Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [137]
“I don’t think she’s ever had a cake before,” Aunt Vi says to Uncle Vern, and Uncle Vern says, “Poor little tyke,” and ruffles Karen’s hair. He does this often these days and Karen doesn’t like it. Uncle Vern’s hands have a heavy luminescence around them, thick like jelly, sticky, brown-green. Sometimes Karen examines her blonde hair in the mirror to see if any of it has come off.
“Make a wish,” says Uncle Vern heartily. “Wish for a bicycle!”
“You have to close your eyes,” says Aunt Vi.
So to humour them Karen closes her eyes, and sees nothing but the sky, and opens her eyes again and obediently blows out the candles. Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern clap their hands, applauding, and Uncle Vern says, “Well, what do you know! Look what we have here!” and out of the kitchen he wheels a brand-new bicycle, bright red. It’s decorated with pink ribbons and has a balloon tied to one handle. “What do you think of that?” says Uncle Vern eagerly.
It’s dusk; the smell of mowed grass comes in through the open window, the June bugs batter themselves against the screen. Karen looks at the bicycle, at its glinting spokes and chains and its two black wheels, and knows that her mother is dead.
Her mother did not die for another three weeks, but it was the same thing, because sometimes (thinks Charis) there is a fold in time, like the way you fold the top bedsheet down to make a border, and if you stick a pin through at any spot, then the two pinholes are aligned, and that’s the way it is when you foresee the future. There’s nothing mysterious about it, any more than there is with a backwash in a lake or with harmony in music, two melodies going on at the same time. Memory is the same overlap, the same kind of pleat, only backwards.
Or maybe the fold is not in time itself but in the mind of the person watching. In any case, Karen looks at the bicycle and sees her mother’s death, and collapses onto the floor, crying, and Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern are baffled and then angry, and tell her she is a lucky girl, a lucky, ungrateful girl, and she can’t explain.
There was a funeral but not very many people came. A few teachers from her mother’s old school, some friends of Aunt Vi’s. Her grandmother wasn’t there, but Karen didn’t find that strange – her grandmother in the city would have been out of place. There was another reason as well – stroke, said Aunt Vi, and nursing home, in the tone of voice that was supposed to enlist other people’s sympathy for her – but these words meant nothing to Karen and she didn’t want to hear them, so she put them out of her mind. She had on a navy blue dress, which was the closest Aunt Vi could get to black, at short notice, although – she said on the phone – she should’ve seen it coming. Karen wasn’t allowed to visit her mother’s body in the coffin because Aunt Vi said it was too shocking a thing for a young child, but she knew anyway what it would look like. The same as alive, only more so.
Uncle Vern and Aunt Vi have had part of their cellar re-done. They’ve had plasterboard put over the cement-block walls, linoleum with thick carpeting over it on the floor. They’ve made a rec room down there, rec not like wreck but like recreation. There’s a bar with bar stools, and a set of chínese chequers for Karen, and a television set. It’s the second television set they’ve bought; the first one is kept in the living room. Karen likes to watch the set in the rec room, out of everyone’s way. She doesn’t actually have to pay attention to what’s in front of her on the screen; she can be by herself, inside her head, and no one will ask what she’s doing.
It’s September, but outside, upstairs, it’s still dry and hot. Karen sits on the carpet, in the rec room where it’s cooler, in bare feet and shorts and a sleeveless top, watching Kukla, Fran & Ollie on