The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  "Oh," says Charis. This is a horrible story, and one that has the ring of truth. So few people understand about animal fats. No, more: so few people understand about anything. "How awful," she says, which is only a pallid reflection of what she feels. She is troubled, she is on the verge of tears; above all she is helpless.

  "Then he gets angry," Zenia goes on. "He gets furious with me, and I feel so weak ... he hates me to cry, it just gets him angrier. He was the one who did this." She gestures towards her eye. "It makes me so ashamed, I feel like I'm the one responsible...."

  Charis tries to remember Stew, or West, whose name once changed so abruptly, just like her own. What she sees is a tall man, a somewhat inturned and unconnected man, gentle as a giraffe. She can't picture him hitting anyone, much less Zenia; but people can have deceptive exteriors. Men especially. They can put on a good act, they can make you believe they are model citizens and that they are right and you are wrong. They can fool everyone and make you seem like a liar. West, no doubt, is one of these. Indignation rises in her, the beginning of anger. But anger is unhealthy for her so she pushes it away.

  "He says if I really have cancer I should have another operation, or else chemotherapy," says Zenia. "But I know I could heal myself again, if only ..." she trails off. "I don't think I can drink any more of this right now," she says. She nudges the juice glass away. "Thank you ... you've been really nice." She reaches across the table and touches Charis's hand. Her thin white fingers look cold but they are hot, hot as coals. Then she pushes back her chair, takes up her coat and purse, and hurries away, almost staggering. Her head is bent, the hair is falling over her face like a veil, and Charis is sure she's crying.

  Charis wants to jump up and run after her and bring her back. This desire is so strong in her it's like a fist on her neck. She wants to sit Zenia down again in her chair and put both hands on her, and summon up all her energy, the energy of the light, and heal her, right on the spot. But she knows she can't do that, so she doesn't move.

  On Friday Zenia isn't in the yoga class, and Charis is anxious about her. Maybe she's collapsed, or maybe West has hit her again, this time more than once. Maybe she's in the hospital with multiple fractures. Charis takes the ferry boat to the Island, fretting all the way. Now she's feeling inadequate: there must have been something she could have said or done, something better than what she did do. A glass of juice was not enough.

  That evening the fog returns, and with it a chilly drizzle, and Charis makes a good fire in the stove and turns on the furnace as well, and Billy wants her to come to bed early. She's brushing her teeth in the drafty bathroom downstairs when she hears a knock at the kitchen door. What she thinks is that it's one of Billy's group, with yet another draft dodger to be parked overnight on her living-room sofa. She has to admit she's getting a bit tired of them. For one thing, they never help with the dishes.

  But it's not a draft dodger. It's Zenia, her head framed in the wet glass square of the door like a photo under water. Her hair is soaked and streaking down her face, her teeth are chattering, her sunglasses are gone, and her eye, purple now, is piteous. There's a fresh cut on her lip.

  The door opens as if by itself, and she stands in the doorway, swaying slightly. "He threw me out," she whispers. "I don't want to disturb you ... I just didn't know where else to go."

  Mutely Charis holds out her arms, and Zenia stumbles over the threshold and collapses into them.

  32

  It's a sunless noon. Charis is in her garden, watched by the hens, who peer greedily through the hexagons of their wire fence, and by the remaining cabbages, goggling at her like three dull green goblin-heads emerging from the ground. The garden in November has a mangy, thumbed appearance: wilted marigolds, nasturtium leaves faded a pale yellow, the stumps of broccoli, the unripe tomatoes frost-killed and mushy, with silvery slug tracks wandering here and there.

  Charis doesn't mind this vegetable disarray. It's all ferment, all fertilizer. She lifts her spade, shoves it into the earth, and steps on the top edge of its blade with her right foot in Billy's rubber boot, digging in. Then she heaves, grunting. Then she turns over the shovelful of soil. Worms suck themselves back into their tunnels, a white grub curls. Charis picks it up and tosses it relentlessly over the fence, in for the gabbling hens. All life is sacred but hens are more sacred than grubs.

