Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [114]
After she’s dressed, after she’s cooked Billy his bacon and toast and coffee, Charis packs her leotard and tights into her Peruvian carry-bag and runs around the house unearthing spare change for the trip from all the places where she’s hidden it, for emergencies such as today, when she’s run out of cash. The mist has evaporated now and the weak November sunlight is filtering through the grey overcast, so she can trust her watch again and she doesn’t miss the ferry. She hardly ever misses it anyway unless it’s a case of Billy, Billy and his spontaneous and overpowering urges. What can she tell him then? I have to work or else we don’t eat? That doesn’t go over too well: he thinks it’s a criticism of him because he doesn’t have a job, and then he sulks. He prefers to believe that she’s like a lily of the field; that she neither toils nor spins; that bacon and coffee are simply produced by her, like leaves from a tree.
The yoga classes are held in the apartment above the co-op, or what used to be an apartment. Right now two of the rooms are offices, one for the co-op, one for a small poetry magazine called Earth Germinations, and the big front room is kept for meetings and for classes like the yoga ones. Charis will teach only ten people at a time: any more would overload her circuits, break her focus. They bring their own towels and mats, and usually they already have their leotards on under their clothes so they don’t have to change. Charis gets there before the others, changes in the bathroom, and spreads out her mat, which she keeps in a cupboard in the co-op office. The old hardwood floor gives you splinters if you aren’t careful.
Her first work is to abolish her surroundings. The faded wallpaper with the mauve trellis pattern on it must recede, the squares of darker wallpaper left by former pictures, the stale smell of used house and of the dank pee-stained carpet on the stairs coming up and of the lunch relics in the office wastebaskets, which nobody ever empties. The traffic noises from outside must go, the voices from the street and from downstairs – she erases them from her mind with a firm hand, as if they’re on a blackboard. She lies down on her back, knees bent, arms loose overhead, and concentrates on her breathing, preparing, centring herself. The breath must go in and down, fully in and down to the solar plexus. The furtive scurrying trivial mind must be shut off. The I must be transcended. The self must be cut loose. It must drift.
The first class goes as usual. Charis knows she has a good voice for this, low and reassuring, and a good pace. “Honour the spine,” she murmurs. “Salute the sun.” The sun she means is inside the body. She uses her voice and also her hands, a touch here, a touch there, nudging the bodies into the right poses. To each individual woman she speaks in a whisper, so as not to call attention or embarrass her or interrupt the concentration of the others. The room fills with the sound of breathing, like wavelets on a shore, and with the scent of tensed muscles. Charis feels energy flowing out of her, through her fingers, into the other bodies. She doesn’t move much – this is not what anyone else would call exertion – but at the end of the hour and a half she’s exhausted.
She has an hour’s break, to replenish herself. She drinks an orange-and-carrot juice from the juice bar downstairs to get some living enzymes into her system, and helps