, like I was dirt!"

  "Streetcar conductors are all rude! They say Move to the back to everybody, they're rude to me!" says Charis, intending to console Shanita - although she's being slightly dishonest, it's only some streetcar conductors, and she herself hardly ever takes the streetcar - and Shanita throws her a glance of contempt, for being unable to acknowledge the racism of almost everybody, almost everybody white, and then Charis feels bad. Sometimes she thinks of Shanita as a dauntless explorer, hacking her way through the jungle. The jungle consists of people like Charis.

  So she stops herself from being too curious, from asking too much about Shanita, about her background, about where she's from. Shanita teases her, though; she throws out hints, changes her story. Sometimes she's part Chinese and part black, with a West Indian grandmother; she can do the accent, so maybe there's something to it. That might be the grandmother who used to eat dirt; but there are other grandmothers too, one from the States and one from Halifax, and one from Pakistan and one from New Mexico, and even one from Scotland. Maybe they are step-grandmothers, or maybe Shanita moved around a lot. Charis can't sort them out: Shanita has more grandmothers than anyone she knows. But sometimes she's part Ojibway, or else part Mayan, and one day she was even part Tibetan. She can be whatever she feels like, because who can tell?

  Whereas Charis is stuck with being white. A white rabbit. Being white is getting more and more exhausting. There are so many bad waves attached to it, left over fro
m the past but spreading through the present, like the killing rays from atomic waste dumps. There's so much to expiate! It gives her anemia just to think about it. In her next life she's going to be a mixture, a blend, a vigorous hybrid, like Shanita. Then no one will have anything on her.

  The store doesn't open till eleven, so Charis helps take stock. Shanita goes through the shelves, counting, and Charis writes down the numbers on a clipboard. It's a good thing she found her reading glasses.

  "We'll have to bring down the prices," says Shanita, frowning. "Stuff is not moving. We'll have to do a sale."

  "Before Christmas?" says Charis, astonished.

  "It's the Recession," says Shanita, pursing her lips. "That's reality. This time of year, we usually have to re-order for Christmas, right? Now, just look at all this!"

  Charis peers: the shelves are upsettingly full. "You know what's moving?" says Shanita. "This thing."

  Charis is familiar with it, because she's sold a lot of them lately. It's a little pamphlet-like book, a cookbook, done on grey recycled paper with black-and-white line drawings, a do-it-yourself home publishing effort: Pot Luck: Penny-Pinching Soups & Stews. It doesn't appeal to her, personally. Penny-pinching as a concept she finds very blocking. There's something hard and grinding about it, and pinching is a hurtful word. True, she saves candle ends and pieces of wool, but that's because she wants to, she wants to create things with them, that's an act of love towards the earth.

  "I need more stuff like this," says Shanita. "Fact is, I'm thinking of changing the store. Changing the name, the concept, everything."

  Charis's heart sinks. "What would you change it to?" she asks.

  "I was thinking, Scrimpers," says Shanita.

  "Scrimpers?" says Charis.

  "You know. Like the old five-and-dime, all cheap stuff," says Shanita. "Only more creative. It could work! A few years ago, you could trade on the impulse buy. Mad money, you know? Folks were flinging it around. But the only way you make it through a recession is by getting people to buy stuff about how not to buy stuff, if you know what I mean."

  "But Radiance is so lovely!" cries Charis unhappily.

  "I know," says Shanita. "It was a lot of fun while it lasted. But lovely is luxury goods. How many of these dinky toys you think people are going to buy, right now? Maybe some, but only if we keep the price down. In these times you cut your losses, you cut your overheads, you do what you have to. This is a lifeboat, you know? It's my lifeboat, it's my life. I have worked damn hard, I know which way the wind is blowing, and I do not intend to go down with the sinking ship."

  She's defensive. She looks at Charis, her gaze level - her eyes are green today - and Charis realizes that she herself is an overhead. If things get much worse, Shanita will cut her, and run the store by herself, and Charis will be out of a job.

  They finish taking stock and open the door for the day, and Shanita's mood changes. She's friendly now, almost solicitous; she makes them both some Morning Miracle, and they sit at the front counter drinking it. There is not exactly a stampede of customers, so Shanita passes the time by asking Charis all about Augusta.

  To Charis's discomfort, Shanita approves of Augusta; she thinks Augusta is smart to be taking a business course. "A woman needs to be prepared to make her own way," she says. "Too many lazy men around." She even approves of the furniture scrapbook, which Charis herself finds so grasping, so materialistic. "That's a girl with a head on her shoulders," Shanita says, pouring them out more tea. "Wish I'd had one, at her age. Would've saved myself a lot of trouble." She has two daughters of her own, and two sons, grown up. She's a grandmother, even; but she doesn't talk much about that part of her life. By now she knows a great deal about Charis, whereas Charis knows almost nothing about her.

  "My pendulum went funny this morning," says Charis, to get off the subject of Augusta.

  "Funny?" says Shanita. The pendulums are sold in the store, five different models, and Shanita is an expert at interpreting their movements.

  "It just stopped," says Charis. "Stock-still, right over my head."

  "That's a strong message," says Shanita. "That's something real sudden, something you weren't looking for. Maybe it's some entity, trying to get a message through. Today is the cusp of Scorpio, right? It's like, the pendulum is pointing a finger and saying, watch out!"

