Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

by Margaret Atwood

  “News must travel slowly in the afterlife,” says Tony, “because Billy’s already come back, right?”

  “Not exactly back,” says Charis primly. “I mean, we’re not … he’s only next door.”

  “Which is already too close for comfort,” says Roz. “Why the heck you ever rented to that deadbeat I just don’t get.”

  Long ago, when they were all a lot younger, Zenia had stolen a man from each of them. From Tony, she’d stolen West, who did, however, think better of it – or that is Tony’s official version to herself – and is safely rooted in Tony’s house, fooling with his electronic music system and getting deafer by the minute. From Roz, she’d stolen Mitch, not exactly hard, since he’d never been able to keep it zipped; but then, after emptying not only his pockets but what Charis called his psychic integrity, Zenia had dumped him, and he’d drowned himself in Lake Ontario. He’d worn a life jacket, and he’d made it look like a sailing accident, but Roz had known.

  She’s over that by now, or as much as a girl can ever be over it, and she has a much nicer husband called Sam, who’s in merchant banking and more suitable, with a better sense of humour. But still, it’s a scar. And it hurt the children; that’s the part she can’t forgive, despite the shrink she went to in an effort to wipe the slate. Not that there’s any percentage in not forgiving a person who’s no longer alive.

  From Charis, Zenia had stolen Billy. That was perhaps the cruellest theft, think Tony and Roz, because Charis was so trusting and defenceless, and let Zenia into her life because Zenia was in trouble, and was a battered woman, and had cancer, and needed someone to take care of her, or that was her story – a shameless fabrication in every part. Charis and Billy were living on the Island then, in a little house that was more like a cottage. They kept chickens. Billy built the coop himself; being a draft dodger, he didn’t exactly have a steady job.

  There wasn’t all that much room in the cottage for Zenia, but Charis made room, being hospitable and wanting to share, the way people were on the Island in those days, and in the dodger communities. There was an apple tree; Charis made apple cakes, and other baked items as well, with the eggs. She was so happy, and also pregnant. And the next thing you knew, Billy and Zenia had gone off together and all the chickens were dead. They’d had their throats cut with the bread knife. It was just so mean.

  Why had Zenia done it? All of it? Why do cats eat birds? was Roz’s unhelpful answer. Tony thought it was an exercise in power. Charis was sure there was a reason, embedded somewhere in the workings of the universe, but she wasn’t sure what it could be.

  Roz and Tony each ended up with a man in residence, despite Zenia’s best ruination efforts, but Charis didn’t. That was because she’d never achieved closure, was Roz’s theory. She couldn’t find anyone ditzy enough, was Tony’s. But less than a month ago, who should turn up but that long-lost schmuck of a Billy, and what did Charis do but rent him the other half of her duplex? It’s enough to make you tear your hair out by its tiny grey roots, thinks Roz, who still gets hers touched up every two weeks. A nice chestnut colour, not vivid. The complexion can get washed out if you go too bright.

  Charis’s duplex is a whole other story. Distant cousins should never die, thinks Tony; or if they do, they should never leave their money to kindly fools like Charis.

  Because, now that Charis is no longer an ex-flower child and erstwhile dabbler in chicken-raising, living on day-old bread and cat food and God knows what else in a badly insulated summer cottage on the Island, facing an increasingly impoverished and eventually hypothermic old age and fighting off her grown-up Ottawa bureaucrat of a daughter’s attempts to move her into a facility; because Charis is no longer an old street bat in training but is worth solid cash, Billy has come back into her life as if teleported.

  Not that the distant cousin left a regal fortune, but she’d left enough so that Charis could move off the Island. It was getting too genteel for her anyway, she said, what with the renovations and the snobby people moving in, and she no longer felt really accepted there. Enough to stave off the facility fate and the day-old bread. Enough to buy a house.

  Charis could have chosen a detached home, but she was maybe losing track of things sometimes – that was how she put it, causing Tony to say, “No shit!” privately to Roz over the phone – and the concept was that she would live in one half of the duplex and rent the other half to someone who was, well, better with tools than she was, and she would trade that person lower rent for maintenance and repairs. Skill-trading was so much less mercenary than charging market value rent, didn’t Roz and Tony feel that?

