The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  What she senses about Tony today is coolness. A transparent coolness. Tony reminds her of a snowflake, so tiny and pale and fastidious, but cold; a mind like an ice cube, clear and square; or cut glass, hard and sharp. Or ice, because it can melt. In the school play, Tony would have been a snowflake: one of the smallest children, too little for a speaking part but taking it all in. Charis herself was usually cast as a tree or a shrub. She wasn't given anything that involved moving around because she would have bumped into things, or that's what the teachers said. They didn't realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn't sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.

  What would Roz have been? Charis visualizes Roz's aura - so golden and many-coloured and spicy - and her air of command, but also that undercurrent of exile, and casts her in the role of one of the Three Kings, wearing brocade and jewels, carrying a splendid gift. But would Roz ever have been in such a play? Her early life is such a jumble, with all those nuns and rabbis in it. Maybe she wouldn't have been allowed.

  Charis herself gave up Christianity a long time ago. For one thing, the Bible is full of meat: animals being sacrificed, lambs, bullocks, doves. Cain was right to offer up the vegetables, God was wrong to refuse them. And there's too much blood: people in the Bible are always having their blood spilled, blood on their hands, their blood licked up by dogs. There are too many slaughters, too much suffering, too many tears.

  She used to think some of the Eastern religions would be more serene; she was a Buddhist for a while, before she discovered how many Hells they had. Most religions are so intent on punishment.

  She realizes that she's halfway through her lunch without having noticed. She's having the grated carrot and cottage cheese salad, a wise choice; not that she can remember having ordered it, but sometimes it's useful to have an automatic pilot like that, to take care of the routines. For a moment she watches Roz eat a piece of French bread; she likes to watch Roz eat French bread, cracking it open, burying her nose in it - This is so good, this is so good! - before sinking her firm white teeth into it. It's like a small prayer, a miniature grace, what Roz does with bread.

  "Tony," says Charis, "I could really make something good, with your back garden." Tony has a great space back there, but there's nothing in it except patchy lawn and some diseased trees. What Charis has in mind would be fixing up the trees, and making a sort of woodland, with jack-in-the-pulpits, violets, mayapples, Solomon's seal, things that grow in shade. Some ferns. Nothing that Tony would have to weed, she could never be depended on for that. It would be special! Perhaps a fountain? But Tony doesn't answer her, and after a moment Charis realizes it's because she hasn't spoken out loud. Sometimes it's hard for her to remember whether she's actually said a thing or not. Augusta has complained about this habit of hers, among others.

  She tunes back in to the conversation: they're talking about some war. Charis wishes they wouldn't get going on war, but they often do these days. It seems to be in the air, after a long time of not being there much at all. Roz starts it; she asks Tony questions, because she likes to ask people questions about things they're supposed to know about.

  One of their lunches a few months ago was all about genocide, and Roz wanted to talk about the Holocaust, and Tony launched into a detailed thing about genocides through the ages, Genghis Khan and then the Cathars in France, and then the Armenians being butchered by the Turks, and then the Irish and the Scots and what the English did to them, death after horrible death, until Charis thought she was going to throw up.

  Tony can deal with all of that, she can handle it, maybe to her it's just words, but for Charis the words are pictures and then screams and moans, and then the smell of rotting meat, and of burning, of burning flesh, and then physical pain, and if you dwell on it you make it happen, and she can never explain this to Tony in a way that Tony will understand, and also she's afraid they'll decide she's being silly. Hysterical, a nitwit, a flake. She knows they both think that sometimes.

  So she'd got up and gone down the dark splintery stairs to the washroom, where there was a Renoir poster on the wall, a rounded pink woman drying herself leisurely after the bath, with blue and mauve highlights on her body, and that was peaceful; but when she'd gone back upstairs Tony was still in Scotland, with the Highland women and children being hunted down in the hills and spitted like pigs and shot like deer.

  "The Scots!" said Roz, who wanted to get back to the Holocaust. "They've done very well for themselves, look at all those bankers! Who cares about them?"

