Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

Charis feels that the only thing she herself can change is her own body, and through it her spirit. She wishes to free her spirit: this is what led her to yoga. She wants to rearrange her body, get rid of the heaviness hidden deep within it, that core of evil treasure she buried some time ago and has never dug up; she wants to make her body lighter and lighter, release it so that she’s almost floating. She knows it’s possible. She gives the yoga lessons because they pay for the rent and the phone and for the bulk food she gets cut-rate through her work at the co-op, but she gives them also because she wants to help other people. Other women, really, because most of the people who take the classes are women. They too must have heavy metals hidden in them, they too must yearn for lightness. Although this class isn’t about weight loss: she tells them that straight out, right at the beginning.

After she’s dressed, after she’s cooked Billy his bacon and toast and coffee, Charis packs her leotard and tights—into her Peruvian carry-bag and runs around the house unearthing spare change for the trip from all the places where she’s hidden it, for emergencies such as today, when she’s run out of cash. The mist has evaporated now and the weak November sunlight is filtering through the grey overcast, so she can trust her watch again and she doesn’t miss the ferry. She hardly ever misses it anyway unless it’s a case of Billy, Billy and his spontaneous and overpowering urges. What can she tell him then? I have to work or else we don’t eat? That doesn’t go over too well: he thinks it’s a criticism of him because he doesn’t have a job, and then he sulks. He prefers to believe that she’s like a lily of the field; that she neither toils nor spins; that bacon and coffee are simply produced by her, like leaves from a tree.

The yoga classes are held in the apartment above the co-op, or what used to be an apartment. Right now two of the rooms are offices, one for the co-op, one for a small poetry magazine called Earth Germinations, and the big front room is kept for meetings and for classes like the yoga ones. Charis will teach only ten people at a time: any more would overload her circuits, break her focus. They bring their own towels and mats, and usually they already have their leotards on under their clothes so they don’t have to change. Charis gets there before the others, changes in the bathroom, and spreads out her mat, which she keeps in a cupboard in the co-op office. The old hardwood floor gives you splinters if you aren’t careful.

Her first work is to abolish her surroundings. The faded wallpaper with the mauve trellis pattern on it must recede, the squares of darker wallpaper left by former pictures, the stale smell of used house and of the dank pee-stained carpet on the stairs coming up and of the lunch relics in the office wastebaskets, which nobody ever empties. The traffic noises from outside must go, the voices from the street and from downstairs—she erases them from her mind with a firm hand, as if they’re on a blackboard. She lies down on her back, knees bent, arms loose overhead, and concentrates on her breathing, preparing, centring herself. The breath must go in and down, fully in and down to the solar plexus. The furtive scurrying trivial mind must be shut off: The I must be transcended. The self must be cut loose. It must drift.

The first class goes as usual. Charis knows she has a good voice for this, low and reassuring, and a good pace. “Honour the spine,” she murmurs. “Salute the sun:” The sun she means is inside the body. She uses her voice and also her hands, a touch here, a touch there, nudging the bodies into the right poses. To each individual woman she speaks in a whisper, so as not to call attention or embarrass her or interrupt the concentration of the others. The room fills with the sound of breathing, like wavelets on a shore, and with the scent of tensed muscles. Charis feels energy flowing out of her, through her fingers, into the other bodies. She doesn’t move much—this is not what anyone else would call exertion—but at the end of the hour and a half she’s exhausted.

She has an hour’s break, to replenish herself. She drinks an orange-and-carrot juice from the juice bar downstairs to get some living enzymes into her system, and helps the others sort out the dried-bean pricing, and then it’s time for her second class. Charis never much notices who is in which class; she counts to ten and registers the colours of the leotards, and once she’s into the class she notes the particularities of the bodies and especially the spines and their wrong positioning, but the faces are not important to her, because the face is the individualism, the very thing Charis wants to help these women transcend. Also, the first exercises are done on the floor, with the eyes closed. So she’s a quarter of the way through before she realizes that there’s a new person, someone she’s never seen before: a dark-haired woman in an indigo leotard and plum-coloured tights, who—strange for such a dimly lighted day—is wearing sunglasses.

This woman is tall, and thin as a razor, so thin Charis can see her ribcage right through the leotard, each rib in high relief as if carved, with a line of darkness beneath it. Her knees and elbows stick out like knots in rope, and the poses, as she performs them, are not fluid but practically geometrical, cages made of coat-hangers. Her skin is white as mushrooms, and a dark-light phosphorescence glimmers around her like the sheen on bad meat. Charis knows unhealth when she sees it: this woman needs a lot more than just one yoga class. A big hit of vitamin C and a dollop of sunlight would-be a start, but they wouldn’t even begin to touch what’s wrong with her.

What’s wrong with her is partly an attitude of the soul: the sunglasses are its manifestation, they symbolize a barrier to inner vision. So just before the lotus meditation Charis goes over and whispers to her, “Wouldn’t you like to take your sunglasses off? They must be a distraction:”

For answer the woman slips the glasses down, and Charis gets a shock. The woman’s left eye is blackened. Black and blue, and half shut. The other eye regards her, hurt, wet, appealing.

“Oh,” Charis breathes. “Sorry.” She winces: she can feel the blow on her own flesh, her own eye.

The woman smiles, a harrowing smile in that emaciated and damaged face. “Aren’t you Karen?” she whispers.

Charis doesn’t know how to explain that she is but she isn’t. She is once-Karen. So’ she says, “Yes,” and looks more closely, because how would this woman recognize her? “I’m Zenia,” the woman says. And she is.

Charis and Zenia sit at one of the little tables beside the juice bar at the far end of the co-op. “What would you recommend?” says Zenia. “This is all new to me,” and Charis, flattered by this call upon her expertise, orders her up a papayaand-orange, with a dash of lemon in it and some brewer’s yeast. Zenia keeps her glasses on and Charis doesn’t blame her. Still, it’s hard to talk with someone whose eyes she can’t see.

She does remember Zenia, of course. Everyone in McClung Hall knew who Zenia was; even Charis, who drifted through her university years as if through an airport. Educationally she was a transient, and she left after three years without completing her degree: whatever it was that she needed to be taught, it wasn’t on the curriculum there. Or maybe she wasn’t ready for it. Charis believes that when you are ready to learn a thing the right teacher will appear, or rather will be sent to you. This has worked out for her so far, more or less, and the only reason she isn’t learning anything at the moment is that she’s so fully occupied with Billy.

Though maybe Billy is a teacher, in a way. She just hasn’t figured out exactly what she’s supposed to be learning from him. How to love, perhaps? How to love a man. Though she already does love him, so what next?