Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

“Sort of like a gun moll,” said Zenia, who was feeling a little better. It was a warmish day, for November, so Charis had decided it was safe for Zenia to go out. They were down by the lake, watching the gulls; Zenia had walked the whole way without once holding onto Charis’s arm. Charis had offered to get her some new sunglasses—Zenia had left the old ones behind, the night she ran away—but she hardly needed them any more: her eye had faded to a yellowy-blue, like a washedout ink stain.

“A what?” said Charis.

“Shit,” said Zenia, smiling, “if living with someone isn’t mixed up, I don’t know what is:” But Charis didn’t care what people called things. Anyway, she wasn’t listening to Zenia, she was watching her smile.

Zenia is smiling more, now. Charis feels as if that smile has been accomplished singlehandedly by her, Charis, and by all the work she’s been putting in: the fruit drinks, the cabbage juice made from her own cabbages, ground up fine and strained through a sieve, the special baths she prepares, the gentle yoga stretches, the carefully spaced walks in the fresh air. All those positive energies are ranging themselves against the cancer cells, good soldiers against bad, light against darkness; Charis herself is taking meditation time every day, on Zenia’s behalf, to visualize that exact same result. And it’s working, it is! Zenia has more colour now, more energy. Although still very thin and weak, she is visibly improving.

She knows it and she’s grateful. “You’re doing so much for me,” she says to Charis, almost every day. “I don’t deserve it; I mean, I’m a total stranger, you hardly know me:”

“That’s all right,” says Charis awkwardly. She blushes a little when Zenia says these things. She isn’t used to people thanking her for what she does, and she has a belief that it isn’t necessary. At the same time, the sensation is very agreeable; also at the same time, it strikes her that Billy could be showing a bit more gratitude himself, for everything she’s done for him. Instead of which he scowls at her and doesn’t eat his bacon. He wants her to make two breakfasts—one for Zenia and a separate one for him—so he doesn’t have to sit at the same table with Zenia in the mornings.

“The way she sucks up to you makes me puke,” he said yesterday. Charis knows now why he says such things. He’s jealous. He’s afraid Zenia will come between them, that she’ll somehow take Charis’s full attention away from him. It’s childish of him to feel like that. After all, he doesn’t have a life-threatening illness, and he ought to know by now that Charis loves him. So Charis touches his arm.

“She won’t be here forever,” she says. “Just till she’s a little better. Just till she can find a place of her own.”

“I’ll help her look,” says Billy. Charis has told him about West punching Zenia in the eye, and his response was not charitable. “I’ll do the other one for her, is what he said. “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am, a real pleasure:”

“That’s not very pacifist of you,” said Charis reproachfully. “I never said I was a goddamn pacifist,” said Billy, insulted. “Just because one war’s wrong doesn’t mean they all are!”

“Charis,” Zenia called fretfully, from the front room. “Is the radio on? I heard voices. I was just having a nap.”

“I can’t say spit in my own goddamn house,” hisses Billy. It’s at moments like these that Charis goes out to dig in the garden.

She pushes her shovel down, lifts, turns the soil over, pauses to look for grubs. Then she hears Zenia’s voice behind her. “You’re so strong,” Zenia says wistfully. “I was that strong, once. I could carry three suitcases:”

“You will be again,” says Charis, as heartily as she can. “I just know it!”

“Maybe,” says Zenia, in a small, sad voice. “It’s the little everyday things you miss so much. You know?”

Charis feels suddenly guilty for digging in her own garden; or as if she ought to feel guilty. It’s the same way with a lot of the other things she does: scrubbing the floor, making the bread. Zenia admires her while she does these things, but it’s a melancholy admiration, Sometimes Charis senses that her own healthy, toned-up body is a reproach to Zenia’s enfeebled one; that Zenia holds it against her.

“Let’s feed the hens,” she says. Feeding the hens is something Zenia can do. Charis brings out the hen feed in its coffee can, and Zenia scatters it, handful by handful. She loves the hens, she says. They are so vital! They are—well, the embodiment of the Life Force. Aren’t they?

Charis is made nervous by this kind of talk. It’s too abstract, it’s too much like university. The hens are not an embodiment of anything but hen-ness. The concrete is the abstract. But how could she explain this to Zenia?

“I’m going to make a salad,” she says instead.

“A Life Force salad,” says Zenia, and laughs. For the first time Charis is not delighted to hear this laughter, welcome as it ought to be. There’s something about it she doesn’t understand. It’s like a joke she’s not getting.

The salad is raisins and grated carrots, with a lemon juice and honey dressing. The carrots themselves are Charis’s own, from the box of damp sand in the root cellar lean-to; already they’re beginning to grow small white whiskers, which shows they’re still alive. Charis and Zenia eat the salad, and the lima beans and boiled potatoes, by themselves, because Billy says he has to go out that night. He has a meeting.

“He goes to a lot of meetings,” murmurs Zenia, as Billy is putting on his jacket. She has given up trying to be nice to Billy, since she wasn’t getting any results; now she’s taken to speaking of him in the third person even when he’s standing right there. It creates a circle, a circle of language, with Zenia and Charis on the inside of it and Billy on the outside. Charis wishes she wouldn’t do it; on the other hand, in a way Billy has only himself to blame.

Billy gives Zenia a dirty look. “At least I don’t just sit around on my butt, like some,” he says angrily. He too speaks only to Charis.

“Be careful,” Charis says. She means about going into the city, but Billy takes it as a reproof.

“Have a real good time with your sick friend,” he says nastily. Zenia smiles to herself, a tiny bitter smile. The door slams behind him, rattling the glass in the windows.

“I think I should leave,” says Zenia, when they are eating some of the applesauce Charis bottled earlier in the fall.

“But where would you live?” says Charis, dismayed. “Oh. I could find a place,” says Zenia.

“But you don’t have any money!” says Charis.

“I could get a job of some sort,” says Zenia. “I’m good at that. I can always lick ass somewhere, I know how to get jobs:’ She coughs, muffling her face in her spindly-fingered hands. “Sorry,” she says. She takes a bird-sip of water.

“Oh, no,” says Charis. “You can’t do that! You’re not well enough yet! You will be soon,” she adds, because she doesn’t want to sound negative. It’s health and not sickness that must be reinforced.

Zenia smiles thinly. “Maybe,” she says. “But Karen, really—don’t worry about me. It’s not your problem.”

“Charis,” says Charis. Zenia has trouble remembering her real name.

And yes, it is her problem, because she has taken it upon herself. Then Zenia says something worse. “It’s not just that he hates me,” she says. Her tongue comes out, licking the applesauce off the tip of her spoon. “The fact is, he can hardly keep his hands off me.”

“West?” says Charis. A cold finger runs down her back. Zenia smiles. “No,” she says. “I mean Billy. Surely you’ve noticed it.”