Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [21]
Augusta tells Charis to straighten her shoulders or she’ll be a bag lady in old age. She goes through Charis’s cupboards and drawers and throws out the candle ends Charis has been saving to make into other candles, sometime when she gets around to it, and the partly used soaps she’s been intending to cook into other soaps, and the twists of wool destined for Christmas tree decorations that got moths in them by mistake. She asks Charis when she last cleaned the toilet, and orders her to get rid of the clutter in the kitchen, by which she means the bunches of dried herbs grown so lovingly by Charis every summer, and dangling – somewhat dusty, but still usable – from the nails of different sizes that stud the top of the window frame, and the hanging wire basket for eggs and onions where Charis tosses her gloves and scarves, and the Oxfam oven mitts made by mountain peasant women, somewhere far away, in the shape of a red owl and a navy blue pussycat.
Augusta frowns at the owl and the pussycat. Her own kitchen will be white, she tells Charis, and very functional, with everything stored in drawers. She’s already cut out a picture of it, from Architectural Digest.
Charis loves Augusta, but decides not to think about her right now. It’s too early in the morning. Instead she will enjoy the sunrise, which is a more neutral way to begin the day.
She goes to the small bedroom window and flings aside the curtain, which is a piece of the same print that covers her bed. She hasn’t got around to hemming it, but she will, later. Several of the thumbtacks holding its top end to the wall pop out and scatter on the floor. Now she will have to remember, and avoid stepping on them in her bare feet. She should get a curtain rod, or something, or two hooks with a piece of string: that wouldn’t be very expensive. In any case the curtain has to be washed before Augusta comes home again. “Don’t you ever wash this thing?” she said the last time she was here. “It looks like poor people’s underpants.” Augusta has a graphic way of putting things that makes Charis wince. It’s too sharp, too bright, too jagged: shapes cut from tin.
Never mind. The view from her bedroom window is there to soothe her. Her house is the end one in the row, and then comes the grass and then the trees, maple and willow, and through a gap in the trees the harbour, with the sun just beginning to touch the water, from which, today, a vapoury mist is rising. So pink, so white, so softly blue, with a slice of moon and the gulls circling and dipping like flights of souls; and on the mist the city floats, tower and tower and tower and spire, the glass walls of different colours, black, silver, green, copper, catching the light and throwing it back, tenderly at this hour.
From here on the Island, the city is mysterious, like a mirage, like the cover on a book of science fiction. A paperback. It’s like this at sunset too, when the sky turns burnt orange and then the crimson of inner space, and then indigo, and the lights in the many windows change the darkness to gauze; and then at night the neon shows up against the sky and it gives off a glow, like an amusement park or something safely on fire. The only time Charis doesn’t care to look at the city is noon, in the full glare of the day. It’s too clear-cut, too brash and assertive. It juts, it pushes. It’s just girders then, and slabs of concrete.
Charis would rather look at the city than go there, even at dusk. Once she’s in it she can no longer see it; or she sees it only in detail, and it becomes harsher, pockmarked, crisscrossed with grids, like a microscopic photograph of skin. She has to go into it every day, however; she has to work. She likes her job well enough as jobs go, but it’s a job, and every job has