The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  Charis did not do this for political reasons: she didn't believe in politics, in getting involved in an activity that caused you to have such negative emotions. She didn't approve of wars, or of thinking about them. So she didn't understand the Vietnam War or want to understand it - although some of it had seeped into her head, despite her precautions, because it was in the air molecules - and above all she didn't watch it on TV She didn't even have a TV, and she did not read newspapers because they were too upsetting and anyway there was nothing she could do about all that misery. So her reason for taking Billy in had nothing to do with any of that. Instead she did it out of a sense of hospitality. She felt an obligation to be kind to strangers, especially strangers who were down on their luck. Also it would have been too weird to have been the only person at the co-op who refused to take anyone in.

  So that was how it started. After a few days the other boy moved out and Billy stayed; and then after a few more days she realized she was expected to go to bed with him. He didn't push it; in that early time he was diffident and shy, disoriented, uncertain of himself. He'd thought it was going to be more or less the same on this side of the border as on the other side, only safer, and when it turned out that it wasn't either one of those things he was confused and upset. He realized he'd done something monumental, something he couldn't reverse; that he'd landed himself in exile, perhaps forever. He'd made life hard for his family - they'd supported his decision about the draft but not about the other stuff, the explosives, and they were getting what he called "a lot of flak." Also he'd deserted his country, a notion that has a good deal more meaning for him than it does for Charis, because in Billy's schools they started the day with their hands over their hearts, saluting their flag, instead of praying to God as they did at Charis's schools. For Billy his country was a kind of God, an idea that Charis finds idolatrous and even barbaric. She finds the standard God with his white beard and anger and lamb sacrifices and death angels barbaric too, of course. She has gone beyond all that. Her God is oval.

  Also Billy worried about his friends back there, back home, guys he'd gone to school with, who hadn't escaped with him and were probably, even now, on their way across the sea or being shot at in rice paddies or blown up by guerrillas as they walked along some hot mud road. He felt he'd betrayed them. He knew the war was wrong and that what he'd done was right, but he felt like a coward anyway. He was homesick. A lot of the time he wanted to go back.

  This was how he talked to Charis, in fits and starts, in bits and pieces. He said he didn't expect her to understand, but she did understand some of it. She understood his emotions, which came at her in a deluge - watery, chaotic, a melancholy blue in colour, like a great wave of tears. He was so lost, so wounded, how could she refuse to offer him whatever comfort she had?

  31

  Things have changed since then. Since they moved to the Island, and into this house. Billy is still nervous, but less so. He seems more rooted. Also he has friends now, a whole network of exiles like himself. They even have meetings, on the mainland; Billy goes over there a couple of times a week. They help out the new arrivals, they pass them around and hide them out, and Charis has had to put up more than one of them, briefly, on the living-room sofa - a different sofa now, still second-hand but with better springs. Living with someone, Charis has discovered, leads to real furniture, although having real furniture was one of the things she renounced years ago.

  Occasionally the exiles forgather at her house to drink beer and talk and smoke dope, though they take care to keep the parties quiet: the last thing they need is the police. They come across on the ferry and they bring their girlfriends, stringy-haired girls quite a lot younger than Charis, girls who take baths in Charis's bathroom because they live in places where they don't have bathrooms of their own, and they use up Charis's few towels and leave rings in Charis's old claw-footed bathtub. Dirt is an illusion, it's just one way of thinking about matter, and Charis knows she shouldn't be upset about it, but if she has to deal with an illusion of dirt she would rather it be her own dirt, not the dirt of these vacant-eyed girls. The men, or boys, refer to these girls as "my old lady," though they are the opposite of old, which makes Charis feel some better about the fact that Billy calls her by this name, as well.

