Authors: Margaret Atwood
In addition to a study desk she has an architect’s drawing board with a high swivelling stool that renders her instantly taller. She uses it for marking student term papers: she likes to perch up there on the stool, swinging her short legs, with the papers on a slant in front of her, and correct from a judicious distance, as if painting. The truth is that she’s getting far-sighted as well as the near-sighted she’s always been. Bifocals will soon be her fate.
She marks with her left hand, using different-coloured pencils, which she holds between the fingers of her right hand like brushes: red for bad comments, blue for good ones, orange for spelling mistakes, and mauve for queries. Sometimes she reverses hands. When each paper is finished she drops it onto the floor, making a satisfying flurry. To combat boredom she occasionally reads a few sentences out loud to herself, backwards.
Seigolonhcet gnitepmoc fo ecneics eht si raw fo ecneics eht
. How true. She has said it herself, many times.
Today she marks quickly, today she’s synchronized. Her left hand knows what her right hand is doing. Her two halves are superimposed: there’s only a slight penumbra, a slight degree of slippage.
Tony marks papers until quarter to eight. Sunlight floods the room, made golden by the yellow leaves outside; a jet flies over; the garbage truck approaches along the street, clanking like a tank. Tony hears it, slippers hastily down the stairs and into the kitchen, lifts the plastic sack from its bin, twist-ties it, runs to the front door with it, and scampers down the porch steps, hiking up her dressing gown. She has to sprint only a short distance before catching up with the truck. The men grin at her: they’ve seen her in her dressing gown before. West is supposed to do the garbage, but he forgets.
She goes back to the kitchen and makes the tea, warming the pot, measuring the leaves carefully, timing the steeping with her big-numbers wristwatch. It was Tony’s mother who taught her about making tea; one of the few useful things she did teach her. Tony has known how to make tea since she was nine. She can remember standing on the kitchen stool, measuring, pouring, carrying the cup upstairs, tenderly balanced, to where her mother was lying in bed under the sheet, a rounded mound, white as a snowdrift.
How lovely. Put it there
. And finding the cup later, cold, still full.
Begone, Mother, she thinks.
Rehtom, enogeb
. She banishes her, not for the first time.
West always drinks the tea that Tony makes. He always accepts her offerings. When she goes upstairs with his cup he’s standing by the back window, looking out over the neglected and derelict autumn yard. (Both of them say they will plant things in it, soon, later. Neither of them does.) He’s already dressed: jeans, and a blue sweatshirt that says
Scales & Tails
and has a turtle on it. Some organization devoted to the saving of amphibians and reptiles, which – Tony imagines – doesn’t have a very large membership, yet. There are so many other things, these days, that require saving.
“Here’s your tea,” she says.
West bends in several places, like a camel sitting down, in order to kiss her. She raises herself on tiptoe.
“Sorry about the garbage,” he says.
“It’s all right,” she says, “it wasn’t heavy. One egg or two?” Once, during the morning garbage race, she tripped on her dressing gown and took a header down the front steps. Luckily she landed on the bag itself, which burst. She didn’t mention this to West, though. She’s always careful with him. She knows how frangible he is, how subject to breakage.
W
hile boiling the eggs Tony thinks of Zenia. Is it a premonition? Not at all. She frequently thinks of Zenia, more frequently than when Zenia was alive. Zenia dead is less of a threat, and doesn’t have to be shoved away, shoved back into the spidery corner where Tony keeps her shadows.
Though even Zenia’s name is enough to evoke the old sense of outrage, of humiliation and confused pain. Or at least an echo of it. The truth is that at certain times – early mornings, the middle of the night – she finds it hard to believe that Zenia is really dead. Despite herself, despite the rational part of herself, Tony keeps expecting her to turn up, stroll in through some unlocked door, climb through a window carelessly left open. It seems improbable that she would simply have evaporated, with nothing left over. There was too much of her: all that malign vitality must have gone somewhere.
Tony slides two slices of bread into the toaster, then rummages in the cupboard for the jam. Zenia
is
dead, of course. Lost and gone
forever. Dead as a cinder. Every time Tony thinks this, the air goes into her lungs, then out in a long sigh of relief.
