The Robber Bride (36 page)

33

K
aren was born to the wrong parents. That’s what Charis’s grandmother said could happen, and it is what Charis believes as well. Such people have to look for a long time, they have to search out and identify their right parents. Or else they have to go through life without.

Karen was seven when she met her grandmother for the first time. On that day she wore a cotton dress with smocking across the front and a sash, and matching hairbows on the ends of her pale blonde pigtails, which were braided so tight her eyes felt slanted. Her mother had starched the dress, and it was stiff and also a little sticky because of the damp late-June heat. They took the train, and when Karen got up off the hot plush seat she had to peel the skirt of the dress off the backs of her legs. That hurt, but she knew better than to say so.

Her mother wore an ivory-coloured linen outfit with a sleeveless dress and a short-sleeved jacket over it. She had a white straw hat and a white bag and shoes to match, and a pair of white cotton gloves, which she carried. “I think you’ll enjoy this,” she kept telling Karen anxiously. “You’re a lot like your grandmother in some ways.”
This was news to Karen, because for a long time her mother and her grandmother had hardly been on speaking terms. She knew from listening in that her mother had run away from the farm when she was only sixteen. She’d worked at grinding hard jobs and saved up her money so she could go to school and become a teacher. She’d done this so she could be out from under the thumb of her own mother, the crazy old bat. Wild horses would not drag her back to that rubbish heap, or this was what she said.

Yet here they were, heading straight to the farm that Karen’s mother hated so much, with Karen’s summer clothes packed neatly into a suitcase and her mother’s overnight bag beside it on the rack above their heads. They passed dirt fields, isolated houses, grey sagging barns, herds of cows. Karen’s mother hated cows. One of her stories was about having to get up in the winter, in blizzards, before sunrise even, and go out shivering through the whirling snow to feed the cows. But, “You’ll like the cows,” she said now, in the too-sweet voice she used on the Grade Twos at school. She checked her lipstick in the mirror of her compact, then smiled at Karen to see how she was taking it. Karen smiled back uncertainly. She was used to smiling even when she didn’t feel like it. She would be in Grade Two in September; she was hoping she wouldn’t be put in her mother’s class.

This wasn’t her first time staying away from home. Other times she’d been sent to her aunt, her mother’s older sister Viola. Sometimes it was just overnight, because her mother was going out; sometimes it was for weeks, especially in the summers. Her mother needed a long rest in the summers because of her nerves.
Well, who wouldn’t have nerves, considering?
said Aunt Vi with disapproval, as if what could Karen’s mother expect? She was speaking to Uncle Vern but looking sideways at Karen as if the nerves were Karen’s doing. But surely not all of them were, because Karen tried to do what she was told, although sometimes she made mistakes; and there were other things, like the sleepwalking, that she couldn’t help.

The nerves were the fault of the war. Karen’s father was killed in the war when Karen wasn’t even born yet, leaving Karen’s mother to bring up Karen all by herself – a thing that was understood to be very hard, practically impossible. There was something else too, which had to do with Karen’s mother’s wedding, or else the absence of it. Whether her father and her mother were actually married was one of the many things Karen wasn’t sure about, although her mother called herself Mrs. and wore a ring. There were no wedding photos, but things had been done differently during the war; everyone said so. There was something in Aunt Vi’s tone of voice that alerted Karen: she was an embarrassment, someone who could only be spoken of obliquely. She wasn’t quite an orphan but she had the taint of one.

Karen didn’t miss her dead father, because how could you miss someone you never even knew? But she was told by her mother that she ought to miss him. There was a framed snapshot of him – not with her mother, but alone, in his uniform, his long bony face looking solemn and somehow already dead – which appeared and disappeared from the mantelpiece, depending on the state of Karen’s mother’s health. When she was up to looking at it, the picture was there; otherwise not. Karen used the picture of her father as a sort of weather report. When it vanished she knew there was going to be trouble, and she tried to keep out of the road, out from underfoot, out of her mother’s hair (road, feet, hair, how could she be on or under or in all of them at the same time?). But she didn’t always succeed, or else she succeeded too well and her mother would accuse her of daydreaming, of not helping, of not caring, of not giving a sweet Jesus about anyone but herself, and her voice would go up high, up higher, up dangerously high, like a thermometer, into the red part.

