Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [119]
“I didn’t give it to her,” said Billy. “Let her go eat someone else’s food.” Charis was incapable of mentioning that if anyone ought to decide who ate what around this place it should be her, since she was the one who either grew it or paid for it herself.
“He doesn’t like me, does he?” said Zenia, when Billy in his turn was out of hearing. Her voice quivered, her eyes were filling. “I’d better go.…”
“Of course he does! It’s just his way,” said Charis warmly. “Now you stay right where you are!”
It took Charis a while to figure out why Billy was so hostile to Zenia. At first she thought it was because he was afraid of her – afraid she would tell on him, tip off the wrong people, turn him in; or that she would just say something to someone by accident, something indiscreet. Loose lips sink ships used to be a slogan, during the war, the old war; it was on posters, and Charis’s Aunt Viola used to quote it as a sort of joke, to her friends, in the late forties. So Charis explained all that to Zenia, how precarious Billy felt and how difficult things were for him. She even told Zenia about the bombs, about blowing things up, and about how Billy might get kidnapped by the Mounties. Zenia promised not to tell. She said she understood perfectly.
“I’ll be careful, cross my heart,” she said. “But Karen – sorry, Charis – how did you get mixed up with them?”
“Mixed up?” said Charis.
“With the draft dodgers,” said Zenia. “The revolutionaries. You never struck me as a very political person. At university, I mean. Not that there were a whole bunch of revolutionaries, around that dump.”
It hadn’t occurred to Charis that Zenia would have taken any notice of her at all, back then, back in her vague, semi-forgotten university days, when she was still Karen, outwardly at least. She hadn’t participated in anything, she hadn’t stood out. She had stayed in the shadows, but it turned out that Zenia at least had spotted her there and had considered her worthy of notice, and she was touched. Zenia must have been a sensitive person; more sensitive than people gave her credit for.
“I’m not,” said Charis. “I wasn’t political at all.”
“I was,” said Zenia. “I was totally anti-bourgeois, back then! A real bohemian fellow-traveller.” She frowned a little, then laughed. “Why not, they had the best parties!”
“Well,” said Charis, “I’m not mixed up. I don’t understand any of those things. I just live with Billy, that’s all.”
“Sort of like a gun moll,” said Zenia, who was feeling a little better. It was a warmish day, for November, so Charis had decided it was safe for Zenia to go out. They were down by the lake, watching the gulls; Zenia had walked the whole way without once holding onto Charis’s arm. Charis had offered to get her some new sunglasses – Zenia had left the old ones behind, the night she ran away – but she hardly needed them any more: her eye had faded to a yellowy-blue, like a washed-out ink stain.
“A what?” said Charis.
“Shit,” said Zenia, smiling, “if living with someone isn’t mixed up, I don’t know what is.” But Charis didn’t care what people called things. Anyway, she wasn’t listening to Zenia, she was watching her smile.
Zenia is smiling more, now. Charis feels as if that smile has been accomplished single-handedly by her, Charis, and by all the work she’s been putting in: the fruit drinks, the cabbage juice made from her own cabbages, ground up fine and strained through a sieve, the special baths she prepares, the gentle yoga stretches, the carefully spaced walks in the fresh air. All those positive energies are ranging themselves against the cancer cells, good soldiers against bad, light against darkness; Charis herself is taking meditation time every day, on Zenia’s behalf, to visualize that exact same result. And it’s working, it is! Zenia has more colour now, more energy. Although still very thin and weak, she is