Authors: Margaret Atwood
“That is such
horseshit,”
said Roz angrily. “It is absolutely
no use
saying you should stop
loving
someone. It doesn’t work like that!”
“Well, you should, if you know it’s bad for you,” said Charis.
“Bad for you has nothing to do with it,” said Roz.
“I like hamburgers,” said Charis, “but I don’t eat them.”
“Hamburgers are not an
emotion,”
said Roz.
“Yes they are,” said Charis.
Charis gets up to put on the kettle. She’ll make some Morning Miracle tea, a special blend from work. To light the gas stove she stands sideways, because at some times – and this is one of them – she doesn’t like to turn her back to the kitchen door.
The kitchen door has a glass panel in it, at head height. A month ago, when she came home for the weekend, Augusta gave Charis a scare. Not in the morning, but at night, at dusk. It was drizzling, a fine Scotch mist; the city and part of the lake were blotted out, and there was no light from the hidden sunset. Charis wasn’t expecting Augusta until later, or possibly not until the next day; she was
expecting her to phone, from the mainland, though she didn’t know just when. Augusta has become fairly offhand about her comings and goings.
But suddenly there was a woman’s face framed in the glass panel of the door. A white face, indistinct in the murkiness, in the cloudy air. Charis turned away from the stove and caught sight of it, and the back of her neck bristled.
It was only Augusta, but that’s not what Charis thought. She thought it was Zenia. Zenia, with her dark hair sleeked down by the rain, wet and shivering, standing on the back step as she had done once before, long ago. Zenia, who had been dead for five years.
The worst thing, thinks Charis, was that she’d confused Zenia with her own daughter, who is nothing like Zenia at all. What a terrible thing for her to have done.
No. The worst thing was that she hadn’t really been all that surprised.
N
ot surprised, because people don’t die. Or so Charis believes. Tony asked her once what she meant by
die
, and Charis – who is made nervous by Tony’s way of pinning her down, and frequently gets out of it by pretending she hasn’t heard the question – had to admit that they did go through a process that everyone was in the habit of calling
death
. Certainly some fairly terminal things happened to the body, things that Charis would rather not dwell on because she hasn’t decided whether it would be better to mingle with the earth, or – through cremation – with the air. Each of these possibilities is appealing as a sort of general idea, but when it comes right down to it, to particulars such as her own fingers, toes, and mouth, then less.
But death was just a stage, she tried to say. It was just a sort of state, a transition; it was – well, a learning experience.
She isn’t very good at explaining things to Tony. She usually stutters to a halt, especially with Tony’s huge and slightly chilly eyes fixed on her, magnified by those glasses, and with Tony’s little pearly-toothed mouth slightly open. It’s as if Tony is amazed by
everything Charis says. But amazement is not – she suspects – what is really going on in that delicate head of Tony’s. Though Tony never laughs at her, not up front.
“What do you learn?” said Tony.
“Well, you learn – how to be better, next time. You join the light,” said Charis. Tony leaned forward, looking interested, so Charis fumbled on. “People have after-death experiences, and that’s what they say, that’s how we know. When they come back to life again.”
“They come back to life?” said Tony, her eyes enormous.
“People pound their chests. And breathe into them, and warm them up, and, and, bring them back,” said Charis.
“She means
near-death,”
said Roz, who often tells Tony what Charis means. “You must have read those articles! It’s a number lately. You’re supposed to get a sort of
son et lumière
. Tunnels and fireworks and baroque music. My father had one, when he had the first heart attack. His old bank manager showed up, lit like a Christmas tree, and told my father he couldn’t die yet because he had unfinished business.”
“Ah,” said Tony. “Unfinished business.”
Charis wanted to say that this wasn’t what she meant, she did mean
after
death. “Some people don’t get as far as the light,” she said. “They get lost. In the tunnel. Some of them don’t even know they’re dead.” She did not go on to say that these sorts of people could be quite dangerous because they could get into your own body, more or less move into it, like squatters, and then it could be difficult to get them out again. She didn’t go on to say this, because it would have been futile: Tony was a proof addict.
