The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
Some hours later she found herself opening the box of old Christmas decorations where she also kept her father's German pistol, wrapped in red tissue paper. There were even some bullets for it, in a metal cough-drop tin. She'd never shot a gun in her life, but she knew the theory.
You need some sleep, she told herself. She could not stand the idea of sleeping in her desecrated bed, so she went to sleep finally in the living room, underneath the spinet. She had some thoughts of destroying it, with something - the meat cleaver? - but decided that could wait until morning.
When she woke up it was noon, and someone was pounding on the door. Probably it was West, come back because he'd forgotten something. (His underwear was gone from the drawer, his neatly arranged socks, washed by Tony and folded carefully in pairs. He'd taken a suitcase.)
Tony went to the door. "Go away," she said.
"Sweetie, it's me," said Roz on the other side. "Open the door, honey, I really need to go to the can, I'm about to flood this entire floor."
Tony didn't want to let Roz in because she didn't want to let anyone in, but she could not turn away a friend in urinary need. So she took off the chain and undid the locks and in waddled Roz, pregnant with her first baby. "This is just what I needed," she said ruefully, "a bigger body. Hey! I'm eating for five!" Tony didn't laugh. Roz looked at Tony's face, then put her fattening arms around Tony. "Oh honey," she said; then, with new-found knowledge, both personal and political, "Men are such pigs!"
Tony had a twinge of indignation. West was not a pig. He wasn't even shaped like one. An ostrich, perhaps. It's not West's fault, she wanted to say. It's her. I loved him but he never really loved me. How could he? He was occupied territory, all along. But she couldn't say anything about this, because she couldn't speak. Also she couldn't breathe. Or rather she could only breathe in. She breathed in and in and finally made a sound, a wail, a long wail that went on and on, like a distant siren. Then she burst into tears. Burst, like a paper bag full of water. She couldn't have burst like that if the tears hadn't been there all along, a huge unfelt pressure behind her eyes. The tears cascaded down her cheeks; she licked her lips, she tasted them. In the Middle Ages they thought that only those without souls could not cry. Therefore she had a soul. It was no comfort.
"He'll come back," said Roz. "I know he will. What does she need him for? She'll just take one bite out of him and throw him away." She rocked Tony back and forth, back and forth, the most mother that Tony had ever had.
Roz moved into Tony's apartment, just until Tony could function. She had a housekeeper, and her husband Mitch was away again, so she didn't need to be at her own house. She phoned the university and cancelled Tony's classes, saying that Tony had strep throat. She ordered in groceries, and fed Tony canned chicken noodle soup, caramel pudding, peanut butter and banana sandwiches, grape juice: baby food. She made her take a lot of baths and played soothing music to her, and told her jokes. She wanted to install Tony in her Rosedale mansion, but Tony didn't want to leave the apartment, even for a second. What if West should come back? She didn't know what would happen if he did, but she knew she needed to be there. She needed to have the choice of slamming the door in his face or falling into his arms. She didn't want to choose, though. She wanted to do both.
"He called you, didn't he?" said Tony after a few days of this, when she was feeling less gutted.
"Yeah," said Roz. "You know what he said? He said he was worried about you. That's kind of cute."
Tony didn't think it was cute. She thought it was Zenia, putting him up to it. Twisting the knife.
It was Roz who suggested Tony should give up the apartment and buy a house. "The prices are great right now! You've got the down payment - just cash in some of those bonds. Look - think of it as an investment. Anyway, you should move out of here. Who needs the bad memories, eh?" She got Tony a good real estate agent, drove around with her from house to house, clambered panting up and down the stairs, peering at furnaces and dry rot and wiring. "Now this - this is a deal," she whispered to Tony. "Ask low - see what they say! A few repairs and this could be gorgeous! Your study goes in the tower, just ditch the fake wood panelling, get rid of that linoleum - it's maple underneath, I looked. It's buried treasure, trust me! Once you're out of the old place, things will be tons better." She got a much bigger charge out of buying the house than Tony did. She found Tony a decent contractor, and dictated the paint colours. Even at the best of times Tony would have been incapable of making such arrangements herself.
