Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [111]
When he says things like this he holds onto Charis very tightly, and she puts her arms around him and says, “I won’t let them,” although she knows she has no power to prevent such a thing. But just saying this has a soothing effect, on both of them. She doesn’t quite believe it anyway, this doom-laden scenario of Billy’s. Things like that might happen in the United States – anything can happen there, where the riot police shoot people and the crime rate is so high – but not here. Not on the Island, where there are so many trees and people don’t lock the door when they go out. Not in this country, familiar to her and drab, undramatic and flat. Not in her house, with the hens cooing peacefully in the yard. No harm can come to her, or to Billy either, with the hens watching over them, feathery guardian spirits. The hens are good luck.
So she says, “I’ll keep you here with me,” even though she knows that Billy is an unwilling voyager. She suspects something worse, as well: that she herself is just a sort of way station for him, a temporary convenience, like the native brides of soldiers who are posted abroad. Although he doesn’t know it yet, she isn’t his real life. But he is hers.
This is painful.
“Well,” says Charis, sliding her mind quickly away, because pain is an illusion and should be circumvented, “how about some breakfast?”
“You’re beautiful,” says Billy. “Bacon, huh? We got any coffee?” Billy drinks real coffee, with caffeine in it. He makes fun of Charis’s herbal teas and won’t eat salad, not even the lettuce Charis grows herself. “Rabbit food,” he calls it. “Fit for nothing but little bunnies, and women.” Li’l.
“There would have been an egg,” says Charis reproachfully, and Billy laughs. (The overalls with their breast pocket full of squished egg are of course no longer on Charis but on the floor. She will wash them, later. She will avoid hot water or the egg will scramble. She will have to turn the pocket inside out.)
“Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs,” he says. Cain’t. Charis turns the sound over, silently in her mouth, tasting it. Cherishing, storing away. She would like his name to be Billy Joe or Billy Bob, one of those double-barrelled Southern names, as in films. She hugs him.
“Billy, you are so …” she says. She wants to say young, because he is young, he’s seven years younger than she is; but he doesn’t like being reminded of it, he’d think she’s pulling rank. Or she could say innocent, which he’d find even more of an insult: he’d think it was a comment on his sexual inexperience.
What she means is pristine. What she means is his unscratched surface. Despite the suffering he’s gone through and is still going through, there’s something shiny about him, shiny and new. Or else impermeable. She herself is so penetrable; sharp edges stick into her, she bruises easily, her inner skin is puffy and soft, like marshmallows. She’s covered all over with tiny feelers like the feelers on ants: they wave, they test the air, they touch and recoil, they warn her. Billy has no such feelers. He doesn’t need them. Whatever slams into him bounces right off – either he dismisses it, or instead of hurting him it makes him angry. It’s a kind of hardness, which exists quite apart from any sadness or melancholy or even guilt that he may be experiencing at the time.
Maybe it’s this: his own sadness and melancholy and guilt are his, and therefore important to him, but they’re contained inside. Those of other people don’t get in. Whereas Charis is a screen door, an open one at that, and everything blows right through.
“I’m so what?” says Billy, grinning. Ah’m. Charis smiles back at him.
“So … well, you know,” she says.
Charis did not exactly meet Billy. Instead he was