Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

Maybe, she thinks, West did it. Maybe he went over to Zenia’s hotel room to beg and plead, hoping to run off with her again, and Zenia laughed at him, and West lost it and heaved her off the balcony. If that’s what happened Tony wants to know. She wants to know so she can shield West, think up a watertight alibi for him, save him from himself.

“Oh, yeah,” says West. “She did call, I don’t know—a week ago. But I didn’t talk to her, she just left a message on the machine.”

“What did it say?” says Tony. “Why didn’t you tell me? What did she want?”

“Maybe I should’ve mentioned it,” says West. “But I didn’t want you to get hurt. I mean, we both thought she was dead. I guess I would’ve liked her to stay that way.”

“Really?” says Tony.

“She didn’t want to talk to me,” says West, as if he knows what Tony’s been thinking. ‘‘She wanted you. If I’d had her on the phone in person I would’ve told her to forget it; I knew you wouldn’t want to see her. I did jot it down—where she was staying—but after I thought things over, I threw it out. She’s always been bad news.”

Tony feels herself softening. “I saw her, though,” she says. “I saw her this afternoon. She seemed to know that your study’s on the third floor. How would she know that, if she’s never been here?”

West smiles. “It’s on my answering machine. ‘Third floor, Headwinds: Remember?”

By this time he’s unwired and standing up. Tony goes over to him and he folds himself up like a bridge chair and wraps his knotted-rope arms around her, and kisses her on the forehead. “I like it that you’re jealous,” he says, “but you don’t need to be. She’s nothing, any more:”

Little does he know, thinks Tony. Or else he does know and he’s pretending not to. Squashed up against his torso, she takes a sniff of him, to see if he’s been drinking a lot. If he has, it will be a dead giveaway. But there’s nothing besides the usual mild scent of beer. “Zenia is dead,” she tells West solemnly.

“Oh, Tony,” says West. “Again? I’m really sorry.” He rocks her to and fro as if she’s the one who needs to be consoled, and not him at all.

When Charis gets back to her house, still shaky but under control, there’s a light on in the kitchen. It’s Augusta, taking a long weekend break, paying a visit. Charis is glad to see her, though she wishes she’d had time to tidy up first. She notes that Augusta has washed the dishes from the last couple of days and has done away with a couple of major spider webs, though she’s known better than to disassemble Charis’s meditational altar. She has noted it, however.

“Mom,” she says, after Charis has greeted her and has put on the kettle for bedtime tea, “what’s this chunk of stone and this pile of dirt and leaves doing on the living-room table?”

“It’s a meditation,” says Charis.

“Christ;” Augusta mutters. “Can’t you put it somewhere else?”

“August,” says Charis, a little tersely, “it’s my meditation, and it’s my house.”

“Don’t snap at me!” says August. “And Mom, it’s Augusta. That’s my name now”

Charis knows this. She knows she should respect August’s new name, because everyone has a right to rename herself according to her inner direction. But she chose August’s original name with such love and care. She gave it to her, it was a gift. It’s hard for her to let it go.

“I’ll make you some muffins,” she says, attempting to conciliate. “Tomorrow. The ones with the sunflower seeds. You always liked those.”

“You don’t have to keep giving me stuff, Mom,” says Augusta, in an oddly grown-up voice. “I love you anyway.” Charis feels her eyes watering. Augusta hasn’t said anything this affectionate for some time. And she does find it difficult to believe—that a person would love her even when she isn’t trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy. “It’s just, I worry about you,” she says. “About your health.” This isn’t really the part of Augusta that worries her, but it stands in for the other, more spiritual things. Though health is a spiritual thing too.

“No kidding,” says Augusta. “Every time I come home you try to stuff me full of veggie burgers. I’m nineteen, Mom, I take care of myself, I eat balanced meals! Why can’t we just have fun? Go for a walk or something.”

It’s unusual for Augusta to want to spend time with Charis. Maybe Augusta isn’t totally hard, not lacquered and shiny all the way through. Maybe she has a soft spot. Maybe she is part Charis, after all.

“Did you mind a lot, not having a father?” Charis asks. “When you were little?” She’s been on the verge of asking this for a long time, although she’s feared the answer because surely it was her fault that Billy had left. If he’d run away it was her fault for not being appealing enough to keep him, if he’d been kidnapped it was her fault for not taking better care of him: Now, though, she has some other possible views of Billy. Whether Zenia was lying or not, maybe it’s just as well Billy didn’t stick around.

“I wish you’d stop feeling so guilty,” says Augusta. “Maybe I minded when I was small, but look around you, Mom, this is the twentieth century! Fathers come and go—a lot of the kids on the Island didn’t have them. I know some people with three or four fathers! I mean, it could have been worse, right?”

Charis looks at Augusta and sees the light around her. It’s a light that’s hard like a mineral and also soft, a glow like the luminosity of a pearl. Inside the layers of light, right at the centre of Augusta, there’s a small wound. It belongs to Augusta, not to Charis; it’s for Augusta to heal.

Charis feels absolved. She puts her hands on Augusta’s shoulders, gently so Augusta will not feel seized, and kisses her on the forehead.

Before she goes to bed, Charis does a meditation on Zenia. She needs to do this, because although she has often thought about Zenia in relation to herself, or to Billy, or even to Tony and Roz, she has never truly considered what Zenia was in and by herself the Zenia-ness of Zenia. She has no object, nothing belonging to Zenia, to focus on, so instead she turns off the lights in the living room and stares out the window, into the darkness, towards the lake. Zenia was sent into her life—was chosen by her—to teach her something. Charis doesn’t know what it was yet, but in time she will uncover it.

She can see Zenia clearly, Zenia lying in the fountain, with her cloudy hair floating. As she watches, time reverses itself and life flows back into Zenia, and she lifts out of the water and flies backwards like a huge bird, up onto the orange balcony. But Charis can’t hold her there, and she falls again; falls down, turning slowly, into her own future. Her future as a dead person, as a person not yet born.

Charis wonders whether Zenia will come back as a human being or as something else. Perhaps the soul breaks up as the body does, and only parts of it are reborn, a fragment here, a fragment there. Perhaps many people will soon be born with a fragment of Zenia in them. But Charis would rather think of her whole.

After a while she turns out the other downstairs lights and goes upstairs. Just before she climbs into her vine-covered bed, she gets out her notebook with the lavender paper and her pen with the green ink, and writes: Zenia has returned to the Light.

She hopes this is so. She hopes that Zenia is not still hovering around, alone and lost, somewhere out there in the night.

After Roz takes Tony home she goes home herself, as fast as she can because she’s worried sick, what if there’s cocaine stashed all over her house, tucked into the tea leaves or the cookie jar in little plastic bags, what if she finds the place full of sniffer dogs and men named Dwayne, who will address her as ma’am and say they are just doing their jobs? She even runs a red light, not a thing she normally does, although everyone else seems to these days. She shucks her coat in the hall, kicks off her shoes, and goes on the hunt for Larry.