  They didn’t, but Charis had brushed their counsel aside and put an offer up on Craigslist, with (Tony thinks) maybe a little too much description of herself and her tastes, all of which (Roz thinks) amounted to an open invitation to an unscrupulous prick like Billy. And presto, all of a sudden, there he was.

  Ouida does not like Billy. She growls at him. Which is some comfort, as Charis pays more attention to Ouida’s opinions now than to those of anyone else, including her two oldest friends.

  It was Tony and Roz who’d given Ouida to Charis. Now that Charis is living in Parkdale – a location rapidly gentrifying, says Roz, who keeps an eye on real estate prices, and Charis will do well in the long run, but the gentrification is far from complete, and you never know what you might run into on the street, not to mention the drug dealers. Also, says Tony, Charis is such an innocent; she has no instinct for ambushes. And she doesn’t like to drive; she prefers to ramble about on foot in the wilder places of the city, ravines and High Park and such, communing with plant spirits. Or whatever the heck she thinks she’s doing, says Roz, and let’s just hope she doesn’t decide the Poison Ivy Fairy is her new best friend.

  Neither of them wants to read about Charis in the paper. “Elderly Woman Mugged Under Bridge.” “Harmless Eccentric Found Battered.” A dog is a deterrent, and Ouida is a terrier blend, maybe with some border collie, a bright dog at any rate, they’d concluded as they were filling out the rescue dog papers. And with a little training …

  Well, said Tony, after Ouida had been installed for a month. That was the weak link in the plan: Charis couldn’t train a banana. “But Ouida is very loyal,” said Roz. “I’d bet on Ouida in a pinch. She’s a good growler.”

  “She growls at mosquitoes,” said Tony gloomily. As a historian, she has no faith in so-called predictable outcomes.

  Ouida is named after a self-dramatizing novelist of the nineteenth century; she’d been a devoted lover of dogs, so what better name for Charis’s new pet? said Tony, who’d done the naming. Roz and Tony suspect that Charis sometimes thinks Ouida the dog actually is Ouida the self-dramatizing novelist, since Charis believes in recycling, not only for bottles and plastics but also for psychic entities. She once said defensively that Prime Minister Mackenzie King was convinced his dead mother had reincarnated in his Irish terrier, and nobody found that strange at the time. Tony refrained from commenting that nobody found it strange at the time because nobody knew about it at the time. But they’d found it plenty strange afterwards.

  Once Roz gets home from their walk, she calls Tony on her cell. “What are we going to do?” she asks.

  “About Zenia?” says Tony.

  “About Billy. The man’s a psychopath. He murdered those chickens!”

  “Chicken-murdering is a public service,” says Tony. “Somebody’s got to do it or we’d be six feet deep in hens.”

  “Tony. Be serious.”

  “What can we do?” says Tony. “She’s not underage, we’re not her mother. She’s already getting that moony woo-woo look.”

  “Maybe I’ll hire a detective. See what kind of record Billy’s got. Before he buries her in the garden.”

  “That house hasn’t got a garden,” says Tony. “Only a patio. He’ll have to use the cellar. Stake out the hardware store, see if he buys any pickaxes.”

  “Charis is our friend!” says Roz. “Don’t make jokes
about this!”

  “I know,” says Tony. “I’m sorry. I only make jokes when I don’t know what to do.”

  “I don’t know what to do either,” says Roz.

  “Pray to Ouida,” says Tony. “She’s our last line of defence.”

  Their regular walks are on Saturdays, but this is a crisis, so Roz fixes lunch for Wednesday.

  The three of them used to eat at the Toxique, back in the days of Zenia. Queen Street West was edgier then: more green hair, more black leather, more comic book stores. Now the mid-scale clothing chains have moved in, though there are still some residual tattoo joints and button shops, and the Condom Shack is soldiering on. The Toxique is long gone, however. Roz settles for the Queen Mother Café. A little elderly and battered, but comfy, like the three of them.

  Or like the three of them used to be. Today, however, Charis is ill at ease. She fiddles with her vegetarian pad Thai and keeps looking out the window, where Ouida is impatiently waiting, roped to a bicycle stand.

