The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  A blue-suited man who identified himself as Zenia's lawyer - the same man, therefore, who had called Tony to tell her about the service - read out a short tribute to Zenia's good qualities, among which courage was listed foremost, though Tony didn't think the manner of Zenia's death had been particularly courageous. Zenia had been blown up during some terrorist rampage or other, in Lebanon; she hadn't been a target, she'd just been in the way. An innocent bystander, said the lawyer. Tony was sceptical about both words: innocent was never Zenia's favourite adjective for herself, and bystanding was not her typical activity. But the lawyer did not say what she'd really been doing there, on that unnamed street in Beirut. Instead he said she would be long remembered.

  "Damn right she will be," Roz whispered to Tony. "And by courage he meant big tits." Tony felt this was tasteless, as the size of Zenia's tits was surely no longer an issue. In her opinion Roz sometimes went too far.

  Zenia herself was present only in spirit, said the lawyer, and also in the form of her ashes, which they would now proceed to the Mount Pleasant Cemetery to inter. He actually said inter. It had been Zenia's wish, as stated in her will, that the ashes should be interred under a tree.

  Interred was very unlike Zenia. So was the tree. In fact, it seemed unlike Zenia to have made a will, or to have had a lawyer at all. But you never knew, people changed. Why, for instance, had Zenia put the three of them on the list of people to be informed in the event of her death? Was it remorse? Or was it some kind of last laugh? If so, Tony failed to get the point.

  The lawyer had been no help: all he had was the list of names, or so he'd claimed. Tony could hardly expect him to explain Zenia to her. If anything it should be the other way around. "Weren't you her friend?" he'd said, accusingly.

  "Yes," said Tony. "But that was so long ago."

  "Zenia had an excellent memory," said the lawyer, and sighed. Tony had heard sighs like that before.

  It was Roz who insisted they go on to the cemetery after the service. She drove them in her car, her large one. "I want to see where they're putting her, so I can walk the dogs there," she said. "I'll train them to widdle on the tree."

  "It's not the tree's fault," said Charis indignantly. "You're being uncharitable."

  Roz laughed. "Right, sweetie! I'm doing it for you!"

  "Roz, you don't have any dogs," said Tony. "I wonder what kind of a tree it is."

  "I'll get some, just for this," said Roz.

  "Mulberry," said Charis. "It was in the vestibule, with a label on."

  "I don't see how it can possibly grow," said Tony. "It's too cold."

  "It'll grow," said Charis, "as long as the buds aren't out yet."

  "I hope it gets blight," said Roz. "No, really! She doesn't deserve a tree."

  Zenia's ashes were in a sealed metal canister, like a small landmine. Tony was familiar with such canisters, and they depressed her. They did not have the grandeur of coffins. She thought of the people inside them as having been condensed, like condensed milk.

  She thought there would be some sprinkling involved, of what the lawyer had referred to as the cremains, but the canister was not opened up and the ashes weren't sprinkled. (Afterwards - after the service, and after her October-morning egg-cooking as well - Tony had occasion to wonder what had really been in there. Sand, probably, or something disgusting, like dog turds or used condoms. That would have been the sort of gesture Zenia would have made, once, when Tony first knew her.)

  They stood around in the fine cold drizzle while the canister was planted, and the mulberry tree on top of it. Earth was tamped down. There were no final words said, no words of dismissal. The drizzle began to freeze, and the men in their overcoats hesitated, then wandered off towards their parked cars.

  "I have the uneasy feeling that we've left something out," said Tony, as they walked away.

  "Well, there wasn't any singing," said Charis.

  "So, like what?" said Roz. "A stake through her heart?"

  "Maybe what Tony meant was that she was a fellow human being," said Charis.

  "Fellow human being, my fat fanny," said Roz. "If she was a fellow human being, I'm the Queen of England."

  What Tony meant was less benevolent. She was thinking that for thousands of years, when people died - especially powerful people, especially people who were feared - the survivors had gone to a lot of trouble. They'd slit the throats of their best horses, they'd buried slaves and favourite wives alive, they'd poured blood into the earth. It hadn't been mourning, it had been appeasement. They'd wanted to show their good will, however spurious, because they'd known the spirit of the dead one would be envious of them for still being alive.

