Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [20]
Charis has covered the bed with a beautiful print spread, dark pink leaves and vines and grapes, on white. A Victorian look. Too fussy, says her daughter Augusta, who has an eye for leather chairs as smooth as the backs of knees, for tubular-chrome-and-glass coffee tables, for nubbly-cotton designer sofas with pillows in greys and ivories and milky-tea browns: minimalist opulence like that in corporate lawyers’ offices. Or so Charis imagines; she doesn’t in fact know any corporate lawyers. Her daughter cuts pictures of these intimidating chairs and tables and sofas out of magazines and pastes them into her furniture scrapbook, and leaves the scrapbook lying around, open, as a reproach to Charis and her slovenly ways.
Her daughter is a hard girl. Hard to please, or hard for Charis to please. Maybe it’s because she has no father. Or not no father: an invisible father, a father like a dotted outline, which has had to be coloured in for her by Charis, who didn’t have all that much to go on herself, so it’s no wonder his features have remained a little indistinct. Charis wonders whether it would have been better for her daughter to have a father. She wouldn’t know, because she never had one herself. Maybe Augusta would go easier on Charis if she had two parents she could find inadequate, and not just one.
Maybe Charis deserves it. Maybe she was the matron of an orphanage in a previous life – a Victorian orphanage, with gruel for the orphans and a cosy fire and a warm four-poster bed with a down-filled quilt for the matron; which would account for her taste in bedspreads.
She remembers her own mother calling her hard, before she was Charis, when she was still Karen. You’re hard, you’re hard, she would cry, hitting Karen’s legs with a shoe or a broom handle or whatever was around. But Karen wasn’t hard, she was soft, too soft. A soft touch. Her hair was soft, her smile was soft, her voice was soft. She was so soft there was no resistance. Hard things sank into her, they went right through her; and if she made a real effort, out the other side. Then she didn’t have to see them or hear them, or touch them even.
Maybe it looked like hardness. You can’t win this fight, said her uncle, putting his meaty hand on her arm. He thought she was fighting. Maybe she was. Finally she changed into Charis, and vanished, and reappeared elsewhere, and she has been elsewhere ever since. After she became Charis she was harder, hard enough to get by, but she’s continued to wear soft clothes: flowing Indian muslins, long gathered skirts, flowered shawls, scarves draped around her.
Whereas her own daughter has gone for polish. Lacquered nails, dark hair gelled into a gleaming helmet, though not a punk look: efficient. She’s too young to be so shiny, she’s only nineteen. She’s like a butterfly hardened into an enamelled lapel pin while still half out of the chrysalis. How will she ever unfold? Her brittle suits, her tidy little soldiers’ boots, her neat lists in crisp computer printout just break Charis’s heart.
August, Charis named her, because that’s when she was born. Warm breezes, baby powder, languorous heat, the smell of mown hay. Such a soft name. Too soft for her daughter, who has added an a. Augusta, she is now – a very different resonance. Marble statues, Roman noses, tight-lipped commanding mouths. Augusta is in first year in the business course at Western, on scholarship, luckily, because Charis could never have afforded to pay for it; her vagueness about money is another source of complaint, for Augusta.
But despite the lack of cash Augusta has always been well fed. Well fed, well nourished, and