  The hens fluster and racket and abuse one another, and chase the one with the grub. Charis once thought it might be a good spiritual discipline to refuse to feed her hens anything she wouldn't eat herself, but she has since decided that this would be pointless. The ground-up shells, for instance, the crushed bones - hens need them to make eggs, but Charis doesn't.

  It's the wrong season of the year to be turning the garden. She should wait till spring, when the new weeds poke through; she'll have to do it all over again at that time. But this is the only way she can be out of the house without either Zenia or Billy wanting to come with her. Each is eager to be with her alone, away from the other one. If she tries to go for a walk, just to be by herself for a short time, just to unwind, there's a rush for the door: a subdued, oblique rush (Zenia) or a gangling, obvious one (Billy). Then there's a psychic collision, and Charis is forced to choose. It's bothering her a lot. But luckily, neither one of them has any great desire to help her dig up the garden. Billy doesn't like mucking in the dirt - he says why do so much work, because all that comes up is vegetables - and Zenia of course is in no shape. She is managing to take feeble, occasional walks, down to the lakeshore and back, but even those exhaust her.

  Zenia has been here for a week now, sleeping on the sofa by night, resting on it by day. The evening of her arrival was almost festive - Charis ran a hot bath for her and gave her one of her own white cotton nightgowns to put on, and hung her wet clothes up on the hooks behind the stove to dry, and after Zenia was finished with the bath and had put on the nightgown Charis wrapped her in a blanket and sat her in a chair beside the stove, and combed her wet hair, and made her a hot milk with honey. It pleased Charis to do these things; she experienced herself as competent and virtuous, overflowing with good will and good energy. It pleased her to give this energy to someone so obviously in need of it as Zenia. But by the time she'd settled Zenia on the sofa and had gone upstairs to bed, Billy was angry with her, and he's been angry ever since. He's made it clear that he doesn't want Zenia in the house at all.

  "What's she doing here?" he whispered that first night.

  "It's just for a bit," said Charis, whispering too because she didn't want Zenia to hear them and feel unwanted. "We've had lots of others. On the same sofa! It's no different."

  "It's way different," said Billy. "They don't have any place else to go."

  "Neither does she," said Charis. The different thing, she was thinking, was that the others were Billy's friends and Zenia was hers. Well, not friend exactly. Responsibility.

  That was before Billy had even laid eyes on Zenia, or spoken a single word to her. The next day he'd grunted a surly "Morning" over the scrambled eggs - not home-grown, unfortunately, the hens had dried up - and the toast with apple jelly that Charis was serving to both of them. He'd hardly looked at Zenia where she sat hunched over, still in Charis's nightgown, with a blanket wrapped around her, sipping her weak tea. If he had looked, thought Charis, he would have relented, because Zenia was so pitiable. Her eye was still discoloured and swollen, and you could practically count the blue veins on the backs of her hands.

  "Get her out of here," said Billy when Zenia had gone to the bathroom. "Just out."

  "Shh," said Charis. "She'll hear you!"

  "What do we know about her, anyway?" said Billy.

  "She has cancer," said Charis, as if this was all anyone needed to know.

  "Then she should be in a hospital," said Billy.

  "She doesn't believe in them," said Charis, who didn't either.

  "Bullshit," said Billy.

  This remark struck Charis as not only ungenerous and crude, b
ut faintly sacrilegious as well. "She has that black eye," she murmured. The eye was living proof of something or other. Of Zenia's neediness, or else her goodness. Of her status.

  "I didn't give it to her," said Billy. "Let her go eat someone else's food." Charis was incapable of mentioning that if anyone ought to decide who ate what around this place it should be her, since she was the one who either grew it or paid for it herself.

  "He doesn't like me, does he?" said Zenia, when Billy in his turn was out of hearing. Her voice quivered, her eyes were filling. "I'd better go...."

  "Of course he does! It's just his way," said Charis warmly. "Now you stay right where you are!"

  It took Charis a while to figure out why Billy was so hostile to Zenia. At first she thought it was because he was afraid of her - afraid she would tell on him, tip off the wrong people, turn him in; or that she would just say something to someone by accident, something indiscreet. Loose lips sink ships used to be a slogan, during the war, the old war; it was on posters, and Charis's Aunt Viola used to quote it as a sort of joke, to her friends, in the late forties. So Charis explained all that to Zenia, how precarious Billy felt and how difficult things were for him. She even told Zenia about the bombs, about blowing things up, and about how Billy might get kidnapped by the Mounties. Zenia promised not to tell. She said she understood perfectly.

