Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [115]
This woman is tall, and thin as a razor, so thin Charis can see her ribcage right through the leotard, each rib in high relief as if carved, with a line of darkness beneath it. Her knees and elbows stick out like knots in rope, and the poses, as she performs them, are not fluid but practically geometrical, cages made of coat-hangers. Her skin is white as mushrooms, and a dark-light phosphorescence glimmers around her like the sheen on bad meat. Charis knows unhealth when she sees it: this woman needs a lot more than just one yoga class. A big hit of vitamin C and a dollop of sunlight would be a start, but they wouldn’t even begin to touch what’s wrong with her.
What’s wrong with her is partly an attitude of the soul: the sunglasses are its manifestation, they symbolize a barrier to inner vision. So just before the lotus meditation Charis goes over and whispers to her, “Wouldn’t you like to take your sunglasses off? They must be a distraction.”
For answer the woman slips the glasses down, and Charis gets a shock. The woman’s left eye is blackened. Black and blue, and half shut. The other eye regards her, hurt, wet, appealing.
“Oh,” Charis breathes. “Sorry.” She winces: she can feel the blow on her own flesh, her own eye.
The woman smiles, a harrowing smile in that emaciated and damaged face. “Aren’t you Karen?” she whispers.
Charis doesn’t know how to explain that she is but she isn’t. She is once-Karen. So she says, “Yes,” and looks more closely, because how would this woman recognize her?
“I’m Zenia,” the woman says. And she is.
Charis and Zenia sit at one of the little tables beside the juice bar at the far end of the co-op. “What would you recommend?” says Zenia. “This is all new to me,” and Charis, flattered by this call upon her expertise, orders her up a papaya-and-orange, with a dash of lemon in it and some brewer’s yeast. Zenia keeps her glasses on and Charis doesn’t blame her. Still, it’s hard to talk with someone whose eyes she can’t see.
She does remember Zenia, of course. Everyone in McClung Hall knew who Zenia was; even Charis, who drifted through her university years as if through an airport. Educationally she was a transient, and she left after three years without completing her degree: whatever it was that she needed to be taught, it wasn’t on the curriculum there. Or maybe she wasn’t ready for it. Charis believes that when you are ready to learn a thing the right teacher will appear, or rather will be sent to you. This has worked out for her so far, more or less, and the only reason she isn’t learning anything at the moment is that she’s so fully occupied with Billy.
Though maybe Billy is a teacher, in a way. She just hasn’t figured out exactly what she’s supposed to be learning from him. How to love, perhaps? How to love a man. Though she already does love him, so what next?
Zenia sips her juice, with the two ovals of her dark glasses turned towards Charis. Charis isn’t sure what she can say to her. She didn’t really know Zenia at university, she never spoke to her – Zenia was older, she was ahead of Charis, and she was in with all those artistic, intellectual people – but Charis remembers her, so beautiful and confident, striding around campus with her boyfriend Stew, and then later with short little Tony as well. What Charis