Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [138]
Uncle Vern comes down the stairs. He’s been mowing the lawn. He is a deeper red than usual, and the smell of sweat encircles him, like the water drops when a wet dog shakes itself. He goes to the bar and gets out a beer, takes the cap off the bottle and drinks down half, and wipes his wet face with the towel beside the sink. Then he sits down on the sofa. The sofa is a sofa-bed, in case they have visitors, because Karen has the room that used to be the guest room. That room is still called “the guest room,” although Karen is living in it. They don’t have visitors, though.
Karen gets up. She intends to go upstairs, because she knows what will happen next, but she isn’t fast enough. “Come on,” says Uncle Vern. He pats his huge, hairy knee, and Karen goes reluctantly towards him. He likes her to sit on his knee. He thinks it’s fatherly. “You’re our little girl now,” he says fondly. But he isn’t really fond of her, Karen knows that. She knows she is unsatisfactory to him, because she doesn’t talk to him, she doesn’t hug him, she doesn’t smile enough. It’s his smell she doesn’t like. That, and his greeny-brown light.
She sits on Uncle Vern’s knee and he pulls her higher up onto his lap and encircles her with one of his red arms. With the other hand he strokes her leg. He often does this, she’s used to it; but this time he moves his hand up higher, between her legs. Kukla, Fran and Ollie continue to talk in their made-up voices; Kukla is some sort of a dragon. Karen squirms a little, trying to move herself away from the enormous fingers, which are inside her shorts now, but the arm tightens around her stomach and Uncle Vern says into her ear, “Hold still!” He does not sound hearty, wheedling, the way he usually does; he sounds angry. He has both hands on her now, he rubs her back and forth across himself as if she’s a washcloth; his sticky breath is all over her ear. “You like your old Uncle Vern, don’t you?” he says furiously.
“You two!” Aunt Vi calls gaily down the cellar stairs. “Supper-time! There’s corn on the cob!”
“Be right there!” Uncle Vern yells hoarsely, as if the words have been expelled from him by a kick in the stomach. He shoves one finger right up inside Karen, and groans as if he’s been stabbed. He holds Karen against himself for another minute: the energy is leaking out of him and he needs a bandage. Then he lets her go.
“Scamper upstairs,” he tells her. He’s trying for his fake voice, his uncle voice, but he hasn’t got it back; his voice is desolate. “Tell your Auntie Vi I’ll be up in a minute.” Karen looks behind herself, to see if the back of her shorts is browny-green, but it isn’t; only wet. Uncle Vern is wiping himself off with the bar towel.
Uncle Vern lurks, he lies in wait. Karen evades him, but she can’t evade him all the time. The strange thing is that Uncle Vern never comes looking for her when Aunt Vi isn’t in the house. Maybe he likes the danger; or maybe he knows that with Aunt Vi there, Karen won’t dare to make a sound. It’s unclear how he knows this, or why this is so, but it’s true. Karen’s fear of Aunt Vi’s finding out is greater than her fear of Uncle Vern’s sausage fingers.
Soon one finger isn’t enough for him. He stands Karen in front of him, facing away so she can’t see, a big knee holding her on either side, and puts his hands up under her pleated school skirts and slides her panties right down, shoving something hard in between her legs from behind. Or he uses two fingers, three. It hurts, but Karen knows that people who love you can do painful things to you, and she tries hard to believe that he does love her. He says he does. “Your old uncle loves you,” he tells her, scraping his face against hers.
When they are having dinner