Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [77]
“You look all dolled up,” says her father. “Special occasion?”
“Not likely, is it?” says her mother.
After that there’s a silence, which fills with the sound of chewing. Tony has spent a good deal of her life listening to her parents chew. The noises their mouths make, their teeth grinding together as they bite down, are disconcerting to her. It’s like seeing someone taking their clothes off through a bathroom window when they don’t know you’re there. Her mother eats nervously, in small bites; her father eats ruminatingly. His eyes are fixed on Anthea as if on a distant point in space; hers are narrowed a little, as if aiming.
Nothing moves, although great force is being exerted. Nothing moves yet. Tony feels as if there’s a thick elastic band stretching right through her own head, with one end of it attached to each of them: any tighter and it would snap.
“How was the bridge club?” says her father at last.
“Fine,” says her mother.
“Did you win?”
“No. We came second.”
“Who won, then?”
Her mother thinks for a moment. “Rhonda and Bev.”
“Rhonda was there?” says her father.
“This is not the Spanish Inquisition,” says her mother. “I just said she was.”
“That’s funny,” says her father. “I bumped into her, downtown.”
“Rhonda left early,” says her mother. She sets her fork down carefully on her plate.
“That’s not what she told me,” says her father.
Her mother pushes back her chair and stands up. She crumples her paper napkin and throws it on top of the sausage ends on her plate. “I refuse to discuss this in front of Tony,” she says.
“Discuss what?” says Tony’s father. He keeps on chewing. “Tony, you are excused.”
“Stay where you are,” says Anthea. “That you called me a liar.” Her voice is low and quivering, as if she’s about to cry.
“Did I?” says Tony’s father. He sounds bemused, and curious about the answer.
“Antonia,” says her mother warningly, as if Tony has been about to do something wrong or dangerous. “Couldn’t you have waited until after dessert? I try every day to get her to eat a decent meal.”
“That’s right, make this my fault,” says Tony’s father.
The dessert is rice pudding. It stays in the fridge, because Tony says she doesn’t want any. She doesn’t, she isn’t hungry. She goes up to her bedroom and climbs into her flannelette-sheeted bed, and tries not to hear or imagine what they are saying to each other.
Bulc egdirb, she murmurs to herself in the darkness. The barbarians gallop across the plains. At their head rides Tnomerf Ynot, her long ragged hair flying in the wind, a sword in each of her hands. Bulc egdirb! she calls, urging them forward. It’s a battle cry, and they are on the rampage. They are sweeping all before them, trampling down crops and burning villages. They loot and plunder and smash pianos, and kill children. At night they put up their tents and eat supper with their hands, whole cows roasted on bonfires. They wipe their greasy fingers on their leather clothes. They have no manners at all.
Tnomerf Ynot herself drinks from a skull, with silver handles attached where the ears used to be. She raises the skull high in a toast to victory, and to the war god of the barbarians: Ettovag! she yells, and the hordes answer, cheering: Ettovag! Ettovag!
In the morning there will be broken glass.
Tony wakes up suddenly in the middle of the night. She gets out of bed, gropes under her night-table until she finds her rabbit-shaped slippers, and tiptoes across the room to the door. It opens easily.
She creeps along the hallway to her parents’ room, but their door is closed and she can’t hear anything. Maybe they are in there, maybe not. Though most likely they are. When she was younger she used to worry – or was it a dream? – that she would come home from school and find only a hole in the ground, and their shoes with feet in them.
She continues to the stairs and goes down them, guiding herself with one hand on the banister. She often gets up like this in the middle of the night; she often makes the rounds, checking for damage.
She gropes her way through the blurry darkness of