After Tony moved in, things were indeed better. She liked the house, though not for any reasons that Roz would have approved. Roz wanted the house to be the centre of the new, outgoing life she envisaged for Tony, but for Tony it was more like a convent. A convent of one. She didn't belong in the land of the adults, the land of the giants. She shut herself up in her house like a nun, and went out only for supplies.
And for work, of course. Lots of work. She worked at school and also at home; she worked nights and weekends. She got pitying looks from her colleagues, because gossip travels through universities at the speed of influenza and they all knew about West, but she didn't care. She skipped regular meals and snacked on cheese food and crackers. She booked an answering service so she couldn't be disturbed while thinking. She did not answer the doorbell. It did not ring.
Tony in her turret room works late into the night. She wants to avoid bed, and sleep, and especially dreaming. She is having a dream, a recurring one; she has the feeling that this dream has been waiting for her a long time, waiting for her to enter it, re-enter it; or that it has been waiting to re-enter her.
This dream is underwater. In her waking life, she is no swimmer; she has never liked immersing herself, getting cold and wet. The most she'll trust herself to is a bathtub, and on the whole she prefers showers. But in the dream she swims effortlessly, in water as green as leaves, with sunlight filtering down through it, dappling the sand. No bubbles come out of her mouth; she is not conscious of breathing. Beneath her, coloured fish flit away, darting like birds.
Then she comes to an edge, a chasm. Like going down a hill she drops over it, slides diagonally through the increasing darkness. The sand falls away under her like snow. The fish here are larger and more dangerous, brighter - phosphorescent. They light up and dim, flash on and off like neon signs, their eyes and teeth glowing - a gas-flame blue, a sulphur yellow, a red the colour of embers. Suddenly she knows she isn't in the sea at all but miniaturized, inside her own brain. These are her neurons, the crackle of electricity touching them as she thinks about them. She looks at the incandescent fish with wonder: she is watching the electrochemical process of her own dreaming!
If so, then what is that, on the dim level white sand at the bottom? Not a ganglion. Someone walking away from her. She swims faster but it's no use, she's held in place, an aquarium goldfish bumping its nose against glass. Reverof, she hears. The backwards dream language. She opens her mouth to call, but there is no air to call with and water rushes in. She wakes up gasping and choking, her throat constricted, her face streaming with tears.
Now that she's started to cry it seems impossible to stop. In the daytime, in the lamplight, when she can work, she can keep this weeping locked away. But sleep is fatal. Fatal and unavoidable.
She takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. From the street her room must look like a lighthouse, a beacon. Warm and cheerful and safe. But towers have other uses. She could empty boiling oil out the left-hand window, get a dead hit on anyone standing at the front door.
Such as West or Zenia, Zenia and West. She broods about them too much, them and their entangled bodies. Action would be better. She thinks about going over to their apartment (she knows where they're living, it wasn't hard to find out, West is listed in the university directory) and confronting Zenia. But what would she say? Give him back? Zenia would just laugh. "He's a free agent," she would say. "He's a grown-up, he can make his own choices." Or something like that. And if she were to t
She recalls a conversation she had with Zenia, early on, in the days when they were drinking coffee at Christie's and Zenia was such a friend.
"Which would you rather have?" said Zenia. "From other people. Love, respect, or fear?"
"Respect," said Tony. "No. Love."
"Not me," said Zenia. "I'd choose fear."
"Why?" said Tony.
"It works better," said Zenia. "It's the only thing that works."
Tony remembers having been impressed by this answer. But it wasn't fear through which Zenia had stolen West. Not a show of strength. On the contrary, it was a show of weakness. The ultimate weapon.
She could always take the gun.
For almost a year there was no word from West; no mention - for instance - of lawyers or divorce; not even any petitions about the spinet and the lute, which Tony was holding captive in her new living room. Tony knew why West was so wordless. It was because he felt too awful about what he'd done, or rather what had been done to him. He felt too ashamed.
