Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

Charis keeps making vague mewing noises about re-doing Tony’s front lawn for her, transforming it into a miracle of bloom, but Tony has fended her off. Charis would make a garden like Tony’s study drapes, which she calls “nourishing”—rampant blossoms, twining vines, blatant seed pods—and it would be too much for Tony. She’s seen what happened to the strip of ground beside Roz’s back walk when Roz gave in to similar pleas. Because Charis has done it, Roz can’t possibly have it re-done, so now there’s a little plot of Roz’s yard that will be forever Charis.

At the street corner Tony turns to look back at her house, as she often does, admiring it. Even after twenty years it still seems like a mirage that she should own such a house, or any house at all. The house is brick, late Victorian, tall and narrow, with green fish-scale shingles on its upper third. Her study window looks out from the fake tower on the left: the Victorians loved to think they were living in castles. It’s a large house, larger than it looks from the street. A solid house, reassuring; a fort, a bastion, a keep. Inside it is West, creating aural mayhem, safe from harm. When she bought it, back when the neighbourhood was more run down and the prices were low, she didn’t expect anyone would ever live in it except her.

She goes down the subway steps, drops her token into the turnstile, boards the train, and sits on the plastic seat, with her tote bag on her knees like a visiting nurse. The car isn’t crowded, so there are no heads of tall people blocking her view and she can read the ads. Hcnurc! says a chocolate bar. Pleh uoy nac? pleads the Red Cross. Elas! Elas! If she were to say these words out loud people would think it was another language. It is another language, an archaic language, a language she knows well. She could speak it in her sleep, and sometimes does.

If the fundamentalists were to catch her at it, they’d accuse her of Satan worship. They play popular songs in reverse, claiming to find blasphemies hidden in them; they think you can invoke the Devil by hanging the cross upside down or by saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards. All nonsense. Evil doesn’t require such invocations, such childish and stagy rituals. Nothing so complicated.

Tony’s other language isn’t evil, however. It’s dangerous only to her. It’s her seam, it’s where she’s sewn together, it’s where she could split apart. Nevertheless, she still indulges in it. A risky nostalgia. Aiglatson. (A Viking chieftain of the Dark Ages? An up-market laxative?)

She gets off at St. George and takes the Bedford Road exit, makes it past the handout men and the street flower-seller and the boy playing the flute on the corner, avoids getting run over while she crosses at the green light, and heads along past Varsity Stadium and then across the grassy circle of the main campus. Her office is down one of the dingy old side streets and around the corner, in a building called McClung Hall.

McClung Hall is a solemn block of red brick, darkened to purple-brown by weather and soot. She lived in it once, as a student, for six years straight, when it was still a women’s residence. She was told it was named after somebody or other who’d helped get the vote for women, but she didn’t much care about that. Nobody did, back then.

Tony’s first memories of the place are of an ancient fire-trap, overheated but drafty, with creaking floors and a lot of wornout but stolid wood in it: massive banisters, heavy window seats, thickly panelled doors. It smelled—it still smells—like a damp pantry suffering from dry rot, with sprouting potatoes forgotten in it. At the time it also had a lingering, queasy odour that filtered up from the dining room: lukewarm cabbage, leftover scrambled eggs, burnt grease. She used to duck the meals-there and smuggle bread and apples up to her room.

The Comparative Religion people got hold of it in the seventies, but since then it’s been turned into makeshift offices for the overflow from various worthy but impoverished departments—people who are thought to use mostly their minds rather than pieces of glossy equipment, and who don’t contribute much to modem industry, and who are therefore considered to be naturally adapted to seediness. Philosophy has established a bridgehead on the ground floor, Modern History has claimed the second. Despite some half-hearted attempts at repainting (already in the past, already fading), McClung is still the same dour, circumspect building it always was, virtuous as cold oatmeal and keeping itself to itself.

Tony doesn’t mind its shabbiness. Even as a student she liked it here—compared, that is, with where she could have been. A rented room, an anonymous studio apartment. Some of the other, more blase students called it McFungus, a name that has been passed down over the years, but for Tony it was a haven, and she remains grateful.

Her own office is on the second floor, just a couple of doors down from her old room. Her old room itself has become the coffee room, a wilfully cheerless place with a chipped pressboard table, several mismatched straight chairs, and a yellowing Amnesty poster of a man tied up in barbed wire and stuck full of bent nails. There’s a drip coffee machine that spits and dribbles, and a rack where they are all supposed to keep their environmentally friendly washable mugs, with their initials painted on them so they won’t get one another’s gum diseases. Tony has gone to some trouble with her own mug. She’s used red nail polish, on black: it says Gnissapsert On. People occasionally use one another’s mugs, by mistake or from laziness, but nobody uses hers.

She pauses at the coffee room, where two of her colleagues, both dressed in fleecy jogging suits, are having milk and cookies. Dr. Ackroyd, the eighteenth-century agriculture expert, and Dr. Rose Pimlott, the social historian and Canadianist, who by any other name, would still be a pain in the butt. She wonders if Rose Pimlott and Bob Ackroyd are having a thing, as Roz would say. They’ve been putting their heads together quite frequently in recent weeks. But most likely it’s just some palace plot. The whole department is like a Renaissance court: whisperings, gangings-up, petty treacheries, snits, and umbrage. Tony tries to stay out of it but succeeds only sometimes. She has no particular allies and is therefore suspected by all.

Especially by Rose. Tony continues to resent the fact that, two years ago, Rose accused one of Tony’s graduate courses of being Eurocentric.

“Of course it’s Eurocentric!” Tony said. “What do you expect in a course called Merovingian Siege Strategy?”

“I think,” said Rose Pimlott, attempting to salvage her position, “that you might teach the course from the point of view of the victims. Instead of marginalizing them:”

“Which victims?” said Tony. “They were all victims! They took turns! Actually, they took turns trying to avoid being the victims. That’s the whole point about war!”

What Dr. Rose Pimlott knows about war you could stick in your ear. But her ignorance is willed: mainly she just wants war to get out of her way and stop being such a nuisance. “Why do you like it?” she said to Tony recently, wrinkling her nose as if talking about snot or farts: something minor and disgusting, and best concealed.

“Do you ask AIDS researchers why they like AIDS?” said Tony. “War is there. It’s not going away soon. It’s not that I like it. I want to see why so many other people like it. I want to see how it works:” But Rose Pimlott would rather not look, she’d rather let others dig up the mass graves. She might break a nail.

Tony considers telling Rose that Laura Secord, whose portrait on the old chocolate boxes that bore her name had turnedout, under X-ray, to be that of a man in a dress, really had been a man in a dress. No woman, she would tell Rose, could possibly have shown such aggressiveness, or—if you like—such courage. That would stick Rose on the horns of a dilemma! She’d have to maintain that women could be just as good at war as men were, and therefore just as bad, or else that they were all by nature lily-livered sissies. Tony is filled with curiosity to see which way Rose would jump. But there isn’t time today.