The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  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.

  23

  This 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.

  Tony went into her parents' bedroom and opened her mother's closet door. Aroma wafted out: there were little satin bags of lavender tied with mauve ribbons on every hanger. Most of Anthea's suits and dresses were still in there, with the matching shoes in their shoe-trees ranged beneath them. They were like hostages, these clothes. Anthea would never just leave them behind, not forever. She would have to come back and retrieve them.

  Ethel was coming up the stairs; Tony could hear her grunting and mumbling. Now she had reached the bedroom door, dragging the vacuum cleaner by its hose. She stood still and looked at Tony.

  "Your mother's run away," she said. She talked in regular language when anyone else was there.

  Tony could hear the scorn in Ethel's voice. Dogs ran away, cats, horses. Mothers did not.

  Here Tony's memory divides, into what she wanted to happen and what actually did happen. What she wanted was for Ethel to take her in her knobbly arms, and stroke her hair and rock her, and tell her that everything would be all right. Ethel, who had bulgy blue veins on her legs, who smelled of sweat and Javex, whom she didn't even like! But who might have been capable of providing comfort, of a sort.

  What actually did happen was nothing. Ethel turned back to the vacuuming, and Tony went into her own room and shut the door and took off the baggy sailor dress and folded it, and put it back into its box.

  After a while Tony's father came home and spoke with Ethel in the front hall, and then Ethel went away and Tony and her father had supper. The supper was a tin of tomato soup; her father warmed it up in a saucepan, and Tony put some crackers and cheddar cheese on a plate. Both of them felt at a loss, as if there were gaps in this meal that could not be filled in because they could not be identified. What had happened was so momentous, and so unheard of, that it could not yet be mentioned.

  Tony's father ate in silence. The little slurping noises he made scratched against Tony's skin. He was looking at Tony slyly, in a speculative way; Tony had seen the same expression on door-to-door salesmen, and on street beggars, and on other children who were about to tell outrageous and transparent lies. The two of them were in a conspiracy now, his look implied: they were going to gang up, have secrets together. Secrets about Anthea, of course. Who else? Although Anthea was gone, she was still there, sitting at the table with them. She was there more than ever.

  After a while Tony's father put down his spoon; it clanked against the plate.

  "We'll make out fine," he said. "Won't we?"

  Tony was not convinced of this, but she felt under pressure to reassure him. "Yes," she said.

  Tomato, she whispered to herself. Otamot. One of the Great Lakes. A stone war hammer used by an ancient tribe. If you said a word backwards, the meaning emptied out and then the word was vacant. Ready for a new meaning to flow in. Anthea. Aehtna. Like dead, it was almost the same thing, backwards or forwards.

  And then what, and then what? Zenia wants to know. But Tony is at a loss: how can she describe emptiness? Acres of vacancy, which Tony filled up with whatever she could, with knowledge, with dates and facts, more and more of them, pouring them into her head to silence the echoes. Because whatever had been lacking when Anthea was there, it was much worse now that she wasn't.

  Anthea was her own absence. She hovered just out of reach, a tantalizing wraith, an almost, endowed with a sort of gauzy flesh by Tony's longing for her. If only she loved Tony more, she would be here. Or Tony would be elsewhere, with her, wherever she was.

  Anthea wrote, of course. She sent a postcard with a picture of palm trees and surf, and said that she wished Tony was there. She sent packages for Tony with clothes in them that never fit: sun suits, shorts, hot-weather dresses, too big or sometimes - after a while - too small. She sent birthday cards, late. She sent snapshots taken always, it seemed, in full sunlight; snapshots of herself wearing white, in which she looked fatter than Tony remembered, her face tanned and shining as if oiled, with a little moustache of shadow cast by her nose. In some of these, runaway, culpable Perry stood beside her with his arm around her waist: a flabby man with wrinkled knees and bags under his eyes and a lopsided, rueful smile. Then after a while Perry was no longer in the pictures, and another man was; and after a while, yet another. The shoulders on Tony's mother's dresses shrank, the skirts grew longer and fuller, the necklines scooped themselves out; Spanish-dancer ruffles appeared on the sleeves. There was talk of Tony visiting, during Easter holidays, during summer holidays, but nothing ever came of it.

  (As for Anthea's other clothes, the ones she'd left behind in her closet, Tony's father had Ethel pack them into boxes and give them away to the Salvation Army. He did not warn Tony in advance. She was in the habit of checking the closet every few days, when she came back from school, and one day it was empty. Tony said nothing about it, but she knew. Anthea would not be coming ba
ck.)