  Maybe I should have sent flowers, thought Tony. But flowers wouldn't have been enough, for Zenia. She would have sneered at flowers. What was needed was a bowl of blood. A bowl of blood, a bowl of pain, some death. Then maybe she would stay buried.

  Tony didn't tell West about the memorial service. He might have gone to it, and fallen to pieces. Or else he might not have gone and then felt guilty, or been upset that she'd attended without him. He knew Zenia was dead though, he'd seen it in the paper: a small oblong, hidden in the middle. Canadian Killed in Terrorist Blast. When they'd been young, blast had been a name for a party. He hadn't said anything to Tony, but she'd found that page with the piece cut out of it. They had a tacit agreement never to mention Zenia.

  Tony presents the eggs in two ceramic eggcups shaped like chickens that she picked up in France a few years ago. The French liked to make dishes in the shapes of the things that were going to be served in them; when it came to eating they rarely beat about the bush. Their menus read like a vegetarian's nightmare - hearts of these, brains of that. Tony appreciates this directness. She has a French fish platter too, in the shape of a fish.

  Shopping in general is not her thing, but she has a weakness for souvenirs. She bought these eggcups near the site of the battlefield where General Marius of Rome wiped out a hundred thousand Teutones - or two hundred thousand, depending on who was doing the chronicling - a century before the birth of Christ. By dangling a small advance contingent of his forces in front of the enemy like bait, he'd decoyed them to his chosen slaughtering-ground. After the battle, three hundred thousand Teutones were sold into slavery, and ninety thousand others may or may not have been thrown into a pit on Mont Sainte Victoire at the urging of a possibly Syrian prophetess, whose name may or may not have been Martha. She was said to have worn purple robes.

  This clothing detail has been passed down through the centuries with firm authority, despite the vagueness of other parts of the story. The battle itself, however, definitely took place. Tony has inspected the terrain: a flat plain, hemmed in on three sides by mountains. A bad place to fight if you were on the defensive. Pourrieres is the name of the nearby town; it's still called that, after the smell of the rotting corpses.

  Tony does not mention (and has never mentioned) this eggcup connection to West. He would be dismayed, not so much by the rotting Teutones as by her. She once remarked to him that she could understand those kings of old who used to have their enemies' skulls made into wine cups. This was a mistake: West likes to think of her as kind and beneficent. And forgiving, of course.

  Tony has made coffee, grinding the beans herself; she serves it with cream, in defiance of cholesterol. Sooner or later, as their arteries fill with sludge, they will have to give up cream, but not just yet. West sits eating his egg; he's absorbed in it, like a happy child. The bright primary colours - the red cups, the yellow tablecloth, the orange plates - give the kitchen a playground air. His grey hair seems a fluke, some unaccountable transformation that's been worked upon him overnight. When she first knew him he was blond.

  "Good egg," he says. Small things like good eggs delight him, small things like bad eggs depress him. He's easy to please, but difficult to protect.

  West, Tony repeats to herself. She says his name from time to time, silently, like a charm. He didn't use to be West.
Once - thirty? thirty-two years ago? - he was Stewart, until he told her how much he hated being called Stew; so she reversed him, and he's been West ever since. She cheated a little, though: strictly speaking, he should have been Wets. But that's what happens when you love someone, thinks Tony. You cheat a little.

  "What's on your agenda for today?" says West.

  "Want some more toast?" says Tony. He nods and she gets up to tend the toaster, pausing to kiss the top of his head, inhaling his familiar scent of scalp and shampoo. His hair up there is thinning: soon he'll have a tonsure, like a monk's. For the moment she's taller than he is: it isn't often she gets such a bird's-eye view.

  There's no need for West to be told who she's having lunch with. He doesn't like Roz and Charis. They make him nervous. He feels - rightly - that they know too much about him.

  "Nothing very exciting," she says.

  4

  After breakfast West goes up to his third-floor study to work, and Tony changes out of her dressing gown, into jeans and a cotton pullover, and marks more papers. From upstairs she can hear a rhythmical thumping, punctuated by what sounds like a mixed chorus of mating hyenas, cows being hit with sledgehammers, and tropical birds in pain.

