The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  She unlatches the wire gate that leads to their enclosure. Charis's first idea had been to let the chickens range free, totally fenceless, but there turned out to be a cat and dog problem; and also the neighbours, although tolerant of the chickens in general, didn't much appreciate having stray ones in their own yards, scratching up their flower beds. The chickens don't like the fence and try to get out, so Charis always closes the gate behind her before opening the henhouse door.

  Billy built the henhouse himself, working with his shirt off and the sun on his back, whacking the nails in. It was good for him, it gave him a sense of accomplishment. The house tilts a little but it does its job. It has one door for the hens, a small square one with a ramp going down, and another for the humans. Charis opens the chickens' door and they crowd and strut and cluck down their ramp, blinking in the light. Then she goes in by the human door, opens the metal garbage can where the chicken feed is kept, and scoops up a coffee tin of feed, which she takes outside and scatters on the ground. She prefers to feed the chickens outside. The book says you should let the straw litter and the chicken droppings build up on the henhouse floor because the heat of decomposition will keep the chickens warm in winter, but Charis does not think that food eaten under such circumstances can possibly be healthy. The cycle of nature is one thing, but you shouldn't confuse the different parts of it.

  The chickens cluck hyperactively, mobbing her legs, making small fluttering hops, jostling and pecking one another, giving out yelps of anger. When they have settled down and are feeding she carries their water container outside too and tops it up from the pail.

  Charis watches the chickens eat. They fill her with joy, a joy that has no rational source, because she knows - she has seen, also she remembers - how greedy chickens are, how selfish and unfeeling, how cruel they are to one another, how they gang up: at least two of them have naked scalps, from being picked on. Nor are they placid vegetarians: you can start a riot among them just by tossing them a few hot-dog ends or scraps of bacon. As for the rooster, with his eye of an insane prophet and his fanatic's air of outrage and his comb and wattles flaunted like genitals, he's an overbearing autocrat, and attacks her rubber boots when he thinks she's not looking.

  Charis doesn't care; she excuses the chickens everything. She adores them! She has adored them ever since the moment they arrived, flowering out of the feed sacks in which they travelled, shaking their angels' feathers. She thinks they are miraculous. They are.

  Inside the henhouse, she rummages through the straw in the boxes, hoping for eggs. In June the hens were bursting with eggs, laying two a day, huge milky ovals with double and triple yolks, but now, with the declining angle of the sun, they've fallen off badly. Their feathers and wattles are duller; several of them are moulting. She does manage to find one egg, an undersized one with a pebbly shell. She slips it into the breast pocket of her overalls; she will feed it to Billy for his breakfast.

  Back in the kitchen she takes off her boots; she leaves the overalls on, because she's cold. She slides another stick of wood into the stove, warming her hands. Should she have her own breakfast first, or wait and have it while Billy has his? Should she wake him at all? Sometimes he's mad if she does, other times he's mad if she doesn't. But today is a city day for her, so if she wakes him up now she can get him fed before she catches the ferry. That way he won't spend the morning asleep, and blame her later.

  She climbs the stairs and walks gently along the hall; when she gets to the doorway she stands for a moment, just looking. She likes looking at Billy in the same way that she likes looking at the hens. Billy too is beautiful; and just as the hens are the essence of henness, Billy is the essence of Billy-ness. (Like the hens, too, he is a little frowsier now than when she first encountered him. This also may have something to do with the angle of the sun.)

  He lies on their mattress, the sleeping bag pulled up to his neck. His left arm is flung across his eyes; the tan on it is fading, although it's still dark, this arm, and pelted with short golden hairs, like a honeybee covered with pollen. His short yellow beard shines in the white room, in the strange light from the mist outside - heraldic, the beard of a saint, or of a knight in an old picture. Or like something on a stamp. Charis loves to watch Billy at such moments, when he's quiet and still. It's easier to maintain her view of him that way than when he's talking and moving around.

