The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  The Comparative Religion people got hold of it in the seventies, but since then it's been turned into makeshift offices for the overflow from various worthy but impoverished departments - people who are thought to use mostly their minds rather than pieces of glossy equipment, and who don't contribute much to modern industry, and who are therefore considered to be naturally adapted to seediness. Philosophy has established a bridgehead on the ground floor, Modern History has claimed the second. Despite some halfhearted attempts at repainting (already in the past, already fading), McClung is still the same dour, circumspect building it always was, virtuous as cold oatmeal and keeping itself to itself.

  Tony doesn't mind its shabbiness. Even as a student she liked it here - compared, that is, with where she could have been. A rented room, an anonymous studio apartment. Some of the other, more blase students called it McFungus, a name that has been passed down over the years, but for Tony it was a haven, and she remains grateful.

  Her own office is on the second floor, just a couple of doors down from her old room. Her old room itself has become the coffee room, a wilfully cheerless place with a chipped pressboard table, several mismatched straight chairs, and a yellowing Amnesty poster of a man tied up in barbed wire and stuck full of bent nails. There's a drip coffee machine that spits and dribbles, and a rack where they are all supposed to keep their environmentally friendly washable mugs, with their initials painted on them so they won't get one another's gum diseases. Tony has gone to some trouble with her own mug. She's used red nail polish, on black: it says Gnissapsert On. People occasionally use one another's mugs, by mistake or from laziness, but nobody uses hers.

  She pauses at the coffee room, where two of her colleagues, both dressed in fleecy jogging suits, are having milk and cookies. Dr. Ackroyd, the eighteenth-century agriculture expert, and Dr. Rose Pimlott, the social historian and Canadianist, who by any other name would still be a pain in the butt. She wonders if Rose Pimlott and Bob Ackroyd are having a thing, as Roz would say. They've been putting their heads together quite frequently in recent weeks. But most likely it's just some palace plot. The whole department is like a Renaissance court: whisperings, gangings-up, petty treacheries, snits, and umbrage. Tony tries to stay out of it but succeeds only sometimes. She has no particular allies and is therefore suspected by all.

  Especially by Rose. Tony continues to resent the fact that, two years ago, Rose accused one of Tony's graduate courses of being Eurocentric.

  "Of course it's Eurocentric!" Tony said. "What do you expect in a course called Merovingian Siege Strategy?"

  "I think," said Rose Pimlott, attempting to salvage her position, "that you might teach the course from the point of view of the victims. Instead of marginalizing them."

  "Which victims?" said Tony. "They were all victims! They took turns! Actually, they took turns trying to avoid being the victims. That's the whole point about war!"

  What Dr. Rose Pimlott knows about war you could stick in your ear. But her ignorance is willed: mainly she just wants war to get out of her way and stop being such a nuisance. "Why do you like it?" she said to Tony recently, wrinkling her nose as if talking about snot or farts: something minor and disgusting, and best concealed.

  "Do you ask AIDS researchers why they like AIDS?" said Tony. "War is there. It's not going away soon. It's not that I like it. I want to see why so many other people like it. I want to see how it works." But Rose Pimlott would rather not look, she'd rather let others dig up the mass graves. She might break a nail.

  Tony considers telling Rose that Laura Secord, whose portrait on the old chocolate boxes that bore her name had turned out, under X-ray, to be that of a man in a dress, really had been a man in a dress. No woman, she would tell Rose, could possibly have shown such aggressiveness, or - if you like - such courage. That would stick Rose on the horns of a dilemma! She'd have to maintain that women could be just as good at war as men were, and therefore just as bad, or else that they were all by nature lily-livered sissies. Tony is filled with curiosity to see which way Rose would jump. But there isn't time today.

  She nods in at Rose and Bob, and they look at her askance, which is the peer-group look she's used to. Male historians think she's invading their territory, and should leave their spears, arrows, catapults, lances, swords, guns, planes, and bombs alone. They think she should be writing social history, such as who ate what when, or Life in the Feudal Family. Female historians, of whom there are not many, think the same thing but for different reasons. They think she ought to be studying birth; not death, and certainly not battle plans. Not routs and debacles, not carnages, not slaughters. They think she's letting women down.

