The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  Roz was one of the Common Room girls. She had a loud voice, and called Tony Toinette, or, worse, Tonikins; even then she'd wanted to dress Tony up, like a doll. Tony hadn't liked her, at that period. She'd considered her intrusive and crude and smothering.

  The girls in general thought Tony was odd, but they weren't hostile towards her. Instead they made a pet of her. They liked to feed her bits of the contraband food they kept hidden in their rooms - chocolate bars, cookies, potato chips. (Food in the rooms was officially forbidden, because of the cockroaches and mice.) They liked to give her little rumplings of the hair, little squeezes. People find it hard to keep their hands off the small - so like kittens, so like babies. Tiny Tony.

  They would call out to her as she scuttled past them on her way to her room: Tony! Hey! Hey Tone! How's it goin'? Frequently Tony resisted them, or avoided them altogether. But sometimes she would go into the Common Room and drink their sedimentary coffee and nibble their sandy cookies. Then they would get her to write their names for them, backwards and forwards at the same time, one name with each hand; they would crowd around, marvelling at what she herself felt to be self-evident, a minor and spurious magic.

  Tony wasn't the only girl with a specialty. One of them could make a sound like a motorboat starting up, several - including Roz - were in the habit of drawing faces on their stomachs with eyebrow pencils and lipsticks and then performing a belly dance that made the painted mouths open and close grotesquely, and another did a trick involving a glass of water, an empty toilet-paper roll, a broomstick, an aluminum pie pan, and an egg. Tony found these accomplishments much more valid than her own. What she did required no skill, no practice; it was merely like being double-jointed, or being able to wiggle your ears.

  Sometimes they would beg her to sing backwards for them, and if they pestered enough and if Tony was feeling strong, she would oblige. In her off-key, surprisingly raspy voice, the voice of a choir-child with a cold, she would sing:

  Gnilrad ym ho,

  Gnilrad ym ho,

  Gnilrad ym ho,

  Enitn(e)melc,

  Reverof (e)nog dna tsol er(a) uoy,

  Yrros lufdaerd,

  Enitn(e)melc.

  In order to make it scan she would claim that three of the vowels were silent, and that uo was a diphthong. Why not? All languages had such tics, and this was her language; so its rules and its irregularities were at her mercy.

  The other girls found this song hilarious, especially since Tony never cracked a smile, never twinkled, never twitched. She did it straight. The truth was that she didn't find it funny, this song about a woman who had drowned in a ludicrous fashion, who was not mourned, who was ultimately forgotten. She found it sad. Lost and gone forever. Why did they laugh?

  When she wasn't with these girls she didn't think much about them - about their edgy jokes, their group smell of pyjamas and hair gel and damp flesh and talcum, their welcoming chirps and clucks, their indulgent smirks behind her back: droll Tony. Instead she thought about wars.

  Wars, and also battles, which were not the same thing.

  What she liked was to replay decisive battles, to see if they could conceivably have been won by the losing side. She studied the maps and the accounts, the disposition of troops, the technologies. A different choice of ground could have tipped the scales, or a different way of thinking, because thought could be a technology. A strong religious faith, because God too was a military weapon. Or a different weather, a different season. Rain was crucial; snow also. So was luck.

  She had no biases, she was never for one side and against the other. The battles were problems that might have been solved in another way. Some had been unwinnable, no matter what; others not. She kept a battle notebook, with her alternative solutions and the scores. The scores were the men lost. "Lost," they were called, as if they had been forgetfully misplaced somewhere and would be found again later. Really it meant killed. Lost and gone forever. Dreadful sorry, the generals would say afterwards, if they themselves were still alive.

  She was smart enough not to mention this interest of hers to the other girls. If known about, it would have pushed her over the edge: from strange but cute to truly pathological. She wanted to retain the option of cookies.

  There were a few other girls in residence who were like Tony, who snuck past the housecoated bridge players and avoided communal meals. These girls didn't band together; they didn't even speak to one another, apart from nods and hellos. Tony suspected them of having secret preoccupations, secret and risible and unacceptable ambitions, like her own.

