Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [135]
Aunt Vi wasn’t all that pleased to see Karen but she pretended to be. She gave Karen a peck on the cheek. “Look how tall you’ve grown!” she said. It sounded like an accusation. “You’ve got her suitcase?” she said to the grandmother.
“Viola, I’m hardly senile yet,” said the grandmother. “I’m not likely to forget her suitcase. Here you go,” she said to Karen softly. “I put a wishbone in it.” She crouched down and put her bony arms around Karen, and Karen could feel her square body, solid as a house, and then her grandmother wasn’t there any longer.
Karen sat on the train beside Aunt Vi, who fussed and fussed. “We’ll have to get you enrolled in school, right away,” she said. “You’ve missed almost a month already! My goodness, you’re brown as a berry!”
“Where’s my mother?” said Karen. She couldn’t think of any berries that were brown.
Aunt Vi frowned and looked away. “Your mother isn’t well,” she said.
When Karen got to Aunt Vi’s house she went into her usual room with the orange-and-pink flowered curtains and opened up her suitcase right away. There was the hen wishbone, wrapped in a piece of wax paper, with a rubber band around it, from her grandmother’s jar of saved-up rubber bands that was kept beside the sink. She took the wishbone out. It smelled sour, but rich and full, like a hand with dirt on it. She hid it in the hem of one of the curtains. She knew that if Aunt Vi found it she would throw it away.
Karen’s mother is in a building, a new flat yellow building that looks like a school. Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern take Karen to visit her. They sit in the waiting room, on hard chairs covered with a nubbly fabric, and Karen is frightened because Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern are so solemn; solemn, and at the same time avid. They are like the people who stop their cars and get out to see when there’s been a car accident. Something is bad, something is wrong, but they want to participate in it, whatever it is. Karen would rather not, she would like to go back right now, back in time, back as far as the farm, but a door opens and her mother comes into the room. She walks slowly, putting a hand out to touch the furniture as if to guide herself. Sleepwalking, thinks Karen. Before, her mother’s fingers were slim, the nails polished. She was proud of her hands. But now her hands are swollen and clumsy and there is no ring any more on her wedding finger. She’s wearing a grey housecoat and slippers that Karen has never seen before, and also she has never before seen her mother’s face.
Not this face. It’s a flat face with a dull shine on it, like the dead fish in the white enamel trays at the fish store. A fading light, silvery, like scales. She turns this face towards Karen; it’s expressionless as a plate. Eyes of china. Suddenly Karen is framed in those eyes, a small pale girl sitting on a nubbly chair, a girl her mother has never seen before. Karen brings her two hands up to her mouth and breathes in, a gasp, the reverse of a scream.
“Gloria. How’re you feeling?” says Uncle Vern.
Karen’s mother’s head swings towards him, a ponderous head, heavy. The hair on it is pulled back, held with clips. Karen’s mother used to do her hair up in pincurls, and when she combed it out it would be wavy. This hair is plain and straight, and filmed over, as if it’s been kept in a cupboard. Karen thinks about her grandmother’s root cellar, with its smell of indoor earth and its rows of preserve bottles, bright berries glassed over, powdered with dust.
“Fine,” says Karen’s mother, after a minute.
“I can’t stand it,” says Aunt Vi. She dabs at her eyes with a hankie. Then, in a firmer voice: “Karen, aren’t you going to give your mother a kiss?”
Aunt Vi’s questions are like orders. Karen slides off her chair and goes over to this woman. She doesn