“Listen to me, Antonia,” says Zenia seriously. “All men are warped. This is something you must never forget:”
The waitress comes, dollops of fat under her chin, support hose on her legs and clumpy shoes on her feet, a grey bibbed bosom with a stain of ketchup on it bulging out in front. Indifferently she refills their cups. “She’s one too,” says Zenia, when her back is turned. “A prostie. In her spare time.”
Tony scans the stolid rump, the bored slope of the shoulders, the straggling bun of dead-squirrel-coloured hair. “No!” she says. “Who would want to?”
“Bet you anything,” says Zenia. “Go on!”
She means that Tony should continue with whatever story she’s been telling, but Tony can scarcely remember where she was. This friendship with Zenia has been very sudden. She feels as if she’s being dragged along on a rope, behind a speeding motorboat, with the waves sloshing over her and her ears full of applause; or as if she’s racketing downhill on a bicycle, with no hands and no brakes either. She’s out of control; at the same time, she’s unusually alert, as if the small hairs on her arms and on the back of her neck are standing straight up. These are perilous waters. But why? They’re only talking.
Though it’s making Tony dizzy, all this reckless verbiage. She’s never listened so much to one person; also, she herself has~never said so much, so heedlessly. She has hardly gone in for self-revelation, in her previous life. Who was there to tell? She has no idea what might come reeling out, the next time she opens her mouth.
“Go on,” says Zenia once more, leaning forward, across the speckled-brown table, the half-empty cups, the butts in the brown metal ashtray. And Tony does.
XXI
What Tony is telling about is her mother. This is the first time Tony has ever said very much to anyone about her mother, beyond the bare bones, that is. Lost and gone, says Tony, and Dreadful sorry, says everyone else. Why say more? Who would be interested?
Zenia is, as it turns out. She can see it’s a painful subject for Tony, but this doesn’t deter her; if anything it spurs her on. She pushes and prods and makes all the right noises, curious and amazed, horrified, indulgent, and relentless, and pulls Tony inside out like a sock.
It takes time, because Tony has no single clear image of her mother. The memory of her is composed of shiny fragments, like a vandalized mosaic, or like something brittle that’s been dropped on the floor. Every once in a while Tony takes out the pieces and arranges and rearranges them, trying to make them fit. (Though she hasn’t spent very long at this yet. The wreck is too immediate.)
So all Zenia can get out of her is a handful of shards. Why does she want such a thing? That’s for Zenia to know and Tony to find out. But, in the entranced and voluble moment, it doesn’t occur to Tony even to ask. :
Tony was hardened off early. This is what she calls it by now, ruefully, in her cellar, at three a.m., with the shambles of Otto the Red’s clove army strewn on the sand-table behind her and West sleeping the sleep of the unjust upstairs, and Zenia raging unchecked, somewhere out there in the city. “Hardened off” is a term she’s lifted from Charis, who has explained that it’s what you do to seedlings to toughen them up and make them frostresistant and help them to transplant better. You don’t water them very much, and you leave them outside in the cold. This is what happened to Tony. She was a premature baby, as her mother was fond of telling her, and was kept in a glass box. (Was there a note of regret in her mother’s voice, as if it was a pity that she was eventually taken out?) So Tony spent her first days motherless. Nor—in the long run—did things improve.
For instance:
When Tony was five, her mother decided she would take her tobogganing. Tony knew what tobogganing was, although she had never done it. Her mother had only a vague idea, gleaned from Christmas cards. But it was one of her romantic English images of Canada.
Where did she get the toboggan? Probably she borrowed it from one of her bridge club friends. She zipped Tony into her snowsuit and got them to the tobogganing hill in a taxi. The toboggan was just a small one, so it fit into the back seat, on a slant, along with Tony. Her mother sat in the front. Tony’s father had the car that day, as he did most days. This was just as well, as the streets were icy and Tony’s mother was at best a spontaneous driver.
By the time they got to the tobogganing hill the sun was low and huge and dimly pink in the grey winter sky, and the shadows were bluish. The hill was very high. It was on the side of a ravine, and covered with close-packed, icy snow. Groups of—screaming children and a few adults were careering down it on sleighs and toboggans and large pieces of cardboard. Some had overturned, and there were pile-ups. Those that reached the bottom disappeared behind a clump of dark fir trees.
Tony’s mother stood at the top of the hill, staring down, holding the toboggan by its rope as if restraining it. “There,” she said. “Isn’t that nice?” She was pleating her lips, the way she did when she put on lipstick, and Tony could tell that the scene before her was not exactly what she’d had in mind. She was wearing her downtown coat and hat, and nylon stockings and little boots with high heels and fur tops. She didn’t have slacks or a ski suit or a Hudson’s Bay coat and earmuffs like the other adults there, and it occurred to Tony that her mother expected her to go down the hill on the toboggan all by herself.
Tony felt an urgent need to pee. She knew how difficult this would be, considering her clumsy two-piece snowsuit with the elastic braces over the shoulders, and what annoyance it would cause her mother—there was not a washroom in sight—so she said nothing about it. Instead she said, “I don’t want to.” She knew that if she ever went down that hill she would flip over, she would crash into something, she would be crushed. One small child was being led up the hill, howling, with blood running from its nose.
Tony’s mother hated having her scenarios foiled. People should enjoy themselves when she wanted them to. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll give you a push. It’ll be lovely!”
Tony sat down on the ground, which was her habitual means of protest. Crying did not work, not with her mother. It was likely to produce a slap, or at best a shake. She had never been much of a crier.
Her mother glanced down at her with disgust. “I’ll show you how!” she said. Her eyes were sparkling, her teeth were set: it was the look she got when she was willing herself to be brave, when she was refusing to be defeated. Before Tony knew
‘ what was happening her mother had picked up the toboggan and run with it to the brink of the hill. There she threw it onto the—snow and hurled herself on top of it, and went whizzing down, flat on her belly, with her beige legs in their nylons and her fur-topped boots sticking straight up behind her. Almost immediately her hat came off.
She went at an astonishing speed. As she diminished down the slope, into the dusk, Tony clambered to her feet. Her mother was going away from her, she was vanishing, and Tony wbuld be left alone on the cold hill.
“No! No!” she screamed. (Unusual for her to have screamed: she must have been terrified.) But inside herself she could hear another voice, also hers, which was shouting, fearlessly and with ferocious delight:
On! On!
As a child, Tony kept a diary. Every January she would write her name in the front of it, in block letters:
Tony Fremont
Then under it she would write her other name: TNOMERFYNOT
This name had a Russian or Martian sound to it, which pleased her. It was the name of an alien, or a spy. Sometimes it was the name of a twin, an invisible twin; and when Tony grew up and learned more about left-handedness she was faced with the possibility that she might in fact have been a twin, the left-handed half of a divided egg, the other half of which had died. But when she was little her twin was merely an invention, the incarnation of her sense that part of her was missing. Although she was a twin, Tnomerf Ynot was a good deal taller than Tony herself. Taller, stronger, more daring.