Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [88]
“There’s one thing about being an orphan, though,” says Zenia thoughtfully. Two jets of smoke come out of her perfect nostrils. “You don’t have to live up to anyone else’s good opinion of you.” She drinks the dregs of her coffee, butts out her cigarette. “You can be whoever you like.”
Tony looks at her, looks into her blue-black eyes, and sees her own reflection: herself, as she would like to be. Tnomerf Ynot. Herself turned inside out.
25
Under the circumstances, what can Tony withhold? Not very much.
Certainly not money. Zenia has to eat – Zenia, and West too, of course – and how are they to do that unless Tony, replete with the wealth of the dead, will lend Zenia the odd twenty, the odd fifty, the odd hundred, from time to time? And then how is Zenia to pay it back, things being what they are? She has a scholarship of some kind, or so she has implied, but it doesn’t cover the whole shot. In the distant past she panhandled and to a certain extent hooked her way through Europe and across the ocean; although – she tells Tony, as Tony’s eyes widen and blink – she’d much rather roll a nice middle-class drunk any time, it’s quicker and a good deal cleaner. In the more recent past she’s made extra cash by waiting on tables and by cleaning washrooms in second-rate hotels – drudgery is the price of virtue – but when she does that she’s too tired to study.
She’s too tired anyway. Love takes it out of you, and love-nests require feathering, and who does the cooking and laundry and cleaning up around Zenia’s place? Not West, poor angel; man-like, he has trouble cooking an egg or making himself a cup of tea. (Ah, thinks Tony, I could make his tea! She longs for such simple domestic chores, to offer up to West. But she censors this almost immediately. Even the boiling of West’s tea-water would feel like a betrayal of Zenia.)
Also, Zenia indicates, it costs to defy the social order: freedom is not free, it comes with a price. The front lines of liberation get the first bullets. Already Zenia and West are paying more than they should for that rat-bag of an apartment because the dirty-minded hypocrite of a landlord has come to suspect they aren’t married. Toronto is so puritanical!
Then how can Tony refuse when Zenia comes to her room one evening, in tears and minus a term paper for Modern History, with barely a moment to spare? “If I flunk this course it’s game over,” she says. “I’ll have to leave university, it’s back on the streets for me. Shit, you don’t know, Tony – you just don’t know! It’s such hell, it’s so degrading, I can’t go back to that!”
Tony is bewildered by her tears; she has thought of Zenia as tearless, more tearless even than herself. And now there are not only tears but many tears, rolling fluently down Zenia’s strangely immobile face, which always looks made-up even when it isn’t. On some other woman the mascara would run; but that isn’t mascara, it’s Zenia’s real eyelashes.
It ends with Tony writing two term papers, one for herself and one for Zenia. She does this nervously: she knows it’s highly risky. She’s stepping over a line, a line she respects. But Zenia is doing Tony’s rebelliousness for her so it’s only fair that Tony should write Zenia’s term paper. Or that is the equation Tony makes, at some level below words. Tony will be Zenia’s right hand, because Zenia is certainly Tony’s left one.
Neither of the term papers is about battles. The Modern History professor, bald-headed, squinty-eyed, leather-elbow-patched Dr. Welch, is more interested in economics than he is in bloodshed, and he has made it clear to Tony – who suggested the out-of-control sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders – that he does not consider war an appropriate subject for girls. So both of the papers are about money. Zenia’s is on the Slavic slave trade with the Byzantine