  Meanwhile the years became other years. At school, Tony was diagnosed as near-sighted and was supplied with glasses, which she did not particularly mind. They were a sort of barrier, and also she could now see the blackboard. For dinner she ate casseroles prepared in advance by Ethel and left on the kitchen counter to be warmed up. She made her own school lunches as usual; also she made caramel puddings out of a package and cakes from cake mixes, to impress her father, though they failed to have this result.

  Her father gave her twenty-dollar bills for Christmas and told her to buy her own presents. She made him cups of tea, which he did not drink, any more than her mother had. He was frequently not there. During one of these years there was a girlfriend, a secretary from his company, who wore jangly bracelets and smelled of violets and warm rubber, who gushed over Tony and said she was cute as a button, and wanted to take her shopping or else to movies. Girl stuff, she called it. We won't take big old Griff! I want us to be chums. Tony despised her.

  After the girlfriend was finished with, Griff began drinking more than ever. He would come into Tony's room and sit there watching her while she did her homework, as if he wanted her to say something to him. But by this time she was older and more hardened, and she expected nothing much from him. She had ceased to consider him her responsibility; she found him simply an irritating interruption. He was much less interesting than the siege techniques of Julius Caesar, which she was studying in Latin. Her father's suffering wore her out: it was too flat, it was too wordless, it was too powerless, it was too much like her own.

  Once or twice, when he was drunker than usual, he chased her through the house, stumbling and shouting, overturning furniture. At other times he would become affectionate: he wanted to tousle her hair, to hug her as if she were still a child, though he had never behaved like that when she really was one. She would crawl underneath the dining-room table to escape from him: she was a lot smaller than he was, but she was also a lot more agile. The worst thing about these episodes was that he seemed to remember nothing about them the next day.

  Tony took to avoiding him when possible. During the course of the evening she would monitor his level of drunkenness - she could tell by the smell partly, of sugary varnish - and plan her exit routes: into the bathroom, out the kitchen door, into her bedroom. The main thing was not to be cornered. Her bedroom had a lock, but she would also push her bureau in front of the door, taking all the drawers out first and then putting them back when the bureau was in place; otherwise it would have been too heavy for her. Then she would sit with her back against the bureau and her book open on her knees, trying to block out the sound of the knob turning, and of the muffled, broken voice, snuffling at her door: I just want to talk to you! That's all! I just want....

  Once she tried an experiment: she poured out all the liquor from his bottles so there was none when he came home from work - he had changed jobs, he had changed jobs again - and he threw all the wineglasses, all the glasses of every kind, against the kitchen wall, and there was a lot of broken glass in the morning. Tony was interested to note that this evidence of chaos no longer frightened her. She used to think that Anthea was the glass-breaker of the family; maybe she had been, once. They had to drink their orange juice out of teacups for a week, until Ethel could buy new glassware.

  When Tony got her first period, it was Ethel who dealt with it. It was Ethel who explained that bloodstains would come out easier if you soaked them first in cold water. She was an authority on stains of all kinds. "It's only the curse," she said, and Tony liked that. It was a curse, but it was only a curse. Pain and distress were of scant importance, really. They could be ignored.

  Tony's mother died by drowning. She dove off a yacht, at night, somewhere off the coast of Baja California, and didn't come back up. She must have become confused underwater, and surfaced in the wrong place and hit her head on the bottom of the boat and knocked herself out. Or this was the story told by Roger, the man she was with at the time. Roger was very sorry about it, in the way you would be if you'd lost someone's car keys or broken their best china plate. He sounded as if he wanted to buy a replacement but wasn't sure how. He also sounded drunk.

  Tony was the one who took the phone call, because neither her father nor Ethel was there. Roger didn't seem to know who she was.

  "I'm the daughter," she said.

  "Who?" said Roger. "She didn't have any daughter."

  "What was she wearing?" said Tony.

  "What?" said Roger.

  "Was she wearing a bathing suit, or a dress?"

  "What kind of a dumb question is that?" said Roger. He was shouting by then, long distance.

  Tony couldn't see why he should be angry. She just wanted to reconstruct. Had Anthea dived off the boat in her bathing suit for a midnight swim, or had she jumped off, wearing a long, entangling skirt, in a fit of anger? The equivalent of a slammed door? The latter seemed more probable. Or perhaps Roger had pushed her. This too was not out of the question. Tony was not interested in revenge, or even in justice. Merely in accuracy.

  Despite his rambling vagueness, it was Roger who arranged for the cremation and shipped back the ashes in a metal cylinder. Tony thought there should be a service of some kind; but then, who would have gone to it except her?

  Shortly after its arrival the cylinder disappeared. She found it again several years later, after her father had died too and she and Ethel were cleaning out the house. It was in the cellar, stuck in among some old tennis racquets. This gave it the proper period flavour: many of her mother's snapshots had shown her in a tennis dress.

