The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  "What thing?" said her grandmother. Leaning against her grandmother's legs was a medium-sized pig. It snuffled at Karen's socks with its alarming snout, wet and tender as an eyeball, drooly as a mouth. "This here's Pinky. She's a pig."

  "No," said Karen. She could tell it was a pig, she'd seen pictures. "The big thing, at the front."

  "Old cultivator," said her grandmother, leaving Karen to wonder what a cultivator was. "Come on!" She strode off towards the door with Karen's suitcase under one arm, and Karen trotted along behind. In the distance there was more barking and cackling. The pig followed as far as the house, and then, to Karen's surprise, came right in. It knew how to nose open the screen door.

  They were in the kitchen, which was a lot less like a rubbish heap than Karen had thought it would be. There was an oval table covered with oilcloth - light green with a design of strawberries - with a huge teapot and some used plates on it. There were some chairs painted apple green, and a wood range and a saggy maroon velvet sofa piled with newspapers. On the floor there were more newspapers, with a ravelled afghan thrown on top of them.

  Karen's mother was sitting in a rocking chair beside the window, looking exhausted. Her linen outfit was all creased. She had her shoes off and was fanning herself with her hat, but when the pig came into the room she gave a slight scream.

  "It's okay, she's house-broken," said the grandmother.

  "That is the limit," said Karen's mother, in a tight, furious voice.

  "Cleaner than most people," said the grandmother. "Smarter, too. Anyways, this is my house. You can do what you like in yours. I didn't ask you to come here and I won't ask you to leave, but while you're here you can take things as you find them."

  She scratched the pig behind the ears and gave it a slap on the rump, and it grunted gently and squinted up at her and then went over and flopped down sideways on the afghan. Karen's mother burst into tears and scrambled out of her chair, and headed out of the room in her stocking feet, with her white gloves crushed to her eyes. Karen's grandmother laughed. "It's okay, Gloria," she called. "Pinky can't climb stairs!"

  "Why not?" said Karen. Her voice was almost a whisper. She'd never heard anyone talk to her mother like that.

  "Legs're too short," said her grandmother. "Now, you can take off that dress, if you've got any other kind of clothes, and help me wash the potatoes." She sighed. "I should've had sons."

  Karen opened her suitcase and found her long cotton pants, and changed into them in a room her grandmother called the back parlour. She didn't want to put on shorts because of the backs of her legs. They were a secret between her and her mother. She wasn't supposed to tell, about the broom handle or the pancake flipper, or there would be trouble, the way there was when her mother punched one of the Grade Two boys in the face and almost lost her job, and then what would they eat?

  "I'll show you your own room later, when Gloria's over the sniffles," said her grandmother. Then Karen helped her grandmother wash the potatoes. They did this in a smaller kitchen off the main one where there was an electric stove, and a tin sink with a cold-water tap. Her grandmother called this room the pantry. The pig came in with them and grunted hopefully until it was sent away. "Not now, Pinky," said the grandmother. "Too many raw potatoes make her sick. She loves 'em, though. She'll take a drink too, and that's just as bad for her. Most animals like to go on a good drunk if they get the chance."

  For dinner they had the potatoes, boiled, and chicken stew with biscuits. Karen wasn't all that hungry. She fed pieces of her dinner furtively to the pig and also to the two dogs, who were underneath the table. Her grandmother saw her doing it but didn't object, so she knew it was all right.

  Her mother came down for dinner, still in the linen dress, with her face washed and a fresh mouth painted on and a grim set to her lips. Karen knew that expression: it meant her mother was going to see this through or else. Or else what? Or else things would not be so good, for Karen.

  "Mother, are there any serviettes?" said Karen's mother. Her mouth jerked into a smile, as if there were strings pulling up the ends of it.

  "Any what?" said the grandmother.

  "Table napkins," said her mother.

  "La-di-da, Gloria, use your sleeve," said the grandmother.

  Karen's mother wrinkled her nose at Karen. "Do you see any sleeves?" she said. Her jacket was off, so her arms were bare. She was taking a new line: she'd decided that they would both find the grandmother comical.

