Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [28]
“You won’t bug the customers,” said Shanita. “They don’t like to be pushed. They like to just sort of float around in here, know what I mean?”
Charis did. She likes to float around in Radiance herself. She likes the way it smells, and she likes the things in it. Sometimes she does a trade, taking goods – at a discount price – instead of pay, much to Augusta’s disgust. More of that junk? she says. She does not see how many more Japanese lacquered bowls and tapes of loon calls Charis really needs. Charis says it isn’t a matter of need, material need that is. It’s a matter of spiritual need. Right now she has her eye on a truly lovely amethyst geode, from Nova Scotia. She will keep it in her bedroom, to ward off bad dreams.
She can picture Augusta’s response to this geode. Mom! What’s this hunk of rock doing in your bed? She can picture Tony’s interested scepticism – Does it really work? – and Roz’s maternal indulgence – Honey, if it makes you happy I’m all for it! This has been her problem all her life: picturing other people’s responses. She’s too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone – other people’s reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands – but somehow they don’t reciprocate. Maybe they can’t. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.
Charis walks away from the ferry dock, up to King and then Queen, sniffing the turgid city air, so different from the air on the Island. This air is full of chemicals, and also of breath, the breath of other people. There are too many people breathing in this city. There are too many people breathing on this planet; maybe it would be beneficial if a few million of them would make the transition. But this is an appallingly selfish thought, so Charis stops thinking it. Instead she thinks about sharing. Every single molecule that Charis is taking into her lungs has been sucked in and out of the lungs of countless thousands of other people, many times. Come to that, every single molecule in her body has once been part of someone else’s body, of the bodies of many others, going back and back, and then past human beings, all the way to the dinosaurs, all the way to the first planktons. Not to mention vegetation. We are all a part of everybody else, she muses. We are all a part of everything.
That’s a cosmic insight, if you can keep it at arm’s length. But then Charis has an unpleasant idea. If everyone is part of everyone else, then she herself is a part of Zenia. Or the other way around. Zenia may be what she’s breathing in. The part of Zenia that went up in smoke, that is. Not her astral body, which is still hovering near earth, and not the ashes either, which are safely in that canister under the mulberry tree.
Maybe that’s what Zenia wants! Maybe she’s bothered by her partial state, some of her energy in the canister and some wafting around. Maybe she wants to be let out. Maybe Charis should go to the cemetery some night, with a shovel and a can-opener, and dig her up and sprinkle her. Mingle her with the Universe. That would be a kindly thing to do.
She reaches Radiance at ten to ten, early for once, and lets herself in with her key, and puts on the mauve-and-aqua smock that Shanita designed for them so the customers will know they aren’t customers themselves.
Shanita is already there. “Hi, Charis, how’re you doing?” she calls out, from the stockroom at the back. It’s Shanita who does all the ordering. She has a knack for it; she goes to crafts fairs and takes trips to little-known corners, and finds things, wonderful things that no other store in town has. She seems to know in advance what people will want.
Charis admires Shanita a lot. Shanita is smart and practical, as well as being psychic. Also she’s strong, and also she’s one of the most beautiful women Charis