“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.
XXXII
It’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.