Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

It’s as if Zenia has already been here, leaving a taunting signature; but the handwriting is West’s. How sweet, she thinks; he just left it there for anyone to see, he doesn’t even know enough to flush it down the toilet. What is not so sweet is that he hasn’t told her. He is less transparent than she thought, less candid; more perfidious. The enemy is already within the walls.

The personal is not political, thinks Tony: the personal is military. War is what happens when language fails.

Zenia, she whispers, trying it out. Zenia, you’re history. You’re dead meat.

Charis gets up at dawn. She makes her bed neatly, because she respects this bed. After working her way through time from one bed to another—a mattress on the floor, or several mattresses on several floors, a second-hand box bed with screw-on tapered wooden legs that kept breaking, a spine-wrecking futon, a chemical-smelling foam pad—she has finally achieved a bed that pleases her: firm, but not too firm, with a wrought-iron bedstead painted white. She bought it cheap from Shanita, at work, who was getting rid of it in one of her periodic transformations. Anything from Shanita is good luck, and this bed is good luck too. It’s clear, it’s fresh, like a mint candy.

Charis has covered the bed with a beautiful print spread, dark pink leaves and vines and grapes, on white. A Victorian look. Too fussy, says her daughter Augusta, who has an eye for leather chairs as smooth as the backs of knees, for tubularchrome-and-glass coffee tables, for nubbly-cotton designer sofas with pillows in greys and ivories and milky-tea browns: minimalist opulence like that in corporate lawyers’ offices. Or so Charis imagines; she doesn’t in fact know any corporate lawyers. Her daughter cuts pictures of these intimidating chairs and tables and sofas out of magazines and pastes them into her furniture scrapbook, and leaves the scrapbook lying around, open, as a reproach to Charis and her slovenly ways.

Her daughter is a hard girl. Hard to please, or hard for Charis to please. Maybe it’s because she has no father. Or not no father. an invisible father, a father like a dotted outline, which has had to be coloured in for her by Charis, who didn’t have all that much to go on herself, so it’s no wonder his features have remained a little indistinct. Charis wonders whether it would have been better for her daughter to have a father. She wouldn’t know, because she never had one herself. Maybe Augusta would go easier on Charis if she had two parents she could find inadequate, and not just one.

Maybe Charis deserves it. Maybe she was the matron of an orphanage in a previous life—a Victorian orphanage, with gruel for the orphans and a cosy fire and a warm four-poster bed with a down-filled quilt for the matron; which would account for her taste in bedspreads.

She remembers her own mother calling her hard, before she was Charis, when she was still Karen. You’re hard, you’re hard, she would cry, hitting Karen’s legs with a shoe or a broom handle or whatever was around. But Karen wasn’t hard, she was soft, too soft. A soft touch. Her hair was soft, her smile was soft, her voice was soft. She was so soft there was no resistance. Hard things sank into her, they went right through her; and if she made a real effort, out the other side. Then she didn’t have to see them or hear them, or touch them even.

Maybe it looked like hardness. You can’t win this fight, said her uncle, putting his meaty hand on her arm. He thought she was fighting. Maybe she was. Finally she changed into Charis, and vanished, and reappeared elsewhere, and she has been elsewhere ever since. After she became Charis she was harder, hard enough to get by, but she’s continued to wear soft clothes: flowing Indian muslins, long gathered skirts, flowered shawls, scarves draped around her.

Whereas her own daughter has gone for polish. Lacquered nails, dark hair gelled into a gleaming helmet, though not a punk look: efficient. She’s too young to be so shiny: she’s only nineteen. She’s like a butterfly hardened into an enamelled lapel pin while still half out of the chrysalis. How will she ever unfold? Her brittle suits, her tidy little soldiers’ boots, her neat lists in crisp computer printout just break Charis’s heart.

August, Charis named her, because that’s when she was born.-Warm breezes, baby powder, languorous heat, the smell of mown hay. Such a soft name. Too soft for her daughter, who has added an a. Augusta, she is now—a very different resonance. Marble statues, Roman noses, tight-lipped commanding mouths. Augusta is in first year in the business course at Western, on scholarship, luckily, because Charis could never have afforded to pay for it; her vagueness about money is another source of complaint, for Augusta.

But despite the lack of cash Augusta has always been well fed. Well fed, well nourished, and every time Augusta comes home for a visit Charis cooks her a nutritious meal, with leafy greens and balanced proteins. She gives Augusta small presents, sachets stuffed with rose petals, sunflower-seed cookies to take back to school with her. But they never seem to be the right things, they never seem to be enough.

Augusta tells Charis to straighten her shoulders or she’ll be a bag lady in old age. She goes through Charis’s cupboards and drawers and throws out the candle ends Charis has been saving to make into other candles, sometime when she gets around to it, and the partly used soaps she’s been intending to cook into other soaps, and the twists of wool destined for Christmas tree decorations that got moths in them by mistake. She asks Charis when she last cleaned the toilet, and orders her to get rid of the clutter in the kitchen, by which she means the bunches of dried herbs grown so lovingly by Charis every summer, and dangling—somewhat dusty, but still usable—from the nails of different sizes that stud the top of the window frame, and the hanging wire basket for eggs and onions where Charis tosses her gloves and scarves, and the Oxfam oven mitts made by mountain peasant women, somewhere far away, in the shape of a red owl and a navy blue pussycat.

Augusta frowns at the owl and the pussycat. Her own kitchen will be white, she tells Charis, and very functional. with everything stored in drawers. She’s already cut out a picture of it, from Architectural Digest.

Charis loves Augusta, but decides not to think about her right now. It’s too early in the morning. Instead she will enjoy the sunrise, which is a more neutral way to begin the day.

She goes to the small bedroom window and flings aside the curtain, which is a piece of the same print that covers her bed. She hasn’t got around to herriiriing it, but she will, later. Several of the thumbtacks holding its top end to the wall pop out and scatter on the floor. Now she will have to remember, and avoid stepping on them in her bare feet. She should get a curtain rod, or something, or two hooks with a piece of string: that wouldn’t be very expensive. In any case the curtain has to be washed before Augusta comes home again. “Don’t you ever u)asla this thing?” she said the last time she was here. “It looks like poor people’s underpants:” Augusta has a graphic way of putting things that makes Charis wince. It’s too sharp, too bright, too jagged: shapes cut from tin.

Never mind. The view from her bedroom window is there to soothe her. Her house is the end one in the row, and then comes the grass and then the trees, maple and willow, and through a gap in the trees the harbour, with the sun just beginning to touch the water, from which, today, a vapoury mist is rising. So pink, so white, so softly blue, with a slice of moon and the gulls circling and dipping like flights of souls; and on the mist the city floats, tower and tower and tower and spire, the glass walls of different colours, black, silver, green, copper, catching the light and throwing it back, tenderly at this hour.