Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [82]
Once she tried an experiment: she poured out all the liquor from his bottles so there was none when he came home from work – he had changed jobs, he had changed jobs again – and he threw all the wineglasses, all the glasses of every kind, against the kitchen wall, and there was a lot of broken glass in the morning. Tony was interested to note that this evidence of chaos no longer frightened her. She used to think that Anthea was the glass-breaker of the family; maybe she had been, once. They had to drink their orange juice out of teacups for a week, until Ethel could buy new glassware.
When Tony got her first period, it was Ethel who dealt with it. It was Ethel who explained that bloodstains would come out easier if you soaked them first in cold water. She was an authority on stains of all kinds. “It’s only the curse,” she said, and Tony liked that. It was a curse, but it was only a curse. Pain and distress were of scant importance, really. They could be ignored.
Tony’s mother died by drowning. She dove off a yacht, at night, somewhere off the coast of Baja California, and didn’t come back up. She must have become confused underwater, and surfaced in the wrong place and hit her head on the bottom of the boat and knocked herself out. Or this was the story told by Roger, the man she was with at the time. Roger was very sorry about it, in the way you would be if you’d lost someone’s car keys or broken their best china plate. He sounded as if he wanted to buy a replacement but wasn’t sure how. He also sounded drunk.
Tony was the one who took the phone call, because neither her father nor Ethel was there. Roger didn’t seem to know who she was.
“I’m the daughter,” she said.
“Who?” said Roger. “She didn’t have any daughter.”
“What was she wearing?” said Tony.
“What?” said Roger.
“Was she wearing a bathing suit, or a dress?”
“What kind of a dumb question is that?” said Roger. He was shouting by then, long distance.
Tony couldn’t see why he should be angry. She just wanted to reconstruct. Had Anthea dived off the boat in her bathing suit for a midnight swim, or had she jumped off, wearing a long, entangling skirt, in a fit of anger? The equivalent of a slammed door? The latter seemed more probable. Or perhaps Roger had pushed her. This too was not out of the question. Tony was not interested in revenge, or even in justice. Merely in accuracy.
Despite his rambling vagueness, it was Roger who arranged for the cremation and shipped back the ashes in a metal cylinder. Tony thought there should be a service of some kind; but then, who would have gone to it except her?
Shortly after its arrival the cylinder disappeared. She found it again several years later, after her father had died too and she and Ethel were cleaning out the house. It was in the cellar, stuck in among some old tennis racquets. This gave it the proper period flavour: many of her mother’s snapshots had shown her in a tennis dress.
After her mother died Tony went to boarding school, by her own request. She’d wanted to get out of the house, which she did not think of as home, where her father lurked and drank and followed her around, clearing his throat as if he was about to start a conversation. She didn’t want to hear what he had to say. She knew it would be some kind of excuse, a plea for understanding, something maudlin. Or else an accusation: if it weren’t for Tony he never would have married her mother, and if it weren’t for him, Tony never would have been born. Tony had been the catastrophe in his life. It was for Tony he had sacrificed – what, exactly? Even he didn’t seem to know. But all the same, didn’t she owe him something?
From piecing things together, from checking dates, from a few stray comments dropped earlier, Tony had come to suspect something of the sort: a pregnancy, a hasty wartime marriage. Her mother was a war bride, her father was a war husband, she herself was a war baby.