  "I do," said Charis, surprising herself as much as she did the two of them. "I care." They looked at her in amazement, because they were used to her taking mental time off when they talked about war. They thought it didn't interest her.

  "You do?" said Roz, her eyebrows up. "Why, Charis?"

  "You should care about everybody," said Charis. "Or maybe it's because I'm part Scottish. Part Scottish, part English. All those people who used to kill one another so much." She leaves out the Mennonites because she doesn't want to upset Roz, although the Mennonites don't count as real Germans. Also they never kill people; they only get killed, instead.

  "Sweetie, I'm sorry," said Roz, contrite. "Of course! I keep forgetting. Stupid moi, thinking of you as pure creme de la WASP." She patted Charis's hand.

  "Nobody's killed them recently, though," said Charis. "Not all at once. But I guess that's how we ended up here."

  "Ended up here?" said Tony, looking around. Did Charis mean the Toxique, or what?

  "Because of wars," said Charis, unhappily; it's an insight she doesn't like much, now that she's had it. "In this country. Wars of one sort or another. But that was then. We should try to live in the now - don't you think? Or at least, I try to."

  Tony smiled at Charis with affection, or the closest she usually got to it. "She's absolutely right," she said to Roz, as if this were a noteworthy event.

  Right about what though, Charis wonders. The wars, or the now? Tony's standard response to the now would be to tell Charis how many babies are being born per minute, in the now she's so fond of, and how all that excess birth will inevitably lead to more wars. Then she would add a footnote about the crazed behaviour of overcrowded rats. Charis is grateful she isn't doing that today.

  But she has it at last, the thread: it's Saddam Hussein and the invasion of Kuwait, and what will happen next. "It's already been decided," says Tony, "like the Rubicon," and Charis says, "The what?"

  "Never mind, sweetie, it's just something historical," says Roz, because she at least does understand that this is not Charis's favourite topic of conversation, she's giving her permission to drift off.

  But then it comes to Charis what the Rubicon is. It's something to do with Julius Caesar, they took it in high school. He crossed the Alps with elephants; another of those men who got famous for killing people. If they stopped giving medals to such men, thinks Charis, if they stopped giving them parades and making statues out of them, then those men would stop doing it. Stop all the killing. They do it to get attention.

  Maybe that's who Tony was, in a previous life: Julius Caesar. Maybe Julius Caesar has been sent back in the body of a woman, to punish him. A very short woman, so he can see what it's like, to be powerless. Maybe that is the way things work.

  The door opens, and Zenia is standing there. Charis goes cold all over, then takes a breath. She's ready, she's been readying herself, though lunch at the Toxique is the last place she would have expected this, this manifestation, this return. The Tower, thinks Charis. A sudden event. Something you weren't looking for. No wonder the pendulum stopped dead, right over her head! But why did Zenia bother opening the door? She could have walked right through it.

  Zenia is in black, which is no surprise, black was her colour. But the strange thing is that she's fatter. Death has filled her out, which is not the usual way. Spirits are supposed to be thinner, hungry-looking, parched, and Zenia ap
pears to be quite well. Especially, her breasts are larger. The last time Charis saw her in the flesh, she was skinny as a rake, a shadow practically, her breasts almost flat, like circles of thick cardboard stuck against her chest, the nipples buttoning them on. Now she's what you would call voluptuous.

  She's angry, though. A dark aura swirls out from around her, like the corona of the sun in eclipse, only negative; a corona of darkness rather than of light. It's a turbulent muddy green, shot through with lines of blood red and greyish black - the worst, the most destructive colours, a deadly aureole, a visible infection. Charis will have to call on all her own light, the white light she's been working so hard at, storing up, for years and years. She will have to do an instant meditation, and what a place for it! Zenia has chosen the ground well for this encounter: the Toxique, the chattering voices, the cigarette smoke and wine fumes, the thick breath-filled air of the city, all are working for Zenia. She stands in the doorway, scanning the room with a scornful rancorous glance, pulling off a glove, and Charis closes her own eyes and repeats to herself: Think about the light.