  The grandmother caught this look and frowned. "They're in the dresser drawer, same as always," she said. "I'm not a savage, but this is no dinner party neither. Those who wants can get them."

  For dessert there was applesauce, and after that strong tea with milk in it. The grandmother passed a cup to Karen, and Karen's mother said, "Oh, Mother, she doesn't drink tea," and the grandmother said, "She does now." Karen thought there might be an argument, but her grandmother added, "If you're leaving her with me, you're leaving her with me. 'Course, you can always take her with you." Karen's mother clamped her mouth shut.

  When Karen's grandmother had finished eating she scooped the chicken bones off the dinner plates, back into the stewpot, and set the plates down on the floor. The animals crowded around them, licking and slurping.

  "Not from the dishes," said Karen's mother faintly.

  "Less germs on their tongues than on a human's," said the grandmother.

  "You're crazy, you know that?" said Karen's mother in a choking voice. "You should be locked up!" She jammed her hand over her mouth and ran out into the yard. The grandmother watched her go. Then she shrugged and went back to drinking her tea.

  "There's clean inside and clean outside," she said. "Clean inside is better, but Gloria never could tell the difference."

  Karen didn't know what to do. She thought about her stomach, with animal slobber and dog and pig germs in it; but strangely, she didn't feel sick.

  When Karen went upstairs later, she heard her mother crying, a sound she had heard many times before. She went carefully into the bedroom where the sound was coming from. Her mother was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking more desolate than Karen had ever seen her. "She was never like a real mother," she sobbed. "She never was!"

  She squeezed Karen tight and cried onto her hair, and Karen wondered what she meant.

  Karen's mother left the next day, before breakfast. She said she had to get back to the city, she had a doctor's appointment. Karen's grandmother drove her to the station and Karen went too, to say goodbye. She wore her long pants, because of her legs, which were hurting again. Her mother kept one arm around her all the way to the station.

  Before starting the truck the grandmother let the geese out of their pen. "They're watch-geese," she said. "Them and Cully'll take care of everything. Anyone tries to get in here, Cully'll knock them down and the geese'll poke out their eyes. Stay, Cully! Come, Glenn." She drove just as fast as before, almost in the centre of the road, but this time she didn't whistle.

  When the time came to say goodbye at the station, Karen's mother kissed Karen on the cheek and squeezed her tight and said she loved her, and told her to be a good girl. She did not kiss the grandmother. She didn't even say goodbye to her. Karen watched the grandmother's face: it was shut tight like a box.

  Karen wanted to wait until the train was actually moving, so they did. Her mother waved at her out of the train window, her white gloves fluttering like flags. That was the last she saw of her real mother, the one that could still smile and wave, although she didn't know it at the time.

  Then Karen and her grandmother went back to the farmhouse and had their breakfast, which was oatmeal porridge with brown sugar and thick new cream on it. With Karen's mother gone, her grandmother was not so talkative.

  Karen looked at her grandmother across the table. She looked thoroughly. The grandmother was older than Karen had thought the day before; her neck was bonier, her eyelids were more wrinkled. Around her head there was a faint pale blue light. Karen had
already figured out that her teeth were false.

  34

  After breakfast Karen's grandmother says to her, "Are you sick?"

  "No," says Karen. Her legs are still hurting but that isn't a sickness, it's nothing because her mother says it's nothing. She doesn't want to be put to bed, she wants to go outside. She wants to see the chickens.

  Her grandmother looks at her sharply but only says, "Don't you want to put on your shorts? Today'll be a scorcher," but Karen says no again and they go to collect the eggs. The dogs and the pig aren't allowed to come with them, because the dogs would try to herd the hens, and the pig likes eggs. The three of them lie on the kitchen floor, the dogs' tails thumping slowly, the pig looking thoughtful. Karen's grandmother takes a six-quart basket with a dishtowel in it, to put the eggs in.

