The Robber Bride (34 page)

Charis doesn’t know how to explain that she is but she isn’t. She is once-Karen. So she says, “Yes,” and looks more closely, because how would this woman recognize her?

“I’m Zenia,” the woman says. And she is.

Charis and Zenia sit at one of the little tables beside the juice bar at the far end of the co-op. “What would you recommend?” says Zenia. “This is all new to me,” and Charis, flattered by this call upon her expertise, orders her up a papaya-and-orange, with a dash of lemon in it and some brewer’s yeast. Zenia keeps her glasses on and Charis doesn’t blame her. Still, it’s hard to talk with someone whose eyes she can’t see.

She does remember Zenia, of course. Everyone in McClung Hall knew who Zenia was; even Charis, who drifted through her university years as if through an airport. Educationally she was a transient,
and she left after three years without completing her degree: whatever it was that she needed to be taught, it wasn’t on the curriculum there. Or maybe she wasn’t ready for it. Charis believes that when you are ready to learn a thing the right teacher will appear, or rather will be sent to you. This has worked out for her so far, more or less, and the only reason she isn’t learning anything at the moment is that she’s so fully occupied with Billy.

Though maybe Billy is a teacher, in a way. She just hasn’t figured out exactly what she’s supposed to be learning from him. How to love, perhaps? How to love a man. Though she already does love him, so what next?

Zenia sips her juice, with the two ovals of her dark glasses turned towards Charis. Charis isn’t sure what she can say to her. She didn’t really know Zenia at university, she never spoke to her – Zenia was older, she was ahead of Charis, and she was in with all those artistic, intellectual people – but Charis remembers her, so beautiful and confident, striding around campus with her boyfriend Stew, and then later with short little Tony as well. What Charis remembers about Tony is that Tony followed her one night when Charis went outside to sit under a tree on the McClung lawn. Probably Tony thought Charis was sleepwalking; which showed some insight, because Charis had certainly done some sleepwalking in the past, though she wasn’t doing it then.

This action of Tony’s revealed a good heart; a quality much more important to Charis than Tony’s academic brilliance, which was what she was known for. Zenia was known for other things as well – most notoriously for living with Stew, right out in the open, at a time when such things were not done. So much has changed. It’s the married people, now, who are considered immoral.
The nukes
, they are called, for nuclear family. Radioactive, potentially lethal; a big leap from Home Sweet Home, but in Charis’s opinion more appropriate.

Zenia too has changed. In addition to being thin she’s ill, and in addition to being ill she is cowed somehow, beaten, defeated. Her shoulders hunch inwards protectively, her fingers are awkward claws, the corners of her mouth droop downwards. Charis wouldn’t have known her. It’s as if the former Zenia, the lovely Zenia, the Zenia of obvious flesh, has been burned away, leaving this bone core.

Charis doesn’t like to question – she doesn’t like to intrude on the selfhood of others – but Zenia is so drained of energy it’s unlikely she will say anything at all, otherwise. So Charis chooses something non-invasive. “What brought you to my class?” she asks.

“I heard about it from a friend,” says Zenia. Every word seems an effort. “I thought it might help.”

“Help?” says Charis.

“With the cancer,” says Zenia.

“Cancer,” says Charis. It isn’t even a question, because didn’t she know it? There’s no mistaking that whiteness, that sickly flicker. An imbalance of the soul.

Zenia smiles crookedly. “I beat it once before,” she says, “but it’s come back.”

Now Charis remembers something: didn’t Zenia disappear suddenly at the end of the year? The second year Charis lived in McClung Hall, that’s when it was: Zenia vanished without an explanation, into thin air. The girls used to talk about it over breakfast and Charis would listen in, on the rare occasions when she bothered with listening, or with breakfast. They didn’t have much there that she could eat: bran flakes was about it. The gossip was that Zenia had run away with another man, dumping Stew flat and taking some of his money as well, but now Charis divines the real truth: it was the cancer. Zenia went away without telling anyone about it because she didn’t want a lot of fuss. She went away to cure herself, and to do that you need to be alone, to be free of interruption. Charis can understand that.

“How did you do it, the first time?” says Charis.

“Do what?” says Zenia, a little sharply.

“Beat it,” says Charis. “The cancer.”

