Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [143]
Charis is beginning to see the drawbacks of living here. Already two of the houses on her street are empty, their windows boarded up. She wonders whether they will have enough wood to keep themselves warm when the real winter comes. There’s a man at the co-op who might trade some yoga lessons for wood, but wood is heavy, so how will she get it to the Island?
They will all need winter clothing too. Billy is in the city tonight, at another one of those meetings. She pictures him at the ferry dock, waiting for the last boat back, shivering in his thin jacket. She should be knitting him something. She’ll go to the Goodwill store, soon, and try for some second-hand coats.
One for Billy, one for herself, and one for Zenia as well, because Zenia has only the clothes on her back. She’s afraid to go to West’s place to get the rest of her clothes, or so she says. She’s afraid West will kill her. He has an obsessive personality – gentle on the outside, but sometimes he goes berserk, and the thought of her dying drives him crazy. If he’s going to lose her, if she’s going to be dead, he wants to be in control of her death himself. A lot of men are like that, says Zenia, with a reminiscent stare into space, a tiny smile. Love drives them mad.
Once upon a time, Charis would never have understood a statement like that. Now she does.
Charis is certain she’s pregnant. She’s missed a period, but that isn’t all: her body feels different, no longer taut and sinewy but spongelike, fluid. Saturated. It has a different energy, a deep orangy-pink, like the inside of a hibiscus. She hasn’t told Billy yet, because she isn’t sure how he’ll take it.
She hasn’t told Zenia either. For one thing, she doesn’t want to hurt her. Zenia can’t have babies because of her hysterectomy for cancer, and Charis doesn’t want to flaunt or boast. But also Zenia is now sleeping in the small room upstairs, the one that used to have all Charis’s cardboard boxes in it. They moved her up there because Billy complained about never having any privacy in the living room. It’s this little room that Charis wants to make over into a nursery for the baby, after Zenia is gone. So how can she tell Zenia she’s pregnant without practically booting her out onto the street?
And she couldn’t do that, not yet; although when Zenia mentions leaving, Charis no longer tells her not to even think about it. She is torn: she wants Zenia to go, but she doesn’t want her to die. She would like to cure her and then never see her again. They don’t have all that much in common, and now that she has part of Zenia inside herself, the only part that’s necessary to her, she would rather not have the actual, fleshly Zenia around. Zenia takes up a lot of time. Also – though Charis hates to think this way – a certain amount of money. Charis doesn’t really have enough money for the three of them.
Zenia is looking a lot better, but this can be deceptive. Sometimes she’ll eat a good meal and then rush to the bathroom and throw up. And just yesterday, after they’d been discussing when Zenia might be ready to leave – after she’d been saying she was sure the tumours were shrinking, she was really getting on top of it – Charis walked into the bathroom and found the toilet bowl full of blood. If it were any other woman she’d have assumed that the woman was having her period and had forgotten to flush. But Zenia can’t have periods. She has made that clear.
Charis was concerned, and asked about the blood; Zenia was offhand. It was just a hemorrhage, she said. More or less like a nosebleed. Minor. Charis admires her courage, but who is she trying to fool? Herself, maybe.