Authors: Margaret Atwood
“Well,” said Charis, “I’m not
mixed up
. I don’t understand any of those things. I just live with Billy, that’s all.”
“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 washed-out 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 single-handedly 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.”
Charis can feel the skin of her entire face sliding down in dismay. She has noticed nothing. But why hasn’t she? It’s obvious to her, now that Zenia’s said it – the energy that leaps out of Billy’s finger-ends and hair whenever Zenia is near. A sexual bristling, like tomcats. “What do you mean?” she says.
“He wants to haul me into bed,” says Zenia. Her voice is lightly regretful. “He wants to jump me.”
“He loves you?” says Charis. Her entire body has gone slack, as if her bones have melted. Dread is what she feels.
Billy loves me
, she protests silently. “Billy loves
me,”
she says, in a choked voice. “He says so.” She sounds to herself like a whiny child. And when was the last time he said that?
“Oh, it’s not love,” says Zenia gently. “Not what he feels for me, I mean. It’s hate. Sometimes it’s so hard for men to tell the difference. But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
“What are you talking about?” Charis whispers.
Zenia laughs. “Come on, you’re not a baby. He loves your ass. Or some other body part, how would I know? Anyway, for sure it’s not your soul, it’s not
you
. If you didn’t put out he’d just take anyway. I’ve watched him, he’s a greedy shit, they’re all just rapists at heart. You’re an innocent, Karen. Believe me, there’s only one thing any
man ever wants from a woman, and that’s sex. How much you can get them to pay for it is the important thing.”
“Don’t say that,” says Charis. “Don’t say it!” She can feel something breaking in her, collapsing, a huge iridescent balloon ripped and greying like a punctured lung. What’s left, if you take away love? Just brutality. Just shame. Just ferocity. Just pain. What becomes of her gifts then, her garden, her chickens, her eggs? All her acts of careful tending. She’s shaking now, she feels sick to her stomach.
“I’m just a realist, that’s all,” says Zenia. “The one reason he wants to stick his dick into me is that he can’t. Don’t worry, he’ll forget all about it after I’ve left. They have short memories. That’s why I want to go, Karen – it’s for you.” She’s still smiling. She looks at Charis, and her face against the weak light of the ceiling bulb is in darkness, with only her eyes gleaming, red as in car headlights, and the look goes into Charis, down and down. It’s a resigned look. Zenia is accepting her own death.
“But you’ll die,” says Charis. She can’t let that happen. “Don’t give up!” She starts to cry. She clutches Zenia’s hand, or Zenia clutches hers, and the two of them hang onto each other’s hands across the tableful of dirty dishes.
Charis lies awake in the night. Billy has come back, long after she went to bed, but he hasn’t reached for her. Instead he turned away in bed and closed himself off and went to sleep. It’s like that a lot, these days. It’s as if they’ve had a fight. But now she knows there’s another reason too: she is not wanted. It’s Zenia who is the wanted one.
But Billy wants Zenia with his body only. That’s why he’s so rude to her – his body is divided from his spirit. That’s why he’s being so cold to Charis, as well: his body wants Charis out of the way, so he can grab Zenia, shove her up against the kitchen counter, take hold of her against her will, even though she’s so ill. Maybe he doesn’t know that’s what he wants. But it is.
A wind has come up. Charis listens to it scraping through the bare trees, and to the cold waves slapping against the shore. Someone is coming towards her across the lake, her bare feet touching the tops of the waves, her nightgown tattered by the years of weathering, her colourless hair floating. Charis closes her eyes, focusing on the inner picture, trying to see who it is. Inside her head there’s moonlight, obscured by scudding clouds; but now the sky lightens and she can see the face.
It’s Karen, it’s banished Karen. She has travelled a long distance. Now she’s coming nearer, with that cowed, powerless face Charis used to see in the mirror looming up to her own face, blown towards her through the darkness like an ousted ghost, towards this house where she has been islanded, thinking herself safe; demanding to enter her, to rejoin her, to share in her body once again.
Charis is not Karen. She has not been Karen for a long time, and she never wants to be Karen again. She pushes away with all her strength, pushes down towards the water, but this time Karen will not go under. She drifts closer and closer, and her mouth opens. She wants to speak.
K
aren was born to the wrong parents. That’s what Charis’s grandmother said could happen, and it is what Charis believes as well. Such people have to look for a long time, they have to search out and identify their right parents. Or else they have to go through life without.
Karen was seven when she met her grandmother for the first time. On that day she wore a cotton dress with smocking across the front and a sash, and matching hairbows on the ends of her pale blonde pigtails, which were braided so tight her eyes felt slanted. Her mother had starched the dress, and it was stiff and also a little sticky because of the damp late-June heat. They took the train, and when Karen got up off the hot plush seat she had to peel the skirt of the dress off the backs of her legs. That hurt, but she knew better than to say so.
Her mother wore an ivory-coloured linen outfit with a sleeveless dress and a short-sleeved jacket over it. She had a white straw hat and a white bag and shoes to match, and a pair of white cotton gloves, which she carried. “I think you’ll enjoy this,” she kept telling Karen anxiously. “You’re a lot like your grandmother in some ways.”
This was news to Karen, because for a long time her mother and her grandmother had hardly been on speaking terms. She knew from listening in that her mother had run away from the farm when she was only sixteen. She’d worked at grinding hard jobs and saved up her money so she could go to school and become a teacher. She’d done this so she could be out from under the thumb of her own mother, the crazy old bat. Wild horses would not drag her back to that rubbish heap, or this was what she said.
Yet here they were, heading straight to the farm that Karen’s mother hated so much, with Karen’s summer clothes packed neatly into a suitcase and her mother’s overnight bag beside it on the rack above their heads. They passed dirt fields, isolated houses, grey sagging barns, herds of cows. Karen’s mother hated cows. One of her stories was about having to get up in the winter, in blizzards, before sunrise even, and go out shivering through the whirling snow to feed the cows. But, “You’ll like the cows,” she said now, in the too-sweet voice she used on the Grade Twos at school. She checked her lipstick in the mirror of her compact, then smiled at Karen to see how she was taking it. Karen smiled back uncertainly. She was used to smiling even when she didn’t feel like it. She would be in Grade Two in September; she was hoping she wouldn’t be put in her mother’s class.