  Billy must sense her flashlight gaze on him. His arm moves away from his eyes, the eyes themselves open, such blue! Like forget-me-nots, like mountains in the distance, on postcards, like thick ice. He smiles at her, uncovering Viking teeth.

  "What time is it?" he says.

  "I don't know," says Charis.

  "You've got a watch, don't you?" he says. Don'tcha. How can she explain about the mist? Also that she can't take the time to look at her watch, because she's looking at him? Looking is not a casual thing. It takes all her attention.

  He gives a small sigh, of exasperation or desire, it's so hard to tell the difference. "Come here," he says.

  It must be desire. Charis goes to the mattress, sits down beside Billy, smooths back the hair on his forehead, hair so yellow it looks painted. It's still amazing to her that the colour doesn't come off on her skin. Although her own hair is blonde as well, it's a different blonde, pale and bleached-out, moon to his sun. Billy's hair glows from within.

  "I said here," says Billy. He pulls her down on top of him, zeroes in on her mouth, encircles her in his golden arms, squeezes her tight.

  "The egg!" says Charis breathlessly, remembering it. The egg breaks.

  30

  That's what Billy was like, at the time. He was always after her then. In the mornings, in the afternoons, at night, it made no difference. Maybe it was just a sort of nervousness, or boredom, because he didn't have that much to fill up the time; or it might have been the tension of being there illegally. He would wait for her at the ferry dock and walk back to the house with her and grab her before she even had a chance to put the groceries down, pressing her back against the kitchen counter, his hands pulling up her long flimsy skirt. His urgency confused her. God I love you, God I love you, he would say at these times. Sometimes he did things that hurt - slapping her, pinching. Sometimes it hurt anyway, but since she didn't mention this, how was he supposed to know about it?

  What had she felt, herself? It's hard to sort out. Maybe if there had been less, less plain old sex - if she had felt less like a trampoline with someone jumping up and down on it - she would have learned to enjoy it more, in time. If she could relax. As it was she merely detached herself, floated her spirit off to one side, filled herself with another essence - apple, plum - until he'd finished and it was safe to re-enter her body. She liked being held afterwards, she liked being stroked and kissed and told she was beautiful, a thing Billy sometimes did. Once in a while she cried, which Billy seemed to find normal. Her tears had nothing to do with Billy; he didn't make her sad, he made her happy! She told him that, and he was satisfied and didn't push her for answers. They talked about other things; they never talked about that.

  But what was it supposed to be like? What would have been normal? She had no idea. Every so often they smoked dope - not a lot, because they couldn't afford much of it, and when they had some it usually came from one of Billy's friends - and at those times she got an inkling, an intimation, a small flutter. But it hardly counted, because her skin felt like rubber then anyway, like a rubber suit she had on with a grid of tiny electric wires running through it, and Billy's hands were like inflated comic-book gloves, and she would get involved with the convolutions of his ear or the whorl of golden hairs on his chest, and whatever her body was up to was no concern of hers. One of Billy's friends said that there was no sense in wasting good hash on Charis because she was stoned all the time anyway. Charis didn't think that was fair, although it was true that being stoned didn't make as much difference for her as it seemed to make for other people.

  Billy wasn't the first man she'd sl
ept with, of course. She'd slept with several, because you were supposed to and she didn't want to be considered uptight, or selfish about her body, and she'd even lived with one man, although it hadn't lasted. He'd ended by calling her a frigid bitch, as if she was doing him some injury or other, which puzzled her. Hadn't she been affectionate enough, hadn't she nodded her head when he talked, hadn't she cooked the meals and laid herself down compliantly whenever he wanted her to, hadn't she washed the sheets afterwards, hadn't she tended him? She was not an ungiving person.

  The good part about Billy was that this thing about her, this abnormality - she knew it must be one, because she'd listened to other women talking - didn't bother him. In fact he appeared to expect it. He thought women were like that: without urges, without needs. He didn't pester her about it, he didn't question her, he didn't try to fix her, as the other men had done - tinkering away at her as if she was a lawnmower. He loved her the way she was. Without anything being said, he simply assumed, as she did, that what she felt about it didn't matter. Both of them were agreed on that. They both wanted the same thing: for Billy to be happy.