  Billy's group is always talking about plans. They think they should do something, take some action, but what kind? They've gone so far as to make up a list of names, the names of the others in the group, though they're first names only and false names at that. Charis - peeking at Billy's copy of the list, although she shouldn't have - was taken aback to discover that some of them were women's names: Edith, Ethel, Emma. During the parties, as she gets cold beer out of her tiny refrigerator, as she dumps chips and mixed nuts from the co-op into bowls, as she finds the shampoo for some girl who wants to wash her hair, as she sits on the floor beside Billy, breathing in second-hand pot smoke and smiling and gazing into space, she has listened in, she has overheard, and she knows that Billy is really Edith, or vice versa. He's named after Edith Cavell, some person in the past. There are telephone numbers, too; some of them are scrawled on the wall beside the phone, but Billy tells her it's safe because they're just the numbers of places where you can leave messages. They also have a plan to put out a newspaper, although there are several draft-dodger newspapers already. A lot of other guys got here before Billy and his new-found friends.

  Charis isn't sure all these cloak-and-dagger props, the sneaking around and the codes and the pretend names, are really necessary. It's like kids playing. But the activity seems to give Billy more energy, and a purpose in life. He's venturing out more, he's less cooped up. On the days when Charis thinks the danger isn't real she rejoices in this, but on the days when she believes in it she worries. And every time Billy steps on board the ferry to go to the mainland, there's a corner of her that panics. Billy is like a tightrope walker, stepping carelessly blindfolded along a clothesline strung between two thirty-storey buildings, thinking he's only four feet above the ground. He believes that his actions, his words, his tiny little newspaper, can change things, can change things out there in the world.

  Charis knows that there is no change possible in the world at large, no change for the better that is. Events are deceptive, they are part of a cycle; to get caught up in them is to be trapped in a whirlpool. But what does Billy know about the relentless malice of the physical universe? He is too young.

  Charis feels that the only thing she herself can change is her own body, and through it her spirit. She wishes to free her spirit: this is what led her to yoga. She wants to rearrange her body, get rid of the heaviness hidden deep within it, that core of evil treasure she buried some time ago and has never dug up; she wants to make her body lighter and lighter, release it so that she's almost floating. She knows it's possible. She gives the yoga lessons because they pay for the rent and the phone and for the bulk food she gets cut-rate through her work at the co-op, but she gives them also because she wants to help other people. Other women, really, because most of the people who take the classes are women. They too must have heavy metals hidden in them, they too must yearn for lightness. Although this class isn't about weight loss: she tells them that straight out, right at the beginning.

  After she's dressed, after she's cooked Billy his bacon and toast and coffee, Charis packs her leotard and tights into her Peruvian carry-bag and runs around the house unearthing spare change for the trip from all the places where she's hidden it, for emergencies such as today, when she's run out of cash. The mist has evaporated now and the weak November sunlight is filtering through the grey overcast, so she can trust her watch again and she doesn't miss the ferry. She hardly ever misses it anyway unless it's a case of Billy, Billy and his spontaneous and overpowering urges. What can she tell him then? I have to work or else we don't eat? That doesn't go over too well: he thinks it's a criticism of him because he doesn't have a job, and then he sulks. He prefers to believe that she's like a lily of the field; tha
t she neither toils nor spins; that bacon and coffee are simply produced by her, like leaves from a tree.

  The yoga classes are held in the apartment above the co-op, or what used to be an apartment. Right now two of the rooms are offices, one for the co-op, one for a small poetry magazine called Earth Germinations, and the big front room is kept for meetings and for classes like the yoga ones. Charis will teach only ten people at a time: any more would overload her circuits, break her focus. They bring their own towels and mats, and usually they already have their leotards on under their clothes so they don't have to change. Charis gets there before the others, changes in the bathroom, and spreads out her mat, which she keeps in a cupboard in the co-op office. The old hardwood floor gives you splinters if you aren't careful.

  Her first work is to abolish her surroundings. The faded wallpaper with the mauve trellis pattern on it must recede, the squares of darker wallpaper left by former pictures, the stale smell of used house and of the dank pee-stained carpet on the stairs coming up and of the lunch relics in the office wastebaskets, which nobody ever empties. The traffic noises from outside must go, the voices from the street and from downstairs - she erases them from her mind with a firm hand, as if they're on a blackboard. She lies down on her back, knees bent, arms loose overhead, and concentrates on her breathing, preparing, centring herself. The breath must go in and down, fully in and down to the solar plexus. The furtive scurrying trivial mind must be shut off. The I must be transcended. The self must be cut loose. It must drift.

