The Books: “The Robber Bride” (Margaret Atwood)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Still on the Margaret Atwood train … the next book on the shelf is The Robber Bride – by Margaret Atwood. This is around the time when I started turning off Margaret Atwood. Although not for good! Never for good. I still buy all her books but I just can’t get into them in the same way. (Her essays and poetry are another story. I still love those). But here I sit and I can’t remember one damn thing about The Robber Bride. Atwood fans: should I give it another go? Maybe Cat’s Eye was so powerful to me, so unbelievable … that anything else that came after was sure to be a letdown. I think I felt, too, that she might have been trying to re-create some of the Cat’s Eye thing – with the boogey-woman character of Zenia .. but I just didn’t get into it. All I remember is that there are a group of women friends, the book is told from different points of view – and this scary man-eating woman who was a friend of theirs – and somehow messed with all of their lives – in profound ways – then died … and the book begins when she comes back to life. They start to see her on the streets of Toronto and they are all terrified. But seriously that is all I remember. Once I flipped through it certain things did come back to me. Tony (a woman) is a military historian and has maps with pins stuck into them all over her house. Roz is a career woman – and Chasis is a woman whose damaged soul finds relief in all kinds of New Agey things – she works in a shop called Radiance, she’s all about love and peace – but it’s only because the things that were once done to her were so damaging that she has basically become a split personality. But … that’s all that remains. And Zenia is this gorgeous scary cold Spider Woman.

Here’s an excerpt.

Excerpt from The Robber Bride – by Margaret Atwood.

That’s what Billy was like, at the time. He was always after her then. In the mornings, in the afternoons, at night, it made no difference. Maybe it was just a sort of nervousness, or boredom, because he didn’t have that much to fill up the time; or it might have been the tension of being there illegally. He would wait for her at the ferry dock and walk back to the house with her and grab her before she even had a chance to put the groceries down, pressing her back against the kitchen counter, his hands pulling up her long flimsy skirt. His urgency confused her. God I love you, God I love you, he would say at these times. Sometimes he did things that hurt – slapping her, pinching. Sometimes it hurt anyway, but since she didn’t mention this, how was he supposed to know about it?

What had she felt, herself? It’s hard to sort out. Maybe if there had been less, less plain old sex – if she had felt less like a trampoline with someone jumping up and down on it – she would have learned to enjoy it more, in time. If she could relax. As it was she merely detached herself, floated her spirit off to one side, filled herself with another essence — apple, plum — until he’d finished and it was safe to re-enter her body. She liked being held afterwards, she liked being stroked and kissed and told she was beautiful, a thing Billy sometimes did. Once in a while she cried, which Billy seemed to find normal. Her tears had nothing to do with Billy; he didn’t make her sad, he made her happy! She told him that, and he was satisfied and didn’t push her for answers. They talked about other things; they never talked about that.

But what was it supposed to be like? What would have been normal? She had no idea. Every so often they smoked dope – not a lot, because they couldn’t afford much of it, and when they had some it usually came from one of Billy’s friends – and at those times she got an inkling, an intimation, a small flutter. But it hardly counted, because her skin felt like rubber then anyway, like a rubber suit she had on with a grid of tiny electric wires running through it, and Billy’s hands were like inflated comic-book gloves, and she would get involved with the convolutions of his ear or the whorl of golden hairs on his chest, and whatever her body was up to was no concern of hers. One of Billy’s friends said that there was no sense in wasting good hash on Charis because she was stoned all the time anywya. Charis didn’t think that was fair, although it was true that being stoned didn’t make as much difference for her as it seemed to make for other people.

Billy wasn’t the first man she’d slept with, of course. She’d slept with several, because you were supposed to and she didn’t want to be considered uptight, or selfish about her body, and she’d even lived with one man, although it hadn’t lasted. He’d ended by calling her a frigid bitch, as if she was doing him some injury or other, which puzzled her. Hadn’t she been affectionate enough, hadn’t she nodded her head when he talked, hadn’t she cooked the meals and laid herself down compliantly whenever he wanted her to, hadn’t she washed the sheets afterwards, hadn’t she tended him? She was not an ungiving person.

The good part about Billy was that this thing about her, this abnormality – she knew it must be one, because she’d listened to other women talking – didn’t bother him. In fact he appeared to expect it. He thought women were like that: without urges, without needs. He didn’t pester her about it, he didn’t question her, he didn’t try to fix her, as the other men had done – tinkering away at her as if she was a lawnmower. He loved her the way she was. Without anything being said, he simply assumed, as she did, that what she felt about it didn’t matter. Both of them were agreed on that. They both wanted the same thing: for Billy to be happy.