Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [18]
It’s nearly time for her to get her hair cut, at Liliane’s, two blocks up and around the corner. They make a fuss of her there: they admire, or pretend to admire, her small feet, her tiny mole-paw hands, her flat bum, her heart-shaped mouth, so out of date among the pouty bee-stung lips of the fashion magazines. They tell her she is almost Chinese.
Only almost, though. Almost is what she has always felt; approximate. Zenia has never been almost, even at her most fraudulent. Her fakery was deeply assumed, and even her most superficial disguises were total.
Tony walks and walks, up Spadina, past the old Victory Burlesque – which victory, whose victory, she wonders – now stuck with posters advertising films in Chinese, past Grossman’s Tavern and across College Street, where the Scott Mission offers Christian soup, to more and more people with less and less money. She can walk all the way home, she has no classes today. She needs to regroup her forces, she needs to ponder, she needs to plan her strategy. Though how much strategy can you plan with so little to go on? For instance, why has Zenia chosen to resurrect herself? Why did she go to the trouble of blowing herself up in the first place? For her own reasons, perhaps; nothing to do with the three of them. Or with the two of them, with her and West. Still, it’s bad luck that Zenia spotted her in the Toxique.
Maybe Zenia has forgotten all about West by now. He’s small game, pleads Tony silently. A tiny fish. Why bother? But Zenia likes hunting. She likes hunting anything. She relishes it.
Imagine your enemy, say the experts. Put yourself in his place. Pretend you are him. Learn to predict him. Unfortunately, Zenia is a bugger to predict. It’s all in the old children’s game – scissors, paper, stone. Scissors cut paper, but break on stone. The trick is to know what your opponent is concealing, what fist or nasty surprise or secret weapon he’s hiding behind his back. Or hers.
The sun declines and Tony walks along her own quiet street, scuffing through the fallen leaves of the maple and chestnut trees, back to her own house. Her stronghold. In the waning light the house is no longer thick, solid, incontrovertible. Instead it looks provisional, as if it’s about to be sold, or to set sail. It flickers a little, sways on its moorings. Before unlocking the door Tony runs her hand over the brickwork, reassuring herself that it exists.
West hears her come in, and calls down to her. Tony checks her face in the hall mirror, settling it into what she hopes is her normal expression.
“Listen to this,” says West, when she’s climbed the third-floor stairs.
Tony listens: it’s another noise, much the same – as far as she can tell – as yesterday’s. Courting male penguins bring rocks, held between their rubber-boot feet; West brings noises. “That’s wonderful,” she says. It’s one of her more minor lies.
West smiles, which means he knows she can’t hear what he hears but likes her for not saying so. She smiles back, scanning his face anxiously. She checks each wrinkle, each lift and inflection. All is as usual, from what she can tell.
Neither of them feels like cooking, so West goes around the corner for Japanese take-out – barbecued eel, yellowtail, and salmon sushi – and they eat it sitting on cushions, in front of the television set in West’s third-floor study, with their shoes off, licking their fingers.
West has the TV in there so he can play videos on it in which sounds are rendered as colours and wavy lines, but they also use it for watching old movies and junky late-night crime series. West usually prefers the movies, but tonight it’s Tony’s turn to choose, and they settle on a rerun of a cop show, high on the offensive-and-tacky scale and punctuated with bursts of gratuitous violence.
Tony’s students would smile if they caught her doing this; they