Karen tried to help, she tried to care. She would have cared except she didn’t know what she was supposed to care about, and also there
were so many things she needed to watch, because of the colours, and other things she needed to listen to. Hours before a storm, when the sky was still windless and blue, she would feel the whisper of the distant lightning running up her arms. She heard the phone before it rang, she heard pain gathering in her mother’s hands, building up there like water behind a dam, getting ready to spill over, and she would stand terrified in the middle of the floor with her eyes elsewhere, looking – her mother said – like an idiot.
Stupid!
Maybe she was stupid, because sometimes she didn’t understand what was being said to her. She wasn’t hearing the words, she was hearing past the words; she heard the faces instead, and what was behind them. At night she would wake up, standing by the door, holding onto the door handle, and wonder how she got there.

Why do you do that? Why?
said her mother, shaking her, and Karen couldn’t answer.
My God, you’re an idiot! Don’t you know what could happen to you out there?
But Karen didn’t know, and her mother would say,
I’ll teach you! Little bitch!
Then she would hit the backs of Karen’s legs with one of her shoes, or else the pancake flipper or the broom handle, whatever was nearby, and thick red light would pour out of her body and some of it would get on Karen, and Karen would squirm and scream. “If your Daddy was alive it’d be him doing this, and he’d do it a damn sight harder, believe you me!” Hitting Karen was the only function Karen’s mother ever ascribed to her father, which made her secretly relieved that he wasn’t there.

Ordinarily Karen’s mother did not say
Jesus
and
God
and
bitch
, she didn’t swear; only when she was heading into a patch of bad nerves. Karen cried a lot when her mother hit her, not just because it hurt but because she was supposed to show that she was sorry, although she was confused about why. Also, if she didn’t cry her mother would keep right on hitting her until she did.
You hard girl!
But she had to stop at the right moment or her mother would hit her for crying.
Stop that noise! Stop right now!
Sometimes Karen couldn’t
stop and neither could her mother, and those were the worst times. Her mother couldn’t help it. It was her nerves.

Then Karen’s mother would fall on her knees and wrap her arms around Karen’s body and squeeze her so she could scarcely breathe, and cry, and say, “I’m sorry, I love you, I don’t know what got into me, I’m sorry!” Karen would try to stop crying then, she would try to smile, because her mother loved her. If someone loved you that made it all right. Karen’s mother sprayed herself every day with Tabu perfume; she had a horror of smelling bad. So that was the smell in the room, during these beatings: warm Tabu.

Karen’s Aunt Vi didn’t like Karen very much, but at least she didn’t touch her, and it wasn’t bad at her place. Karen slept in the guest room, which had large disturbing roses on the curtains, orange and pink ones, like cauliflowers. She stayed out of the way as much as possible. She helped with the dishes without being asked, and kept her handkerchiefs folded in the top bureau drawer and her socks in pairs, and did not get dirty. “She’s a nice enough little thing, but there’s not that much to her,” said Aunt Vi on the telephone. “Milk and water. Well, I keep her clean and fed, it’s not that hard. Anyway it’s only Christian charity, and it’s not as if we have children of our own. I don’t mind, really.”

Uncle Vern went further than that. “Who’s my girl?” he would exclaim. He wanted Karen to sit on his knee, he rubbed her head, he put his face down close to hers and grinned at her, and tickled her under the arms; Karen didn’t like this but she laughed nervously anyway, because she could tell he wanted her to. “We have a good time, don’t we?” he said boisterously; but he didn’t believe it, it was only his idea of how he should behave towards her. “Don’t pester her,” said Aunt Vi coldly.

Uncle Vern’s skin was white on top but red underneath. He mowed the lawn in his shorts, on Sunday evenings when Aunt Vi
was at church, and at those times he got even redder, though the light around his body was dim and a muddy green-brown. In the mornings, when she was still lying in bed, Karen could hear him grunting and groaning in the bathroom. She would put her pillow over her ears.