  After her mother died Tony went to boarding school, by her own request. She'd wanted to get out of the house, which she did not think of as home, where her father lurked and drank and followed her around, clearing his throat as if he was about to start a conversation. She didn't want to hear what he had to say. She knew it would be some kind of excuse, a plea for understanding, something maudlin. Or else an accusation: if it weren't for Tony he never would have married her mother, and if it weren't for him, Tony never would have been born. Tony had been the catastrophe in his life. It was for Tony he had sacrificed - what, exactly? Even he didn't seem to know. But all the same, didn't she owe him something?

  From piecing things together, from checking dates, from a few stray comments dropped earlier, Tony had come to suspect something of the sort: a pregnancy, a hasty wartime marriage. Her mother was a war bride, her father was a war husband, she herself was a war baby. She was an accident. So what? She didn't want to hear about it. Whatever he wanted to say to her remained unsaid. It was Ethel who found him, lying on the floor of his still-neat study, with his sharpened pencils lined up on the desk. He said in the note that Tony's high school graduation was all he'd been waiting for. He'd even come to the ceremony, that afternoon, and had sat in the auditorium with the other parents, and had given Tony a gold wristwatch afterwards. He kissed her on the cheek. "You'll do all right," he told her. After that he went home and shot himself in the head with his liberated gun. A Luger pistol, as Tony knows now, since she inherited it. He put newspapers down first because of the rug.

  Ethel said that was what he was like: considerate, a gentleman. She cried at the funeral, unlike Tony, and talked to herself during the prayers. Tony thought at first that she was saying Pisspiss but actually it was Pleaseplease. Maybe it always had been. Maybe she wasn't crying about Griff at all, but about her two dead children. Or life in general. Tony could consider all possibilities, she had an open mind.

  Griff's life insurance was no good, of course. It didn't cover suicide. But Tony had the money from the house, after the mortgage was paid off, and her mother's leftover money, which had been willed to her, and whatever else was in the bank. Maybe that's what her father meant when he said she would be all right.

  So that's it, Tony tells Zenia. And it is, as far as she knows. She doesn't think about her parents very much. She doesn't have nightmares about her father appearing with half of
his head blown off, still with something to tell; or of her mother, trailing wet skirts and salt water, her hair hanging over her face like seaweed. She thinks maybe she ought to have such nightmares, but she doesn't. The study of history has steeled her to violent death; she is well armoured.

  "You've still got the ashes?" says Zenia. "Your mother's?"

  "They're on my sweater shelf," says Tony.

  "You are a gruesome little creature," says Zenia, laughing. Tony takes it as a compliment: it's the same thing Zenia said when Tony showed her the battle notebooks with the scores of the men lost. "What else have you got? The gun?" But then she turns serious. "You should get rid of those ashes right away! They're bad luck, they'll ill-wish you."

  This is a new side to Zenia: she's superstitious. Tony would not have suspected it, and her high estimate of Zenia slips a notch. "They're just plain old ashes," she says.

  "You know that's not true," says Zenia. "You know it isn't. Keep those, and she'll still have a hold on you."

  So the next evening at twilight the two of them take the ferry across to the Island. It's December and there's a bitter wind, but no ice on the lake yet, so the ferry is still running. Halfway across Tony tosses the canister with her mother's ashes off the back of the ferry, into the dark choppy water. It's not something she'd have done on her own; it's just to please Zenia.

  "Rest in peace," says Zenia. She doesn't sound altogether convinced. Worse, the metal cylinder isn't sinking. It's floating, bobbing along in the wake of the ferry. Tony realizes she should have opened it and dumped out the contents. If she had a rifle she could put a couple of holes through it. If she could shoot.

  24

  December darkens and darkens, and the streets sprout forth their Christmas tinsel, and the Salvation Army brass band sings hymns and jingles its bells and stirs up its cauldron of money, and loneliness blows in the snowflurries, and the other girls in McClung Hall set off to join their families, in their homes, their warm homey homes, and Tony stays behind. As she has done before; but this time it's better, this time there's no cold feeling in the pit of her stomach, because Zenia is there with her heartening sneers. "Christmas is a bitch," says Zenia. "Screw Christmas, it is so bourgeois," and then Tony feels all right again and tells Zenia about the controversy over Christ's birthdate, in the Dark Ages, and how grown men were willing to kill one another over it, over the exact timing of Peace on earth, goodwill towards men, and Zenia laughs. "Your head is a card file," she says. "Let's eat, I'll make us something." And Tony sits with contentment at Zenia's kitchen table, watching her measure and blend and stir.