  "Tony, what's wrong?" says Roz, and Charis opens her eyes again. The waitress is moving towards Zenia.

  "Turn your head slowly," says Tony. "Don't scream." Charis watches with interest, to see if the waitress will walk right through Zenia; but she doesn't, she stops short. She must sense something. A coldness.

  "Oh shit," says Roz. "It's her."

  "Who?" says Charis, doubt beginning to form. Roz hardly ever says "Oh shit." It must be important.

  "Zenia," says Tony. So they can see her too! Well, why not? They have enough to say to her, each one of them. It isn't only Charis.

  "Zenia's dead," says Charis. I wonder what she's come back for, is what she thinks. Who she's come back for. Zenia's aura has faded now, or else Charis can no longer see it: Zenia appears to be solid, substantial, material, disconcertingly alive.

  "He looked like a lawyer," says Charis. Zenia is coming towards her, and she concentrates all her forces for the moment of impact; but Zenia strides right past them in her richly textured dress, with her long legs, her startling new breasts, her glossy hair nebulous around her shoulders, her purple-red angry mouth, trailing musky perfume. She's refusing to notice Charis, refusing deliberately; she's passing a hand of darkness over her, usurping her, blotting her out.

  Shaken and feeling sick, Charis closes her eyes, struggling to regain her body. My body, mine, she repeats. I am a good person. I exist. In the moonlit night of her head she can see an image: a tall structure, a building, something toppling from it, falling through the air, turning over and over. Coming apart.

  11

  The three of them stand outside the Toxique, saying goodbye. Charis isn't entirely sure how she got out here. Her body has walked her out, all by itself, her body has taken care of it. She's shivering, despite the sun, she's cold, and she feels thinner - lighter and more porous. It's as though energy has been drained out of her, energy and substance, in order for Zenia to materialize. Zenia has made it back across, back across the river; she's here now, in a fresh body, and she's taken a chunk of Charis's own body and sucked it into herself.

  That's wrong though. Zenia must be alive, because other people saw her. She sat down in a chair, she ordered a drink, she smoked a cigarette. But none of these are necessarily signs of life.

  Roz gives her a squeeze and says, "Take care of yourself, sweetie, I'll call you, okay?" and goes off in the direction of her car. Tony has already smiled at her and is going, gone, off down the street, her short legs moving her steadily along, like a wind-up toy. For a moment Charis stands there in front of the Toxique, lost. She doesn't know what to do next. She could turn around and march back in there, march up to Zenia, stand planted; but the things she was going to say to Zenia have evaporated, have flown up out of her head. All that's left is a whirring sound.

  She could go back to the store, back to Radiance, even though it's her half-day and Shanita isn't expecting her. She could tell Shanita what happened; Shanita is a teacher, maybe she can help. But possibly Shanita won't be too sympathetic. A woman like that, she'll say. She's nothing. Why are you concerned about her? You are giving her the power, you know better than that! What colour is she? What colour is the pain? Wipe the tape!

  Shanita has never had a dose of Zenia. She won't realize, she can't understand, that Zenia can't be meditated out of existence. If she could be, Charis would have done it long ago.

  She decides to go home. She'll fill up the bathtub and put some orange peel into it, some rose oil, a few cloves; she'll pin up her hair and get into the tub and let her arms float in the scented water. Steering herself towards this goal, she walks downhill, in the general direction of the lake and the ferry dock; but a block along she turns left and makes her way by a narrow alley to the next street, and then she turns left again, and now she's back on Queen.

  Her body doesn't wish her to go home right now. Her body is urging her to have a cup of coffee; worse than that, a cup of espresso. This is so unusual - her body's promptings of this kind are normally for fruit juice or glasses of water - that she feels obliged to do what it wants.

