Read Online The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood - Free Book Online

In a way they are inappropriate friends for her to have. It’s odd to think that she’s known them so long, ever since McClung Hall. Well, not known. She didn’t truly know anybody back then, just their appearances. But Tony and Roz are friends now, that’s beyond a doubt. They’re part of her pattern, for this life.
    She steps away from the window, and pauses to remove a thumbtack from her foot. It doesn’t hurt as much as she would have expected. She flashes briefly on the image of a bed of nails, withherself lying on it. It would take some getting used to, but it would be good training.
    She pulls off her white cotton nightgown, drinks the glass of water she leaves beside her bed every night to remind herself about drinking enough water, and does her yoga exercises in nothing but her underpants. Her leotard is in the wash, but who cares? Nobody can see her. There are some good things about living alone. The room is cool, but cool air tones up the skin. One nice thing about her job is that it doesn’t start until ten, which gives her a long morning, time to grow slowly into her day.
    She cheats a little on the exercises because she doesn’t feel like lying down on the floor right now. Then she goes downstairs and has her shower. The bathroom is off the kitchen, because it was added on after the house was built. A lot of the Island houses are like that; at first they would have had outhouses, because they were just summer cottages then. Charis has painted her bathroom a cheerful shade of pink, but that’s done nothing to improve the slanting floor. Possibly the bathroom is coming away from the rest of the house, which would account for the cracks, and the drafts in winter. She may have to get it propped up.
    Charis washes herself with Body Shop shower gel, the Dewberry flavour: her arms, her neck, her legs with their nearly invisible scars. She likes to be clean. There’s clean outside and there’s clean inside, her grandmother used to say, and clean inside is better. But Charis is not altogether clean inside: shreds of Zenia cling to her still, like dirty spangled muslin. She sees the name
Zenia
in her head, glowing like a scratch, like lava, and draws a line through it with a thick black crayon. It’s too early in the morning to think about Zenia.
    She scrubs her hair in the shower, then gets out and towel-dries it and parts it in the middle. Augusta is pestering her to get it cut. Coloured also. Augusta doesn’t want an old washed-out mother.
Washed-out
is her phrase. “I like myself the way I am,” Charis tellsher; but she wonders if that’s altogether true. However, she refuses to dye her hair, because once you begin you have to keep on doing it, and that’s just one more heavy chain. Look at Roz.
    She does her breast self-examination in the bathroom mirror – she has to do it every day, or she’ll forget and never do it – and doesn’t find any lumps. Maybe she should start wearing a brassiere. Maybe she should always have worn one; then she wouldn’t have become so floppy. Nobody tells you about aging, in advance. No, that’s not right. People tell you but you don’t hear them. “Mum’s on another channel,” August used to say to her friends, before she added the
a
.
    Charis takes her quartz pendulum out of its blue Chinese silk drawstring bag – silk conserves the vibrations, says Shanita – and holds it over her head, watching it in the mirror. “Will this be a good day?” she asks it. Round and round means yes, back and forth means no. The pendulum hesitates, begins to swing: a sort of ellipse. It can’t make up its mind.
Normal
, thinks Charis. Then it gives a sort of jump, and stops. Charis is puzzled: she’s never seen it do that before. She decides to ask Shanita; Shanita will know. She tucks the pendulum back into its bag.
    To get another angle, she takes down her grandmother’s Bible, closes her eyes, and pokes at the pages with a pin. She hasn’t done this for a while, but