“They did an operation,” says Zenia. “They took out – they did a hysterectomy, I can never have babies. But it didn’t work. So then I went to the mountains, by myself. I stopped eating meat, I cut out alcohol. I just had to concentrate. On getting well.”

This sounds exactly right to Charis. Mountains, no meat. “And now?” she says.

“I thought I was better,” says Zenia. Her voice has sunk to a hoarse whisper. “I thought I was strong enough. So I came back. I’ve been living with Stew – with West. I guess I let him take me back into our old way of living, you know, he drinks a lot – and the cancer came back. He can’t take it – he really can’t! A lot of people can’t stand to be around sickness, they’re afraid of it.” Charis nods: she knows this, she knows this deeply, at the level of her cells. “He just denies that there’s anything wrong with me,” Zenia continues. “He tries to get me to eat … mounds of food, steak and butter, all those animal fats. They make me nauseated, I can’t, I just can’t!”

“Oh,” says Charis. This is a horrible story, and one that has the ring of truth. So few people understand about animal fats. No, more: so few people understand about anything. “How awful,” she says, which is only a pallid reflection of what she feels. She is troubled, she is on the verge of tears; above all she is helpless.

“Then he gets angry,” Zenia goes on. “He gets furious with me, and I feel so weak … he hates me to cry, it just gets him angrier. He was the one who did this.” She gestures towards her eye. “It makes me so ashamed, I feel like I’m the one responsible.…”

Charis tries to remember Stew, or West, whose name once changed so abruptly, just like her own. What she sees is a tall man, a somewhat inturned and unconnected man, gentle as a giraffe. She can’t picture him hitting anyone, much less Zenia; but people can
have deceptive exteriors. Men especially. They can put on a good act, they can make you believe they are model citizens and that they are right and you are wrong. They can fool everyone and make you seem like a liar. West, no doubt, is one of these. Indignation rises in her, the beginning of anger. But anger is unhealthy for her so she pushes it away.

“He says if I really have cancer I should have another operation, or else chemotherapy,” says Zenia. “But I know I could heal myself again, if only …” she trails off. “I don’t think I can drink any more of this right now,” she says. She nudges the juice glass away. “Thank you … you’ve been really nice.” She reaches across the table and touches Charis’s hand. Her thin white fingers look cold but they are hot, hot as coals. Then she pushes back her chair, takes up her coat and purse, and hurries away, almost staggering. Her head is bent, the hair is falling over her face like a veil, and Charis is sure she’s crying.

Charis wants to jump up and run after her and bring her back. This desire is so strong in her it’s like a fist on her neck. She wants to sit Zenia down again in her chair and put both hands on her, and summon up all her energy, the energy of the light, and heal her, right on the spot. But she knows she can’t do that, so she doesn’t move.

On Friday Zenia isn’t in the yoga class, and Charis is anxious about her. Maybe she’s collapsed, or maybe West has hit her again, this time more than once. Maybe she’s in the hospital with multiple fractures. Charis takes the ferry boat to the Island, fretting all the way. Now she’s feeling inadequate: there must have been something she could have said or done, something better than what she did do. A glass of juice was not enough.

That evening the fog returns, and with it a chilly drizzle, and Charis makes a good fire in the stove and turns on the furnace as well, and Billy wants her to come to bed early. She’s brushing her teeth in the drafty bathroom downstairs when she hears a knock at
the kitchen door. What she thinks is that it’s one of Billy’s group, with yet another draft dodger to be parked overnight on her living-room sofa. She has to admit she’s getting a bit tired of them. For one thing, they never help with the dishes.

But it’s not a draft dodger. It’s Zenia, her head framed in the wet glass square of the door like a photo under water. Her hair is soaked and streaking down her face, her teeth are chattering, her sunglasses are gone, and her eye, purple now, is piteous. There’s a fresh cut on her lip.

The door opens as if by itself, and she stands in the doorway, swaying slightly. “He threw me out,” she whispers. “I don’t want to disturb you … I just didn’t know where else to go.”

Mutely Charis holds out her arms, and Zenia stumbles over the threshold and collapses into them.

