The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  "Well, for heaven's sake," says Aunt Vi. "You should've had sense enough to take her into the bathroom. I'll get the floor cloth. Karen, are you going to do that again?"

  Karen has no speech, because Charis has taken all the words with her. Karen opens her mouth, and Charis is sucked back, it's as if she's being vacuumed into their shared throat. "Yes," she says.

  After the third time Karen knows she is trapped. All she can do is split in two; all she can do is turn into Charis, and float out of her body and watch Karen, left behind with no words, flailing and sobbing. She will have to go on like this forever because Aunt Vi will never hear her, no matter what she says. She would like to take an axe and chop Uncle Vern's head off, and Aunt Vi's too, as if they were chickens; she would watch the grey smoke of their lives twist up out of them. But she knows she could never kill anything. She isn't hard enough.

  She takes the wishbone out of the hem of her curtain and closes her eyes, and holds both stems of the wishbone, and pulls. What she wishes for is her grandmother. Her grandmother is far away now, almost like a story she was told once; she can hardly believe she once lived at such a place as the farm, or even that there is such a place. But she wishes anyway, and when she opens her eyes her grandmother is there, coming right into her room through the closed door, wearing her overalls and frowning a little, and smiling also. She walks towards Karen and Karen feels a cool wind against her skin, and the grandmother holds out both of her knobby old hands, and Karen puts out her own hands and touches her, and her hands feel as if sand is falling over them. There's a smell of milkweed flowers and garden soil. The grandmother keeps on walking; her eyes are light blue, and her cheek comes against Karen's, cool grains of dry rice. Then she's like the dots on the comic page, close up, and then she's only a swirl in the air, and then she's gone.

  But some of her power stays there, in Karen's hands. Her healing power, her killing power. Not enough to get Karen out of the trap, but enough to keep her alive. She looks at her hands and sees a trace of blue.

  What she has to do is wait. She must wait like a stone, until it's time. So this is what she does. As soon as Uncle Vern touches her she splits in two, and the rest of the time she waits.

  Her grandmother is dead, or dead to this life, though Karen has seen her and she knows there isn't any death really. The Bible arrives in a large box, addressed to Karen, and Karen puts it in her suitcase under her bed, ready for when she can leave. Her grandmother has left her the farm, but because Karen's not old enough she can't have it or even go there, although she wants to. Uncle Vern and Aunt Vi are her guardians. They are in control.

  When she grows breasts and hair under her arms and on her legs and between them, and has her first period, Uncle Vern leaves her alone. There is a space between them, but it isn't like an absence. It's a presence, transparent but thicker than air. Uncle Vern is afraid of her now, he's afraid of what she's going to do or say; he's afraid of what she remembers, he's afraid of being judged. Maybe it's because her eyes are no longer timid, no longer vacant or beseeching. Her eyes are stone. When she looks at him with her stone eyes it's as if she's reaching in through his ribs and squeezing his heart so it almost stops. He says he has a heart condition, he takes pills for it, but they both know it's a thing she's doing to him. Every time she looks at him she feels loathing, and a deep nausea. She's disgusted with him, but also with her body, because it still has his dirt inside it. She must think of ways to get clean inside.

  When she feels those things she has to seal them off. She has to or else she will be destroyed. She splits herself in two and stays with the cooler part, the clearer part of herself. She has a name for this part now: she is Charis. She picked the hint for her new name out of the Bible, with a pin: "The greatest of these is Charity." Charity is better than Faith and Hope. She can use this new name only to herself, of course. Everyone else still calls her Karen.

  Charis is more serene than Karen, because the bad things have stayed behind, with small Karen. She's polite to her aunt, but remote. One day, when she is over eighteen, she asks the two of them what they have done with her grandmother's money. Her uncle says he's invested it for her and she can have all of it when she's twenty-one, and meanwhile some of it can be used for her education. Aunt Vi acts as if this is an act of great generosity, as if the money belongs to them and they're giving it away. But nevertheless they're both relieved when she goes to university and moves into McClung Hall. Aunt Vi is nervous of her because of her stony eyes; as for Uncle Vern, he doesn't know what she remembers. He hopes she's forgotten it all, but he isn't sure.