After a while he began to leave timid messages with Tony's answering service, suggesting they get together for a beer. Tony did not reply, not because she was angry with him - she wouldn't have been angry with him if he'd been run over by a truck, and she viewed seduction by Zenia as analogous - but because she couldn't imagine what form any conversation between the two of them might take. How are you and Fine would about cover it. Thus when he finally turned up at her door, her new house door, the door of her nunnery, she simply stared at him.
"Let me in?" said West. Tony could tell at a glance that it was all finished between Zenia and West. She could tell from the colour of his skin, which was a light greenish grey, and from his sagging shoulders and dejected mouth. He'd been dismissed, sacked, ejected. He'd been kicked in the nuts.
He looked so pitiful, so pulled apart - as if he'd been on the rack, as if every one of his bones had been disconnected from every other bone, leaving only a kind of anatomical jelly - that of course she let him in. Into her home, into her kitchen, where she made him a hot drink, and ultimately into her bed, where he clutched her, shivering. It was not a sexual clutch, it was the clutch of a man drowning. But Tony was in no danger of being dragged down. She felt, if anything, strangely dry; strangely detached from him. He might be drowning, but this time she was standing on the beach. Worse: with binoculars.
She began again to cook small dinners, to boil breakfast eggs. She remembered how to care for him, how to pat him back into shape, and she did it again; but this time with fewer illusions. She still loved him, but she didn't believe he would ever love her in return, not to the same extent. How could he, after what he'd been through? Could a man with one leg tap-dance?
Nor could she trust him. He might crawl out of his depression, tell her how good she was, bring home treats for supper, go through the routines; but if Zenia were to return, from wherever she had gone - and even West didn't seem to know - then all of these fond habits would count for nothing. He was only on loan. Zenia was his addiction; one sip of her and he'd be gone. He'd be like a dog summoned by a supersonic whistle, inaudible to human ears. He would run off.
She never mentioned Zenia: to dwell on her might be to invoke her. But when Zenia died, when she was blown up and safely encapsulated and planted under a mulberry tree, Tony no longer needed to fear the doorbell. Zenia was no longer a menace, not in the flesh. She was a footnote. She was history.
Now Zenia is back, and hungry for blood. Not for West's blood: West is an instrument merely. The blood Zenia wants to drink is Tony's, because she hates Tony and always has. Tony could see that hatred in her eyes today, at the Toxique. There's no rational explanation for such hatred, but it doesn't surprise Tony. She seems to have been familiar with it for a long time. It's the rage of her unborn twin.
Or so thinks Tony, removing the vestiges of Otto the Red's fallen army with her tweezers, installing the Saracens in their freshly captured territory. The flag of Islam flies above the corpse-strewn Italian beaches, while Otto himself escapes by sea. His defeat will inspire the Slavic Wends to make another looting and pillaging foray into Germany; it will motivate uprisings, rebellions, a return to the old cannibal gods. Brutality, counter-brutality, chaos. Otto is losing his grip.
How could he have won this battle? Hard to say. By avoiding recklessness? By drawing the enemy out first to estimate its strength? Strength and cunning are both essential, but each without the other is valueless.
Tony herself, lacking strength, will have to rely on cunning. In order to defeat Zenia she will have to become Zenia, at least enough to anticipate her next move. It would help if she knew what Zenia wanted.
Tony turns out the cellar lights and climbs the stairs to the kitchen, where she runs herself a glass of water out of the spring-water dispenser foisted on her by Charis. (As full of chemicals as anything else, she knows; but at least there's no chlorine. Eau de Swimming Pool, is what Roz calls the Toronto tap water.) Then she unlocks the back door and creeps out into the yard, into its flora of dry thistles and tree trunks and unpruned shrubs, its fauna of mice. Raccoons are regulars; squirrels make untidy nests in the branches. Once they had a skunk back here, hunting for grubs, rolling up what vestiges of turf remain; once a chipmunk, miraculous survivor of the neighbourhood gamut of cats.
