Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [90]
The reverse was far from true: Tony was still curious, still fascinated, still avid for detail; but when Tony asked questions, Zenia’s answers – although good-natured enough – were short, and her eyes wandered elsewhere. She had the same affable but absent-minded attitude towards West now, too. Although she still touched him whenever he came into the room, although she still doled out little flatteries, little praises, she wasn’t concentrating on him. She was thinking about something else.
On a Friday in early April, Zenia climbs in through Tony’s bedroom window in the middle of the night. Tony doesn’t see her do it, because she’s asleep; but suddenly her eyes open and she sits up straight in her bed, and there’s a woman standing in the darkness of the room, her head outlined against the yellowy-grey oblong of the window. In the instant of waking Tony thinks it’s her mother. Anthea could not be disposed of so easily, it appears: compressed into a cylinder, tossed into the lake, forgotten. She’s come back to exact retribution, but for what? Or maybe she has returned, far too late, to collect Tony and take her away at last, to the bottom of the deep blue sea, where Tony has no desire to go, and what would she look like if Tony were to turn on the light? Herself, or a bloated watercolour?
Tony goes cold all over. Where are my clothes? Anthea is about to say, out of the middle of her faceless face. She means her body, the one that’s been burned up, the one that’s been drowned. What can Tony reply? I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
All this is wordless. What Tony experiences is a complex wave of recognition and dread, shock and the lack of it: the package that comes intact whenever unvoiced wishes come true. She is too paralyzed to scream. She gasps, and puts both hands over her mouth.
“Hi,” says Zenia quietly. “It’s me.”
There’s a pause while Tony recovers herself a little. “How did you get in?” she asks, when her heart is again inaudible.
“The window,” says Zenia. “I climbed up the fire escape.”
“But it’s too high,” says Tony. Zenia is tall, but not tall enough to reach the bottom platform. Is West down there, did he give her a boost? Tony moves to switch on her bedside light, then thinks better of it. She isn’t supposed to have anyone in her room at this time of night, and dons and busybodies prowl the corridors, on the sniff for cigarette smoke and contraband sex.
“I went up that tree and swung over from the branch,” says Zenia. “Any lunatic could do it. You should really get some sort of a lock on your window.” She sits down, cross-legged, on the floor.
“What’s the matter?” says Tony. There has to be something: even Zenia wouldn’t just climb in through somebody’s window in the middle of the night on a passing whim.
“I couldn’t sleep,” says Zenia. They are both almost whispering. “I needed to talk to you. I’m feeling so bad about poor Professor Welch.”
“What?” says Tony. She doesn’t understand.
“About how we cheated on him. I think we should confess. It was forgery, after all,” says Zenia pensively. She’s talking about the term paper, on which Tony spent so much time and generous care. There was nothing dishonest about the paper itself: just about the name on it, which was Zenia’s.
Now Zenia wants to tell, and there goes Tony’s life. Many large though shadowy possibilities loom ahead for Zenia – journalism, high finance, even politics have all been mentioned – but university professor has never been among them; whereas for Tony it’s the only thing. It’s her vocation; without it she’ll be useless as an amputated hand. What else can she do? Where else can her pedlar’s pack of knowledge, the doodads and odd fragments and frippery she accumulates like lint, be exchanged for an honest living? Honest: that’s the key.