Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [249]
Each one of them has a poppy stuck into the front of her coat. Flimsy plastic but who can resist, thinks Roz, though she liked the cloth ones better. It’s like those awful daffodils for cancer, pretty soon every single flower will be hooked up with some body part or disease. Plastic lupins for lupus, plastic columbines for colostomies, plastic aspidistras for AIDS, you have to buy the darn things though, it protects you from getting hit up every time you walk out the door. I have one already. See?
It was Tony who insisted on this particular day. Remembrance Day. Bloody Poppy Day. Tony is getting more bizarre by the minute, in Roz’s opinion; but then, so are they all.
Remembrance Day is only fitting, thinks Tony. She wants to do Zenia justice; but she’s remembering more than Zenia. She’s remembering the war, and those killed by it, at the time or later; sometimes wars take a long time to kill people. She’s remembering all the wars. She craves some idea of ceremony, of decorum; not that she’s getting one whole hell of a lot of cooperation from the others. Roz did wear black, as requested, but she’s tarted it up with a red-and-silver scarf. Black brings out my eye bags, she said. I needed something else right next to my face. Goes with my lipstick – this is Rubicon, hot off the press. Like it? You don’t mind, do you honey?
And as for Charis … Tony looks sideways at the receptacle Charis is holding: not the chintzy copper urn with the imitation Greek handles peddled by the crematorium, more like a stirrup cup really, but something even worse. It’s a handmade ceramic flower vase, heavily artistic, in mottled shades of mauve and maroon, donated to Charis by Shanita, from the stockroom of Scrimpers, where it had been gathering dust for years. Charis insisted on something more meaningful than the tin can that Tony’s been keeping in her cellar, so before they got their ferry tickets they transferred Zenia from canister to vase, in the Second Cup coffee shop. Roz poured; the ashes were stickier than Tony had expected. Charis couldn’t bear to look, in case there were any teeth. But she’s got her nerve back by now; she stands at the railing of the ferry, her pale hair spread out, looking like a ship’s figurehead going backwards and cradling the lurid flower vase with Zenia’s earthly remains inside it. If the dead come back for revenge, thinks Tony, the flower vase alone will be enough to do it.
“Would you say this is halfway?” asks Tony. She wants them to be over the deepest part.
“Looks right to me, sweetie,” says Roz. She’s impatient to get this over. When they reach the Island they are all going to Charis’s house for tea, and, Roz trusts and hopes, some form of lunch: a piece of homemade bread, a whole wheat cookie, anything. Whatever it is will taste like straw – that brown-rice, dauntingly healthy, lipstick-less taste that is the base note of everything Charis cooks – but it will be food. She has three Mozart Balls tucked into her purse as a sort of anti-vitamin supplement and starvation fallback. She intended to bring champagne but she forgot.
It will be a wake of sorts, the three of them gathered around Charis’s round table, munching away at the baked goods, adding to the seven-grain crumbs on the floor, because death is a hunger, a vacancy, and you have to fill it up. Roz intends to talk: it will be her contribution. Tony has picked the day and Charis the container, so the vocals will be up to Roz.
The funny thing is, she actually feels sad. Now figure that out! Zenia was a tumour, but she was also a major part of Roz’s life, and her life is past the midpoint. Not soon, but sooner than she wants, she