Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [29]
The hair itself is black, neither curly nor frizzy but wavy, thick and shining and luscious, like pulled taffy or lava. Like hot black glass. Shanita coils it, and winds it here and there on her head: sometimes on top, sometimes on one side. Or else she lets it hang down her back in one thick curl. She has wide cheekbones, a trim high-bridged nose, full lips, and large darkly fringed eyes, which are a startling shade that shifts from brown to green, depending on what colour she’s wearing. Her skin is smooth and unwrinkled, an indeterminate colour, neither black nor brown nor yellow. A deep beige; but beige is a bland word. Nor is it chestnut, nor burnt sienna, nor umber. It’s some other word.
People coming into the store frequently ask Shanita where she’s from. “Right here,” she says, smiling her ultra-bright smile. “I was born right in this very city!” She’s nice about it to their faces, but it’s a question that bothers her a lot.
“I think they mean, where were your parents from,” says Charis, because that’s what Canadians usually mean when they ask that question.
“That’s not what they mean,” says Shanita. “What they mean is, when am I leaving.”
Charis cannot see why anyone would want Shanita to leave, but when she says so, Shanita laughs. “You,” she says, “have led one damn sheltered life.” Then she tells Charis about the rudeness of white streetcar conductors towards her. “Move to the back, they tell me, like I was dirt!”
“Streetcar conductors are all rude! They say Move to the back to everybody, they’re rude to me!” says Charis, intending to console Shanita – although she’s being slightly dishonest, it’s only some streetcar conductors, and she herself hardly ever takes the streetcar – and Shanita throws her a glance of contempt, for being unable to acknowledge the racism of almost everybody, almost everybody white, and then Charis feels bad. Sometimes she thinks of Shanita as a dauntless explorer, hacking her way through the jungle. The jungle consists of people like Charis.
So she stops herself from being too curious, from asking too much about Shanita, about her background, about where she’s from. Shanita teases her, though; she throws out hints, changes her story. Sometimes she’s part Chinese and part black, with a West Indian grandmother; she can do the accent, so maybe there’s something to it. That might be the grandmother who used to eat dirt; but there are other grandmothers too, one from the States and one from Halifax, and one from Pakistan and one from New Mexico, and even one from Scotland. Maybe they are step-grandmothers, or maybe Shanita moved around a lot. Charis can’t sort them out: Shanita has more grandmothers than anyone she knows. But sometimes she’s part Ojibway, or else part Mayan, and one day she was even part Tibetan. She can be whatever she feels like, because who can tell?
Whereas Charis is stuck with being white. A white rabbit. Being white is getting more and more exhausting. There are so many bad waves attached to it, left over from the past but spreading through the present, like the killing rays from atomic waste dumps. There’s so much to expiate! It gives her anemia just to think about it. In her next life she’s going to be a mixture, a blend, a vigorous hybrid, like Shanita. Then no one will have anything on her.
The store doesn’t open till eleven, so Charis helps take stock. Shanita goes through the shelves, counting, and Charis writes down the numbers on a clipboard. It’s a good thing she found her reading glasses.
“We’ll have to bring down the prices,” says Shanita, frowning. “Stuff is not moving. We’ll have to do a sale.”
“Before Christmas?” says Charis, astonished.
“It’s the Recession,” says Shanita, pursing her lips. “That’s reality. This time of year,