  On the whole she fares better with the men, if they can work their way past the awkward preliminaries; if they can avoid calling her "little lady," or saying they weren't expecting her to be so feminine, by which they mean short. Though only the most doddering ones do that any more.

  If she weren't so tiny, though, she'd never get away with it. If she were six feet tall and built like a blockhouse; if she had hips. Then she'd be threatening, then she'd be an Amazon. It's the incongruity that grants her permission. A breath would blow you away, they beam down at her silently. You wish, thinks Tony, smiling up. Many have blown.

  She unlocks her office door, then locks it behind her to disguise the fact that she's in there. It's not her office hours but the students take advantage. They can smell her out, like sniffer dogs; they'll seize any opportunity to suck up to her or whine, or attempt to impress her, or foist upon her their versions of sulky defiance. I'm just a human being, Tony wants to say to them. But of course she isn't. She's a human being with power. There isn't much of it, but it's power all the same.

  A month or so ago one of them - large, leather-jacketed, red-eyed, second-year undergraduate survey course - stuck a clasp knife into the middle of her desk.

  "I need an A!" he shouted. Tony was both frightened by him and angry. Kill me and you won't even pass! she wanted to shout back. But he might have been on something. Doped up or crazy, or both, or imitating those other berserk, professor-slaughtering students he'd seen on the news. Luckily it was only a knife.

  "I appreciate your directness," she said to him. "Now, why don't you sit down, in that chair right over there, and we can discuss it?"

  "Thank God for Psychiatric Services," she said to Roz on the phone, after he'd left. "But what gets into them?"

  "Listen, sweetie," said Roz. "There's just one thing I want you to remember. You know those chemicals women have in them, when they've got PMS? Well, men have the very same chemicals in them all the time."

  Maybe it's true, thinks Tony. Otherwise, where would sergeants come from?

  Tony's office is large, larger than it would be in a modern building, with the standard-issue scratched desk, the standard sawdusty bulletin board, the standard dust-laden venetian blinds. Generations of thumbtacks have woodwormed the pale green paint; leftover shards of cellophane tape glint here and there, like mica in a cave. Tony's second-best word processor is on the desk - it's so slow and outmoded she hardly cares if anyone steals it - and in her bookcase are a few dependable volumes, which she lends out to students sometimes: Creasy's Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, a necessary chestnut; Liddell Hart; Churchill, of course; The Fatal Decisions; and, one of her own favourites, Keegan's The Face of Battle.

  On one wall there's a bad reproduction of Benjamin West's "The Death of Wolfe," a lugubrious picture in Tony's opinion, Wolfe white as a codfish belly, with his eyes rolled piously upwards and many necrophiliac voyeurs in fancy dress grouped around him. Tony keeps it in her office as a reminder, both to herself and to her students, of the vainglory and martyrologizing to which those in her profession are occasionally prone. Beside him is Napoleon, thoughtfully crossing the Alps.

  On the opposite wall she's hung an amateurish pen-and-ink cartoon entitled "Wolfe Taking a Leak." The general is shown turned away from the viewer, with only his weak-chinned profile show
ing. He's wearing a peevish expression, and the balloon coming out of his mouth says, "Fuck These Buttons." This cartoon was drawn by one of her students, two years ago, and was presented to her by the whole class at the end of term. As a rule her students are mostly men: not a lot of women find themselves deeply attracted to such courses as Late Medieval Tactical Blunders or Military History as Artefact, which is what her graduate courses are entitled, this time around.

  As she'd unwrapped the package, they'd all eyed her to see how she'd respond to the word fuck. Men of their age seem to think that women of her age have never heard such words before. She finds this touching. She has to make a conscious effort to stop herself from calling her students "my boys." If she doesn't watch it, she'll turn into a hearty, jocular den mother; or worse, a knowing, whimsical old biddy. She'll start winking, and pinching cheeks.

