Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [74]
She never says “I truly, truly love you.” It’s always Mother, as if Mother is someone else.
Rehtom, thinks Tony. Evol. The metronome ticks on.
Anthea gazes down at her, holding onto her with her two gloved hands. In the semi-dark her eyes behind the spots of her veil are sooty black, bottomless; her mouth is tremulous. She bends over and presses her cheek to Tony’s, and Tony feels the rasp of the veil and the damp, creamy skin under it, and smells her, a smell of violet perfume and underarms mixed with dress cloth, and a salty, eggy smell, like strange mayonnaise. She doesn’t know why Anthea is acting like this, and she’s embarrassed. All Anthea does normally is kiss her goodnight, a little peck; she’s shaking all over, and for a moment Tony thinks – hopes – it’s with laughter.
Then she lets go of Tony and gets up and moves to the window, and stands with her back turned, unpinning her hat really this time. She takes it off and throws it down on the sofa, and fluffs out her dark hair at the back. After a moment she kneels and looks out. “Who’s been making all these smudges?” she says, in a higher, tighter voice. It’s the voice she uses for mimicking happiness, when she’s angry with Tony’s father and wants to show him she doesn’t care. She knows the smudges are Tony’s. Ordinarily she’d be irritated, she’d make some remark about how much it costs to have Ethel clean the windows, but this time she laughs, breathlessly, as if she’s been running.
“Nose marks, just like a dog. Guppy, you are such a funny child.”
Guppy is a name from long ago. Anthea’s story is that she called Tony that right after she was born, because of her time in the incubator. Anthea would come and look at Tony through the glass, and Tony’s mouth would be opening and closing but there wouldn’t be any sound. Or Anthea said she couldn’t hear any. She kept the name because later, when Tony was out of danger and she’d taken her home, Tony scarcely cried; she just opened and closed her mouth. Anthea tells this story as if it’s funny.
This nickname – enclosed by quotation marks – is pencilled in below Tony’s baby pictures, in Anthea’s white leather My Baby photo album: “ ‘Guppy,’ 18 months”; “ ‘Guppy’ and Me”; “ ‘Guppy’ and her Dad.” After a while Anthea must have stopped taking these pictures, or stopped sticking them in, because there are just blank pages.
Tony feels a rush of longing for whatever it was that existed once between herself and her mother, in the photo album; but she feels annoyance as well, because the name itself is a trick. She used to think a guppy was something warm and soft, like a puppy, and she was hurt and insulted when she discovered it was a fish.
So she doesn’t answer her mother. She sits on the piano bench, waiting to see what Anthea will do next.
“Is he here?” she says. She must know the answer: Tony’s father wouldn’t have left Tony in the house alone.
“Yes,” says Tony. Her father is in his study at the back of the house. He’s been there all along. He must have heard the silence, when Tony wasn’t playing. He doesn’t care whether Tony practises the piano or not. The piano, he says, is her mother’s bright idea.
22
Tony’s mother cooks supper as usual. She doesn’t take off her good bridge club dress, but puts her apron over it, her best apron, the white one with ruffles over the shoulders. She has re-done her lipstick: her mouth shines like a waxed apple. Tony sits on the kitchen stool, watching her, until Anthea tells her to stop goggling: if she wants to be useful she can set the table. Then she can go and dig up her father. Anthea often puts it this way: dig up, as if he’s a potato. Sometimes she says root out.
Tony has no particular desire to be useful, but she’s relieved that her mother is acting more normally. She