Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [124]
Why do you do that? Why? said her mother, shaking her, and Karen couldn’t answer. My God, you’re an idiot! Don’t you know what could happen to you out there? But Karen didn’t know, and her mother would say, I’ll teach you! Little bitch! Then she would hit the backs of Karen’s legs with one of her shoes, or else the pancake flipper or the broom handle, whatever was nearby, and thick red light would pour out of her body and some of it would get on Karen, and Karen would squirm and scream. “If your Daddy was alive it’d be him doing this, and he’d do it a damn sight harder, believe you me!” Hitting Karen was the only function Karen’s mother ever ascribed to her father, which made her secretly relieved that he wasn’t there.
Ordinarily Karen’s mother did not say Jesus and God and bitch, she didn’t swear; only when she was heading into a patch of bad nerves. Karen cried a lot when her mother hit her, not just because it hurt but because she was supposed to show that she was sorry, although she was confused about why. Also, if she didn’t cry her mother would keep right on hitting her until she did. You hard girl! But she had to stop at the right moment or her mother would hit her for crying. Stop that noise! Stop right now! Sometimes Karen couldn’t stop and neither could her mother, and those were the worst times. Her mother couldn’t help it. It was her nerves.
Then Karen’s mother would fall on her knees and wrap her arms around Karen’s body and squeeze her so she could scarcely breathe, and cry, and say, “I’m sorry, I love you, I don’t know what got into me, I’m sorry!” Karen would try to stop crying then, she would try to smile, because her mother loved her. If someone loved you that made it all right. Karen’s mother sprayed herself every day with Tabu perfume; she had a horror of smelling bad. So that was the smell in the room, during these beatings: warm Tabu.
Karen’s Aunt Vi didn’t like Karen very much, but at least she didn’t touch her, and it wasn’t bad at her place. Karen slept in the guest room, which had large disturbing roses on the curtains, orange and pink ones, like cauliflowers. She stayed out of the way as much as possible. She helped with the dishes without being asked, and kept her handkerchiefs folded in the top bureau drawer and her socks in pairs, and did not get dirty. “She’s a nice enough little thing, but there’s not that much to her,” said Aunt Vi on the telephone. “Milk and water. Well, I keep her clean and fed, it’s not that hard. Anyway it’s only Christian charity, and it’s not as if we have children of our own. I don’t mind, really.”
Uncle Vern went further than that. “Who’s my girl?” he would exclaim. He wanted Karen to sit on his knee, he rubbed her head, he put his face down close to hers and grinned at her, and tickled her under the arms; Karen didn’t like this but she laughed nervously anyway, because she could tell he wanted her to. “We have a good time, don’t we?” he said boisterously; but he didn’t believe it, it was only his idea of how he should behave towards her. “Don’t pester her,” said Aunt Vi coldly.
Uncle Vern’s skin was white on top but red underneath. He mowed the lawn in his shorts, on Sunday evenings when Aunt Vi was at church, and at those times he got even redder, though the light around his body was dim and a muddy green-brown. In the mornings, when she was still lying in bed, Karen could hear him grunting and groaning in the bathroom. She would put her pillow over her ears.
“She does sleepwalk, but not that much,” said Aunt Vi on the phone. “I just keep the doors locked, she can’t get out. I don’t know what Gloria makes such a fuss about. Of course her nerves are shot. Left with a – well, a child on her hands, like that – I feel I have to help out. But then, I’m her sister.