Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

From here on the Island, the city is mysterious, like a mirage, like the cover on a book of science fiction. A paperback. It’s like this at sunset too, when the sky turns burnt orange and then the crimson of inner space, and then indigo, and the lights in the many windows change the darkness to gauze; and then at night the neon shows up against the sky and it gives off a—glow, like an amusement park or something safely on fire. The only time Charis doesn’t care to look at the city is noon, in the full glare of the day. It’s too clear-cut, too brash and assertive. It juts, it pushes. It’s just girders then, and slabs of concrete.

Charis would rather look at the city than go there, even at dusk. Once she’s in it she can no longer see it; or she sees it only in detail, and it becomes harsher, pockmarked, crisscrossed with grids, like a microscopic photograph of skin. She has to go into it every day, however; she has to work. She likes her job well enough as jobs go, but it’s a job, and every job has shackles attached to it. Square brackets. So she tries to plan a small respite for each day, a small joy, something extra.

Today she’s having lunch at the Toxique, with Roz and Tony. In a way they are inappropriate friends for her to have. It’s odd to think that she’s known them so long, ever since McClung Hall. Well, not known. She didn’t truly know anybody back then, just their appearances. But Tony and Roz are friends now, that’s beyond a doubt. They’re part of her pattern, for this life.

She steps away from the window, and pauses to remove a thumbtack from her foot. It doesn’t hurt as much as she would have expected. She flashes briefly on the image of a bed of nails, with herself lying on it. It would take some getting used to, but it would be good training.

She pulls off her white cotton nightgown, drinks the glass of water she leaves beside her bed every night to remind herself about drinking enough water, and does her yoga exercises in nothing but her underpants. Her leotard is in the wash, but who cares? Nobody can see her. There are some good things about living alone. The room is cool, but cool air tones up the skin. One nice thing about her job is that it doesn’t start until ten, which gives her a long morning, time to grow slowly into her day.

She cheats a little on the exercises because she doesn’t feel like lying down on the floor right now. Then she goes downstairs and has her shower. The bathroom is off the kitchen, because it was added on after the house was built. A lot of the Island houses are like that; at first they would have had outhouses, because they were just summer cottages then. Charis has painted her bathroom a cheerful shade of pink, but that’s done nothing to improve the slanting floor. Possibly the bathroom is coming away from the rest of the house, which would account for the cracks, and the drafts in winter. She may have to get it propped up.

Charis washes herself with Body Shop shower gel, the Dewberry flavour: her arms, her neck, her legs with their nearly invisible scars. She likes to be clean. There’s clean outside and there’s clean inside, her grandmother used to say, and clean inside is better. But Charis is not altogether clean inside: shreds of Zenia cling to her still, like dirty spangled muslin. She sees the name Zenia in her head, glowing like a scratch, like lava, and draws a line through it with a thick black crayon. It’s too early in the morning to think about Zenia.

She scrubs her hair in the shower, then gets out and toweldries it and parts it in the middle. Augusta is pestering her to get it cut. Coloured also. Augusta doesn’t want an old washedout mother. Washed-out is her phrase. “I like myself the way I am,” Charis tells her; but she wonders if that’s altogether true. However, she refuses to dye her hair, because once you begin you have to keep on doing it, and that’s just one more heavy chain. Look at Roz.

She does her breast self-examination in the bathroom mirror—she has to do it every day, or she’ll forget and never do it—and doesn’t find any lumps. Maybe she should start wearing a brassiere. Maybe she should always have worn one; then she wouldn’t have become so floppy. Nobody tells you about aging, in advance. No, that’s not right. People tell you but you don’t hear them. “Mum’s on another channel,” August used to say to her friends, before she added the a.

Charis takes her quartz pendulum out of its blue Chinese silk drawstring bag—silk conserves the vibrations, says Shanita—and holds it over her head, watching it in the mirror. “Will this be a good day?” she asks it. Round and round means yes, back and forth means no. The pendulum hesitates, begins to swing: a sort of ellipse. It can’t make up its mind. Normal, thinks Charis. Then it gives a sort of jump, and stops. Charis is puzzled: she’s never seen it do that before. She decides to ask Shanita; Shanita will know. She tucks the pendulum back into its bag.

To get another angle, she takes down her grandmother’s Bible, closes her eyes, and pokes at the pages with a pin. She hasn’t done this for a while, but she hasn’t lost the knack. Her hand is drawn down, and she opens her eyes and reads: For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. First Corinthians, and, as a daily forecast, not one whole lot of help.

For breakfast she has muesli, with yogourt mixed in and half an apple cut up in it. When Billy was here they used to have eggs, from the long-vanished hens, and bacon. Or Billy would have bacon. He liked it.

Charis quickly wipes from her mind—Wipe it! Like a video! says Shanita—the image of Billy, and of the things he liked. She considers bacon instead. She stopped eating bacon when she was seven, but other kinds of meat went later. The Save Your Life Cookbook advised her, back there, back then, to visualize what any given piece of fat would look like in her stomach. A pound of butter, a pound of lard, a strip of bacon, uncooked, white and limp and flat like a tapeworm. Charis is all too good at visualizing; she hasn’t been able to stop with fat. Every time she puts something into her mouth she’s likely to see it in living colour, as it makes its way down her esophagus into her stomach, where it churns unpleasantly and then inches through her digestive tract, which is the shape of a long snarled garden hose covered inside with little rubbery fingers, like foot massage sandals. Sooner or later it will come out the other end. This is what her concentration on healthy eating can lead to: she sees everything on her plate in the guise of a future turd.

Wipe the bacon, she tells herself sternly. It’s sunny outside now, she should think about that. She sits at her kitchen table, a round oak one she’s had ever since August was born, in her Japanese cotton kimono with the bamboo shoots on it, and eats her muesli, giving it the recommended number of chews and looking out the kitchen window. She used to be able to see the henhouse from here. Billy built that himself and she left it there as a sort of monument, even though there were no hens in it any more, until August changed into Augusta and made her take it down. The two of them did it with crowbars, and she cried afterwards, on her white bedspread with the vines. If only she knew where he’d gone. If only she knew where they’d taken him. He must have been taken somewhere, by force, by someone. He wouldn’t have just gone away like that, without telling her, without writing ...

Pain hits her in the neck, right across the windpipe, before’ she can stop it. Wipe the pain. But sometimes she just can’t. She bangs her forehead softly on the edge of the table.

“Sometimes I just can’t,” she says out loud.

All right then, says Shanita’s voice. Let it wash. Let it just wash over you. It’s only a wave. It’s like water. Think about what colour that wave is.