The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

bath, with blue and mauve highlights on her body, and that was peaceful; but when she’d gone back upstairs Tony was still in Scotland, with the Highland women and children being hunted down in the hills and spitted like pigs and shot like deer.
    “The Scots!” said Roz, who wanted to get back to the Holocaust. “They’ve done very well for themselves, look at all those bankers! Who cares about them?”
    “I do,” said Charis, surprising herself as much as she did the two of them. “I care.” They looked at her in amazement, because they were used to her taking mental time off when they talked about war. They thought it didn’t interest her.
    “You do?” said Roz, her eyebrows up. “Why, Charis?”
    “You should care about everybody,” said Charis. “Or maybe it’s because I’m part Scottish. Part Scottish, part English. All those people who used to kill one another so much.” She leaves out the Mennonites because she doesn’t want to upset Roz, although the Mennonites don’t count as real Germans. Also they never kill people; they only get killed, instead.
    “Sweetie, I’m sorry,” said Roz, contrite. “Of course! I keep forgetting. Stupid moi , thinking of you as pure crème de la WASP.” She patted Charis’s hand.
    “Nobody’s killed them recently, though,” said Charis. “Not all at once. But I guess that’s how we ended up here.”
    “Ended up here?” said Tony, looking around. Did Charis mean the Toxique, or what?
    “Because of wars,” said Charis, unhappily; it’s an insight she doesn’t like much, now that she’s had it. “In this country. Wars of one sort or another. But that was then. We should try to live in the now – don’t you think? Or at least, I try to.”
    Tony smiled at Charis with affection, or the closest she usually got to it. “She’s absolutely right,” she said to Roz, as if this were a noteworthy event.
    Right about what though, Charis wonders. The wars, or the now? Tony’s standard response to the now would be to tell Charis how many babies are being born per minute, in the now she’s so fond of, and how all that excess birth will inevitably lead to more wars. Then she would add a footnote about the crazed behaviour of overcrowded rats. Charis is grateful she isn’t doing that today.
    But she has it at last, the thread: it’s Saddam Hussein and the invasion of Kuwait, and what will happen next. “It’s already been decided,” says Tony, “like the Rubicon,” and Charis says, “The what?”
    “Never mind, sweetie, it’s just something historical,” says Roz, because she at least does understand that this is not Charis’s favourite topic of conversation, she’s giving her permission to drift off.
    But then it comes to Charis what the Rubicon is. It’s something to do with Julius Caesar, they took it in high school. He crossed the Alps with elephants; another of those men who got famous for killing people. If they stopped giving medals to such men, thinks Charis, if they stopped giving them parades and making statues out of them, then those men would stop doing it. Stop all the killing. They do it to get attention.
    Maybe that’s who Tony was, in a previous life: Julius Caesar. Maybe Julius Caesar has been sent back in the body of a woman, to punish him. A very short woman, so he can see what it’s like, to be powerless. Maybe that is the way things work.
    The door opens, and Zenia is standing there. Charis goes cold all over, then takes a breath. She’s ready, she’s been readying herself, though lunch at the Toxique is the last place she would have expected this, this manifestation, this return. The Tower , thinks Charis. A sudden event. Something you weren’t looking for . No wonder the pendulum stopped dead, right over her head! But why did Zenia bother opening the door? She could have walked right through it.
    Zenia is in black, which is no surprise, black was her colour. But the strange thing is that she’s fatter. Death has filled