Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [32]
Not that she doesn’t like Tony. No, wrong. There are quite a few times when she doesn’t like Tony. Tony can use too many words, can grate on her, can rub her electrical field the wrong way. But she loves Tony all the same. Tony is so calm, so clear-headed, so grounded. If Charis ever hears any more voices telling her to slit her wrists, Tony is the one she’d call, to come over on the Island ferry and take charge of her, to defuse her, to tell her not to be an idiot. Tony would know what to do, step by step, one thing at a time, in order.
She wouldn’t call Roz at first, because Roz would freak out, would cry and sympathize and agree with her about the unbearability of it all, and would be late for the ferry as well. But afterwards, after she felt safe again, she would go to Roz for the hug.
Roz and Tony come in together, and Charis waves at them, and there’s the flurry there always is when Roz enters a restaurant, and the two of them sit down and Roz lights a cigarette, and they start talking at once. Charis tunes out because she isn’t that interested in what they’re saying, and just lets their presences wash over her. Their presences are more important to her anyway than what comes out of their mouths. Words are so often like window curtains, a decorative screen put up to keep the neighbours at a distance. But auras don’t lie. Charis herself doesn’t see auras as often as she used to. When she was little, when she was Karen, she saw them effortlessly; now it’s only at moments of stress. But she can sense them, the way blind people can sense colour through the ends of their fingers.
What she senses about Tony today is coolness. A transparent coolness. Tony reminds her of a snowflake, so tiny and pale and fastidious, but cold; a mind like an ice cube, clear and square; or cut glass, hard and sharp. Or ice, because it can melt. In the school play, Tony would have been a snowflake: one of the smallest children, too little for a speaking part but taking it all in. Charis herself was usually cast as a tree or a shrub. She wasn’t given anything that involved moving around because she would have bumped into things, or that’s what the teachers said. They didn’t realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn’t sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.
What would Roz have been? Charis visualizes Roz’s aura – so golden and many-coloured and spicy – and her air of command, but also that undercurrent of exile, and casts her in the role of one of the Three Kings, wearing brocade and jewels, carrying a splendid gift. But would Roz ever have been in such a play? Her early life is such a jumble, with all those nuns and rabbis in it. Maybe she wouldn’t have been allowed.
Charis herself gave up Christianity a long time ago. For one thing, the Bible is full of meat: animals being sacrificed, lambs, bullocks, doves. Cain was right to offer up the vegetables, God was wrong to refuse them. And there’s too much blood: people in the Bible are always having their blood spilled, blood on their hands, their blood licked up by dogs. There are too many slaughters, too much suffering, too many tears.
She used to think some of the Eastern religions would be more serene; she was a Buddhist for a while, before she discovered how many Hells they had. Most religions are so intent on punishment.
She realizes that she’s halfway through her lunch without having noticed. She’s having the grated carrot and cottage cheese salad, a wise choice; not that she can remember having ordered it, but sometimes it’s useful to have an automatic pilot like that, to take care of the routines. For a moment she watches Roz eat a piece of French bread; she likes to watch Roz eat French bread, cracking it open, burying her nose in it – This is so good, this is so good! – before sinking her firm white teeth into it. It’s like a small prayer, a miniature grace, what Roz does with bread.
“Tony,” says Charis, “I could really make something good, with your back garden.