It refreshes Tony to sneak around at night, from time to time. She enjoys being awake when others are asleep. She enjoys occupying dark space. Maybe she will see things other people can't see, witness nocturnal events, gain rare insights. She used to think that as a child, too - tiptoeing through the house, listening at doors. It didn't work then, either.
From this vantage point she has a novel view of her own house: the view of a lurking enemy commando. She thinks about how the house would look if she or anyone else were to blow it up. Study, bedroom, kitchen, and hall, suspended in fiery mid-air. Her house is no protection for her, really. Houses are too fragile.
The kitchen lights go on, the back door opens. It's West, a gangling silhouette, backlighted, his face indistinct. "Tony?" he calls anxiously. "Are you out there?"
Tony savours his anxiety, just a little. True, she adores him, but there's no such thing as an unmixed motive. She waits for a moment, listening, in her moonlit weedy garden, blending - possibly - with the dappled silvery shadows cast by the trees. Is she invisible? The legs of West's pyjamas are too short, and so are the arms; they lend him an untended air, like that of a Frankenstein monster. Yet who could have tended him - over the years, and apart from finding some pyjamas that would fit - better than Tony? If she had done it unwillingly she might deserve to feel aggrieved. Is that how grievance works? I've given you the best years of my life! But for a gift you don't expect a return. And who would she have given them to otherwise, those years?
"I'm here," she says, and he comes outside and down the back porch steps. He has his slippers on, she's relieved to see, although not his dressing gown.
"You were gone," he says, stooping down towards her, peering. "I couldn't sleep."
"Neither could I," she says. "So I did some work, and then I came out for a breath of fresh air."
"I don't think you should wander around outside at night," he says. "It's not safe."
"This isn't wandering," she says, amused. "It's our backyard."
"Well, there might be muggers," he says.
She takes his arm. Under the thin cloth, under the flesh, within the arm itself, she can feel another arm forming: the arm of an old man. His eyes shine milky white in the moonlight. Blue eyes, she's read, are not the basic colour of human eyes; probably they grew from a mutation, and are therefore more prone to cataracts. She has a quick vision of West, ten years older and stone blind, herself leading him tenderly by the hand. Training the seeing-eye dog, arranging the library of books-on-tape, the collection of electronic noises. What would he do without her?
"Come inside," s
"Is anything wrong?" he says.
"Not a thing," she lies pleasantly. "I'll make us some hot milk."
"Good," he says. "We can put some rum in it. Look at that moon! There's been men playing golf, up there."
He is so ordinary, so cherished, so familiar to her; like the smell of the skin on her own forearm, like the taste of her fingers. She would like to hang a sign on him, like the metal ones for liquor bottles or the plasticized ones at conventions: Gnissapsert On. She hugs him, standing on tiptoe, stretching her arms as far around him as they can go. They don't reach all the way.
How long can she protect him? How long before Zenia descends on them, with her bared incisors and outstretched talons and banshee hair, demanding what is rightfully hers?
WEASEL NIGHTS
28
Charis follows Zenia and the man who is not Billy along Queen Street, at a distance, dodging around her fellow pedestrians and occasionally bumping into them. She bumps into them because she feels that if she takes her eyes off Zenia, even for an instant, Zenia will vanish - not like a popped soap bubble, but like someone out of a TV kids' cartoon, turning into a bunch of dots and dashes and beaming herself off to some other locale. If you knew enough about matter you could walk through walls, and maybe Zenia does know enough; although any such knowledge must have been acquired by her in a sinister way. Something involving chicken blood, and the eating of still-alive animals. The collection of other people's toenails, pins driven in. Pain for someone.
Zenia must feel the stun-ray intensity of Charis's gaze burning into the small of her back, because at one point she turns around and looks, and Charis darts behind a lamppost, almost braining herself in the process. When she recovers from the bright red sensation in her head (It's not a hurt, it's a colour) and dares to peek, Zenia and the man have stopped and are talking.