  Charis is apprehensive: could it be Augusta, an accident? That's the first thing she thinks of, so she asks.

  "It's not what I get," says Shanita reassuringly, "but let's just see." She takes the Tarot she keeps under the counter, the Marseilles deck she favours, and Charis shuffles and cuts.

  "The Tower," says Shanita. "Sudden, like I said. The Priestess. An opening, something hidden is revealed. The Knight of Swords - well, that could be interesting! The Knights all bring messages. Now, the Empress. A strong woman! Not you, though. Somebody else. But I wouldn't say this is Augusta, no. The Empress is not a young girl."

  "Maybe it's you," Charis says, and Shanita laughs and says, "Strong! I am a broken reed!" She puts down another card. "Death," she says. "A change. Could be a renewal." She crosses that card again. "Oh. The Moon."

  The Moon, with its baying dogs, its pool, its lurking scorpion. Just then the bell tinkles and a customer comes into the store; she asks Charis for two copies of Pot Luck, one for herself, one for a gift. Charis agrees with her that it's very useful and not too expensive, and that the hand-done illustrations are sweet, and tells her that yes, Shanita is truly stunning but she's not from any place except just plain old Toronto, and takes the money and wraps the books, her mind elsewhere.

  The Moon, she thinks. Illusion.

  10

  At noon Charis takes off her flowered smock and says goodbye to Shanita - it's her half-day, Tuesday, so she won't be back after lunch - and heads out into the street, trying not to breathe too much. She has seen bicycle messengers wearing white paper nose masks, like nurses. It's a trend, she thinks; maybe they should order some for the store, only coloured and with some nice patterns printed on.

  As soon as she walks into the Toxique her head starts to crackle. It's as if there's a thunderstorm around somewhere, or a loose connection. Ions are bombarding her, wavelets of menacing energy. She brushes her forehead, then shakes her fingers to get rid of them.

  She cranes her neck, looking around for the source of the disturbance. Sometimes it's the people who come in to deal drugs on the stairs going down to the washrooms, but none of them seem to be around right now. The waitress comes up to her, and Charis asks for the corner near the mirror. Mirrors deflect.

  The Toxique is Roz's latest discovery. Roz is always discovering things, especially restaurants. She likes eating in places where no one from her office would ever eat, she likes being surrounded by people wearing clothes she'd never wear herself. She likes to think she's mingling with real life, real meaning poorer than her. Or that's the impression Charis sometimes gets. She's tried telling Roz that all life is equally real, but Roz doesn't appear to understand what she means; though maybe Charis doesn't put it clearly enough.

  She glances at the leopard-skin tights of the waitress, wrinkles her nose - these clothes are too tough for her - tells herself not to be judgmental, orders a bottle of Evian and some white wine, and settles down to wait. She opens the menu, squints at it, rummages in her bag for her reading glasses, can't find them - has she left them at the store? - and finally locates them on top of her head. She must have walked along the street like that. She puts them on her nose and scans the daily specials. At least they always have something vegetarian; though who knows where the vegetables come from? Probably off some irradiated chemical-saturated agro-business maxi-farm.

  The truth is that she doesn't much like the Toxique. It's partly the name: she considers it damaging to the neurons to spend time around such a poisonous name. And the clothes on the waiters, the servers, remind her of some of the things they used to sell in Okkult. At any moment there could be rubber scars and fake blood. But s
he's willing to eat here once in a while for the sake of Roz.

  As for Tony, who knows what she thinks of this place? Tony's hard for Charis to read; she always has been, ever since they first met, back in the McClung Hall days. But most likely Tony would have exactly the same attitude if it were the King Eddie, or else McDonald's: a kind of goggle-eyed, incredulous note-taking, like a Martian on a time-travel holiday. Collecting specimens. Freeze-drying them. Sticking everything into labelled boxes. Leaving no space, no space for the unsayable.

  Not that she doesn't like Tony. No, wrong. There are quite a few times when she doesn't like Tony. Tony can use too many words, can grate on her, can rub her electrical field the wrong way. But she loves Tony all the same. Tony is so calm, so clear-headed, so grounded. If Charis ever hears any more voices telling her to slit her wrists, Tony is the one she'd call, to come over on the Island ferry and take charge of her, to defuse her, to tell her not to be an idiot. Tony would know what to do, step by step, one thing at a time, in order.

  She wouldn't call Roz at first, because Roz would freak out, would cry and sympathize and agree with her about the unbearability of it all, and would be late for the ferry as well. But afterwards, after she felt safe again, she would go to Roz for the hug.

  Roz and Tony come in together, and Charis waves at them, and there's the flurry there always is when Roz enters a restaurant, and the two of them sit down and Roz lights a cigarette, and they start talking at once. Charis tunes out because she isn't that interested in what they're saying, and just lets their presences wash over her. Their presences are more important to her anyway than what comes out of their mouths. Words are so often like window curtains, a decorative screen put up to keep the neighbours at a distance. But auras don't lie. Charis herself doesn't see auras as often as she used to. When she was little, when she was Karen, she saw them effortlessly; now it's only at moments of stress. But she can sense them, the way blind people can sense colour through the ends of their fingers.