“She does sleepwalk, but not that much,” said Aunt Vi on the phone. “I just keep the doors locked, she can’t get out. I don’t know what Gloria makes such a fuss about. Of course her nerves are shot. Left with a – well, a child on her hands, like that – I feel I have to help out. But then, I’m her sister.” She dropped her voice when saying this, as if it was a secret.

Her aunt and uncle did not live in an apartment, the way her mother did. They lived in a house, a new house in the suburbs, with carpets all over the floor. Uncle Vern was in the home furnishings business; there was a real demand for home furnishings because it was right after the war, so Uncle Vern was doing well, and right now Uncle Vern and Aunt Vi had gone on a vacation. They had gone to Hawaii. This was why Karen couldn’t stay with them, but had to go to her grandmother’s instead.

She had to go, because her mother needed a rest. She needed it badly; Karen knew how badly. When she peeled the starched skirt away from the backs of her legs, some of the skin came off too, because last night her mother had used the pancake flipper, not the flat way but sideways; she had used the cutting edge and there had been blood.

The grandmother met them at the train station in a battered blue pickup truck.

“How are you, Gloria,” she said to Karen’s mother, shaking hands with her as if they were strangers. Her hands were large and sunburned and so was her face; her head was topped with a straggly whitish grey nest, which Karen realized after a moment was her hair.
She was wearing overalls, and not clean ones either. “So this is wee Karen.” Her big, crinkly face swooped down, with a beak of a nose and two small bright blue eyes under wiry eyebrows, and her teeth appeared, large too and unnaturally even, and so white they were almost luminous. She was smiling. “I’m not going to eat you,” she said to Karen. “Not today. You’re too skinny, anyway – I’d have to fatten you up.”

“Oh, Mother,” said Karen’s own mother reproachfully, in her sweet Grade Twos voice. “She won’t know you’re only joking!”

“Then she better find out fast,” said the grandmother. “Part of it’s true, anyway. She’s too skinny. If I had a calf like that I’d say it was starving.”

There was a black-and-white collie on the seat of the pickup truck, lying on a filthy plaid rug. “Into the back, Glennie,” said the grandmother, and the dog pricked up its ears, wagged its tail, jumped down, and scrambled into the back of the truck via the back fender. “In you go,” said the grandmother, picking Karen up as if she were a sack and hoisting her onto the seat. “Shove over for your mother.” Karen slid along the seat; it hurt, because of her legs. Karen’s mother looked at the dog hairs, hesitating.

“Get in, Gloria,” said the grandmother drily. “It’s just as dirty as it always was.”

She drove the truck fast, whistling tunelessly, one elbow jauntily out the window. Both windows were open and the gravel dust billowed in, but even so the inside of the car stank of old dog. Karen’s mother took off her white hat and stuck her head partway out the window. Karen, who was squashed in the middle and feeling a little sick, tried to imagine she was a dog herself, because if she was, then she would think the smell was nice.

“Home again, home again, jiggy jog jog,” said the grandmother jovially. She swung up a bumpy driveway, and Karen caught a glimpse of a huge skeleton, like a dinosaur skeleton, in the long weedy grass
in front of the house. This thing was a rusty red, with sharp spines and many encrusted bones sticking out of it. She wanted to ask what it was but she was still too afraid of her grandmother, and anyway the truck was no longer moving and now there was a commotion, a barking and hissing and cackling outside, and a grunting, and her grandmother was yelling, “Be off, be off with you, shoo, shoo, boys and girls!”

Karen couldn’t see out, so she looked at her mother. Her mother was sitting bolt upright, her hat on her knees, with her eyes tight shut, scrunching her white cotton gloves into a ball.

The grandmother’s face appeared at the window. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Gloria,” she said, jerking open the door. “It’s only the geese.”

“Those geese are killers,” said Karen’s mother, but she clambered down out of the truck. Karen thought that her mother shouldn’t have worn her white shoes, because the yard in front of the house wasn’t a lawn, it was an expanse of mud, some of it dry, some of it not, and some of it not mud at all but animal poo of various kinds. Karen was familiar only with the dog kind, because they had that in the city. There were now two dogs, the black-and-white collie and a larger, brown-and-white one, and at the moment they were herding a flock of geese back towards the barnyard, barking and waving their brushy tails. There were a lot of flies buzzing around.