  Charis lies under the sleeping bag, propped on one elbow, touching lightly the face of Billy, who has his eyes closed and may be on his way back to sleep. Maybe one of these days she will have a baby, Billy's baby; it will look like him. She's thought about it before - how it would just happen, without any decision or plan, and how he would stay with her then, stay on and on, and they could keep living here, like this, forever. There's even a small room in the house where she could put the baby. At the moment it's full of stuff - some of it is Billy's, but most of it is Charis's, because despite her wish not to be pinned down by possessions she has a number of cardboard boxes full of them. But that could all be cleared out and she could put a little cradle in there, with rockers on it, or a rush laundry basket. Not a crib, though; nothing with bars.

  She runs her fingers over Billy's forehead, his nose, his gently smiling mouth; he doesn't know it, but this touching she does is not only tender, not only compassionate, but possessive. Although he is not a prisoner, he is in a way a prisoner of war. It's war that has brought him here, war that keeps him in hiding, war that makes him stay put. She can't help thinking of him as a captive; her captive, because his very existence here depends on her. He is hers, to do with as she will, as much hers as if he were a traveller from another planet, trapped on Earth in this dome of artificial interplanetary air that is her house. If she were to ask him to leave, what would happen to him? He'd be caught, deported, sent back, to where the air is heavier. He would implode.

  He might as well be from another planet, because he's from the United States; not only that, but from some dim and esoteric part of it, as mysterious to Charis as the dark side of the moon. Kentucky? Maryland? Virginia? He's lived in all three places, but what do those words mean? Nothing to Charis, except that they verge on the South, a word also lacking in solid content. Charis has a few images connected with it - mansions, wisteria, and, once upon a time, segregation - she has seen movies, back in her other life, before she was Charis - but Billy does not seem to have lived in a mansion or to have segregated anybody. On the contrary, his father was almost run out of town (which town?) for being what Billy calls a "liberal," which is not at all the same thing as the solid, the orthodox, the bland-faced and interchangeable Liberals that appear on Toronto election posters with such stultifying monotony.

  The United States is just across the lake, of course, and on clear days you can almost see it - a sort of line, a sort of haze. Charis has even been there, on a high-school day trip to Niagara Falls, but that part of it looked disappointingly similar; not like the part Billy comes from, which must be very strange. Strange, and more dangerous - that much is clear - and maybe because of that, superior. The things that happen there are said to matter in the world. Unlike the things that happen here.

  So Charis runs her fingers over Billy, gloating a little, because here he is, in her bed, in her hands, her very own mythological creature, odd as unicorns, her very own captive draft dodger, part of a thousand headline stories, part of history, tucked away in secret in her house, the house for which she alone has had to sign the rental lease because nobody must know Billy's name or where he is. Some of the draft dodgers have visas, but others - such as Billy - don't, and once you're inside this country you can't get a visa, you'd have to go back across the border and apply from there, and then you'd be nabbed for sure.

  Billy has explained all this; also that the Mounties are not really the Mounties of Charis's childhood, not the picturesque men on horseback, in red uniforms, upright and true, who always get their man. Instead they are devious and cunning and in cahoots with the U.S. government, and if they put their finger on Billy he's a dead duck, because - and she must never tell this to anyone, even his friends here don't know about it - dodging the draft wasn't the only thing he did. What else? He blew things up. A couple of people too, but they were an accident. That's why the Mounties are after him.

  If he's lucky they'll go through the extradition process, and he might have a chance. If unlucky they'll just tip off the CIA and Billy will be kidnapped, some dark night, and whisked back across the border, maybe across the lake in a speedboat, the way the Canadians smuggled liquor during Prohibition, he's heard of guys they've done that to - he'll be spirited away and thrown into jail and that will be the end of him. Someone will cut his throat, in the shower, for being a draft dodger. That's what happens.

