The Robber Bride (23 page)

Sometimes she wonders what he did before the war, but he won’t talk about that either. He has told only one story. When he was small he lived on a farm, and his father took him out into the woods, in winter. His father intended to chop firewood, but the tree was frozen so hard that the axe bounced off it and cut into his leg. He threw down the axe and strode away, leaving Griff by himself in the woods. But he followed the footprints home through the snow: a red one, a white one, a red one.

If it hadn’t been for the war, Griff wouldn’t have an education. That’s what he says. He would still be on the farm. And then, where would Tony be?

Her father keeps on doing whatever it is he does. He works for an insurance company. Life insurance.

“So, Tony,” her father says without looking up. “What can I do for you?”

“Anthea says to tell you supper is almost ready,” she says.

“Almost ready?” he says. “Or really ready?”

“I don’t know,” says Tony.

“Then you’d better go and see,” says her father.

The supper is sausages, as it often is when Anthea has been out in the afternoon. Sausages and boiled potatoes, and green beans from
a can. The sausages are a little burned, but Tony’s father doesn’t say anything about it. He doesn’t say anything when the food is really good either. Anthea says Tony and her father are two of a kind. Two cold fish.

She brings the serving dishes in from the kitchen, and sits down in her own chair still wearing her apron. Usually she takes it off. “Well!” she says brightly. “And how are we all today?”

“Fine,” says Tony’s father.

“That’s good,” says her mother.

“You look all dolled up,” says her father. “Special occasion?”

“Not likely, is it?” says her mother.

After that there’s a silence, which fills with the sound of chewing. Tony has spent a good deal of her life listening to her parents chew. The noises their mouths make, their teeth grinding together as they bite down, are disconcerting to her. It’s like seeing someone taking their clothes off through a bathroom window when they don’t know you’re there. Her mother eats nervously, in small bites; her father eats ruminatingly. His eyes are fixed on Anthea as if on a distant point in space; hers are narrowed a little, as if aiming.

Nothing moves, although great force is being exerted. Nothing moves yet. Tony feels as if there’s a thick elastic band stretching right through her own head, with one end of it attached to each of them: any tighter and it would snap.

“How was the bridge club?” says her father at last.

“Fine,” says her mother.

“Did you win?”

“No. We came second.”

“Who won, then?”

Her mother thinks for a moment. “Rhonda and Bev.”

“Rhonda was there?” says her father.

“This is not the Spanish Inquisition,” says her mother. “I just said she was.”

“That’s funny,” says her father. “I bumped into her, downtown.”

“Rhonda left early,” says her mother. She sets her fork down carefully on her plate.

“That’s not what she told me,” says her father.

Her mother pushes back her chair and stands up. She crumples her paper napkin and throws it on top of the sausage ends on her plate. “I refuse to discuss this in front of Tony,” she says.

“Discuss what?” says Tony’s father. He keeps on chewing. “Tony, you are excused.”

“Stay where you are,” says Anthea. “That you called me a liar.” Her voice is low and quivering, as if she’s about to cry.

“Did I?” says Tony’s father. He sounds bemused, and curious about the answer.

“Antonia,” says her mother warningly, as if Tony has been about to do something wrong or dangerous. “Couldn’t you have waited until after dessert? I try every day to get her to eat a decent meal.”

“That’s right, make this my fault,” says Tony’s father.

The dessert is rice pudding. It stays in the fridge, because Tony says she doesn’t want any. She doesn’t, she isn’t hungry. She goes up to her bedroom and climbs into her flannelette-sheeted bed, and tries not to hear or imagine what they are saying to each other.

Bulc egdirb
, she murmurs to herself in the darkness. The barbarians gallop across the plains. At their head rides Tnomerf Ynot, her long ragged hair flying in the wind, a sword in each of her hands.
Bulc egdirb!
she calls, urging them forward. It’s a battle cry, and they are on the rampage. They are sweeping all before them, trampling down crops and burning villages. They loot and plunder and smash pianos, and kill children. At night they put up their tents and eat supper with their hands, whole cows roasted on bonfires. They wipe their greasy fingers on their leather clothes. They have no manners at all.

