Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [141]
When she grows breasts and hair under her arms and on her legs and between them, and has her first period, Uncle Vern leaves her alone. There is a space between them, but it isn’t like an absence. It’s a presence, transparent but thicker than air. Uncle Vern is afraid of her now, he’s afraid of what she’s going to do or say; he’s afraid of what she remembers, he’s afraid of being judged. Maybe it’s because her eyes are no longer timid, no longer vacant or beseeching. Her eyes are stone. When she looks at him with her stone eyes it’s as if she’s reaching in through his ribs and squeezing his heart so it almost stops. He says he has a heart condition, he takes pills for it, but they both know it’s a thing she’s doing to him. Every time she looks at him she feels loathing, and a deep nausea. She’s disgusted with him, but also with her body, because it still has his dirt inside it. She must think of ways to get clean inside.
When she feels those things she has to seal them off. She has to or else she will be destroyed. She splits herself in two and stays with the cooler part, the clearer part of herself. She has a name for this part now: she is Charis. She picked the hint for her new name out of the Bible, with a pin: “The greatest of these is Charity.” Charity is better than Faith and Hope. She can use this new name only to herself, of course. Everyone else still calls her Karen.
Charis is more serene than Karen, because the bad things have stayed behind, with small Karen. She’s polite to her aunt, but remote. One day, when she is over eighteen, she asks the two of them what they have done with her grandmother’s money. Her uncle says he’s invested it for her and she can have all of it when she’s twenty-one, and meanwhile some of it can be used for her education. Aunt Vi acts as if this is an act of great generosity, as if the money belongs to them and they’re giving it away. But nevertheless they’re both relieved when she goes to university and moves into McClung Hall. Aunt Vi is nervous of her because of her stony eyes; as for Uncle Vern, he doesn’t know what she remembers. He hopes she’s forgotten it all, but he isn’t sure.
She remembers everything, or rather Karen does; but Karen is in storage. Charis only remembers when she takes Karen out, from the suitcase under her bed where she has put her. She doesn’t do this often. Karen is still little, but Charis is growing up.
Charis turned twenty-one, but nothing was said about her grandmother’s money. She didn’t care. She wouldn’t take money from them anyway, because even though it was really her own money it had been in their hands, it was dirty. She wouldn’t be able to get it anyway without a fight.
She didn’t want to fight. Instead she wanted to go away somewhere else, and as soon as she felt ready she simply dropped out of sight. Out of their sight. It wasn’t so hard when you knew no one would come looking for you. She left university before finishing – she was flunking her courses anyway, because they failed to hold her attention – and went travelling. She hitchhiked, she took buses. She worked as a waitress, she worked in an office. For a while she was in an ashram on the West Coast, for a while she stayed on a communal farm in Saskatchewan. She did various things.
Once she went back to the farm, her grandmother’s farm; she wanted to see it. But it wasn’t a farm any more, it was a subdivision. Charis tried not to mind, since nothing that was or had been would perish, and the farm was still inside her, it was still hers because places belonged to the people who loved them.
When she was twenty-six she dumped her old name. A lot of people were changing their names, then, because names were not