  The sky is bright, bright blue like a fist pushed into an eye, that puddle of hot colour; the thin piercing voices of the cicadas go straight into Karen's head like wires. The edges of her grandmother's hair catch the sunlight and burn like fiery wool. They walk along the path, tall weeds beside them, thistles and Queen Anne's lace, smelling deeper and greener than anything Karen has ever smelled before, mixing in with the sweet pungent barnyard smells so that she doesn't know whether it smells good or bad or just so powerful and rich it's like being smothered.

  The henhouse is near the chicken-wire and rail fence that's around the garden; inside the fence are potato hills, and lettuce in a frilly row, and tripods of poles with climbing beans on them, their red flowers humming with bees. "Potatoes, lettuce, beans," Karen's grandmother says, to Karen, or possibly to herself. "Hens," she says, when they get as far as the henhouse.

  The hens are two kinds: white with red wattles, and reddish brown. They scratch and cluck, and peer at Karen with their yellow lizards' eyes, one eye and then the other; sparkles of many-coloured light run off their feathers, like dew. Karen looks and looks at them, until her grandmother takes her arm. "No eggs out here," she says.

  The henhouse is musty inside, and dim. Karen's grandmother gropes in the straw-filled boxes, and under the two hens still inside, and puts the eggs into her basket. She gives Karen one egg to carry, for herself. A tender glow comes from inside it. It is a little damp; there are bits of henshit and straw clinging to it. Also it's warm. Karen feels the backs of her legs throbbing and the heat running from the egg up into her head. The egg is soft in her hands, like a beating heart with a rubber shell around it. It's growing, swelling up, and as they walk back past the garden through the sun's glare and the vibration of the bees it gets so large and hot that Karen has to drop it.

  After that she was in bed, lying on her stomach. Her grandmother was washing off her legs. "I wasn't the right mother for her," said the grandmother. "Nor she the right daughter, for me. And now look. But it can't be helped." She put her large nubbly hands on Karen's legs and at first it hurt more, and then Karen got warmer and warmer, and then cool, and after that she went to sleep.

  When she woke up she was outside. It was quite dark but there was a half moon; in the moonlight she could see the trunks of trees, and the shadows the branches made. At first she was afraid because she didn't know where she was or how she'd got there. There was a deep sweet smell, a glimmering of flowers, milkweeds as she learned later, and a fluttering of many moths, the white flakes of their wings kissing against her. Somewhere near was running water.

  She heard breathing. Then she felt a wet nose pushed into her hand, and something brushed against her. The two dogs were with her, one on either side. Had they barked when she came out of the house? She didn't know, she hadn't heard them. But she didn't worry any more because they would know the way back. She stood for a long time, breathing in and breathing in, the scent of trees and dogs and night flowers and water, because this was the best thing, it was what she wanted, to be outside in the night by herself. She wasn't sick any longer.

  Finally the dogs nudged her gently, turning her around, herding her back towards the dark bulk of the house. No lights were on anywhere; she thought she might go in and up the stairs and into her bed without her grandmother knowing. She didn't want to be shaken or told she was hard, or hit with anything. But when she reached the house her grandmother was standing beside it, in a long pale nightgown with her hair feathery in the moonlight, holding the door open, and she didn't say anything at all. She simply nodded at Karen, and Karen went inside.

  She felt welcomed, as if the house were a different house, at night; as if this was the first time she had entered it. She knew now that her grandmother walked in her sleep, too, and that her grandmother also could see in the dark.

  In the morning Karen ran her hands over the backs of her legs. Nothing hurt. All she could feel, instead of the sticky welts that had been there before, were some tiny thin lines, like hairs; like the cracks in a mirror.

  The room Karen slept in was the smallest bedroom upstairs. It used to be her mother's. The bed was narrow, with a scratched headboard of dark varnished wood. There was a white bedspread on it that looked like a lot of caterpillars sewn together, and a chest of drawers painted blue, with a straight-backed wooden chair to match. The drawers were lined with old newspapers; Karen put her folded clothes into them. The curtains were a faded forget-me-not print. In the mornings the sunlight came in through them, showing the dust on the surfaces, and on the rungs of the chair. There was a braided rug, shabby from use, and a dark wardrobe jammed into one corner.