  One of these isolates was Charis. Her name wasn't Charis then, but plain Karen. (It changed sometime in the sixties, when there were a lot of nomenclatural mutations.) Charis-Karen was a thin girl; willowy was one of the words that came to mind, like willows, with their swaying branches, their shivering fountains of blonde leaves. The other word was amnesiac.

  Charis meandered: Tony saw her sometimes, on the way to and from classes, wandering slantways across the street, always - it seemed - in danger of being run over. She wore long dirndl skirts with wedges of slip showing beneath them; things fell out of her purses, or rather her bags, which were woven, ravelling, and embroidered. When she strayed into the Common Room it was always to ask if anyone had seen her other glove, her mauve scarf, her fountain pen. Usually no one had.

  One evening when Tony was coming back from the library she saw Charis climbing down the McClung fire escape at the side of the building. She was wearing what looked like her nightgown; at any rate it was long and white and billowy. She reached the bottom platform, hung by her hands for a minute, then dropped the last few yards and began to walk towards Tony. Her feet were bare.

  She was sleepwalking, Tony decided. She wondered what to do. She knew you weren't supposed to wake sleepwalkers, although she had forgotten why. Charis was none of her business, she'd never said more than two words to her, but she felt she ought to follow her to make sure no moving vehicles bumped into her. (If this had been happening now Tony would have included rape among the possibilities: a young woman in a nightgown, outside in the dark, in downtown Toronto, would be heavily at risk. Charis might have been at risk then too, but rape was not among Tony's daily-life categories at that time. Rape went with pillage, and was historical.)

  Charis didn't go far. She walked through several piles of raked-up leaves, from the maples and chestnuts on the McClung lawn; then she turned around and walked back through them again, with Tony sneaking along behind her like a butterfly collector. After that she sat down under one of the trees.

  Tony wondered how long she was going to stay there. It was getting cold, and she wanted to go inside; but she couldn't just leave Charis out on the lawn, sitting under a tree in her nightgown. So she sat down under the tree next to Charis's. The ground was not dry. Tony hoped nobody would see her out there, but luckily it was quite dark and she had on a grey coat. Unlike Charis, who glimmered faintly.

  After a while a voice spoke to Tony out of the darkness. "I'm not asleep," it said. "But thank you anyway."

  Tony was annoyed. She felt she had been led on. She didn't find this behaviour of Charis's - traipsing around in her bare feet and her nightgown - at all mysterious or intriguing. She found it theatrical and bizarre. Roz and the girls in the Common Room might be abrasive, but at least they were solid and uncomplicated, they were known quantities. Charis on the other hand was slippery and translucent and potentially clinging, like soap film or gelatin or the prehensile tentacles of sea anemones. If you touched her, some of her might come off on you. She was contagious, and better left alone.

  19

  None of the McClung Hall girls had anything to do with Zenia. And Zenia would have nothing to do with them. She wouldn't have lived in a women's residence if forced at gunpoint, as she said to Tony the first time she set foot in the place. This dump, she called it.

  (Why had she come? To borrow something. What was it? Tony doesn't wish to remember, but remembers an
yway: it was money. Zenia was always running short. Tony found it embarrassing to be asked, but she would have found it more embarrassing still to refuse. What she finds embarrassing now is that she so naively, so tamely, so obligingly forked over.)

  "Residence is for small people," Zenia said, gazing contemptuously around her, at the institutional paintwork, the shoddy chairs in the Common Room, the comic strips cut out of the newspaper and Scotch-taped to the girls' doors.

  "Right," said Tony, heavily.

  Zenia looked down at Tony, smiling, correcting herself. "Imaginatively small. I don't mean you."

  Tony was relieved, because Zenia's contempt was a work of art. It was so nearly absolute; it was a great privilege to find yourself excluded from it. You felt reprieved, you felt vindicated, you felt grateful; or this is what Tony felt, pattering off to her room, locating her little chequebook, writing out her little cheque. Offering it up. Zenia took it carelessly, folded it twice, and stuck it into her sleeve. Both of them tried to act as if nothing had happened; as if nothing had changed hands, as if nothing at all was owed.

