Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [112]
Charis did not do this for political reasons: she didn’t believe in politics, in getting involved in an activity that caused you to have such negative emotions. She didn’t approve of wars, or of thinking about them. So she didn’t understand the Vietnam War or want to understand it – although some of it had seeped into her head, despite her precautions, because it was in the air molecules – and above all she didn’t watch it on TV She didn’t even have a TV, and she did not read newspapers because they were too upsetting and anyway there was nothing she could do about all that misery. So her reason for taking Billy in had nothing to do with any of that. Instead she did it out of a sense of hospitality. She felt an obligation to be kind to strangers, especially strangers who were down on their luck. Also it would have been too weird to have been the only person at the co-op who refused to take anyone in.
So that was how it started. After a few days the other boy moved out and Billy stayed; and then after a few more days she realized she was expected to go to bed with him. He didn’t push it; in that early time he was diffident and shy, disoriented, uncertain of himself. He’d thought it was going to be more or less the same on this side of the border as on the other side, only safer, and when it turned out that it wasn’t either one of those things he was confused and upset. He realized he’d done something monumental, something he couldn’t reverse; that he’d landed himself in exile, perhaps forever. He’d made life hard for his family – they’d supported his decision about the draft but not about the other stuff, the explosives, and they were getting what he called “a lot of flak.” Also he’d deserted his country, a notion that has a good deal more meaning for him than it does for Charis, because in Billy’s schools they started the day with their hands over their hearts, saluting their flag, instead of praying to God as they did at Charis’s schools. For Billy his country was a kind of God, an idea that Charis finds idolatrous and even barbaric. She finds the standard God with his white beard and anger and lamb sacrifices and death angels barbaric too, of course. She has gone beyond all that. Her God is oval.
Also Billy worried about his friends back there, back home, guys he’d gone to school with, who hadn’t escaped with him and were probably, even now, on their way across the sea or being shot at in rice paddies or blown up by guerrillas as they walked along some hot mud road. He felt he’d betrayed them. He knew the war was wrong and that what he’d done was right, but he felt like a coward anyway. He was homesick. A lot of the time he wanted to go back.
This was how he talked to Charis, in fits and starts, in bits and pieces. He said he didn’t expect her to understand, but she did understand some of it. She understood his emotions, which came at her in a deluge – watery, chaotic, a melancholy blue in colour, like a great wave of tears. He was so lost, so wounded, how could she refuse to offer him whatever comfort she had?
31
Things have changed since then. Since they moved to the Island, and into this house. Billy is still nervous, but less so.