  When he says things like this he holds onto Charis very tightly, and she puts her arms around him and says, "I won't let them," although she knows she has no power to prevent such a thing. But just saying this has a soothing effect, on both of them. She doesn't quite believe it anyway, this doom-laden scenario of Billy's. Things like that might happen in the United States - anything can happen there, where the riot police shoot people and the crime rate is so high - but not here. Not on the Island, where there are so many trees and people don't lock the door when they go out. Not in this country, familiar to her and drab, undramatic and flat. Not in her house, with the hens cooing peacefully in the yard. No harm can come to her, or to Billy either, with the hens watching over them, feathery guardian spirits. The hens are good luck.

  So she says, "I'll keep you here with me," even though she knows that Billy is an unwilling voyager. She suspects something worse, as well: that she herself is just a sort of way station for him, a temporary convenience, like the native brides of soldiers who are posted abroad. Although he doesn't know it yet, she isn't his real life. But he is hers.

  This is painful.

  "Well," says Charis, sliding her mind quickly away, because pain is an illusion and should be circumvented, "how about some breakfast?"

  "You're beautiful," says Billy. "Bacon, huh? We got any coffee?" Billy drinks real coffee, with caffeine in it. He makes fun of Charis's herbal teas and won't eat salad, not even the lettuce Charis grows herself. "Rabbit food," he calls it. "Fit for nothing but little bunnies, and women." Li'l.

  "There would have been an egg," says Charis reproachfully, and Billy laughs. (The overalls with their breast pocket full of squished egg are of course no longer on Charis but on the floor. She will wash them, later. She will avoid hot water or the egg will scramble. She will have to turn the pocket inside out.)

  "Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs," he says. Cain't. Charis turns the sound over, silently in her mouth, tasting it. Cherishing, storing away. She would like his name to be Billy Joe or Billy Bob, one of those double-barrelled Southern names, as in films. She hugs him.

  "Billy, you are so ..." she says. She wants to say young, because he is young, he's seven years younger than she is; but he doesn't like being reminded of it, he'd think she's pulling rank. Or she could say innocent, which he'd find even more of an insult: he'd think it was a comment on his sexual inexperience.

  What she means is pristine. What she means is his unscratched surface. Despite the suffering
he's gone through and is still going through, there's something shiny about him, shiny and new. Or else impermeable. She herself is so penetrable; sharp edges stick into her, she bruises easily, her inner skin is puffy and soft, like marshmallows. She's covered all over with tiny feelers like the feelers on ants: they wave, they test the air, they touch and recoil, they warn her. Billy has no such feelers. He doesn't need them. Whatever slams into him bounces right off - either he dismisses it, or instead of hurting him it makes him angry. It's a kind of hardness, which exists quite apart from any sadness or melancholy or even guilt that he may be experiencing at the time.

  Maybe it's this: his own sadness and melancholy and guilt are his, and therefore important to him, but they're contained inside. Those of other people don't get in. Whereas Charis is a screen door, an open one at that, and everything blows right through.

  "I'm so what?" says Billy, grinning. Ah'm. Charis smiles back at him.

  "So ... well, you know," she says.

  Charis did not exactly meet Billy. Instead he was allotted to her, at the Furrows Food Co-op, where she knew a good many people although not well. It was a woman called Bernice who got her into it. Bernice was Peace Movement and in some church or other, and they were parcelling out the draft dodgers they had collected, sticking them here and there in people's houses, like the English children who were shipped across the ocean during the Second World War. Charis just happened to be at the co-op that day, and Bernice more or less raffled off the draft dodgers, and Billy was left over, him and another boy (Bernice called them "boys"), so Charis said she would put them up for a few nights, in her sublet Queen Street warehouse room, one on the broken-springed Goodwill sofa she had then and one on the floor, just until they could find some other place, if Bernice would supply the sleeping bags because Charis didn't have any extras.