Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [76]
The raw. A raw bride, thinks Tony. Uncooked. Or, more like it: rubbed raw, like her own wrists by the frozen cuffs of her snowsuit.
“I was a war husband,” her father says; or used to say, back when he still made jokes. He also said that he’d picked Anthea up in a dance hall. Anthea didn’t like that.
“Griff, don’t be vulgar,” she would say.
“Men were scarce,” he would add, to the audience. (There was usually an audience for these exchanges. They rarely said such things when they were alone.) “She had to grab what she could get.”
Then Anthea would laugh. “Decent men were scarce, and who grabbed who? And it wasn’t a dance hall, it was a dance.”
“Well, you can’t expect us poor barbarians to know the difference.”
What happened after that? After the dance. It’s unclear. But for some reason, Anthea decided to marry Griff. That it was her decision is frequently underlined by Tony’s father: Well, nobody forced you. Her mother was somehow forced, however. She was forced, she was coerced, she was carried off by that crude thieving lout, Tony’s father, to this too-cramped, two-storey, fake Tudor, half-timbered, half-baked house, in this tedious neighbourhood, in this narrow-minded provincial city, in this too-large, too-small, too-cold, too-hot country that she hates with a strange, entrapped, and baffled fury. Don’t talk like that! she hisses at Tony. She means the accent. Flat, she calls it. But how can Tony talk the same way her mother does? Like the radio, at noon. The kids at school would laugh.
So Tony is a foreigner, to her own mother; and to her father also, because, although she talks the same way he does, she is – and he has made this clear – not a boy. Like a foreigner, she listens carefully, interpreting. Like a foreigner she keeps an eye out for sudden hostile gestures. Like a foreigner she makes mistakes.
Tony sits on the floor, looking at her father and wondering about the war, which is such a mystery to her but which appears to have been decisive in her life. She would like to ask him about battles, and if she can look at the gun; but she knows already that he will evade these questions, as if there’s a sore place on him that he must protect. A raw place. He will keep her from putting her hand on it.
Sometimes she wonders what he did before the war, but he won’t talk about that either. He has told only one story. When he was small he lived on a farm, and his father took him out into the woods, in winter. His father intended to chop firewood, but the tree was frozen so hard that the axe bounced off it and cut into his leg. He threw down the axe and strode away, leaving Griff by himself in the woods. But he followed the footprints home through the snow: a red one, a white one, a red one.
If it hadn’t been for the war, Griff wouldn’t have an education. That’s what he says. He would still be on the farm. And then, where would Tony be?
Her father keeps on doing whatever it is he does. He works for an insurance company. Life insurance.
“So, Tony,” her father says without looking up. “What can I do for you?”
“Anthea says to tell you supper is almost ready,” she says.
“Almost ready?” he says. “Or really ready?”
“I don’t know,” says Tony.
“Then you’d better go and see,” says her father.
The supper is sausages, as it often is when Anthea has been out in the afternoon. Sausages and boiled potatoes, and green beans from a can. The sausages are a little burned, but Tony’s father doesn’t say anything about it. He doesn’t say anything when the food is really good either. Anthea says Tony and her father are two of a kind. Two cold fish.
She brings the serving dishes in from the kitchen, and sits down in her own chair still wearing her apron. Usually she takes it off. “Well!” she says brightly. “And how are we all today?”
“Fine,” says Tony’s father.
“That’s good,” says