  West is a musicologist. Some of what he does is traditional - influences, variants, derivations - but he's also involved in one of those cross-disciplinary projects that have become so popular lately. He's mixed up with a bunch of neurophysiologists from the medical school; together they're studying the effects of music on the human brain - different kinds of music, and different kinds of noises, because some of the things West comes up with can hardly be thought of as music. They want to know which part of the brain is listening, and especially which half of it. They think this information may be useful to stroke victims, and to people who have lost parts of their brains in car accidents. They wire people's brains up, play the music - or noises - and watch the results on a coloured computer screen.

  West is very excited about all of this. He says it's become clear to him that the brain itself is a musical instrument, that you can actually compose music on it, on someone else's brain; or you could, if you had free rein. Tony finds this idea distressing - what if the scientists want to play something that the person with the brain doesn't want to hear? West says it's only theoretical.

  But he has a strong urge to wire up Tony, because of her left-handedness. Handedness is one of the things they study. They want to attach electrodes to Tony's head and then have her play the piano, because the piano is two-handed and the hands both work at the same time, but on different notations. Tony has avoided this so far by saying she's forgotten how to play, which is mostly true; but also she doesn't want West peering in at anything that might be going on in her brain.

  She finishes the set of papers and goes back to the bedroom to change for lunch. She looks into her closet: there isn't a lot of choice, and no matter what she wears, Roz will narrow her eyes at it and suggest they go shopping. Roz thinks Tony goes in for too much floral-wallpaper print, although Tony has carefully explained that it's camouflage. Anyway, the black leather suit Roz once tried to convince her was her real self just made her look like an avant-garde Italian umbrella stand.

  She finally settles on a forest green rayon outfit with small white polka dots that she bought in the children's section at Eaton's. She buys quite a few of her clothes there. Why not? They fit, and there's less tax; and, as Roz is never tired of remarking, Tony is a miser, especially when it comes to clothes. She would much rather save the money and spend it on airplane tickets for visits to the sites of battles.

  On these pilgrimages she collects relics: a flower from each site. Or a weed rather, because what she picks are common things - daisies, clovers, poppies. Sentimentalities of this kind seem reserved, in her, for people she does not know. She presses the flowers between the pages of the Bibles left by proselytizing sects in the dresser drawers of the cheap hotels and pensions where she stays. If there's no Bible she flattens them under ashtrays. There are always ashtrays.

  Then, when she gets home, she tapes them into her scrapbooks, in alphabetical order: Agincourt. Austerlitz. Bunker Hill. Carcassonne. Dunkirk. She doesn't take sides: all battles are battles, all contain bravery, all involve death. She doesn't talk about this practice of hers to her colleagues, because none of them would understand why she does it. She isn't even sure herself. She isn't sure what she's really collecting, or in memory of what.

  In the bathroom she adjusts her face. Powder on the nose, but no lipstick. Lipstick is alarming on her, extra, like those red plastic mouths children stick onto potatoes. Comb through the hair. She gets her hair cut in Chinatown because they don't charge the earth, and they know how to do straight black short hair with a few straggly bangs over the forehead, the same every time. A pixie cut, it used to be called. With her big glasses and her big eyes behind them and her too-skinny neck, the effect is street urchin crossed with newly hatched bird. She still has good skin, good enough; it offsets the grey strands. She looks like a very young old person, or a very old young person; but then, she's looked that way ever since she was two.

  She bundles the term papers into her outsized canvas tote bag and runs up the stairs to wave goodbye to West. Headwinds, says the sign on his study door, and that's what his answering machine says too - Third floor, Headwinds. It's what he'd call his high-tech recording studio if he had one. West has his earphones on now, he's hooked up to his tape deck and his synthesizer, but he sees her and waves back. She leaves by the front door, locking it behind her. She's always careful about the door. She doesn't want any drug addicts getting in while she's away, and bothering West.