  "I'll be careful, cross my heart," she said. "But Karen - sorry, Charis - how did you get mixed up with them?"

  "Mixed up?" said Charis.

  "With the draft dodgers," said Zenia. "The revolutionaries. You never struck me as a very political person. At university, I mean. Not that there were a whole bunch of revolutionaries, around that dump."

  It hadn't occurred to Charis that Zenia would have taken any notice of her at all, back then, back in her vague, semi-forgotten university days, when she was still Karen, outwardly at least. She hadn't participated in anything, she hadn't stood out. She had stayed in the shadows, but it turned out that Zenia at least had spotted her there and had considered her worthy of notice, and she was touched. Zenia must have been a sensitive person; more sensitive than people gave her credit for.

  "I'm not," said Charis. "I wasn't political at all."

  "I was," said Zenia. "I was totally anti-bourgeois, back then! A real bohemian fellow-traveller." She frowned a little, then laughed. "Why not, they had the best parties!"

  "Well," said Charis, "I'm not mixed up. I don't understand any of those things. I just live with Billy, that's all."

  "Sort of like a gun moll," said Zenia, who was feeling a little better. It was a warmish day, for November, so Charis had decided it was safe for Zenia to go out. They were down by the lake, watching the gulls; Zenia had walked the whole way without once holding onto Charis's arm. Charis had offered to get her some new sunglasses - Zenia had left the old ones behind, the night she ran away - but she hardly needed them any more: her eye had faded to a yellowy-blue, like a washed-out ink stain.

  "A what?" said Charis.

  "Shit," said Zenia, smiling, "if living with someone isn't mixed up, I don't know what is." But Charis didn't care what people called things. Anyway, she wasn't listening to Zenia, she was watching her smile.

  Zenia is smiling more, now. Charis feels as if that smile has been accomplished single-handedly by her, Charis, and by all the work she's been putting in: the fruit drinks, the cabbage juice made from her own cabbages, ground up fine and strained through a sieve, the special baths she prepares, the gentle yoga stretches, the carefully spaced walks in the fresh air. All those positive energies are ranging themselves against the cancer cells, good soldiers against bad, light against darkness; Charis herself is taking meditation time every day, on Zenia's behalf, to visualize that exact same result. And it's working, it is! Zenia has more colour now, more energy. Although still very thin and weak, she is visibly improving.

  She knows it and she's grateful. "You're doing so much for me," she says to Charis, almost every day. "I don't deserve it; I mean, I'm a total stranger, you hardly know me."

  "That's all right," says Charis awkwardly. She blushes a little when Zenia says these things. She isn't used to people thanking her for what she does, and she has a belief that it isn't necessary. At the same time, the sensation is very agreeable; also at the same time, it strikes her that Billy could be showing a bit more gratitude himself, for everything she's done for him. Instead of which he scowls at her and doesn't eat his bacon. He wants her to make two breakfasts - one for Zenia and a separate one for him - so he doesn't have to sit at the same table with Zenia in the mornings.

  "The way she sucks up to you makes me puke," he said yesterday. Charis knows now why he says such things. He's jealous. He's afraid Zenia will come between them, that she'll somehow take Charis's full attention away from him. It's childish of him to feel like that. After all, he doesn't have a life-threatening illness, and he ought to know by now that Charis loves him. So Charis touches his arm.

  "She won't be here forever," she says. "Just till she's a little better. Just till she can find a place of her own."

  "I'll help her look," says Billy. Charis has told him about West punching Zenia in the eye, and his response was not charitable. "I'll do the other one for her," is what he said. "Wham, bam, thank you ma'am, a real pleasure."

  "That's not very pacifist of you," said Charis reproachfully.

  "I never said I was a goddamn pacifist," said Billy, insulted. "Just because one war's wrong doesn't mean they all are!"

  "Charis," Zenia called fretfully, from the front room. "Is the radio on? I heard voices. I was just having a nap."

  "I can't say spit in my own goddamn house," hisses Billy.