  There's a cafe, right across the street from the Toxique. It's called the Kafay Nwar, and has a hot-pink neon sign in forties writing in the window. Charis goes into it and sits at one of the small round chrome-edged tables by the window, and takes off her cardigan, and when the waiter comes, wearing a pleated dress shirt, a black bow tie, and jeans, she orders an Espresso Esperanto - all the things on the menu have complicated names, Cappuccino Cappriccio, Tarte aux Tarts, Our Malicious Mudcake - and watches the door of the Toxique. It's clear to her now that her body doesn't want an espresso primarily. Her body wants her to spy on Zenia.

  To make herself less obvious as a watcher she takes her notebook out of her tote bag, a lovely notebook she traded some of her paytime for. It has a hand-bound cover of marbled paper with a burgundy suede spine, and the pages are a delicate lavender. The pen she bought to go with it is pearl grey, and filled with grey-green ink. She got the pen at Radiance too, and the ink. It makes her sad to think of Radiance vanishing. So many gifts.

  The notebook is for her to write her thoughts in, but so far she hasn't written any. She hates to spoil the beauty of the blank pages, their potential; she doesn't want to use them up. But now she uncaps her pearl grey pen, and prints: Zenia must go back. She once took a course in italic handwriting, so the message looks elegant, almost like a rune. She does one letter at a time, looking up between the words, over the tops of her reading glasses, so nothing going on across the street will escape her.

  At first more people go in than out, and after that more people go out than in. None of the people who go in is Billy, not that she is realistically expecting him, but you never know. None of the people who come out is Zenia.

  Her coffee arrives and her body tells her to drop two lumps of sugar into it, and so she does, and then she drinks the coffee quickly and feels the hit of caffeine and sucrose rush to her head. She's focused now, she has X-ray vision, she knows what she has to do. Neither Tony nor Roz can help her, they don't need to help her with this, because their stories, the stories with Zenia in them, have endings. At least they know what happened. Charis doesn't, Charis has never known. It's as if her story, the story with Billy and Zenia in it, was going along a path, and suddenly there were no more footprints.

  At last, when Charis is beginning to think that Zenia must have slipped out the back or else vaporized, the door opens and she comes out. Charis lowers her eyes slightly; she doesn't want to rest the full weight of her supercharged eyes on Zenia, she doesn't want to give herself away. But Zenia doesn't even glance in her direction. She's with someone Charis doesn't recognize. A young fair-haired man. Not Billy. He's too slightly built to be Billy.

  Though if it were Billy, he would hardly be young any more. He might even be fat, or bald. But in her head he has stayed the same age as he was the last time she saw him. The sa
me age, the same size, everything the same. Loss opens again beneath her feet, the pit, the familiar trapdoor. If she were alone, if she weren't here in the Kafay Nwar but home in her own kitchen, she would bang her forehead softly on the edge of the table. The pain is red and it hurts, and she can't just wipe it away.

  Zenia isn't happy, Charis thinks. It's not an insight, it's more like a charm, an incantation. She can't possibly be happy. If she were allowed to be happy it would be completely unfair: there must be a balance in the Universe. But Zenia is smiling up at the man, whose face Charis can't quite see, and now she's taking his arm and they're walking along the street, and from this distance at least she looks happy enough.

  Compassion for all living things, Charis reminds herself. Zenia is alive, so that means compassion for Zenia.

  This is what it does mean, though Charis realizes, on taking stock, that at the moment she feels no compassion whatsoever for Zenia. On the contrary she has a clear picture of herself pushing Zenia off a cliff, or other high object.

  Own the emotion, she tells herself, because although it's a thoroughly unworthy one it must be acknowledged fully before being discarded. She concentrates on the image, bringing it closer; she feels the wind against her face, senses the height, hears the release of her arm muscles inside her body, listens for the scream. But Zenia makes no sound. She merely falls, her hair streaming behind her like a dark comet.

  Charis wraps this image up in tissue paper and with an effort expels it from her body. All I want to do is talk to her, she tells herself. That's all.

  There's a confusion, a rustling of dry wings. Zenia has left the oblong of the Kafay Nwar window. Charis gathers up her notebook, her grey pen, her cardigan, her reading glasses, and her tote bag, and prepares to follow.