Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [31]
“Maybe it’s you,” Charis says, and Shanita laughs and says, “Strong! I am a broken reed!” She puts down another card. “Death,” she says. “A change. Could be a renewal.” She crosses that card again. “Oh. The Moon.”
The Moon, with its baying dogs, its pool, its lurking scorpion. Just then the bell tinkles and a customer comes into the store; she asks Charis for two copies of Pot Luck, one for herself, one for a gift. Charis agrees with her that it’s very useful and not too expensive, and that the hand-done illustrations are sweet, and tells her that yes, Shanita is truly stunning but she’s not from any place except just plain old Toronto, and takes the money and wraps the books, her mind elsewhere.
The Moon, she thinks. Illusion.
10
At noon Charis takes off her flowered smock and says goodbye to Shanita – it’s her half-day, Tuesday, so she won’t be back after lunch – and heads out into the street, trying not to breathe too much. She has seen bicycle messengers wearing white paper nose masks, like nurses. It’s a trend, she thinks; maybe they should order some for the store, only coloured and with some nice patterns printed on.
As soon as she walks into the Toxique her head starts to crackle. It’s as if there’s a thunderstorm around somewhere, or a loose connection. Ions are bombarding her, wavelets of menacing energy. She brushes her forehead, then shakes her fingers to get rid of them.
She cranes her neck, looking around for the source of the disturbance. Sometimes it’s the people who come in to deal drugs on the stairs going down to the washrooms, but none of them seem to be around right now. The waitress comes up to her, and Charis asks for the corner near the mirror. Mirrors deflect.
The Toxique is Roz’s latest discovery. Roz is always discovering things, especially restaurants. She likes eating in places where no one from her office would ever eat, she likes being surrounded by people wearing clothes she’d never wear herself. She likes to think she’s mingling with real life, real meaning poorer than her. Or that’s the impression Charis sometimes gets. She’s tried telling Roz that all life is equally real, but Roz doesn’t appear to understand what she means; though maybe Charis doesn’t put it clearly enough.
She glances at the leopard-skin tights of the waitress, wrinkles her nose – these clothes are too tough for her – tells herself not to be judgmental, orders a bottle of Evian and some white wine, and settles down to wait. She opens the menu, squints at it, rummages in her bag for her reading glasses, can’t find them – has she left them at the store? – and finally locates them on top of her head. She must have walked along the street like that. She puts them on her nose and scans the daily specials. At least they always have something vegetarian; though who knows where the vegetables come from? Probably off some irradiated chemical-saturated agro-business maxi-farm.
The truth is that she doesn’t much like the Toxique. It’s partly the name: she considers it damaging to the neurons to spend time around such a poisonous name. And the clothes on the waiters, the servers, remind her of some of the things they used to sell in Okkult. At any moment there could be rubber scars and fake blood. But she’s willing to eat here once in a while for the sake of Roz.
As for Tony, who knows what she thinks of this place? Tony’s hard for Charis to read; she always has been, ever since they first met, back in the McClung Hall days. But most likely Tony would have exactly the same attitude if it were the King Eddie, or else McDonald’s: a kind of goggle-eyed, incredulous note-taking, like a Martian on a time-travel holiday. Collecting specimens. Freeze-drying them. Sticking everything into labelled boxes. Leaving no space, no space