  It's at moments like these that Charis goes out to dig in the garden.

  She pushes her shovel down, lifts, turns the soil over, pauses to look for grubs. Then she hears Zenia's voice behind her.

  "You're so strong," Zenia says wistfully. "I was that strong, once. I could carry three suitcases."

  "You will be again," says Charis, as heartily as she can. "I just know it!"

  "Maybe," says Zenia, in a small, sad voice. "It's the little everyday things you miss so much. You know?"

  Charis feels suddenly guilty for digging in her own garden; or as if she ought to feel guilty. It's the same way with a lot of the other things she does: scrubbing the floor, making the bread. Zenia admires her while she does these things, but it's a melancholy admiration. Sometimes Charis senses that her own healthy, toned-up body is a reproach to Zenia's enfeebled one; that Zenia holds it against her.

  "Let's feed the hens," she says. Feeding the hens is something Zenia can do. Charis brings out the hen feed in its coffee can, and Zenia scatters it, handful by handful. She loves the hens, she says. They are so vital! They are - well, the embodiment of the Life Force. Aren't they?

  Charis is made nervous by this kind of talk. It's too abstract, it's too much like university. The hens are not an embodiment of anything but hen-ness. The concrete is the abstract. But how could she explain this to Zenia?

  "I'm going to make a salad," she says instead.

  "A Life Force salad," says Zenia, and laughs. For the first time Charis is not delighted to hear this laughter, welcome as it ought to be. There's something about it she doesn't understand. It's like a joke she's not getting.

  The salad is raisins and grated carrots, with a lemon juice and honey dressing. The carrots themselves are Charis's own, from the box of damp sand in the root cellar lean-to; already they're beginning to grow small white whiskers, which shows they're still alive. Charis and Zenia eat the salad, and the lima beans and boiled potatoes, by themselves, because Billy says he has to go out that night. He has a meeting.

  "He goes to a lot of meetings," murmurs Zenia, as Billy is putting on his jacket. She has given up trying to be nice to Billy, since she wasn't getting any results; now she's taken to speaking of him in the third person even when he's standing right there. It creates a circle, a circle of language,
with Zenia and Charis on the inside of it and Billy on the outside. Charis wishes she wouldn't do it; on the other hand, in a way Billy has only himself to blame.

  Billy gives Zenia a dirty look. "At least I don't just sit around on my butt, like some," he says angrily. He too speaks only to Charis.

  "Be careful," Charis says. She means about going into the city, but Billy takes it as a reproof.

  "Have a real good time with your sick friend," he says nastily. Zenia smiles to herself, a tiny bitter smile. The door slams behind him, rattling the glass in the windows.

  "I think I should leave," says Zenia, when they are eating some of the applesauce Charis bottled earlier in the fall.

  "But where would you live?" says Charis, dismayed.

  "Oh, I could find a place," says Zenia.

  "But you don't have any money!" says Charis.

  "I could get a job of some sort," says Zenia. "I'm good at that. I can always lick ass somewhere, I know how to get jobs." She coughs, muffling her face in her spindly-fingered hands. "Sorry," she says. She takes a bird-sip of water.

  "Oh, no," says Charis. "You can't do that! You're not well enough yet! You will be soon," she adds, because she doesn't want to sound negative. It's health and not sickness that must be reinforced.

  Zenia smiles thinly. "Maybe," she says. "But Karen, really - don't worry about me. It's not your problem."

  "Charis," says Charis. Zenia has trouble remembering her real name.

  And yes, it is her problem, because she has taken it upon herself.

  Then Zenia says something worse. "It's not just that he hates me," she says. Her tongue comes out, licking the applesauce off the tip of her spoon. "The fact is, he can hardly keep his hands off me."

  "West?" says Charis. A cold finger runs down her back.

  Zenia smiles. "No," she says. "I mean Billy. Surely you've noticed it."

  Charis can feel the skin of her entire face sliding down in dismay. She has noticed nothing. But why hasn't she? It's obvious to her, now that Zenia's said it - the energy that leaps out of Billy's finger-ends and hair whenever Zenia is near. A sexual bristling, like tomcats. "What do you mean?" she says.