  How she must have hated me for that, thinks Tony.

  So Tony did not meet Zenia among the girls at McClung Hall. She met her instead through her friend West.

  She was not sure, exactly, how West had become her friend. He had more or less materialized. He began by sitting beside her in class and borrowing her Modern History notes because he'd missed the lecture before that one, and then all of a sudden he was a part of her routine.

  West was the only person she could talk to about her interest in war. She hadn't done it yet, but she was working up to it gradually. Such a thing might take years, and he'd only been her friend for a month. For the first two weeks of this period she'd called him Stewart, like his other, his male friends, who would slap him on the shoulder, give him small punches on the arm, and say, Hey Stew, what's new? But then he'd come across a few of the cryptic comments she'd written in the margins of her notes - egabrag tahw, poop dlo gnirob - and she'd had to explain them. He was impressed with her ability to write backwards - That's something, was what he said - and he'd wanted his own name reversed. He claimed to like his new name a lot better.

  The girls in the residence began referring to West as Tony's boyfriend, although they knew he wasn't. They did it to tease. "How's your boyfriend?" Roz would yell, grinning at Tony from the saggy depths of the orange sofa, which sagged even more when it was Roz who was sitting on it. "Hey, Tonikins! How's your secret life? How's Mr. Beanpole? Poor me! The tall guys always go for shrimps!"

  West was tall enough, but walking beside Tony made him look even taller. He lacked the solidity of the word giant; instead he was skinny, loosely strung. His legs and arms were only tentatively attached to the rest of him, and his hands and feet seemed larger than they were because his sleeves and pant legs were always an inch or two short. He was handsome in an angular, an attenuated way, like a medieval stone saint or an ordinarily handsome man who had been stretched like rubber.

  He had shaggy blond hair then, and wore dark, tarnished clothing - a frayed turtleneck, sullied jeans. This was unusual for the time: most men at university still wore ties, or at least jackets. His clothes were a badge of the fringe, they gave him an outlaw's lustre. When Tony and West had coffee together after their Modern History lecture, in one of the student coffee shops they frequented, the girls would stare at West. Then their eyes would move downwards and they would spot Tony, in her kiddie pageboy, her horn-rimmed glasses and kilty skirt and penny loafers. Then they would be puzzled.

  Drinking coffee was about all Tony did with West. As they drank the coffee, they talked; although neither of them was what you would call loquacious. Most of their talk was an easy silence. Sometimes they drank beer, in various dark beer parlours, or rather West did. Tony would sit on the edge of her chair, her toes barely touching the floor, and lick the froth off the top of her draft, her tongue exploring it thoughtfully, like a cat's. Then West would drink the rest of the beer and order two more. Four was his limit. To Tony's relief he never drank any more than that. It was surprising that the beer parlours let Tony in, because she looked so under-age. She was under-age. They must have thought she would never dare to set foot in such places unless she was in reality twenty-two. But she was disguised as herself, one of the most successful disguises. If she'd tried to look older it wouldn't have worked.

  West said nobody took better history notes than Tony. That made her feel useful - even better, indispensable. Praised.

  West was taking Modern History - which wasn't modern history at all, it was simply not Ancient History, which ended with the fall of Rome - because he was interested in folk songs and ballads, and in antique musical instruments. He played the lute, or so he said. Tony had never seen his lute. She'd never been to his room, if in fact he lived in a room. She didn't know where he lived, or what he did in the evenings. She told herself she wasn't interested: theirs was a friendship of the afternoons.

  As time went on, however, she began thinking about the rest of his life. She found herself wondering what he ate for dinner, and even breakfast. She assumed he lived with other men, or boys, because he'd told her about a guy he knew who could set fire to his own farts. He didn't tell her this in a sniggering way, but regretfully somehow. "Imagine having that engraved on your tombstone," he said. Tony recognized the fart-lighting as a variant of the more sedate tricks that went on in McClung Hall with the eggs and lipstick faces, and postulated a men's residence. But she didn't ask.