32

I
t’s a sunless noon. Charis is in her garden, watched by the hens, who peer greedily through the hexagons of their wire fence, and by the remaining cabbages, goggling at her like three dull green goblin-heads emerging from the ground. The garden in November has a mangy, thumbed appearance: wilted marigolds, nasturtium leaves faded a pale yellow, the stumps of broccoli, the unripe tomatoes frost-killed and mushy, with silvery slug tracks wandering here and there.

Charis doesn’t mind this vegetable disarray. It’s all ferment, all fertilizer. She lifts her spade, shoves it into the earth, and steps on the top edge of its blade with her right foot in Billy’s rubber boot, digging in. Then she heaves, grunting. Then she turns over the shovelful of soil. Worms suck themselves back into their tunnels, a white grub curls. Charis picks it up and tosses it relentlessly over the fence, in for the gabbling hens. All life is sacred but hens are more sacred than grubs.

The hens fluster and racket and abuse one another, and chase the one with the grub. Charis once thought it might be a good spiritual
discipline to refuse to feed her hens anything she wouldn’t eat herself, but she has since decided that this would be pointless. The ground-up shells, for instance, the crushed bones – hens need them to make eggs, but Charis doesn’t.

It’s the wrong season of the year to be turning the garden. She should wait till spring, when the new weeds poke through; she’ll have to do it all over again at that time. But this is the only way she can be out of the house without either Zenia or Billy wanting to come with her. Each is eager to be with her alone, away from the other one. If she tries to go for a walk, just to be by herself for a short time, just to unwind, there’s a rush for the door: a subdued, oblique rush (Zenia) or a gangling, obvious one (Billy). Then there’s a psychic collision, and Charis is forced to choose. It’s bothering her a lot. But luckily, neither one of them has any great desire to help her dig up the garden. Billy doesn’t like mucking in the dirt – he says why do so much work, because all that comes up is vegetables – and Zenia of course is in no shape. She is managing to take feeble, occasional walks, down to the lakeshore and back, but even those exhaust her.

Zenia has been here for a week now, sleeping on the sofa by night, resting on it by day. The evening of her arrival was almost festive – Charis ran a hot bath for her and gave her one of her own white cotton nightgowns to put on, and hung her wet clothes up on the hooks behind the stove to dry, and after Zenia was finished with the bath and had put on the nightgown Charis wrapped her in a blanket and sat her in a chair beside the stove, and combed her wet hair, and made her a hot milk with honey. It pleased Charis to do these things; she experienced herself as competent and virtuous, overflowing with good will and good energy. It pleased her to give this energy to someone so obviously in need of it as Zenia. But by the time she’d settled Zenia on the sofa and had gone upstairs to bed, Billy was angry with her, and he’s been angry ever since. He’s made it clear that he doesn’t want Zenia in the house at all.

“What’s she doing here?” he whispered that first night.

“It’s just for a bit,” said Charis, whispering too because she didn’t want Zenia to hear them and feel unwanted. “We’ve had lots of others. On the same sofa! It’s no different.”

“It’s way different,” said Billy. “They don’t have any place else to go.”

“Neither does she,” said Charis. The different thing, she was thinking, was that the others were Billy’s friends and Zenia was hers. Well, not friend exactly. Responsibility.

That was before Billy had even laid eyes on Zenia, or spoken a single word to her. The next day he’d grunted a surly “Morning” over the scrambled eggs – not home-grown, unfortunately, the hens had dried up – and the toast with apple jelly that Charis was serving to both of them. He’d hardly looked at Zenia where she sat hunched over, still in Charis’s nightgown, with a blanket wrapped around her, sipping her weak tea. If he had looked, thought Charis, he would have relented, because Zenia was so pitiable. Her eye was still discoloured and swollen, and you could practically count the blue veins on the backs of her hands.

“Get her out of here,” said Billy when Zenia had gone to the bathroom. “Just
out.”

“Shh,” said Charis. “She’ll hear you!”

“What do we know about her, anyway?” said Billy.

“She has cancer,” said Charis, as if this was all anyone needed to know.

“Then she should be in a hospital,” said Billy.

“She doesn’t believe in them,” said Charis, who didn’t either.

“Bullshit,” said Billy.

This remark struck Charis as not only ungenerous and crude, but faintly sacrilegious as well. “She has that black eye,” she murmured. The eye was living proof of something or other. Of Zenia’s neediness, or else her goodness. Of her status.