Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [26]
She finds the reading glasses under the tea cosy in the kitchen; she doesn’t remember putting them there. Objects have a life of their own, and the ones in her house move around at night. They’ve been doing it more, recently. It’s the ozone layer, probably. Unknown energies are getting through.
She has twenty minutes to walk to the ferry. That’s ample. She goes out the back door as a matter of course; the front one is nailed shut, with plastic sheeting on the inside for insulation and an Indian hand-woven bedspread over top of it, in a paisley green-and-blue print. The insulation is for winter. In the summers she takes it down, except last summer she didn’t get around to it. There’s always a bunch of dead flies underneath the plastic, and she doesn’t enjoy them a lot.
The air on the Island is so good. Compared, that is. At least there’s usually a breeze. She pauses outside her back door, breathing in the comparatively good air, feeling its crispness fill her lungs. Her vegetable garden is still pushing up the Swiss chard, there are still carrots and green tomatoes; a rusty-orange chrysanthemum blooms in one corner. The soil is rich here; traces of henshit still linger, and she digs in compost from her compost heap every spring and fall. It’s almost time to do it, now, before the first frost comes.
She loves her garden; she loves kneeling in the dirt, with both hands deep in the ground, rummaging among the roots with the earthworms slipping away from her groping fingers, enveloped in the smell of mudpies and slow ferment and thinking about nothing. Helping things grow. She never uses gardening gloves, much to Augusta’s despair.
Shanita says her grandmother used to eat dirt, a handful or two every spring. She said it was good for you. (Although it’s been impossible for Charis to figure out exactly which grandmother she means: Shanita seems to have more than two.) But eating dirt is the sort of thing that Charis’s own grandmother might have done, because that grandmother, grubby and terrifying though she had been, was a woman who knew about such things. Charis hasn’t got around to trying it herself yet, but she’s working up to it.
At the front of her house there’s more to be done. She pulled out the lawn last spring, and tried for a sort of English cottage effect, which she thought would go well with the house itself, with its white clapboard and slightly falling-apart look; but she planted too many species and didn’t thin out, nor did she weed as much as she should have, and what resulted was a sort of scramble. Mostly the snapdragons won; they’re still blooming, some of the tall spikes fallen over (she should have staked them), with leggy offshoots coming up from them. Next year she’ll put the tall things in the back, and have fewer colours.
If there is a next year, that is. Next year she may not even have a house. The Island’s war with the city is still going on. The city wants to tear down all these houses, level everything, turn it into a park. A lot of the houses here went that way, years ago, before people dug in their heels. Charis sees it as envy: if the city people can’t live here themselves they don’t want anyone else to be able to do it either. Well, it kept the property prices low. If not for that, where would Charis be?
And if no one lived on the Island, who would ever be able to look at the city from a distance, the way Charis does every morning at sunrise, and find it so beautiful? Without such a vision of itself, of its loveliness and best possibilities, the city would decay, would crack apart, would collapse into useless rubble. It’s only sustained by belief; belief, and meditation, the meditation of people like her. Charis knows this for a certainty, but so far she has been unable to put it that way, exactly, in her frequent letters to the city