Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [72]
“No! No!” she screamed. (Unusual for her to have screamed: she must have been terrified.) But inside herself she could hear another voice, also hers, which was shouting, fearlessly and with ferocious delight:
On! On!
As a child, Tony kept a diary. Every January she would write her name in the front of it, in block letters:
TONY FREMONT
Then under it she would write her other name:
TNOMERF YNOT
This name had a Russian or Martian sound to it, which pleased her. It was the name of an alien, or a spy. Sometimes it was the name of a twin, an invisible twin; and when Tony grew up and learned more about left-handedness she was faced with the possibility that she might in fact have been a twin, the left-handed half of a divided egg, the other half of which had died. But when she was little her twin was merely an invention, the incarnation of her sense that part of her was missing. Although she was a twin, Tnomerf Ynot was a good deal taller than Tony herself. Taller, stronger, more daring.
Tony wrote her outer name with her right hand and her other name, her inner one, with her left; although, officially, she was forbidden to write with her left hand, or to do anything else of importance with it. Nobody had told her why. About the closest she’d come to an explanation was a speech of Anthea’s – of her mother’s – in which she’d said that the world was not constructed for the left-handed. She also said that Tony would understand better when she grew up, which was just another of Anthea’s assurances that failed to come true.
When Tony was younger the teachers at school would slap her left hand or hit it with rulers, as if she’d been caught picking her nose with it. One teacher tied it to the side of her desk. The other children might have teased her about this, but they didn’t. They couldn’t see the logic of it, any more than she could.
That was a school Tony got yanked out of quickly. Usually it took Anthea eight months or more before she got fed up with a school. It was true that Tony couldn’t spell very well, or not according to the teachers. They said she reversed letters. They said she had trouble with numbers. They would say this to Anthea, and Anthea would say that Tony was gifted, and then Tony would know it would soon be time for a change because very shortly now Anthea would lose her temper and start insulting the teachers. Nincompoops was one of the nicer names she called them. She wanted Tony changed, fixed, turned right side up, and she wanted it to happen overnight.
Tony could do things easily with her left hand, things her right hand would stumble over. In her right-handed life she was awkward, and her handwriting was lumpish and clumsy. But that made no difference: despite its good performance her left hand was scorned, but her right hand was bribed and encouraged. It wasn’t fair, but Anthea said that life wasn’t fair.
Secretly Tony continued to write left-handed; but she felt guilty about it. She knew there must be something shameful about her left hand or it would not have been humiliated like that. It was the hand she loved best, all the same.
It’s November, and the afternoon is already darkening. Earlier there was a dusting of snow, but now it’s drizzling. The drizzle runs down the living-room windows in icy, sinuous trickles; a few brown leaves are stuck to the outside of the glass like leather tongues.
Tony kneels on the chesterfield with her nose pressed against the window, making fog patches with her breath. When the patch is big enough she writes on it, squeakily, with her index finger. Then she rubs out the words. Kcuf, she writes. This is a word too bad even for her diary. Tihs. She writes these words with fear and awe, but also with a superstitious relish. They are Tnomerf Ynot words. They make her feel powerful, in charge of something.
She breathes and writes and rubs out, breathes and writes. The air is unfresh, filled with the dry, burnt smell of the chintz curtains. All the