  She remembers everything, or rather Karen does; but Karen is in storage. Charis only remembers when she takes Karen out, from the suitcase under her bed where she has put her. She doesn't do this often. Karen is still little, but Charis is growing up.

  Charis turned twenty-one, but nothing was said about her grandmother's money. She didn't care. She wouldn't take money from them anyway, because even though it was really her own money it had been in their hands, it was dirty. She wouldn't be able to get it anyway without a fight.

  She didn't want to fight. Instead she wanted to go away somewhere else, and as soon as she felt ready she simply dropped out of sight. Out of their sight. It wasn't so hard when you knew no one would come looking for you. She left university before finishing - she was flunking her courses anyway, because they failed to hold her attention - and went travelling. She hitchhiked, she took buses. She worked as a waitress, she worked in an office. For a while she was in an ashram on the West Coast, for a while she stayed on a communal farm in Saskatchewan. She did various things.

  Once she went back to the farm, her grandmother's farm; she wanted to see it. But it wasn't a farm any more, it was a subdivision. Charis tried not to mind, since nothing that was or had been would perish, and the farm was still inside her, it was still hers because places belonged to the people who loved them.

  When she was twenty-six she dumped her old name. A lot of people were changing their names, then, because names were not just labels, they were also containers. Karen was a leather bag, a grey one. Charis collected everything she didn't want and shoved it into this name, this leather bag, and tied it shut. She threw away as many of the old wounds and poisons as she could. She kept only the things about herself that she liked or needed.

  She did all of this inside her head, because the events there are just as real as the events anywhere else. Still inside her head, she walked to the shore of Lake Ontario and sank the leather bag into the water.

  That was the end of Karen. Karen was gone. But the lake was inside Charis really, so that's where Karen was too. Down deep.

  36

  Until now, in her house on the Island, until this windy night with the scraping branches. Karen is coming back, Charis can't keep her away any more. She's torn away the rotting leather, she's come to the surface, she's walked through the bedroom wall, she's standing in the room right now. But she is no longer a nine-year-old girl. She has grown up, she has grown tall and thin and straggly, like a plant in a cellar, starved for light. And her hair isn't pale any more, but dark. The sockets of her eyes are dark too, dark bruises. She no longer looks like Karen. She looks like Zenia.

  She walks towards Charis and bends, and blends into her, and now she's inside Charis's body. With her she brings the ancient shame, which feels warm.

  Charis must have said something or made a sound, because Billy's awake now. He has turned over, he's pulling her to him, he's kissing her, burrowing into her with his old urgency. It isn't me, Charis wants to tell him, because she's no longer in charge of her own body. This other woman has taken over; but Charis doesn't float away, doesn't watch from behind the curtain. She's in the body too, she can feel everything. She can feel the body moving, responding; she can feel the pleasure shoot through her like electricity, unfold in a hundred colours, like a peacock's tail on fire. She forgets about Karen, she forgets about herself. Everything in her has been fused together.


  "Hey, that was different," Billy says. He's kissing her eyes, her mouth; she's lying in his arms, limp as a sick person; she can't move. It wasn't me, she thinks. But it was, partly. What she feels is difficult: guilt, relief. Anguish. Resentment, because Billy has the power to do that; resentment also, because she has lived for so many years without knowing about it.

  Deep inside, far inside her body, something new is moving.

  (That was the night her daughter was conceived. Charis is sure of it. She has always known who the father was, of course. There weren't any other choices. But the mother? Was it herself and Karen, sharing their body? Or was it Zenia, too?)

  In the morning she feels more like herself, like Charis. She doesn't know where Karen has gone. Not back underneath the lake; it doesn't feel like that. Possibly Karen is hiding somewhere else inside their shared body; but when she closes her eyes and searches with the mind's eye, here and there within herself, she can't find her, although there is a dark patch, a shadow, something she can't see. When she makes love with Billy she doesn't think about being Karen, or Charis either. She thinks about being Zenia.

  "Promise me she's leaving soon," says Billy. By now he's no longer angry. He's insistent, pleading, almost desperate.