  The first class goes as usual. Charis knows she has a good voice for this, low and reassuring, and a good pace. "Honour the spine," she murmurs. "Salute the sun." The sun she means is inside the body. She uses her voice and also her hands, a touch here, a touch there, nudging the bodies into the right poses. To each individual woman she speaks in a whisper, so as not to call attention or embarrass her or interrupt the concentration of the others. The room fills with the sound of breathing, like wavelets on a shore, and with the scent of tensed muscles. Charis feels energy flowing out of her, through her fingers, into the other bodies. She doesn't move much - this is not what anyone else would call exertion - but at the end of the hour and a half she's exhausted.

  She has an hour's break, to replenish herself. She drinks an orange-and-carrot juice from the juice bar downstairs to get some living enzymes into her system, and helps the others sort out the dried-bean pricing, and then it's time for her second class. Charis never much notices who is in which class; she counts to ten and registers the colours of the leotards, and once she's into the class she notes the particularities of the bodies and especially the spines and their wrong positioning, but the faces are not important to her, because the face is the individualism, the very thing Charis wants to help these women transcend. Also, the first exercises are done on the floor, with the eyes closed. So she's a quarter of the way through before she realizes that there's a new person, someone she's never seen before: a dark-haired woman in an indigo leotard and plumcoloured tights, who - strange for such a dimly lighted day - is wearing sunglasses.

  This woman is tall, and thin as a razor, so thin Charis can see her ribcage right through the leotard, each rib in high relief as if carved, with a line of darkness beneath it. Her knees and elbows stick out like knots in rope, and the poses, as she performs them, are not fluid but practically geometrical, cages made of coat-hangers. Her skin is white as mushrooms, and a dark-light phosphorescence glimmers around her like the sheen on bad meat. Charis knows unhealth when she sees it: this woman needs a lot more than just one yoga class. A big hit of vitamin C and a dollop of sunlight would be a start, but they wouldn't even begin to touch what's wrong with her.

  What's wrong with her is partly an attitude of the soul: the sunglasses are its manifestation, they symbolize a barrier to inner vision. So just before the lotus meditation Charis goes over and whispers to her, "Wouldn't you like to take your sunglasses off? They must be a distraction."

  For answer the woman slips the glasses down, and Charis gets a shock. The woman's left eye is blackened. Black and blue, and half shut. The other eye regards her, hurt, wet, appealing.

  "Oh," Charis breathes. "Sorry." She winces: she can feel the blow on her own flesh, her own eye.

  The woman smiles, a harrowing smile in that emaciated and damaged face. "Aren't you Karen?" she whispers.

  Charis doesn't know how to explain that she is but she isn't. She is once-Karen. So she says, "Yes," and looks more closely, because how would this woman recognize her?

  "I'm Zenia," the woman says. And she is.

  Charis and Zenia sit at one of the little tables beside the juice bar at the far end of the co-op. "What would you recommend?" says Zenia. "This is all new to me," and Charis, flattered by this call upon her expertise, orders her up a papaya-and-orange, with a dash of lemon in it and some brewer's yeast. Zenia keeps her glasses on and Charis doesn't blame her. Still, it's hard to talk with someone whose eyes she can't see.

  She does remember Zenia, of course. Everyone in McClung Hall knew who Zenia was; even Charis, who drifted through her university years as if through an airport. Educationally she was a transient, and she left after three years without completing her degree: whatever it was that she needed to be taught, it wasn't on the curriculum there. Or maybe she wasn't ready for it. Charis believes that when you are ready to learn a thing the right teacher will appear, or rather will be sent to you. This has worked out for her so far, more or less, and the only reason she isn't learning anything at the moment is that she's so fully occupied with Billy.

