Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [152]
Charis, once so tall and thin, is now tall and bulgy. Tony spends the last two weeks of the pregnancy at Charis’s house. She can afford to, she says, because it’s the summer vacation. She helps Charis with her breathing exercises, timing Charis on her big-numbers wristwatch and squeezing Charis’s hand in her own little hand, so strangely like a squirrel’s paw. Charis can’t quite believe she is actually having a baby; or she can’t quite believe that the baby will soon be outside her. She knows it’s in there, she talks to it constantly. Soon she will be able to hear its own voice, in return.
She promises it that she will never touch it in anger. She will never hit it, not even a casual slap. And she almost never does.
Charis goes to a hospital after all, because Tony and Roz decide it will be better: if there were complications Charis would have to be taken to the mainland in a police launch, which would not be appropriate. When August is born she has a golden halo, just like Jesus in the Christmas cards. No one else can see it, but Charis can. She holds August in her arms and vows to be the best person she can be, and praises her oval God.
Now that August is in the outside world Charis feels more anchored. Anchored, or tethered. She no longer blows around so much in the wind; all of her attention is on the now. She has been pushed back into her own milky flesh, into the heaviness of her breasts, into her own field of gravity. She lies under her apple tree on a blanket spread on the patchy grass, in the humid air, in the sunlight filtering through the leaves, and sings to August. Karen is far away, which is just as well: Karen would not be dependable around small children.
Tony and Roz are the godmothers. Not officially, of course, because there isn’t a church in the world that would do things the way Charis wants. She performs the ceremony herself, with her grandmother’s Bible and a very potent round stone she found on the beach, and a bayberry candle and some spring water from a bottle, and Tony and Roz promise to watch over August and to protect her spirit. Charis is glad she’s able to give August two such hard-headed women as godmothers. They won’t let her be a wimp, they’ll teach her to stand up for herself – not a quality Charis is sure that she herself can provide.
There is a third godmother present, of course – a dark godmother, one who brings negative gifts. The shadow of Zenia falls over the cradle. Charis prays she will be able to cast enough light, from within herself, to wash it away.
August grows bigger, and Charis tends her and rejoices, because August is happy, happier than Charis ever was when she was Karen, and she feels the tears in her own life mending. Though not completely, never completely. At night she takes long baths, with lavender and rosewater in them, and she visualizes all of her negative emotions flowing out of her body into the bathwater, and when she pulls the plug they swirl down the drain. It’s an operation she feels compelled to repeat frequently. She stays away from men, because men and sex are too difficult for her, they are too snarled up with rage and shame and hatred and loss, with the taste of vomit and the smell of rancid meat, and with the small golden hairs on Billy’s vanished arms, and with hunger.
She is better just by herself, and with August. August’s aura is daffodil yellow, strong and clear. Even by the age of five she has definite opinions. Charis is glad about that; she’s glad August is not a Pisces, like her. August has few electric feelers, few hunches; she can’t even tell when it’s going to