Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [83]
Ethel said that was what he was like: considerate, a gentleman. She cried at the funeral, unlike Tony, and talked to herself during the prayers. Tony thought at first that she was saying Pisspiss but actually it was Pleaseplease. Maybe it always had been. Maybe she wasn’t crying about Griff at all, but about her two dead children. Or life in general. Tony could consider all possibilities, she had an open mind.
Griff’s life insurance was no good, of course. It didn’t cover suicide. But Tony had the money from the house, after the mortgage was paid off, and her mother’s leftover money, which had been willed to her, and whatever else was in the bank. Maybe that’s what her father meant when he said she would be all right.
So that’s it, Tony tells Zenia. And it is, as far as she knows. She doesn’t think about her parents very much. She doesn’t have nightmares about her father appearing with half of his head blown off, still with something to tell; or of her mother, trailing wet skirts and salt water, her hair hanging over her face like seaweed. She thinks maybe she ought to have such nightmares, but she doesn’t. The study of history has steeled her to violent death; she is well armoured.
“You’ve still got the ashes?” says Zenia. “Your mother’s?”
“They’re on my sweater shelf,” says Tony.
“You are a gruesome little creature,” says Zenia, laughing. Tony takes it as a compliment: it’s the same thing Zenia said when Tony showed her the battle notebooks with the scores of the men lost. “What else have you got? The gun?” But then she turns serious. “You should get rid of those ashes right away! They’re bad luck, they’ll ill-wish you.”
This is a new side to Zenia: she’s superstitious. Tony would not have suspected it, and her high estimate of Zenia slips a notch. “They’re just plain old ashes,” she says.
“You know that’s not true,” says Zenia. “You know it isn’t. Keep those, and she’ll still have a hold on you.”
So the next evening at twilight the two of them take the ferry across to the Island. It’s December and there’s a bitter wind, but no ice on the lake yet, so the ferry is still running. Halfway across Tony tosses the canister with her mother’s ashes off the back of the ferry, into the dark choppy water. It’s not something she’d have done on her own; it’s just to please Zenia.
“Rest in peace,” says Zenia. She doesn’t sound altogether convinced. Worse, the metal cylinder isn’t sinking. It’s floating, bobbing along in the wake of the ferry. Tony realizes she should have opened it and dumped out the contents. If she had a rifle she could put a couple of holes through it. If she could shoot.
24
December darkens and darkens, and the streets sprout forth their Christmas tinsel, and the Salvation Army brass band sings hymns and jingles its bells and stirs up its cauldron of money, and loneliness blows in the snowflurries, and the other girls in McClung Hall set off to join their families, in their homes, their warm homey homes, and Tony stays behind. As she has done before; but this time it’s better, this time there’s no cold feeling in the pit of her stomach, because Zenia is there with her heartening sneers. “Christmas is a bitch,” says Zenia. “Screw Christmas, it is so bourgeois,” and then Tony feels all right again and tells Zenia about the controversy over Christ’s birthdate, in the Dark Ages, and how grown