“Right,” said Roz, who was made very uncomfortable by this sort of conversation. “I know people like that. My
own
bank manager, for instance. Or the government. Dead all right, but do they know it?” She laughed, and asked Charis what could be wrong with her delphiniums, because they were turning black. “It’s a mildew,” said
Charis. That was how Roz handled the afterlife: perennial borders. It was the one subject about which Charis had a good deal more hard data than Tony did.
But when Zenia appeared at the back door, in the rain, this is what Charis thought. She thought, Zenia is lost. She can’t find the light. Maybe she doesn’t even know she’s dead. What would be more natural than for her to show up at Charis’s house, to ask for help? Help was what she had come for, at first.
Then of course it turned out that Zenia wasn’t Zenia at all, but only Augusta, home for the weekend and slightly forlorn, because – Charis suspected – some other plan of hers had fallen through, something involving a man. There are men in Augusta’s life, Charis divines this; though they are not produced, they are not presented to Charis. Most likely they are in the business course too, fledgling entrepreneurs who would take one look at Charis in her not yet fully organized house and run like crazy. Most likely Augusta heads them off. Maybe she tells them her mother is ill, or in Florida or something.
But Augusta is not completely lacquered yet; she does have moments of soft guilt. That time, she’d brought a loaf of bran bread with her as a peace offering, and some dried figs. Charis gave her an extra hug and made her some zucchini muffins, and a hot-water bottle for her bed, as she used to do when Augusta was little, because she was so thankful that Augusta was not Zenia after all.
Still, it’s almost as if Zenia really has been here. As if she came and then went away without getting what she wanted. As if she’ll be back.
When she materializes the next time, Charis will be expecting her. Zenia must have something she wants to say. Or no. Maybe it’s Charis who has something to say; maybe this is what’s holding Zenia to this earth. Because Zenia’s around, she’s around somewhere, Charis has known it ever since that funeral. She looked at the
canister with Zenia’s ashes in it, and she knew. The ashes might be in there, but ashes were not a person. Zenia was not in that canister, or with the light either. Zenia was loose, loose in the air but tethered to the world of appearances, and it’s all the fault of Charis. It’s Charis who needs her to be here, it’s Charis who won’t cut her free.
Zenia will appear, her white face looming in the glass oblong, and Charis will open the door.
Come in
, she will say, because the dead can’t cross your threshold unless you invite them.
Come in
, she will say, risking her own body, because Zenia will be searching for a new flesh dress.
Come in
, she will say, for the third and crucial time, and Zenia will drift through the doorway, her eyes cavernous, her hair like cold smoke. She will stand in the kitchen and the light will darken, and Charis will be afraid.
But she won’t back down, she won’t back away this time.
What did they do with Billy?
she’ll ask her. Zenia is the only one who knows.
Charis goes back upstairs and gets dressed for work, trying not to look over her shoulder. Sometimes she thinks it’s not such a great idea for her to live alone. The rest of the time she likes it, though. She can do what she wants, she can be who she is, and if she talks out loud to herself there’s nobody to stare. Nobody to complain about the dustballs, except maybe Augusta, who gets out the broom and sweeps them up.
She steps on another thumbtack and this one hurts more, so she puts on her shoes. When she has all of her clothes on she goes in search of her reading glasses, because she’ll need them at work, when she’s making out invoices, and to read the menu at the Toxique.
She looks forward to that lunch. She wills herself to look forward to it, although there’s something tugging at her, some intuition … a sinking feeling. Not something violent, like an explosion or a fire. Something else. She often has these feelings, but since nothing ever comes of half of them they aren’t dependable. Shanita says it’s
because she has a Solomon’s Cross on her palm but it’s fuzzed over; too many wispy hairlines. “You are picking up a lot of stations,” is what Shanita says. “Cosmic static.”
She finds the reading glasses under the tea cosy in the kitchen; she doesn’t remember putting them there. Objects have a life of their own, and the ones in her house move around at night. They’ve been doing it more, recently. It’s the ozone layer, probably. Unknown energies are getting through.
