Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [156]
She turns her back on Mitch’s stuff so she won’t have to look at it. It’s too doleful. There are some of the twins’ old things down here too, and some of Larry’s: his baseball glove, his board games – Admirals, Strategy, Kamikaze – foisted on him by Tony because she thought those were the kind of games he should like. The children’s books, fondly saved by Roz in the hope that someday she will have grandchildren and will read them these very same books. Do you know, sweetie – this used to be your mommy’s! When she was a little girl. (Or your daddy’s. But Roz, although she hopes, has trouble picturing Larry as a father.)
Larry used to sit gravely silent while she read to him. His favourites were about trains that talked and were a success, or good-for-you books about interspecies cooperation. Mr. Bear helps Mr. Beaver build a dam. Larry didn’t comment much. But with the twins she could barely get a word in edgewise. They would fight her for control of the story – Change the ending, Mom! Make them go back! I don’t like this part! They’d wanted Peter Pan to end before Wendy grew up, they’d wanted Matthew in Anne of Green Gables to live forever.
She remembers one phase, when they were, what? Four, five, six, seven? It went on for a while. They’d decided that all the characters in every story had to be female. Winnie the Pooh was female, Piglet was female, Peter Rabbit was female. If Roz slipped up and said “he,” they would correct her: She! She! they would insist. All of their stuffed animals were female, too. Roz still doesn’t know why. When she asked them, the twins would give her looks of deep contempt. “Can’t you see?” they would say.
She used to worry that this belief of theirs was some reaction to Mitch and his absences, some attempt to deny his existence. But maybe it was simply the lack of penises, on the stuffed animals. Maybe that was it. In any case, they grew out of it.
Roz sits down on the cellar floor, in her orange bathrobe, never mind the cement dust and silverfish and webs. She pulls books off the shelves at random. To Paula and Erin, from Aunt Tony. There on the cover is the dark forest, the dark wolfish forest, where lost children wander and foxes lurk, and anything can happen; there is the castle turret, poking through the knobbly trees. The Three Little Pigs, she reads. The first little pig built his house of straw. Her house, her house, shout the small voices in her head. The Big Bad Wolf fell down the chimney, right into the cauldron of boiling water, and got his fur all burned off. Her fur! It’s odd what a difference it makes, changing the pronoun.
At one point the twins decided that the wolf should not be dropped into the cauldron of boiling water – it should be one of the little pigs, instead, because they had been the stupid ones. But when Roz suggested that maybe the pigs and the wolf could forget about the boiling water and make friends, the twins were scornful. Somebody had to be boiled.
It amazed Roz then, how bloodthirsty children could be. Not Larry; he didn’t like the more violent stories, they gave him nightmares. He didn’t take to the kinds of books Tony liked to contribute – those authentic fairy tales in the gnarly-tree editions, not a word changed, all the pecked-out eyes and cooked bodies and hanged corpses and red-hot nails intact. Tony said they were more true to life that way.
“The Robber Bridegroom,” reads Tony, long ago, a twin at each elbow. The beautiful maiden, the search for a husband, the arrival of the rich and handsome stranger who lures innocent girls to his stronghold in the woods and then chops them up and eats them. “One day a suitor appeared. He was …”
“She! She!” clamour the twins.
“All right, Tony, let’s see you get out of this one,” says Roz, standing in the doorway.