The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  Tony feels a rush of longing for whatever it was that existed once between herself and her mother, in the photo album; but she feels annoyance as well, because the name itself is a trick. She used to think a guppy was something warm and soft, like a puppy, and she was hurt and insulted when she discovered it was a fish.

  So she doesn't answer her mother. She sits on the piano bench, waiting to see what Anthea will do next.

  "Is he here?" she says. She must know the answer: Tony's father wouldn't have left Tony in the house alone.

  "Yes," says Tony. Her father is in his study at the back of the house. He's been there all along. He must have heard the silence, when Tony wasn't playing. He doesn't care whether Tony practises the piano or not. The piano, he says, is her mother's bright idea.

  22

  Tony's mother cooks supper as usual. She doesn't take off her good bridge club dress, but puts her apron over it, her best apron, the white one with ruffles over the shoulders. She has re-done her lipstick: her mouth shines like a waxed apple. Tony sits on the kitchen stool, watching her, until Anthea tells her to stop goggling: if she wants to be useful she can set the table. Then she can go and dig up her father. Anthea often puts it this way: dig up, as if he's a potato. Sometimes she says root out.

  Tony has no particular desire to be useful, but she's relieved that her mother is acting more normally. She deals out the plates and then the forks, knives, and spoons, a left right right, a left right right, and then she goes into her father's study, knocking first, and sits down cross-legged on the floor. She can always go in there as long as she keeps quiet.

  Her father is working at his desk. He has his desk lamp on, with its green shade, so his face has a greenish tinge. He's a large man with small neat handwriting that looks as if it's been done by fastidious mice. Beside it, Tony's own writing is that of a three-fingered giant. His long arrow nose is pointing straight down at the papers he's working on; his yellowy-grey hair is combed back, and the nose and the hair together make him seem as if he's flying through a strong headwind, hurtling down towards the target of his paper. He's frowning, as if braced for the impact. Tony is dimly aware that he isn't happy; but happiness isn't something she expects, in men. He never complains about not having it; unlike her mother.

  His yellow pencil twiddles. He has a jarful of these pencils on his desk, kept very sharp. Sometimes he asks Tony to sharpen them for him; she turns them one by one in the businesslike sharpener clamped to the windowsill, feeling that she's preparing his arrows. What he does with these pencils is beyond her, but she knows that it's something of the utmost importance. More important - for instance - than she is.

  Her father's name is Griff, but she doesn't think of him as Griff, the way she thinks of her mother as Anthea. He's somewhat more like the other fathers, whereas Anthea isn't very much like the other mothers, although occasionally she tries to be. (Griff is not her Dad, though. Griff is not a Dad.)

  Griff was in the war. Anthea says that although he may have been in it, he didn't go through it, the way she did. Her parents' house in London was destroyed by a bomb during the Blitz and her parents were both killed. She'd come home - where had she been? She has never said - to find nothing but a crater, one standing wall, and a pile of rubble; and her own mother's shoe, with a foot in it.

  But Griff missed all that. He only got into it at D-Day. (It meaning the danger, the killing; not the training, the waiting, the fooling around.) He was there for the landing, the advance, the easy bit, says Anthea. The winning.

  Tony likes to think of him like that - winning - like someone winning a race. Victorious. He has not been noticeably victorious lately. But Anthea says the easy bit in front of people, in front of their friends when they come over for drinks and Tony watches from doorways. Anthea says the easy bit, looking straight at Griff with her chin up, and he turns red.

  "I don't want to talk about it," he says.

  "He never does," says Anthea with mock despair, lifting her shoulders. It's the same gesture she makes when Tony refuses to play the piano for the bridge club.

  "At the end it was just children," says Griff. "Children, in men's uniforms. We were killing children."

  "Lucky you," says Anthea lightly. "That must have made it smoother for you."

  "It didn't," says Tony's father. They stare at each other as if no one else is in the room: tense and measuring.

  "He liberated a gun," says Anthea. "Didn't you, darling? He's got it in his study. I wonder if the gun feels liberated." She gives a dismissive laugh, and turns away. A silence eddies behind her.

  That was how Anthea and Griff met - during the war, when he was in England. Stationed in England, Anthea would say; so Tony pictures the two of them in a train station, waiting to depart. It would have been a winter train station; they had on their overcoats and her mother was wearing a hat, and their breath was turning to white fog as it came out of their mouths. Were they kissing, as in pictures? It's not clear. Perhaps they were going on the train together, perhaps not. They had a lot of suitcases. There are always a lot of suitcases in the story of Tony's parents.

  "I was a war bride," Anthea says; she gives a self-deprecating smile, and then a sigh. She says war bride as if she's making fun of it - minor-key, rueful fun. What does she mean to imply? That she has fallen prey to an old trick, an old confidence trick, and knows it now and deplores it? That Tony's father took advantage of her in some way? That it was the fault of the war?

  The raw. A raw bride, thinks Tony. Uncooked. Or, more like it: rubbed raw, like her own wrists by the frozen cuffs of her snowsuit.

  "I was a war husband," her father says; or used to say, back when he still made jokes. He also said that he'd picked Anthea up in a dance hall. Anthea didn't like that.

  "Griff, don't be vulgar," she would say.

  "Men were scarce," he would add, to the audience. (There was usually an audience for these exchanges. They rarely said such things when they were alone.) "She had to grab what she could get."

  Then Anthea would laugh. "Decent men were scarce, and who grabbed who? And it wasn't a dance hall, it was a dance."

  "Well, you can't expect us poor barbarians to know the difference."

  What happened after that? After the dance. It's unclear. But for some reason, Anthea decided to marry Griff. That it was her decision is frequently underlined by Tony's father: Well, nobody forced you. Her mother was somehow forced, however. She was forced, she was coerced, she was carried off by that crude thieving lout, Tony's father, to this too-cramped, two-storey, fake Tudor, half-timbered, half-baked house, in this tedious neighbourhood, in this narrow-minded provincial city, in this too-large, too-small, too-cold, too-hot country that she hates with a strange, entrapped, and baffled fury. Don't talk like that! she hisses at Tony. She means the accent. Flat, she calls it. But how can Tony talk the same way her mother does? Like the radio, at noon. The kids at school would laugh.

  So Tony is a foreigner, to her own mother; and to her father also, because, although she talks the same way he does, she is - and he has made this clear - not a boy. Like a foreigner, she listens carefully, interpreting. Like a foreigner she keeps an eye out for sudden hostile gestures. Like a foreigner she makes mistakes.

  Tony sits on the floor, looking at her father and wondering about the war, which is such a mystery to her but which appears to have been decisive in her life. She would like to ask him about battles, and if she can look at the gun; but she knows already that he will evade these questions, as if there's a sore place on him that he must protect. A raw place. He will keep her from putting her hand on it.

  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...."

  "Y
ou 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:

  Darling, you know I would like to take you with me but I can't right now. When you are older you will understand why. Be a good girl and do well in school. I will write you lots. Your Mother who loves you very much.

  P.S. See you soon!

  (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.