Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [71]
For instance:
When Tony was five, her mother decided she would take her tobogganing. Tony knew what tobogganing was, although she had never done it. Her mother had only a vague idea, gleaned from Christmas cards. But it was one of her romantic English images of Canada.
Where did she get the toboggan? Probably she borrowed it from one of her bridge club friends. She zipped Tony into her snowsuit and got them to the tobogganing hill in a taxi. The toboggan was just a small one, so it fit into the back seat, on a slant, along with Tony. Her mother sat in the front. Tony’s father had the car that day, as he did most days. This was just as well, as the streets were icy and Tony’s mother was at best a spontaneous driver.
By the time they got to the tobogganing hill the sun was low and huge and dimly pink in the grey winter sky, and the shadows were bluish. The hill was very high. It was on the side of a ravine, and covered with close-packed, icy snow. Groups of screaming children and a few adults were careering down it on sleighs and toboggans and large pieces of cardboard. Some had overturned, and there were pile-ups. Those that reached the bottom disappeared behind a clump of dark fir trees.
Tony’s mother stood at the top of the hill, staring down, holding the toboggan by its rope as if restraining it. “There,” she said. “Isn’t that nice?” She was pleating her lips, the way she did when she put on lipstick, and Tony could tell that the scene before her was not exactly what she’d had in mind. She was wearing her downtown coat and hat, and nylon stockings and little boots with high heels and fur tops. She didn’t have slacks or a ski suit or a Hudson’s Bay coat and earmuffs like the other adults there, and it occurred to Tony that her mother expected her to go down the hill on the toboggan all by herself.
Tony felt an urgent need to pee. She knew how difficult this would be, considering her clumsy two-piece snowsuit with the elastic braces over the shoulders, and what annoyance it would cause her mother – there was not a washroom in sight – so she said nothing about it. Instead she said, “I don’t want to.” She knew that if she ever went down that hill she would flip over, she would crash into something, she would be crushed. One small child was being led up the hill, howling, with blood running from its nose.
Tony’s mother hated having her scenarios foiled. People should enjoy themselves when she wanted them to. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll give you a push. It’ll be lovely!”
Tony sat down on the ground, which was her habitual means of protest. Crying did not work, not with her mother. It was likely to produce a slap, or at best a shake. She had never been much of a crier.
Her mother glanced down at her with disgust. “I’ll show you how!” she said. Her eyes were sparkling, her teeth were set: it was the look she got when she was willing herself to be brave, when she was refusing to be defeated. Before Tony knew what was happening her mother had picked up the toboggan and run with it to the brink of the hill. There she threw it onto the snow and hurled herself on top of it, and went whizzing down, flat on her belly, with her beige legs in their nylons and her fur-topped boots sticking straight up behind her. Almost immediately her hat came off.
She went at an astonishing speed. As she diminished down the slope, into the dusk, Tony clambered