Zenia’s memorial service was five years ago, or four and a half. It was in March. Tony can recall the day perfectly, a wet grey day that turned to sleet later. What surprised her at the time was that there were so few people there. Men, mostly, with their coat collars turned up. They avoided the front row and kept trying to get behind one another, as if they didn’t want to be seen.
None of these men was Roz’s runaway husband Mitch, Tony noted with interest and some disappointment, though she was glad for Roz. She could sense Roz craning her neck, riffling through the faces: she must have expected him to be there, and then what? Then there would have been a scene.
Charis was looking too, in a less obtrusive way; but if any of these men was Billy, Tony wouldn’t have been able to tell, because she’d never met Billy. He’d arrived, then vanished, during the interval when she hadn’t been in touch with Charis. True, Charis had shown her a photo, but the focus was bad and the top of Billy’s head was cut off, and he’d had a beard then. Men’s faces changed more than women’s did, over time. Or they could change them more, at will. Add facial hair and subtract it.
There was no one at all that Tony knew; except Roz and Charis, of course. They wouldn’t have missed it for anything, said Roz. They wanted to see the end of Zenia, make sure she was now fully (Tony’s word) inoperational. Charis’s word was
peaceful
. Roz’s was
kaput
.
The service was unsettling. It seemed a patched-up affair, held at a funeral parlour chapel of a lumpy, magenta clumsiness that would have filled Zenia with scorn. There were several bunches of flowers, white chrysanthemums. Tony wondered who could have sent them. She hadn’t sent any flowers herself.
A blue-suited man who identified himself as Zenia’s lawyer – the same man, therefore, who had called Tony to tell her about the service – read out a short tribute to Zenia’s good qualities, among which courage was listed foremost, though Tony didn’t think the manner of Zenia’s death had been particularly courageous. Zenia had been blown up during some terrorist rampage or other, in Lebanon; she hadn’t been a target, she’d just been in the way. An innocent bystander, said the lawyer. Tony was sceptical about both words:
innocent
was never Zenia’s favourite adjective for herself, and bystanding was not her typical activity. But the lawyer did not say what she’d really been doing there, on that unnamed street in Beirut. Instead he said she would be long remembered.
“Damn right she will be,” Roz whispered to Tony. “And by
courage
he meant
big tits.”
Tony felt this was tasteless, as the size of Zenia’s tits was surely no longer an issue. In her opinion Roz sometimes went too far.
Zenia herself was present only in spirit, said the lawyer, and also in the form of her ashes, which they would now proceed to the Mount Pleasant Cemetery to inter. He actually said
inter
. It had been Zenia’s wish, as stated in her will, that the ashes should be interred under a tree.
Interred
was very unlike Zenia. So was the tree. In fact, it seemed unlike Zenia to have made a will, or to have had a lawyer at all. But you never knew, people changed. Why, for instance, had Zenia put the three of them on the list of people to be informed in the event of her death? Was it remorse? Or was it some kind of last laugh? If so, Tony failed to get the point.
The lawyer had been no help: all he had was the list of names, or so he’d claimed. Tony could hardly expect him to explain Zenia to her. If anything it should be the other way around. “Weren’t you her friend?” he’d said, accusingly.
“Yes,” said Tony. “But that was so long ago.”
“Zenia had an excellent memory,” said the lawyer, and sighed. Tony had heard sighs like that before.
It was Roz who insisted they go on to the cemetery after the service. She drove them in her car, her large one. “I want to see where they’re putting her, so I can walk the dogs there,” she said. “I’ll train them to widdle on the tree.”
“It’s not the
tree’s
fault,” said Charis indignantly. “You’re being uncharitable.”
Roz laughed. “Right, sweetie! I’m doing it
for
you!”
“Roz, you don’t have any dogs,” said Tony. “I wonder what kind of a tree it is.”
“I’ll get some, just for this,” said Roz.
“Mulberry,” said Charis. “It was in the vestibule, with a label on.”
“I don’t see how it can possibly grow,” said Tony. “It’s too cold.”
“It’ll grow,” said Charis, “as long as the buds aren’t out yet.”
“I hope it gets blight,” said Roz. “No, really! She doesn’t deserve a tree.”
Zenia’s ashes were in a sealed metal canister, like a small landmine. Tony was familiar with such canisters, and they depressed her. They did not have the grandeur of coffins. She thought of the people inside them as having been condensed, like condensed milk.