She has twenty minutes to walk to the ferry. That’s ample. She goes out the back door as a matter of course; the front one is nailed shut, with plastic sheeting on the inside for insulation and an Indian hand-woven bedspread over top of it, in a paisley green-and-blue print. The insulation is for winter. In the summers she takes it down, except last summer she didn’t get around to it. There’s always a bunch of dead flies underneath the plastic, and she doesn’t enjoy them a lot.
The air on the Island is so good. Compared, that is. At least there’s usually a breeze. She pauses outside her back door, breathing in the comparatively good air, feeling its crispness fill her lungs. Her vegetable garden is still pushing up the Swiss chard, there are still carrots and green tomatoes; a rusty-orange chrysanthemum blooms in one corner. The soil is rich here; traces of henshit still linger, and she digs in compost from her compost heap every spring and fall. It’s almost time to do it, now, before the first frost comes.
She loves her garden; she loves kneeling in the dirt, with both hands deep in the ground, rummaging among the roots with the earthworms slipping away from her groping fingers, enveloped in the smell of mudpies and slow ferment and thinking about nothing. Helping things grow. She never uses gardening gloves, much to Augusta’s despair.
Shanita says her grandmother used to eat dirt, a handful or two every spring. She said it was good for you. (Although it’s been
impossible for Charis to figure out exactly which grandmother she means: Shanita seems to have more than two.) But eating dirt is the sort of thing that Charis’s own grandmother might have done, because that grandmother, grubby and terrifying though she had been, was a woman who knew about such things. Charis hasn’t got around to trying it herself yet, but she’s working up to it.
At the front of her house there’s more to be done. She pulled out the lawn last spring, and tried for a sort of English cottage effect, which she thought would go well with the house itself, with its white clapboard and slightly falling-apart look; but she planted too many species and didn’t thin out, nor did she weed as much as she should have, and what resulted was a sort of scramble. Mostly the snapdragons won; they’re still blooming, some of the tall spikes fallen over (she should have staked them), with leggy offshoots coming up from them. Next year she’ll put the tall things in the back, and have fewer colours.
If there is a next year, that is. Next year she may not even have a house. The Island’s war with the city is still going on. The city wants to tear down all these houses, level everything, turn it into a park. A lot of the houses here went that way, years ago, before people dug in their heels. Charis sees it as envy: if the city people can’t live here themselves they don’t want anyone else to be able to do it either. Well, it kept the property prices low. If not for that, where would Charis be?
And if no one lived on the Island, who would ever be able to look at the city from a distance, the way Charis does every morning at sunrise, and find it so beautiful? Without such a vision of itself, of its loveliness and best possibilities, the city would decay, would crack apart, would collapse into useless rubble. It’s only sustained by belief; belief, and meditation, the meditation of people like her. Charis knows this for a certainty, but so far she has been unable to put it that way, exactly, in her frequent letters to the city councillors,
only two of which she has actually got around to mailing. But just writing it down helps. It beams out the message, which gets into the city councillors’ heads without their awareness. It’s like radio waves.
When she reaches the dock the ferry is already boarding. People are going on, singly and in twos; there’s something processional about their entrance, in the way they step from land to water. Right here was where she last saw Billy; and also Zenia, in the flesh. They were already aboard, and as Charis came heavily running, gasping, hands on her belly to hold it attached to her, it was dangerous for her to run like that, she could have fallen and lost the baby, the ferry men were hoisting up the gangway, the ferry was hooting and backing out, the deep water churning to a whirlpool. She couldn’t have jumped.
Billy and Zenia were not touching. There were two strange men with them; or there were two strange men standing nearby. Men in overcoats. Billy saw her. He didn’t wave. He turned away. Zenia didn’t move. Her aura was deep red. Her hair blew out around her head. The sun was behind her, so she had no face. She was a dark sunflower. The sky was hugely blue. The two of them got smaller, going away.
Charis doesn’t remember the sound that came out of her. She doesn’t want to. She tries to hold the image of the two of them receding, a moment of time stilled and devoid of content, like a postcard with nothing written on the back.