  "She's leaving soon," says Charis, as if reassuring a child. She loves Billy more now, in some ways; but in some ways less. Once greediness comes into a thing, the greediness of the body, it gets in the way of pure giving. She wants Billy's body now, for itself, not just as a manifestation of his essence. Instead of simply ministering to him, she wants something back. Maybe this is wrong; she doesn't know.

  They're lying in bed, it's morning, she's stroking his face. "Soon, soon," she sings, crooning, to soothe him. She no longer thinks his body wants Zenia. How could he want Zenia, now that Charis wants him?

  It's the middle of December. The frost is in the ground, the leaves are off the trees, the wind is gathering momentum. Tonight it's straight off the lake, hurling itself through the trees and bushes, tearing at the plastic sheeting that Charis has stapled over the windows to keep out the drafts. There are no storm windows for this house and the landlord has no intention of buying them any, because in his opinion all the houses on the Island will soon be bulldozed flat, so why spend the money? There's also no insulation.

  Charis is beginning to see the drawbacks of living here. Already two of the houses on her street are empty, their windows boarded up. She wonders whether they will have enough wood to keep themselves warm when the real winter comes. There's a man at the co-op who might trade some yoga lessons for wood, but wood is heavy, so how will she get it to the Island?

  They will all need winter clothing too. Billy is in the city tonight, at another one of those meetings. She pictures him at the ferry dock, waiting for the last boat back, shivering in his thin jacket. She should be knitting him something. She'll go to the Goodwill store, soon, and try for some second-hand coats.

  One for Billy, one for herself, and one for Zenia as well, because Zenia has only the clothes on her back. She's afraid to go to West's place to get the rest of her clothes, or so she says. She's afraid West will kill her. He has an obsessive personality - gentle on the outside, but sometimes he goes berserk, and the thought of her dying drives him crazy. If he's going to lose her, if she's going to be dead, he wants to be in control of her death himself. A lot of men are like that, says Zenia, with a reminiscent stare into space, a tiny smile. Love drives them mad.

  Once upon a time, Charis would never have understood a statement like that. Now she does.

  Charis is certain she's pregnant. She's missed a period, but that isn't all: her body feels different, no longer taut and sinewy but spongelike, fluid. Saturated. It has a different energy, a deep orangy-pink, like the inside of a hibiscus. She hasn't told Billy yet, because she isn't sure how he'll take it.

  She hasn't told Zenia either. For one thing, she doesn't want to hurt her. Zenia can't have babies because of her hysterectomy for cancer, and Charis doesn't want to flaunt or boast. But also Zenia is now sleeping in the small room upstairs, the one that used to have all Charis's cardboard boxes in it. They moved her up there because Billy complained about never having any privacy in the living room. It's this little room that Charis wants to make over into a nursery for the baby, after Zenia is gone. So how can she tell Zenia she's pregnant without practically booting her out onto the street?

  And she couldn't do that, not yet; although when Zenia mentions leaving, Charis no longer tells her not to even think about it. She is torn: she wants Zenia to go, but she doesn't want her to die. She would like to cure her and then never see her again. They don't have all that much in common, and now that she has part of Zenia inside herself, the only part that's necessary to her, she would rather not have the actual, fleshly Zenia around. Zenia takes up a lot of time. Also - though Charis hates to think this way - a certain amount of money. Charis doesn't really have enough money for the three of them.

  Zenia is looking a lot better, but this can be deceptive. Sometimes she'll eat a good meal and then rush to the bathroom and throw up. And just yesterday, after they'd been discussing when Zenia might be ready to leave - after she'd been saying she was sure the tumours were shrinking, she was really getting on top of it - Charis walked into the bathroom and found the toilet bowl full of blood. If it were any other woman she'd have assumed that the woman was having her period and had forgotten to flush. But Zenia can't have periods. She has made that clear.

  Charis was concerned, and asked about the blood; Zenia was offhand. It was just a hemorrhage, she said. More or less like a nosebleed. Minor. Charis admires her courage, but who is she trying to fool? Herself, maybe. She doesn't fool Charis. From time to time Charis wonders whether she should suggest a hospital. But she can't stand hospitals. Because her mother died in one she thinks of them as places where you go to die. She is already making plans to have the baby at home.