  Karen knew her mother hated this room; she hated the whole house. Karen didn't hate it, although there were some things about it she found strange. In the big front bedroom where her grandmother slept, there was a row of men's boots in the closet. There was no bathroom, only an outhouse, with a wooden box of lime and a little wooden paddle, to put the lime down the hole. There was a front parlour with dark curtains and a collection of Indian arrowheads picked up in the fields, and huge stacks of old newspapers all over the floor. On the wall was a framed photo of Karen's grandfather, from a long time ago, before he got crushed by a tractor. "He didn't grow up with tractors," said the grandmother. "Only horses. Damn thing rolled on him. Your mother saw it happen, she was only ten at the time. Maybe that's where she went off the rails. He said it was his own fault, for meddling with the Devil's inventions. He lived for a week, but there was nothing I could do. I can't do a thing about bones." She said these things more to herself than to Karen, as she said many things.

  The tractor itself was still in the drive shed; her grandmother used to drive it before she got too old. Now the fields were worked by Ron Sloane from down the road, and he used his own tractor, his own baler, all his own stuff. The second week Karen was there one of the hens went broody and made a nest on the tractor seat instead of in her box. Karen found her, sitting on twenty-three eggs. "They'll do that," said the grandmother. "They know we take their eggs, so they sneak off by themselves. The other hens've been dropping their own eggs on her. Saving themselves the bother. Lazy sluts."

  That hen had to be moved back into the henhouse though, because of the weasels. "They come at night," said Karen's grandmother. "They bite the chickens in the neck and suck out their blood." The weasels were so thin they could get through the smallest crack. Karen imagined them, long thin animals like snakes, cold and silent, slithering in through the walls, their mouths open, their sharp fangs ready, their eyes shining and vicious. Her grandmother sent her into the henhouse one night after dark, with the lantern, while she herself stayed outside, looking for cracks in the boards where the light shone through. One weasel in a henhouse, she said, and that would be that. "They don't kill to eat," she said. "They kill for the pleasure of it."

  Karen looked at the photo of her grandfather. She could never tell much from pictures; the bodies in them were just flat, made from black-and-white paper, and no light came out of them. The grandfather had a beard and heavy eyebrows and was wearing a black suit and a hat; he was not smiling. Karen's grandmother said he was a Mennonite, before he married her and b
roke with the rest of them. Karen was not able to make any sense of this at all, because she didn't know what a Mennonite was. Her grandmother said they were a religion. They wouldn't use anything newfangled, they kept themselves to themselves, they were good farmers. You could always tell a Mennonite farm because they farmed right to the edges of the fields. Also, they didn't hold with war. They wouldn't fight. "In wartime they aren't too popular," she said. "There's people on this line who still aren't speaking to me, because of him."

  "I don't hold with war, either," said Karen solemnly. She had just decided that. It was the war that gave her mother so many nerves.

  "Well, I know Jesus said turn the other cheek, but God said an eye for an eye," said her grandmother. "If people start killing your folks, you should fight back. That's my opinion."

  "You could just go somewhere else," said Karen.

  "That's what the Mennonites did," said her grandmother. "Trouble is, what happens when there's no place else to go? Answer that one, I say to him!" Her grandmother often spoke of the grandfather as if he were still alive - "He likes a good pot roast for dinner," or "He never cuts corners." Karen began to wonder whether he was indeed still alive, in some way. If anywhere, he would be in the front parlour.

  Maybe that was why they never used the front parlour, only the back one. They would sit in it and Karen's grandmother would knit, one bright afghan square after another, and they would listen to the radio, the news and weather mostly. Karen's grandmother liked to know if it was going to rain, though she said she could tell better than the radio, she could feel rain in her bones. She fell asleep in there every afternoon, on the sofa, wrapped in one of the finished afghans, with her teeth in a glass of water and the pig and the two dogs guarding. In the mornings she was brisk and cheerful; she whistled, she talked to Karen and told her what to do, because there was a right and a wrong way to do everything. But in the afternoons, after lunch, she would droop and begin to yawn, and then she would say she was just going to sit down for a minute.