  When West appeared, he said Hi. When he disappeared, he said See you. Tony never knew when either of these things was going to happen.

  In this fashion they reached November. Tony and West were sitting in a beer parlour called Montgomery's Inn, after one of the skirmishes of the 1837 Rebellion in Upper Canada, which, in Tony's opinion, should have gone the other way, but had been lost through stupidity and panic. Tony was licking the foam off the top of her draft beer as usual, when West said something surprising. He said he was having a party.

  What he actually said was we. And he didn't say party, he said bash.

  Bash was an odd word, coming from West. Tony did not think of West as a violent person, and bash was harsh, a body-blow term. He sounded as if he were quoting someone.

  "A bash?" Tony said uncertainly. "I don't know." She had heard the girls in the residence talking about bashes. They took place at men's fraternities, and frequently ended with people being sick - men mostly, but sometimes girls too, either at the fraternity itself or later, in one of the McClung washrooms.

  "I think you should come," said West, gazing at her benevolently with his blue eyes. "I think you're looking pale."

  "This is the colour I am," said Tony defensively. She was taken aback by the sudden concern for her health on West's part. It seemed too polite; although, in contradiction to his offhand and sullen clothing, he always opened doors. She wasn't used to such concern from him, or from anyone else. She found it alarming, as if he had touched her.

  "Well," said West, "I think you should get out more."

  "Out?" said Tony. She was confused: what did he mean by out?

  "You know," said West. "Meet people."

  There was something almost sly about the way he said this, as if he were concealing a more devious purpose. It occurred to her that he might be trying to set her up with some man, out of misplaced solicitude, the way Roz might. Toinette! There's someone I want you to meet! Roz would say, and Tony would sidestep and evade.

  Now she said, "But I wouldn't know anyone there."

  "You'd know me," said West. "And you could meet the others."

  Tony didn't say she did not want to meet any more people. It would have sounded too strange. Instead she let West write down the address for her, on a corner of paper torn from his Rise of the Renaissance textbook. He didn't say he would pick her up, so at least it wasn't a date. Tony couldn't have handled a date with anyone, much less West. She couldn't have handled the impli
cations, or the hope. Hope of that kind might unbalance her. She didn't want to get involved, with anyone, underlined, full stop.

  The bash is up two flights of stairs, in a narrow asphalt-shingled building far downtown that forms part of a row of cut-price and army surplus stores, and fronts on the railway tracks. The stairs are steep; Tony climbs them one step at a time, helping herself up by the banister. The door at the top is open; smoke and noise are billowing out through the doorway. Tony wonders whether to knock, decides against it on the grounds that no one would hear her, and goes in.

  Right away she wishes she hadn't, because the room is thick with people, and they are the kind of people who, taken en masse, are most likely to frighten her, or at least make her very uneasy. Most of the women have straight hair, worn long in a ballerina ponytail or wound into austere buns. They have black stockings and black skirts and black tops, and no lipstick; their eyes are heavily outlined. Some of the men have beards. They wear the same kind of clothes that West does - work shirts, turtlenecks, jean jackets - but they lack his candour, his sweetness, his air of hairlessness. Instead they are compacted, matted, dense with supercharged matter. They hulk, they loom, they bristle with static energy.

  The men are talking mostly to one another. The women aren't talking at all. They're leaning against the wall, or standing with their arms folded under their breasts, a cigarette carelessly in one hand, dropping ashes on the floor, looking as if they're bored and about to leave for some other, better party; or they're gazing expressionlessly at the men, or staring past their shoulders as if searching intently for someone else, some other man, a more important one.

  A couple of the women glance over at Tony as she comes in, then shift their eyes quickly away. Tony is wearing the sort of clothes she usually wears, a dark green corduroy jumper with a white blouse under it, a green velvet hairband, and knee socks and brown loafers. She has kept a lot of her clothes from high school, because they still fit. She knows at this moment that she will have to acquire other clothes. But she is not sure how.