She thought there would be some sprinkling involved, of what the lawyer had referred to as the cremains, but the canister was not opened up and the ashes weren’t sprinkled. (Afterwards – after the service, and after her October-morning egg-cooking as well – Tony had occasion to wonder what had really been in there. Sand, probably, or something disgusting, like dog turds or used condoms. That would have been the sort of gesture Zenia would have made, once, when Tony first knew her.)
They stood around in the fine cold drizzle while the canister was planted, and the mulberry tree on top of it. Earth was tamped down.
There were no final words said, no words of dismissal. The drizzle began to freeze, and the men in their overcoats hesitated, then wandered off towards their parked cars.
“I have the uneasy feeling that we’ve left something out,” said Tony, as they walked away.
“Well, there wasn’t any singing,” said Charis.
“So, like what?” said Roz. “A stake through her heart?”
“Maybe what Tony meant was that she was a fellow human
being,”
said Charis.
“Fellow human being, my fat fanny,” said Roz. “If she was a fellow human being, I’m the Queen of England.”
What Tony meant was less benevolent. She was thinking that for thousands of years, when people died – especially powerful people, especially people who were feared – the survivors had gone to a lot of trouble. They’d slit the throats of their best horses, they’d buried slaves and favourite wives alive, they’d poured blood into the earth. It hadn’t been mourning, it had been appeasement. They’d wanted to show their good will, however spurious, because they’d known the spirit of the dead one would be envious of them for still being alive.
Maybe I should have sent flowers, thought Tony. But flowers wouldn’t have been enough, for Zenia. She would have sneered at flowers. What was needed was a bowl of blood. A bowl of blood, a bowl of pain, some death. Then maybe she would stay buried.
Tony didn’t tell West about the memorial service. He might have gone to it, and fallen to pieces. Or else he might not have gone and then felt guilty, or been upset that she’d attended without him. He knew Zenia was dead though, he’d seen it in the paper: a small oblong, hidden in the middle.
Canadian Killed in Terrorist Blast
. When they’d been young,
blast
had been a name for a party. He hadn’t said anything to Tony, but she’d found that page with the piece cut out of it. They had a tacit agreement never to mention Zenia.
Tony presents the eggs in two ceramic eggcups shaped like chickens that she picked up in France a few years ago. The French liked to make dishes in the shapes of the things that were going to be served in them; when it came to eating they rarely beat about the bush. Their menus read like a vegetarian’s nightmare – hearts of these, brains of that. Tony appreciates this directness. She has a French fish platter too, in the shape of a fish.
Shopping in general is not her thing, but she has a weakness for souvenirs. She bought these eggcups near the site of the battlefield where General Marius of Rome wiped out a hundred thousand Teutones – or two hundred thousand, depending on who was doing the chronicling – a century before the birth of Christ. By dangling a small advance contingent of his forces in front of the enemy like bait, he’d decoyed them to his chosen slaughtering-ground. After the battle, three hundred thousand Teutones were sold into slavery, and ninety thousand others may or may not have been thrown into a pit on Mont Sainte Victoire at the urging of a possibly Syrian prophetess, whose name may or may not have been Martha. She was said to have worn purple robes.
This clothing detail has been passed down through the centuries with firm authority, despite the vagueness of other parts of the story. The battle itself, however, definitely took place. Tony has inspected the terrain: a flat plain, hemmed in on three sides by mountains. A bad place to fight if you were on the defensive. Pourrières is the name of the nearby town; it’s still called that, after the smell of the rotting corpses.
Tony does not mention (and has never mentioned) this eggcup connection to West. He would be dismayed, not so much by the rotting Teutones as by her. She once remarked to him that she could understand those kings of old who used to have their enemies’ skulls made into wine cups. This was a mistake: West likes to think of her as kind and beneficent. And forgiving, of course.
Tony has made coffee, grinding the beans herself; she serves it with cream, in defiance of cholesterol. Sooner or later, as their arteries fill with sludge, they will have to give up cream, but not just yet. West sits eating his egg; he’s absorbed in it, like a happy child. The bright primary colours – the red cups, the yellow tablecloth, the orange plates – give the kitchen a playground air. His grey hair seems a fluke, some unaccountable transformation that’s been worked upon him overnight. When she first knew him he was blond.