Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [85]
Once Tony forgot to sign out of McClung Hall and then stayed at Zenia’s too late. She ended up spending the night on Zenia’s living-room floor, rolled in a blanket, on top of Zenia’s coat and her own coat and West’s. In the morning, very early, West went back with her to McClung Hall and gave her a boost onto the bottom platform of the fire escape, which was too high for her to reach otherwise.
It was a daring thing to do, staying out all night, but she doesn’t want to do it again. For one thing it was too humiliating, coming back with West on the streetcar and then the subway, unable to think of what she should be saying to him, then being lifted up by him and deposited on the fire escape platform like a parcel. For another thing, sleeping outside the bedroom with both of them inside it made her too unhappy.
She didn’t sleep, anyway. She couldn’t, because of the sounds. Thick sounds, unknown sounds, deep sounds, hair-covered and snouted and root-like, muddy and hot and watery sounds from underneath the earth.
“I think your mother was a romantic,” says Zenia, out of nowhere. She is mixing batter for the langues de chat she’s making; Tony is sitting at the table copying out her own history notes for Zenia, who as usual is short of time. “I think she was in search of the perfect man.”
“I don’t think so,” says Tony. She’s a little taken aback: she thought the file on her mother was closed.
“She sounds fun-loving,” says Zenia. “She sounds full of life.”
Tony can’t quite understand why Zenia wants to excuse her mother. She herself has not done so, she realizes now. “She liked parties,” she says briefly.
“I bet she tried to have an abortion, and it didn’t work out,” says Zenia cheerfully. “Before she married your father. I bet she filled the bathtub up with boiling water and drank a lot of gin. That’s what they used to do.”
This is a darker view of her mother than Tony herself has ever taken. “Oh, no,” she murmurs. “She wouldn’t have done that!” Though it could be true. Maybe that’s why Tony is so small. Neither of her parents was particularly diminutive. Maybe her growth got stunted by the gin. But then, wouldn’t she be an idiot as well?
Zenia fills the shallow moulds and slides them into the oven. “The war was a strange time,” she says. “Everybody screwed everybody, they just cut loose! The men thought they were going to die, and the women thought that too. People couldn’t get used to being normal again, afterwards.”
Wars are Tony’s territory. She knows all this, she has read about it. Plagues have the same effect: a panic, a hothouse forcing, a sort of greedy hysteria. But it seems unfair that such conditions should have applied to her own parents. They should have been exempt. (Her father, the Christmas after her mother ran away, standing in the middle of the living room with an armful of glass ornaments, standing there in front of the naked Christmas tree as if paralyzed, not knowing what to do. Herself going for the stepladder, taking the ornaments gently from his hands. Here. I can hang them on! He would have thrown them, otherwise. Thrown them against the wall. Sometimes he would pause that way, in the middle of doing a simple thing, as if he’d gone blind or lost his memory. Or suddenly regained it. He was living in two times at once: hanging the Christmas tree ornaments, and blowing holes in enemy children. So no wonder, thinks Tony. Despite his increasingly drunken and fragmented and, yes, violent and frightening later years, she has more or less forgiven him. And if Anthea hadn’t run away, would he have ended up on the floor, with his blood soaking into the morning paper? Not likely.)
“She abandoned me,” says Tony.
“My own mother sold me,” says Zenia, with a sigh.
“Sold you?” says Tony.
“Well, rented me out,” says Zenia. “For money. We had to eat. We were refugees. She’d made it as far as Poland before the war but she