  “When’s the next vampire night?” says Roz. She’s just come from the dentist and is having trouble eating because of the freezing. Her teeth are going the way of her high-heeled shoes, and for the same reasons: crumbling and pain. And the expense! It’s like shovelling money into her open mouth. On the bright side, dentistry is far more pleasant than it used to be. Instead of writhing and sweating, Roz puts on dark glasses and earphones and listens to New Age dingle music, borne away on a wave of sedatives and analgesics.

  “Well,” says Charis, “the thing is, vampire night was last night.” She sounds guilty.

  “You didn’t tell us?” says Tony. “We would have come over. I bet it gave you bad dreams about Zenia.”

  “That was the night before,” says Charis. “Zenia came and sat at the end of my bed and told me to watch out for this person … it was a name I didn’t know. It sounded like a woman. A Martian kind of name, you know, it began with a Y. This time, she was wearing fur.”

  “What sort of fur?” says Tony. She’s guessing wolverine.

  “I don’t know,” says Charis. “It was black and white.”

  “Cripes,” says Roz. “And then you watched a vampire film by yourself! That was reckless!”

  “I didn’t,” says Charis – now she’s gone pink – “watch it by myself.”

  “Oh, crap,” says Roz. “Not Billy!”

  “Did you have sex?” asks Tony. It’s an intrusive question, but she and Roz need to know exactly where the enemy stands.

  “No!” says Charis, flustered. “It was just friendly! We talked! And I feel a lot better now, because how can you really forgive a person if they aren’t there?”

  “Did he put his arm around you?” says Roz, feeling like her own mother. No: her grandmother.

  Charis ducks this. “Billy thinks we should open an urban B&B,” she says. “As an investment. They’re the coming thing. In one-half of the duplex. He’d do the renovations, and then I’d do the baking.”

  “And he’d be in charge of the money right?” says Roz.

  “The name Zenia told you. It wouldn’t by any chance be Yllib?” says Tony. Zenia had always been good at codes, and puzzles, and reflections.

  “Trust me on this: forget it!” says Roz. “Billy’s a drainpipe. He’ll clean you out.”

  “What does Ouida have to say about him?” Tony asks.

  “Ouida’s a little jealous, I have to admit,” says Charis. “I had to … I had to sequester her.” She is definitely blushing now.

  “Locked Ouida in the closet, is my guess,” says Tony to Roz on the phone.

  “This is dire,” says Roz.

  They devise a phone tree: Charis will get two calls a day, one from each of them, to monitor the situation. But Charis stops answering the phone.

  Three days pass. Then Tony receives a text message: Need to talk. Please come. Sorry. It’s from Charis.

  Tony collects Roz, or rather Roz collects Tony, in her Prius. When they arrive at the duplex, Charis is sitting at the kitchen table. She’s been crying. But at least she’s still alive.

  “What happened, sweetie?” says Roz. There are no marks of violence; maybe that schmuck Billy has pocketed Charis’s life savings.

  Tony looks at Ouida. She’s sitting beside Charis, ears pricked, tongue out. There’s something on her chest fur. Pizza sauce?

  “Billy’s in the hospital,” says Charis. “Ouida bit him.” She starts to sniffle. Good dog, Ouida, thinks Tony.

  “I’ll make us some mint tea,” says Roz. “Why did Ouida … ?”

  “Well, we were going to, you know … in the bedroom. And Ouida was barking, so I had to shut her in the upstairs hall closet. And then, just before … I simply had to know. So I said, ‘Billy, who murdered my chickens?’ Because back then, Zenia told me it was Billy who did it, but I never knew what to believe, because Zenia was such a liar, and I just couldn’t … with someone who’d done that. And Billy said, ‘It was Zenia, she slit their throats, I tried to stop her.’ And then Ouida started to bark really loud, as if something was hurting her, and I had to go see what was wrong, and when I opened the closet door she rushed out and jumped up on the bed and bit Billy. He screamed a lot, there was blood on the sheets, it was …”

  “You can get it out with cold water,” says Roz.

  “On the leg?” asks Tony.

