Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [128]
When the time came to say goodbye at the station, Karen’s mother kissed Karen on the cheek and squeezed her tight and said she loved her, and told her to be a good girl. She did not kiss the grandmother. She didn’t even say goodbye to her. Karen watched the grandmother’s face: it was shut tight like a box.
Karen wanted to wait until the train was actually moving, so they did. Her mother waved at her out of the train window, her white gloves fluttering like flags. That was the last she saw of her real mother, the one that could still smile and wave, although she didn’t know it at the time.
Then Karen and her grandmother went back to the farmhouse and had their breakfast, which was oatmeal porridge with brown sugar and thick new cream on it. With Karen’s mother gone, her grandmother was not so talkative.
Karen looked at her grandmother across the table. She looked thoroughly. The grandmother was older than Karen had thought the day before; her neck was bonier, her eyelids were more wrinkled. Around her head there was a faint pale blue light. Karen had already figured out that her teeth were false.
34
After breakfast Karen’s grandmother says to her, “Are you sick?”
“No,” says Karen. Her legs are still hurting but that isn’t a sickness, it’s nothing because her mother says it’s nothing. She doesn’t want to be put to bed, she wants to go outside. She wants to see the chickens.
Her grandmother looks at her sharply but only says, “Don’t you want to put on your shorts? Today’ll be a scorcher,” but Karen says no again and they go to collect the eggs. The dogs and the pig aren’t allowed to come with them, because the dogs would try to herd the hens, and the pig likes eggs. The three of them lie on the kitchen floor, the dogs’ tails thumping slowly, the pig looking thoughtful. Karen’s grandmother takes a six-quart basket with a dishtowel in it, to put the eggs in.
The sky is bright, bright blue like a fist pushed into an eye, that puddle of hot colour; the thin piercing voices of the cicadas go straight into Karen’s head like wires. The edges of her grandmother’s hair catch the sunlight and burn like fiery wool. They walk along the path, tall weeds beside them, thistles and Queen Anne’s lace, smelling deeper and greener than anything Karen has ever smelled before, mixing in with the sweet pungent barnyard smells so that she doesn’t know whether it smells good or bad or just so powerful and rich it’s like being smothered.
The henhouse is near the chicken-wire and rail fence that’s around the garden; inside the fence are potato hills, and lettuce in a frilly row, and tripods of poles with climbing beans on them, their red flowers humming with bees. “Potatoes, lettuce, beans,” Karen’s grandmother says, to Karen, or possibly to herself. “Hens,” she says, when they get as far as the henhouse.
The hens are two kinds: white with red wattles, and reddish brown. They scratch and cluck, and peer at Karen with their yellow lizards’ eyes, one eye and then the other; sparkles of many-coloured light run off their feathers, like dew. Karen looks and looks at them, until her grandmother takes her arm. “No eggs out here,” she says.
The henhouse is musty inside, and dim. Karen’s grandmother gropes in the straw-filled boxes, and under the two hens still inside, and puts the eggs into her basket. She gives Karen one egg to carry, for herself. A tender glow comes from inside it. It is a little damp; there are bits of henshit and straw clinging to it. Also it’s warm. Karen feels the backs of her legs throbbing and the heat running from the egg up into her head. The egg is soft in her hands, like a beating heart with a rubber shell around it. It’s growing, swelling up, and as they walk back past the garden through the sun’s glare and the vibration of the bees it gets so large and hot that Karen has to drop it.
After that she