Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

But some of her power stays there, in Karen’s hands. Her healing power, her killing power. Not enough to get Karen out of the trap, but enough to keep her alive. She looks at her hands and sees a trace of blue.

What she has to do is wait. She must wait like a stone, until it’s time. So this is what she does. As soon as Uncle Vern touches her she splits in two, and the rest of the time she waits.

Her grandmother is dead, or dead to this life, though Karen has seen her and she knows there isn’t any death really. The Bible arrives in a large box, addressed to Karen, and Karen puts it in her suitcase under her bed, ready for when she can leave. Her grandmother has left her the farm, but because Karen’s not old enough she can’t have it or even go there, although she wants to. Uncle Vern and Aunt Vi are her guardians. They are in control.

When she grows breasts and hair under her arms and on her legs and between them, and has her first period, Uncle Vern leaves her alone. There is a space between them, but it isn’t like an absence. It’s a presence, transparent but thicker than air. Uncle Vern is afraid of her now, he’s afraid of what she’s going to do or say; he’s afraid of what she remembers, he’s afraid of being judged. Maybe it’s because her eyes are no longer timid, no longer vacant or beseeching. Her eyes are stone. When she looks at him with her stone eyes it’s as if she’s reaching in through his ribs and squeezing his heart so it almost stops. He says he has a heart condition, he takes pills for it, but they both know it’s a thing she’s doing to him. Every time she looks at him she feels loathing, and a deep nausea. She’s disgusted with him, but also with her body, because it still has his dirt inside it. She must think of ways to get clean inside.

When she feels those things she has to seal them off. She has to or else she will be destroyed. She splits herself in two and stays with the cooler part, the clearer part of herself. She has a name for this part now: she is Charis. She picked the hint for her new name out of the Bible, with a pin: “The greatest of these is Charity.” Charity is better than Faith and Hope. She can use this new name only to herself, of course. Everyone else still calls her Karen.

Charis is more serene than Karen, because the bad things have stayed behind, with small Karen. She’s polite to her aunt, but remote: One day, when she is over eighteen, she asks the two of them what they have done with her grandmother’s money. Her uncle says he’s invested it for her and she can have all of it when she’s twenty-one, and meanwhile some of it can be used for her education. Aunt Vi acts as if this is an act of great generosity, as if the money belongs to them and they’re giving it away. But nevertheless they’re both relieved when she goes to university and moves into McClung Hall. Aunt Vi is nervous of her because of her stony eyes; as for Uncle Vern, he doesn’t know what she remembers. He hopes she’s forgotten it all, but he isn’t sure.

She remembers everything, or rather Karen does; but Karen is in storage. Charis only remembers when she takes Karen out, from the suitcase under her bed where she has put her. She doesn’t do this often. Karen is still little, but Charis is growing up.

Charis turned twenty-one; but nothing was said about her grandmother’s money. She didn’t care. She wouldn’t take money from them anyway, because even though it was really her own money it had been in their hands, it was dirty She wouldn’t be able to get it anyway without a fight.

She didn’t want to fight. Instead she wanted to go away somewhere else, and as soon as she felt ready she simply dropped out of sight. Out of their sight. It wasn’t so hard when you knew no one would come looking for you. She left university before finishing—she was flunking her courses anyway, because they failed to hold her attention—and went travelling. She hitchhiked, she took buses. She worked as a waitress, she worked in an office. For a while she was in an ashram on the West Coast, for a while she stayed on a communal farm in Saskatchewan. She did various things.

Once she went back to the farm, her grandmother’s farm; she wanted to see it. But it wasn’t a—farm any more, it was a subdivision. Charis tried not to mind, since nothing that was or had been would perish; and the farm was still inside her, it was still hers because places belonged to the people who loved them.

When she was twenty-six she dumped her old name. A lot of people were changing their names, then, because names were not just labels, they were also containers. Karen was a leather bag, a grey one. Charis collected everything she didn’t want and shoved it into this name, this leather bag, and tied it shut. She threw away as many of the old wounds and poisons as she could. She kept only the things about herself that she liked or needed.

She did all of this inside her head, because the events there are just as real as the events anywhere else. Still inside her head, she walked to the shore of Lake Ontario and sank the leather bag into the water.

That was the end of Karen. Karen was gone. But the lake was inside Charis really, so that’s where Karen was too. Down deep.

Until now, in her house on the Island, until this windy night with the scraping branches. Karen is coming back, Charis can’t keep her away any more. She’s torn away the rotting leather, she’s come to the surface, she’s walked through the bedroom wall, she’s standing in the room right now. But she is no longer a nine-year-old girl. She has grown up, she has grown tall and thin and straggly, like a plant in a cellar, starved for light. And her hair isn’t pale any more, but dark. The sockets of her eyes are dark too, dark bruises. She no longer looks like Karen. She looks like Zenia.

She walks towards Charis and bends, and blends into her, and now she’s inside Charis’s body. With her she brings the ancient shame, which feels warm.

Charis must have said something or made a sound, because Billy’s awake now. He has turned over, he’s pulling her to him, he’s kissing her, burrowing into her with his old urgency. It isn’t me, Charis wants to tell him, because she’s no longer in charge of her own body. This other woman has taken over; but Charis doesn’t float away, doesn’t watch from behind the curtain. She’s in the body too, she can feel everything. She can feel the body moving, responding; she can feel the pleasure shoot through her like electricity, unfold in a hundred colours; like a peacock’s tail on fire. She forgets about Karen, she forgets about herself. Everything in her has been fused together.

“Hey, that was different,” Billy says. He’s kissing her eyes, her mouth; she’s lying in his arms, limp as a sick person; she can’t move. It wasn’t me, she thinks. But it was, partly. What she feels is difficult: guilt, relief. Anguish. Resentment, because Billy has the power to do that; resentment also, because she has lived for so many years without knowing about it.

Deep inside, far inside her body, something new is moving ..

(That was the night her daughter was conceived. Charis is sure of it. She has always known who the father was, of course. There weren’t any other choices. But the mother? Was it herself and Karen, sharing their body? Or was it Zenia, too?)

In the morning she feels more like herself, like Charis. She doesn’t know where Karen has gone. Not back underneath the lake; it doesn’t feel like that. Possibly Karen is hiding somewhere else inside their shared body; but when she closes her eyes and searches with the mind’s eye, here and there within herself, she can’t find her, although there is a dark patch, a shadow, something she can’t see. When she makes love with Billy she doesn’t think about being Karen, or Charis either. She thinks about being Zenia.