  The wooden porch needs repairing; there's a rotting board. She'll have it fixed next spring, she promises herself; it will take at least that long to get such a thing organized. Someone has tucked a circular under her doormat: another tool sale. Tony wonders who buys all these tools - all these circular saws, cordless drills, rasps, and screwdrivers - and what they do with them really. Maybe tools are substitute weapons; maybe they're what men go in for when they aren't waging war. West is not the tool-using type, though: the only hammer in the house belongs to Tony, and for anything other than simple nail-pounding she looks in the Yellow Pages. Why risk your life?

  There's another tool circular cluttering the tiny front lawn, which is weed-ridden and needs cutting. The lawn is a neighbourhood blot. Tony knows this, and is embarrassed by it from time to time, and vows to have the grass dug up and replaced with some colourful but hardy shrubs, or else gravel. She has never seen the point of lawns. Given the choice she'd prefer a moat, with a drawbridge, and crocodiles optional.

  Charis keeps making vague mewing noises about re-doing Tony's front lawn for her, transforming it into a miracle of bloom, but Tony has fended her off. Charis would make a garden like Tony's study drapes, which she calls "nourishing" - rampant blossoms, twining vines, blatant seed pods - and it would be too much for Tony. She's seen what happened to the strip of ground beside Roz's back walk when Roz gave in to similar pleas. Because Charis has done it, Roz can't possibly have it re-done, so now there's a little plot of Roz's yard that will be forever Charis.

  At the street corner Tony turns to look back at her house, as she often does, admiring it. Even after twenty years it still seems like a mirage that she should own such a house, or any house at all. The house is brick, late Victorian, tall and narrow, with green fish-scale shingles on its upper third. Her study window looks out from the fake tower on the left: the Victorians loved to think they were living in castles. It's a large house, larger than it looks from the street. A solid house, reassuring; a fort, a bastion, a keep. Inside it is West, creating aural mayhem, safe from harm. When she bought it, back when the neighbourhood was more run down and the prices were low, she didn't expect anyone would ever live in it except her.

  She goes down the subway steps, drops her token into the turnstile, boards the train, and sits on the plastic seat, with her tote bag
on her knees like a visiting nurse. The car isn't crowded, so there are no heads of tall people blocking her view and she can read the ads. Hcnurc! says a chocolate bar. Pleh uoy nac? pleads the Red Cross. Elas! Elas! If she were to say these words out loud people would think it was another language. It is another language, an archaic language, a language she knows well. She could speak it in her sleep, and sometimes does.

  If the fundamentalists were to catch her at it, they'd accuse her of Satan worship. They play popular songs in reverse, claiming to find blasphemies hidden in them; they think you can invoke the Devil by hanging the cross upside down or by saying the Lord's Prayer backwards. All nonsense. Evil doesn't require such invocations, such childish and stagy rituals. Nothing so complicated.

  Tony's other language isn't evil, however. It's dangerous only to her. It's her seam, it's where she's sewn together, it's where she could split apart. Nevertheless, she still indulges in it. A risky nostalgia. Aiglatson. (A Viking chieftain of the Dark Ages? An upmarket laxative?)

  She gets off at St. George and takes the Bedford Road exit, makes it past the handout men and the street flower-seller and the boy playing the flute on the corner, avoids getting run over while she crosses at the green light, and heads along past Varsity Stadium and then across the grassy circle of the main campus. Her office is down one of the dingy old side streets and around the corner, in a building called McClung Hall.

  McClung Hall is a solemn block of red brick, darkened to purple-brown by weather and soot. She lived in it once, as a student, for six years straight, when it was still a women's residence. She was told it was named after somebody or other who'd helped get the vote for women, but she didn't much care about that. Nobody did, back then.

  Tony's first memories of the place are of an ancient fire-trap, overheated but drafty, with creaking floors and a lot of worn-out but stolid wood in it: massive banisters, heavy window seats, thickly panelled doors. It smelled - it still smells - like a damp pantry suffering from dry rot, with sprouting potatoes forgotten in it. At the time it also had a lingering, queasy odour that filtered up from the dining room: lukewarm cabbage, leftover scrambled eggs, burnt grease. She used to duck the meals there and smuggle bread and apples up to her room.