Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [23]
For breakfast she has muesli, with yogourt mixed in and half an apple cut up in it. When Billy was here they used to have eggs, from the long-vanished hens, and bacon. Or Billy would have bacon. He liked it.
Charis quickly wipes from her mind – Wipe it! Like a video! says Shanita – the image of Billy, and of the things he liked. She considers bacon instead. She stopped eating bacon when she was seven, but other kinds of meat went later. The Save Your Life Cookbook advised her, back there, back then, to visualize what any given piece of fat would look like in her stomach. A pound of butter, a pound of lard, a strip of bacon, uncooked, white and limp and flat like a tapeworm. Charis is all too good at visualizing; she hasn’t been able to stop with fat. Every time she puts something into her mouth she’s likely to see it in living colour, as it makes its way down her esophagus into her stomach, where it churns unpleasantly and then inches through her digestive tract, which is the shape of a long snarled garden hose covered inside with little rubbery fingers, like foot massage sandals. Sooner or later it will come out the other end. This is what her concentration on healthy eating can lead to: she sees everything on her plate in the guise of a future turd.
Wipe the bacon, she tells herself sternly. It’s sunny outside now, she should think about that. She sits at her kitchen table, a round oak one she’s had ever since August was born, in her Japanese cotton kimono with the bamboo shoots on it, and eats her muesli, giving it the recommended number of chews and looking out the kitchen window. She used to be able to see the henhouse from here. Billy built that himself and she left it there as a sort of monument, even though there were no hens in it any more, until August changed into Augusta and made her take it down. The two of them did it with crowbars, and she cried afterwards, on her white bedspread with the vines. If only she knew where he’d gone. If only she knew where they’d taken him. He must have been taken somewhere, by force, by someone. He wouldn’t have just gone away like that, without telling her, without writing.…
Pain hits her in the neck, right across the windpipe, before she can stop it. Wipe the pain. But sometimes she just can’t. She bangs her forehead softly on the edge of the table.
“Sometimes I just can’t,” she says out loud.
All right then, says Shanita’s voice. Let it wash. Let it just wash over you. It’s only a wave. It’s like water. Think about what colour that wave is.
“Red,” says Charis out loud.
Well then, says Shanita, smiling. That can be a pretty colour too, can’t it? Just hold that. Just hold that colour.
“Yes,” says Charis meekly. “But it hurts.”
Well of course it hurts! Who ever said it wouldn’t hurt? If it hurts, that means you are still alive! Now – what colour is that hurt?
Charis breathes in, breathes out, and the colour fades. It works with headaches, too. She once tried to explain this to Roz, when Roz was in deep pain, a deeper and more recent pain than Charis’s. Though maybe not deeper. “You can heal yourself,” she told Roz, keeping her voice level and confident, like Shanita’s. “You can control it.”
“That is such horseshit,” said Roz angrily. “It is absolutely no use saying you should stop loving someone. It doesn’t work like that!”
“Well, you should, if you know it’s bad for you,” said Charis.
“Bad for you has nothing to do with it,” said Roz.
“I like hamburgers,” said Charis, “but I don’t eat them.”
“Hamburgers are not an emotion,” said Roz.
“Yes they are,” said Charis.
Charis gets up to put on the kettle. She’ll make some Morning Miracle tea, a special blend from work. To light the gas stove she stands sideways, because at some times – and this is one of them – she doesn’t like to turn her back to the kitchen door.
The kitchen door