Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

Whereas Charis is stuck with being white. A white rabbit. Being white is getting more and more exhausting. There are so many bad waves attached to it, left over from the past but spreading through the present, like the killing rays from atomic waste dumps. There’s so much to expiate! It gives her anemia just to think about it. In her next life she’s going to be a mixture, a blend, a vigorous hybrid, like Shanita. Then no one will have anything on her.

The store doesn’t open till eleven, so Charis helps take stock. Shanita goes through the shelves, counting, and Charis writes down the numbers on a clipboard. It’s a good thing she found her reading glasses.

“We’ll have to bring down the prices,” says Shanita, frowning. “Stuff is not moving. We’ll have to do a sale:”

“Before Christmas?” says Charis, astonished.

“It’s the Recession,” says Shanita, pursing her lips: “That’s reality. This time of year, we usually, have to re-order for Christmas, right? Now, just look at all this!”

Charis peers: the shelves are upsettingly full. “You know what’s moving?” says Shanita. “This thing:”

Charis is familiar with it, because she’s sold a lot of them lately. It’s a little pamphlet-like book, a cookbook, done on grey recycled paper with black-and-white fine drawings, a doityourself home publishing effort: Pot Luck: Penny-Pinching Soups & Stews. It doesn’t appeal to her, personally. Pennypinching as a concept she finds very blocking. There’s something hard and grinding about it, and pinching is a hurtful word. True, she saves candle ends and pieces of wool, but that’s because she wants to, she wants to create things with them, that’s an act of love towards the earth.

“I need more stuff like this,” says Shanita. ‘Fact is, I’m thinking of changing the store. Changing the name, the concept, everything.”

Charis’s heart sinks. “What would you change it to?” she asks. “I was thinking, Scrimpers,” says Shanita.

“Scrimpers?” says Charis.

“You know. Like the old five-and-dime, all cheap stuff,” says Shanita. “Only more creative. It could work! A few years ago, you could trade on the impulse buy. Mad money, you know? Folks were flinging it around. But the only way you make it through a recession is by getting people to buy stuff about how not to buy stuff, if you know what I mean.”

“But Radiance is so lovely!” cries Charis unhappily.

“I know,” says Shanita. It was a lot of fun while it lasted. But lovely is luxury goods. How many of these dinky toys you think people are going to buy, right now? Maybe some, but only if we keep the price down. In these times you cut your losses, you cut your overheads, you do what you have to. This is a lifeboat, you know? It’s my lifeboat, it’s my life. I have worked damn hard, I know which way the wind is blowing, and I do not intend to go down with the sinking ship:’

She’s defensive. She looks at Charis, her gaze level—her eyes are green today—and Charis realizes that she herself is an overhead. If things get much worse, Shanita will cut her, and run the store by herself, and Charis will be out of a job.

They finish taking stock and open the door for the day, and Shanita’s mood changes. She’s friendly now, almost solicitous; she makes them both some Morning Miracle, and they sit at the front counter drinking it. There is not exactly a stampede of customers, so Shanita passes the time by asking Charis all about Augusta.

To Charis’s discomfort, Shanita approves of Augusta; she thinks Augusta is smart to be taking a business course. “A woman needs to be prepared to make her own way,” she says. “Too many lazy men around:” She even approves of the furniture scrapbook, which Charis herself finds so grasping, so materialistic. “That’s a girl with a head on her shoulders,” Shanita says, pouring them out more tea. “Wish I’d had one, at her age. Would’ve saved myself a lot of trouble.” She has two daughters of her own, and two sons, grown up. She’s a grandmother, even; but she doesn’t talk much about that part of her life. By now she knows a great deal about Charis, whereas Charis knows almost nothing about her.

“My pendulum went funny this morning,” says Charis, to get off the subject of Augusta.

“Funny?” says Shanita. The pendulums are sold in the store, five different models, and Shanita is an expert at interpreting their movements.

“It just stopped,” says Charis. “Stock-still, right over my head.”

“That’s a strong message,” says Shanita. “That’s something real sudden, something you weren’t looking for. Maybe it’s some entity, trying to get a message through. Today is the cusp of Scorpio, right? It’s like, the pendulum is pointing a finger and saying, watch out!”

Charis is apprehensive: could it be Augusta, an accident? That’s the first thing she thinks, of, so she asks.

“It’s not what I get,” says Shanita reassuringly, “but let’s just see.” She takes the Tarot she keeps under the counter, the Marseilles deck she favours, and Charis shuffles and cuts.

“The Tower,” says Shanita. “Sudden, like I said. The Priestess. An opening, something hidden is revealed. The Knight of Swords—well, that could be interesting! The Knights all bring messages. Now, the Empress. A strong woman! Not you, though. Somebody else. But I wouldn’t say this is Augusta, no. The Empress is not a young girl.”

“Maybe it’s you,” Charis says, and Shanita laughs and says, “Strong! I am a broken reed!” She puts down another card. “Death,” she says. “A change. Could be a renewal.” She crosses that card again. “Oh. The Moon:”

The Moon, with its baying dogs, its pool, its lurking scorpion. Just then the bell tinkles and a customer comes into the store; she asks Charis for two copies of Pot Luck, one for herself, one for a gift. Charis agrees with her that it’s very useful and not too expensive, and that the hand-done illustrations are sweet, and tells her that yes, Shanita is truly stunning but she’s not from any place except just plain old Toronto, and takes the money and wraps the books, her mind elsewhere.

The Moon, she thinks. Illusion:

At noon Charis takes off her flowered smock and says goodbye to Shanita—it’s her half-day, Tuesday, so she won’t be back after lunch—and heads out into the street, trying not to breathe too much. She has seen bicycle messengers wearing white paper nose masks, like nurses. It’s a trend, she thinks; maybe they should order some for the store, only coloured and with some nice patterns printed on.

As soon as she walks into the Toxique her head starts to crackle. It’s as if there’s a thunderstorm around somewhere, or a loose connection. Ions are bombarding her, wavelets of menacing energy. She brushes her forehead, then shakes her fingers to get rid of them.

She cranes her neck, looking around for the source of the disturbance. Sometimes it’s the people who come in to deal drugs on the stairs going down to the washrooms, but none of them seem to be around right now. The waitress comes up to her, and Charis asks for the corner near the mirror. Mirrors deflect.

The Toxique is Roz’s latest discovery. Roz is always discovering things, especially restaurants. She likes eating in places where no one from her office would ever eat, she likes being’ surrounded by people wearing clothes she’d never wear herself. She likes to think she’s mingling with real life, real meaning poorer than her. Or that’s the impression Charis sometimes gets. She’s tried telling Roz that all life is equally real, but Roz doesn’t appear to understand what she means; though maybe Charis doesn’t put it clearly enough.

She glances at the leopard-skin tights of the waitress, wrinkles her nose—these clothes are too tough for her—tells herself not to be judgmental, orders a bottle of Evian and some white wine, and settles down to wait. She opens the menu, squints at it, rummages in her bag for her reading glasses, can’t find them—has she left them at the store?—and finally locates them on top of her head. She must have walked along the street like that. She puts them on her nose and scans the daily specials. At least they always have something vegetarian; though who knows where the vegetables come from? Probably off some irradiated chemical-saturated agro-business maxi-farm.