Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [60]
As she recalls, it was November. (She had a wall calendar on which she crossed off the days, though there was no special date she was heading towards or anticipating; but it gave her the feeling of moving forward.) She’d been living in McClung Hall for the past three years, ever since the death of her father. Her mother had died earlier and was presently in a metal canister the shape of a miniature depth charge, which she kept on a closet shelf, tucked in behind her folded sweaters. Her father was in the Necropolis, although his 1940s German pistol was in a box of old Christmas tree decorations, about all she’d kept from the family house. She’d been intending to reunite her parents – take a trowel to the Necropolis one day, plant her mother beside her father like an aluminum-alloy tulip bulb – but she was held back by the suspicion that her mother, at least, would have gone a long way to avoid such a thing. Anyway, she didn’t at all mind having her mother in her room, on her shelf, where she could keep an eye on her. (Assign her a location. Tether her down. Make her stay put.)
Tony had a room to herself because the girl who was supposed to be sharing with her had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and had had her stomach pumped, and had then disappeared. People tended to, in Tony’s experience. For weeks before she left, the roommate had stayed in bed all day with her clothes on, reading paperback novels and weeping softly. Tony hated that. It bothered her more than the sleeping pills.
Tony had the sensation of living by herself, but of course she was surrounded by others; other girls, or were they women? McClung Hall was called a women’s residence, but girls was what they said to one another. Hey girls, they would call, running up the stairs. Guess what!
Tony did not feel she had much in common with these other girls. Groups of them would spend the evenings – when they weren’t out on dates – in the Common Room, sprawled on the dispirited orangy-brown chesterfield and the three overstuffed and leaking easy chairs, in their pyjamas and housecoats and big bristly hair rollers, playing bridge and smoking and drinking coffee, and dissecting their dates.
Tony herself did not go out on dates; she did not have anybody to go with. She did not mind this; in any case, she was happier in the company of people who had died a long time ago. That way there was no painful suspense, no disappointment. Nothing to lose.
Roz was one of the Common Room girls. She had a loud voice, and called Tony Toinette, or, worse, Tonikins; even then she’d wanted to dress Tony up, like a doll. Tony hadn’t liked her, at that period. She’d considered her intrusive and crude and smothering.
The girls in general thought Tony was odd, but they weren’t hostile towards her. Instead they made a pet of her. They liked to feed her bits of the contraband food they kept hidden in their rooms – chocolate bars, cookies, potato chips. (Food in the rooms was officially forbidden, because of the cockroaches and mice.) They liked to give her little rumplings of the hair, little squeezes. People find it hard to keep their hands off the small – so like kittens, so like babies. Tiny Tony.
They would call out to her as she scuttled past them on her way to her room: Tony! Hey! Hey Tone! How’s it goin’? Frequently Tony resisted them, or avoided them altogether. But sometimes she would go into the Common Room and drink their sedimentary coffee and nibble their sandy cookies. Then they would get her to write their names for them, backwards and forwards at the same time, one name with each hand; they would crowd around, marvelling at what she herself felt to be self-evident, a minor and spurious magic.
Tony wasn’t the only girl with a specialty. One of them could make a sound like a motorboat starting up, several – including Roz – were in the habit of drawing faces on their stomachs with eyebrow pencils and lipsticks and then performing