  Though maybe Billy is a teacher, in a way. She just hasn't figured out exactly what she's supposed to be learning from him. How to love, perhaps? How to love a man. Though she already does love him, so what next?

  Zenia sips her juice, with the two ovals of her dark glasses turned towards Charis. Charis isn't sure what she can say to her. She didn't really know Zenia at university, she never spoke to her - Zenia was older, she was ahead of Charis, and she was in with all those artistic, intellectual people - but Charis remembers her, so beautiful and confident, striding around campus with her boyfriend Stew, and then later with short little Tony as well. What Charis remembers about Tony is that Tony followed her one night when Charis went outside to sit under a tree on the McClung lawn. Probably Tony thought Charis was sleepwalking; which showed some insight, because Charis had certainly done some sleepwalking in the past, though she wasn't doing it then.

  This action of Tony's revealed a good heart; a quality much more important to Charis than Tony's academic brilliance, which was what she was known for. Zenia was known for other things as well - most notoriously for living with Stew, right out in the open, at a time when such things were not done. So much has changed. It's the married people, now, who are considered immoral. The nukes, they are called, for nuclear family. Radioactive, potentially lethal; a big leap from Home Sweet Home, but in Charis's opinion more appropriate.

  Zenia too has changed. In addition to being thin she's ill, and in addition to being ill she is cowed somehow, beaten, defeated. Her shoulders hunch inwards protectively, her fingers are awkward claws, the corners of her mouth droop downwards. Charis wouldn't have known her. It's as if the former Zenia, the lovely Zenia, the Zenia of obvious flesh, has been burned away, leaving this bone core.

  Charis doesn't like to question - she doesn't like to intrude on the selfhood of others - but Zenia is so drained of energy it's unlikely she will say anything at all, otherwise. So Charis chooses something non-invasive. "What brought you to my class?" she asks.

  "I heard about it from a friend," says Zenia. Every word seems an effort. "I thought it might help."

  "Help?" says Charis.

  "With the cancer," says Zenia.

  "Cancer," says Charis. It isn't even a question, because didn't she know it? There's no mistaking that whiteness, that sickly flicker. An imbalance of the soul.

  Zenia smiles crookedly. "I beat it once before," she says, "bu
t it's come back."

  Now Charis remembers something: didn't Zenia disappear suddenly at the end of the year? The second year Charis lived in McClung Hall, that's when it was: Zenia vanished without an explanation, into thin air. The girls used to talk about it over breakfast and Charis would listen in, on the rare occasions when she bothered with listening, or with breakfast. They didn't have much there that she could eat: bran flakes was about it. The gossip was that Zenia had run away with another man, dumping Stew flat and taking some of his money as well, but now Charis divines the real truth: it was the cancer. Zenia went away without telling anyone about it because she didn't want a lot of fuss. She went away to cure herself, and to do that you need to be alone, to be free of interruption. Charis can understand that.

  "How did you do it, the first time?" says Charis.

  "Do what?" says Zenia, a little sharply.

  "Beat it," says Charis. "The cancer."

  "They did an operation," says Zenia. "They took out - they did a hysterectomy, I can never have babies. But it didn't work. So then I went to the mountains, by myself. I stopped eating meat, I cut out alcohol. I just had to concentrate. On getting well."

  This sounds exactly right to Charis. Mountains, no meat. "And now?" she says.

  "I thought I was better," says Zenia. Her voice has sunk to a hoarse whisper. "I thought I was strong enough. So I came back. I've been living with Stew - with West. I guess I let him take me back into our old way of living, you know, he drinks a lot - and the cancer came back. He can't take it - he really can't! A lot of people can't stand to be around sickness, they're afraid of it." Charis nods: she knows this, she knows this deeply, at the level of her cells. "He just denies that there's anything wrong with me," Zenia continues. "He tries to get me to eat ... mounds of food, steak and butter, all those animal fats. They make me nauseated, I can't, I just can't!"