Tnomerf Ynot herself drinks from a skull, with silver handles attached where the ears used to be. She raises the skull high in a
toast to victory, and to the war god of the barbarians:
Ettovag!
she yells, and the hordes answer, cheering:
Ettovag! Ettovag!

In the morning there will be broken glass.

Tony wakes up suddenly in the middle of the night. She gets out of bed, gropes under her night-table until she finds her rabbit-shaped slippers, and tiptoes across the room to the door. It opens easily.

She creeps along the hallway to her parents’ room, but their door is closed and she can’t hear anything. Maybe they are in there, maybe not. Though most likely they are. When she was younger she used to worry – or was it a dream? – that she would come home from school and find only a hole in the ground, and their shoes with feet in them.

She continues to the stairs and goes down them, guiding herself with one hand on the banister. She often gets up like this in the middle of the night; she often makes the rounds, checking for damage.

She gropes her way through the blurry darkness of the hushed living room. Items gleam here and there in the dull glow from the streetlights outside: the mirror over the fireplace, the two china dogs on the mantelpiece. Her eyes feel huge, her slippered feet are soundless on the carpet.

She doesn’t turn on a light until she gets to the kitchen. There’s nothing on the counter or on the floor, nothing broken. She opens the refrigerator door: the rice pudding is in there but it’s intact, so she can’t eat any of it without detection. She makes herself a piece of bread and jam instead. Anthea says that Canadian bread is a disgrace, all air and sawdust, but it tastes fine to Tony. The bread is like many of Anthea’s hatreds – Tony doesn’t get the point. Why is the country too big, or too small? What would “just right” be? What’s wrong with the way she talks, anyways?
Anyway
. She wipes the crumbs up carefully, and goes back to bed.

When she gets up the next morning she doesn’t have a chance to make a pot of tea – her one possible atonement to Anthea for failing to be English – because Anthea is already in the kitchen, cooking breakfast. She has on her daily apron, blue-and-white checks; she’s frying things at the stove. (This is a sporadic activity, for her. Tony often makes her own breakfast, and her own brown-bag school lunch as well.)

Tony slides herself across the padded seat of the breakfast nook. Her father is already in there, reading the paper. Tony pours herself some cold cereal and spoons it into her mouth, with her left hand because nobody’s watching. With her right hand she holds the cereal box close to her eyes.
Sekalf narb. Ytiraluger
, Tony whispers to herself. They never come right out and say “constipation.”
Noitapitsnoc:
a much more satisfactory word.

She has a collection of palindromes –
Live evil, Madam I’m Adam, Able was I ere I saw Elba –
but the phrases she prefers are different backwards: skewed, odd, melodious. They belong to another world, where Tony is at home because she can speak the language.
Reffo eerf! Evas! Faol tun egnaro!
Two barbarians stand on a narrow bridge, hurling insults, daring their enemies to cross.…

“Tony, put that down,” says her father tonelessly. “You shouldn’t read at the table.” He says this every morning, once he’s finished with the paper.

Anthea comes with two full plates, bacon and eggs and toast, setting them down formally as if it’s a restaurant. Tony cuts her egg open and watches the yolk run like yellow glue into her toast. Then she watches her father’s Adam’s apple go up and down while he swallows his coffee. It’s like something stuck in his throat.
Madam I’m Adam’s apple
.

Anthea has a bright enamelled cheerfulness this morning that makes her seem covered with nail polish. She scrapes the cereal bowls into the garbage can, singing: “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile.…”

“You should have been on stage,” says Tony’s father.

“Yes, I should have, shouldn’t I?” says her mother. Her voice is airy and careless.

There’s been nothing out of place, nothing obvious; nevertheless, when Tony comes home from school that afternoon, her mother isn’t there. She isn’t just out, she’s gone. She’s left a wrapped package for Tony, on her bed, and a note in an envelope. As soon as Tony sees the note and the package she turns cold all over. She’s frightened, but somehow she is not surprised.

