Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

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 goodnatured 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 yellowygrey 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 fight, 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. Stripped of her intellectual honesty, her reputation, her integrity, she’ll be exiled. And Zenia is in a position to strip her.

“But I did it to help you!” says Tony, aware even as she says it that her own motives will cut no ice with the authorities. (For a moment she thinks, I could simply deny I wrote the thing. But Zenia has the original, in Tony’s back-slanted handwriting. Naturally she had to copy it out in her own.)

“I know” says Zenia. “But still. Well, maybe IT think differently in the morning. I’m just depressed, I’m down on myself; sometimes I feel so shitty I just want to jump off a bridge, you know? I feel like such an impostor sometimes. I feel I don’t belong here—that I’m just not good enough. Or for West, either. He’s so squeaky clean. Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll get him dirty, or break him, or something. You know the worst of it? Sometimes I want to. When I’m—you know. Under a lot of stress.”

So it’s not only Tony whose life is threatened, but West’s too. From what she’s seen of West and his unquestioning devotion, Tony is convinced that Zenia could indeed wreak havoc. One contemptuous flick of her hand could splatter him all over the sidewalk. How did Zenia get so much power without Tony noticing? Insofar as West is concerned, Tony did notice. But she trusted Zenia to use that power well. She trusted Zenia. Now both she and West are in danger, now she must save them—w both. “Stress?” she says faintly.

“Oh, the money thing. Tony, you wouldn’t know, it’s not something you’ve ever had to deal with. The fucking rent’s a few months behind, and the fucking landlord’s threatening to have us evicted; he says he’ll phone the university and make a stink. There’s no point in even bothering West with any of it—he’s such a baby, he just leaves all those practical things to me. If I told him how much we owe he’d go out and sell his lute, no question; I mean, what else does he have? He’d do anything for me, though it wouldn’t even make a dint, poor lamb; but he’s fond of those sacrificial gestures. I just don’t know what to do. It’s all such a burden, Tony. That’s when I get so fucking depressed!”

Tony has given Zenia money for the rent, several times already. However, she knows what Zerua will say if she men tions this. But Tony! We had to eat! You don’t know what it’s like, to be hungry. You just don’t get it! You don’t know what it’s like to have no money at all!

“How much?” she says in a cold, meticulous voice. It’s a neat piece of blackmail. She’s being bushwhacked. ‘ “A thousand dollars would see us out of the woods,” says Zenia smoothly. A thousand dollars is a great deal of money. It will make a definite hole in Tony’s nest egg. Also it’s much more than could possibly be needed for back rent. But Zenia doesn’t beg, she doesn’t plead. She knows that Tony’s response is a foregone conclusion.

Tony gets out of bed in her polo pyjamas with blue mice in clown suits printed on them, sent to her from California by her mother, left over from when she was fourteen—her nocturnal wardrobe has not been upgraded, because who would ever see it, and one of the things she minds most about this evening in retrospect is that Zenia got a good look at her absurd pyjamas—and goes over to her desk and turns the desk lamp on, briefly, and writes the cheque. “Here,” she says, thrusting it at Zenia.

“Tony, you’re a brick,” says Zenia. “I’ll pay you back later!” Both of them know this isn’t true.

Zenia exits via the window, and Tony goes back to bed. A brick: hard, foursquare, a potential murder weapon. You could bash in quite a few skulls, with a brick. No doubt Zenia will be back later for more money, and then more. Tony has gained nothing but time.

X,Kvl

Two days later West comes to McClung Hall and seeks out Tony, and asks her if she’s seen Zenia, because Zenia is gone. She’s gone from the apartment, she’s gone from the precincts of the university, she appears to be gone from the entire city, because nobody—not the bearded theatrical men, not the thin, ballet-faced, horse-maned women, and not the police, when West finally calls them—knows where she is. Nobody saw her’ go. She is simply not there any more.