  “Not exactly,” says Charis. “He wasn’t wearing any clothes, otherwise I’m sure she wouldn’t have … but they’re doing surgery. I feel bad about that. I told them at the hospital, after they’d wheeled him to emerg – I said it was me who bit him, it was a sex thing Billy liked and it went too far, and they were very nice, they said these things happen. I hated to lie, but they might have, you know, put Ouida away. It was very stressful! But at least now I know the answer.”

  “What answer?” asks Roz. “The answer to what?”

  Charis says it’s all very clear: Zenia has been coming back in dreams to warn her about Billy, who was the chicken-murderer all along. But Charis was too stupid to figure it out – she wanted to believe the best of Billy, and it was so nice at first that he was back in her life, it was like a completion of the circle or something, so Zenia had to take the next step and reincarnate herself in the body of Ouida – that’s why she was wearing fur in the second dream – and she was naturally annoyed when she heard Billy sticking the blame onto her for something she hadn’t done.

  In fact, says Charis, maybe Zenia’s intentions were benevolent all along. Maybe she stole Billy to protect Charis from such a bad apple as him. Maybe she stole West to teach Tony a life lesson about, well, music appreciation or something, and maybe she stole Mitch to clear the way for Roz’s much better husband, Sam. Maybe Zenia was, like, the secret alter ego of each of them, acting out stuff for them they didn’t have the strength to act out by themselves. When you looked at it that way …

  So that is how Tony and Roz have agreed to look at it, at least when they are with Charis, because it makes Charis happier. It takes some doing to pretend that a medium-sized black-and-white dog who wipes her paws on your coat and poops behind logs is in fact Zenia, but they don’t have to pretend all the time: Zenia comes and goes, unpredictable as she has always been, and only Charis can tell when Zenia is present inside Ouida and when she is not.

  Billy made threatening noises about suing Charis for his injuries, but Roz squashed that: she can out-lawyer him any day of the week, she told him. Thanks to the extensive search done by her hired detective, she has chapter and verse on his career in matron-fleecing, Ponzi schemes, and identity theft, and if he thinks he can use Ouida as his blackmail weapon he should think again, because it’s his word against Charis’s, and who does he think a jury will believe?

  So Billy has gone elsewhere, never to be seen again, and now a jovial retired plumber lives in the other half of Charis’s duplex. He’s a widower, and Roz and Tony have hopes for him. He’s redoing the bathroom, which is a start. Ouida approves of him, and tries to cram herself und
er the sink when he’s down there with his wrench, and licks him wherever possible, and flirts with him shamelessly.

  THE DEAD HAND LOVES YOU

  • • • • • •• • •

  The Dead Hand Loves You started as a joke. Or more like a dare. He should have been more careful about it, but the fact was he’d been blowing a fair amount of dope around that time and drinking too much inferior-grade booze, so he hadn’t been fully responsible. He shouldn’t be held responsible. He shouldn’t be held to the terms of the fucking contract, that’s what had shackled his ankles: the contract.

  And he can never get rid of that contract, because there wasn’t any drop-dead date on it. He should have included a good-only-until clause, like milk cartons, like tubs of yogourt, like mayonnaise jars; but what did he know about contracts back then? He’d been twenty-two.

  He’d needed the money.

  It was so little money. It was such a crappy deal. He was exploited. How could the three of them have taken advantage of him like that? Though they refuse to admit the unfairness of it. They just cite the fucking contract, with those undeniable signatures on it, including his, and then he has to suck it up and fork out. He resisted paying them at first, until Irena got a lawyer; now the three of them have lawyers the way dogs have fleas. Irena should have cut him some slack in view of how close they were once, but no, Irena has a heart of asphalt, harder and drier and more sun-baked every year. Money has ruined her.

  His money, since it’s because of him that Irena and the other two are rich enough to afford those lawyers of theirs. Top-quality lawyers too, as good as his; not that he wants to get into a snarling, snapping, rending contest among lawyers. It’s the client who’s always the cracked-bone hyena’s breakfast: they take bites out of you, they nibble away at you like a sackful of ferrets, of rats, of piranhas, until you’re reduced to a shred, a tendon, a toenail.