The note is in the brown ink Anthea favours, on her initialled cream-coloured notepaper. In her curling handwriting with its florid capital letters she has written:

(Tony kept this note, and marvelled over it later, when she was grown up. As an explanation it was of course inadequate. Also, nothing in it was true. To begin with, Tony was not
darling
. The only people who were
darling
, for Anthea, were men, and sometimes women if she was annoyed with them. She didn’t want to take Tony with her: if she’d wanted to she would have done it, because she mostly did what she wanted. She didn’t write Tony lots, she didn’t love her very much, and she didn’t see her soon. And although Tony did get older, she did not understand why.)

At the moment of finding this note, however, Tony wants to believe every word of it, and by an effort of will she does. She even
manages to believe more than is there. She believes her mother will send for her, or else come back. She isn’t sure which.

She opens the package; it’s the same package Anthea was carrying yesterday, in the drizzle, on her way back from the bridge club, which means that all of this was planned out in advance. It isn’t like the times she rushed out of the house, slamming the door, or locked herself in the bathroom and turned on the taps so that the tub overflowed out into the hall and down the stairs and through the ceiling, and Griff had to call the Fire Department to break in. It isn’t a tantrum, or a whim.

Inside the package is a box, and inside the box there’s a dress. It’s navy blue, with a sailor collar piped in white. Since there’s nothing else she can think of to do, Tony tries it on. It’s two sizes too big for her. It looks like a dressing gown.

Tony sits down on the floor and pulls up her knees, and pushes her nose into the skirt of the dress, inhaling its smell, a rough chemical smell of broadcloth and sizing. The smell of newness, the smell of futility, the smell of noiseless grief.

All of this is her own fault, somehow. She hasn’t made enough cups of tea, she’s misread the signals, she has let go of the string or the rope or the chain or whatever it is that’s been attaching her mother to this house, holding her in place, and like an escaped sailboat or a balloon her mother has come loose. She’s out in the blue, she’s blowing away with the wind. She’s lost.

T
his is the story Tony tells to Zenia, as they sit in Christie’s Coffee Shop, their heads leaning together across the table, drinking harsh acidy coffee in the dead of night. It seems a bleak story, as she tells it – starker and more dire than when it was actually happening to her. Possibly because she believes it, by now. Back then it seemed temporary – her motherlessness. Now she knows it was permanent.

“So she buggered off, just like that! Where’d she go?” says Zenia, with interest.

Tony sighs. “She ran off with a man. A life insurance man, from my father’s office. His name was Perry. He was married to someone called Rhonda, from my mother’s bridge club. They went to California.”

“Good choice,” says Zenia, laughing. In Tony’s opinion it was not a good choice. It was a lapse of taste, and of consistency as well: if Anthea had to go anywhere, why didn’t she go to England,
home
as she always called it? Why go to California, where the bread is even airier, the accent even flatter, the grammar even more spurious, than it is here?

So Tony doesn’t think it’s all that funny, and Zenia catches this reservation and changes her face immediately. “Weren’t you furious?”

“No,” says Tony. “I don’t think so.” She searches through herself, patting surfaces, testing pockets. She doesn’t discover any fury.

“I would have been,” says Zenia. “I would have been enraged.”

Tony isn’t sure what it would be like, to be enraged. Possibly too dangerous. Or else a relief.

No rage at the time: only a cold panic, a desolation; and fear, because of what her father would do, or say: would she be blamed?

Tony’s father wasn’t yet back from work. There was nobody else in the house, nobody but Ethel, mopping the floor in the kitchen. Anthea asked her to stay late on the afternoons when she went out so someone would be there when Tony came home from school.

Ethel was a craggy big-boned woman with lines on her face like those on other people’s hands, and dry, wig-like hair. She had six children. Only four of them were still alive – diphtheria had killed the others – but if you asked her how many children she had, she would say six. Anthea used to tell this as if it were a joke, as if Ethel couldn’t count properly. Ethel had a habit of groaning as she worked, and talking to herself: words that sounded like “Oh no, oh no,” and “Pisspisspiss.” As a rule Tony kept out of her way.