  The cartoon itself is in honour of her lecture on the technology of fly-front fastenings, which - she's heard - has been dubbed "Tender Buttons," and which usually attracts an overflow crowd. Writers on war - she begins - have tended to concentrate on the kings and the generals, on their decisions, on their strategy, and have overlooked more lowly, but equally important factors, which can, and have, put the actual soldiers - those on the sharp edge - at risk. Disease-carrying lice and fleas, for instance. Faulty boots. Mud. Germs. Undershirts. And fly-front fastenings. The drawstring, the overlap, the buttoned flap, the zipper, have all played their part in military history through the ages; not to mention the kilt, for which, from a certain point of view, there is much to be said. Don't laugh, she tells them. Instead, picture yourself on the battlefield, with nature calling, as it frequently does in times of stress. Now picture yourselves trying to undo these buttons.

  She holds up a sketch of the buttons in question, a nineteenth-century set that would surely have required at least ten fingers and ten minutes each.

  Now picture a sniper. Less funny?

  An army marches on its stomach, but also on its fly-front fastenings. Not that the zipper - although improving the speed of opening - has been entirely blameless. Why not? Use your heads - zippers get stuck. And they're noisy! And men have developed the dangerous habit of striking matches on them. In the dark! You might as well set a flare.

  Many have been the crimes committed - she continues - on helpless enlisted men by the designers of military clothing. How many British soldiers died needlessly because of the redness of their uniforms? And don't think that sort of thoughtlessness went out with the nineteenth century. Mussolini's criminal failure to provide shoes - shoes! - for his own troops was just one case in point. And, in Tony's opinion, whoever dreamed up those nylon pants for North Korea should have been court-martialled. You could hear the legs whisking together a mile away. And the sleeping bags - they rustled too, and you couldn't undo them easily from inside, and they froze shut! During night raids by the enemy, those men got butchered like kittens in a sack.

  Murder by designer! She can get quite worked up about it.

  All of which, in a more sedate and footnoted form, will be good for at least one chapter of her book-in-progress: Deadly Vestments: A History of Inept Military Couture.

  Charis says it's bad for Tony to spend so much of her time on something as negative as war. She says it's carcinogenic.

  Tony searches through her accordion file for the class list, locates it under B, for Bureaucracy, and enters the grade for each paper in the little square provided. When she's finished she drops the marked papers into the heavy manila envelope thumbtacked to the outside of her door, where the students can pick them up later today, as promised. Then she continues to the end of the hall, checks for mail in the squalid cubbyhole of a departmental office where there is sometimes a secretary, finds nothing but a renewal notice for Jane's Defence Weekly and her latest copy of Big Guns, and tucks both into her bag.

  Next she makes a rest stop in the overheated women's washroom, which smells of liquid soap, chlorine, and partly digested onions. One of the three toilets is clogged, as is its long-standing habit, and the other two stalls lack toilet paper. There's some hidden in the non-functioning one, however, so Tony requisitions it. On the wall of the cubicle she prefers - the one next to the pebble-glass window - someone has scratched a new message, above Herstory Not History and Hersterectomy Not Hysterectomy: FEMINIST DECONSTRUCTION SUCKS. The sub-text of this, as Tony well knows, is that there's a move afoot to have McClung Hall declared a historic building and turned over to Women's Studies. HISTORIC NOT HERSTORIC, someone has added off to the side. Omens of a coming tussle Tony hopes to avoid.

  She leaves a note on the secretary's desk: The Toilet is Clogged. Thank you. Antonia Fremont. She does not add, Again. There is no need to be unpleasant. Nothing will come of this note, but she has done her duty. Then she hurries out of the building and back to the subway, and heads south.

  5

  The lunch is at the Toxique, so Tony gets off at Osgoode and walks west along Queen Street, past Dragon Lady Comics, past the Queen Mother Cafe, past the BamBoo Club with its hot graphics. She could wait for a streetcar, but in streetcar crowds she tends to get squashed, and sometimes pinched. She's done enough shirt-button and belt-buckle surveys to last her for a while, so she chooses the more random hazards of the sidewalk. She's not very late, anyway; no later than Roz is, always.