  Charis and Zenia are sitting at the kitchen table. They're finishing supper: baked potatoes, mashed-up squash, a cabbage salad. This cabbage came from the market, because Charis's own cabbages have all been used up. They've been turned into juice and poured into Zenia, green transfusions.

  "You're looking stronger today," says Charis hopefully.

  "I'm strong as an ox," says Zenia. She puts her head down on the table for a moment, then raises it with an effort. "Really, I am."

  "I'll make you a cup of ginseng," says Charis.

  "Thanks," says Zenia. "So, where is he tonight?"

  "Billy?" says Charis. "Some meeting, I guess."

  "Don't you ever worry?" says Zenia.

  "About what?" says Charis.

  "That it's not just some meeting."

  Charis laughs. She has more confidence lately. "You mean, some chick," she says. "No. Anyway, it wouldn't interfere." She believes that. Billy can do what he wants with other women, because it wouldn't count.

  Billy has begun speaking to Zenia. He now says good morning to her, and when he comes into a room she's already in, he nods and grunts. What he calls his Southern manners are having a struggle with his aversion to Zenia, and the manners are winning. The other night he even offered her a puff on the joint he was smoking. But Zenia shook her head and Billy felt rebuffed, and that was that. Charis would like to ask Zenia to take it easy on Billy, to meet him halfway, but after the way he's behaved she can hardly do that.

  Behind Zenia's back, Billy is if anything even ruder than he was at first. "If she has cancer I'll eat my hat," he said two days ago.

  "Billy!" said Charis, appalled. "She's had an operation! She has a big scar!"

  "You seen it?" said Billy.

  Charis hadn't. Why would she? Why would she ask to see a person's cancer scar? It wasn't something you could do.

  "You want to place a little bet?" said Billy. "Five bucks there isn't one."

  "No," said Charis. How could you prove such a thing? She had a short vision of Billy rushing into Zenia's room and tearing
off her nightgown. That was not something she wanted.

  "Penny for your thoughts," says Zenia.

  "What?" says Charis. She is thinking about Zenia's scar.

  "Billy's a big boy," says Zenia. "You shouldn't get too anxious about him. He can take care of himself."

  "I was thinking about the winter," says Charis. "How we're going to get through it."

  "Not how - if," says Zenia. "Oh, sorry, too morbid. One day at a time!"

  Mostly Zenia goes to bed early because Charis tells her to, but sometimes she stays up. Charis makes a good fire in the wood stove and they sit at the kitchen table and talk. Sometimes they listen to music, sometimes they play solitaire.

  "I can read the cards," Zenia says one evening. "Here, I'll read yours."

  Charis isn't sure about this. She doesn't think it's such a good idea to know the future, because you can hardly ever change it, so why suffer twice? "Just for fun," says Zenia. She has Charis shuffle the deck three times and cut away from her so the bad luck won't come towards her, and then she lays the cards out in rows of three, for the past, the present, and the future. She studies the rows, then adds another set of cards, crossways.

  "Someone new is coming into your life," she says. Oh, thinks Charis. That must be the baby. "And someone else is going out of it. There's water involved; a crossing of the water." Zenia herself, thinks Charis. She'll get better, she'll leave soon. And anyone who leaves here has to cross water.

  "Anything about Billy?" she says.

  "There's a jack," says Zenia. "Jack of Spades. That could be him. Crossed by the Queen of Diamonds."

  "Is that money?" says Charis.

  "Yes," says Zenia, "but it's a cross card. There's something off about the money. Maybe he'll take up dealing drugs or something."

  "Not Billy," says Charis. "He's too smart." She doesn't really want to go on with this. "Where did you learn?" she asks.

  "My mother was a Roumanian gypsy," says Zenia carelessly. "She said it ran in the family."

  "It does," says Charis. This makes sense to her: she knows about gifts like that, there's her own grandmother. Zenia's black hair and dark eyes, and also her fatalism - they'd go with being a gypsy.