  She keeps to the outside of the sidewalk, away from the walls and the ragged figures who lean against them. Ostensibly they want small change, but Tony sees them in a more sinister light. They are spies, scouting the territory before a mass invasion; or else they are refugees, the walking wounded, in retreat before the coming onslaught. Either way she steers clear. Desperate people alarm her, she grew up with two of them. They'll hit out, they'll grab at anything.

  This part of Queen has settled down a little. Several years ago it was wilder, more risky, but the rents have gone up and a lot of the second-hand bookstores and scruffier artists are gone. The mix is still fringe fashion, Eastern European deli, wholesale office furniture, country-and-western beer drinkers' bars; but there are brightly lit doughnut shops now, trendy nightspots, clothes with meaningful labels.

  The Recession however is deepening. There are more buildings for sale; there are more closed-out boutiques, and saleswomen lurk in the doorways of those still open, aiming defeated, pleading stares at the passers-by, their eyes filled with baffled rage. Prices Slashed, say the windows: that would have been unheard of at this time last year, two months before Christmas. The glistering dresses on the blank-faced or headless mannequins are no longer what they seemed, the incarnation of desire. Instead they look like party trash. Crumpled paper napkins, the rubble left by rowdy crowds or looting armies. Although nobody saw them or could say for certain who they were, the Goths and the Vandals have been through.

  So thinks Tony, who could never have worn those dresses anyway. They are for women with long legs, long torsos, long graceful arms. "You're not short," Roz tells her. "You're petite. Listen, for a waist like that I'd kill."

  "But I'm the same thickness all the way down," says Tony.

  "So, what we need is a blender," says Roz. "We'll put in your waist and my thighs, and we'll split the difference. Fine by you?"

  If they had been younger such conversations might have pointed to serious dissatisfactions with their own bodies, serious longings. By this time they're just repertoire. More or less.

  There's Roz now, waving to her outside the Toxique. Tony comes up to her and Roz stoops, and Tony stretches up her face, and they kiss the air on both sides of each other's heads, as has lately become the fashion in Toronto, or in certain layers of it. Roz parodies the ritual by sucking in her cheeks so her mouth is a fish-mouth, and crossing her eyes. "Pretentious? Moi?" she says. Tony smiles, and they go in together.

  The Toxique is one of their favourite places: not too expensive, and with a buzz; though it's a little arch, a little grubby. Plates arrive with strange textures sticking to their undersides, the waiters may have
eye shadow or nose rings, the waitresses tend to wear fluorescent leg-warmers and leather mini-shorts. There's a long smoked-glass mirror along one side, salvaged from some wrecked hotel. Posters of out-of-date alternative-theatre events are glued to the walls, and people with pallid skin and chains hanging from their sombre, metal-studded clothing slouch through to the off-limits back rooms or confer together on the splintering stairs that lead down to the toilets. The Toxique specials are a chevre-and-roasted-pepper sandwich, a Newfoundland cod-cake, and a sometimes mucilaginous giant salad with a lot of walnuts and shredded roots in it. There's baklava and tiramisu, and strong, addictive espresso.

  They don't go there at night, of course, when the rock groups and the high decibels take over. But it's good for lunch. It cheers them up. It makes them feel younger, and more daring, than they are.

  Charis is already there, sitting in the corner at a red formica table with gold sprinkles baked into it and aluminum legs and trim, which is either authentic fifties or else a reproduction. She's got them a bottle of white wine already, and a bottle of Evian water. She sees them and smiles, and airy kisses go round the table.

  Today Charis is wearing a sagging mauve cotton jersey dress, with a fuzzy grey cardigan over top and an orange-and-aqua scarf with a design of meadow flowers draped around her neck. Her long straight hair is grey-blonde and parted in the middle; she has her reading glasses stuck up on top of her head. Her peach lipstick could be her real lips. She resembles a slightly faded advertisement for herbal shampoo - healthful, but verging on the antique. What Ophelia would have looked like if she'd lived, or the Virgin Mary when middle-aged - earnest and distracted, and with an inner light. It's the inner light that gets her in trouble.