The Robber Bride

Tony was the first to welcome Zenia into her inner sphere, and she questions the deficiencies in her own life that allowed that to happen. She remembers her college days when they first met and the routines that kept her going in the void left by the deaths of her parents. She is a loner and didn’t much care for Roz back then, believing her to be too crude and “smothering.” The other girls in her dorm mostly respect her privacy, though they view her as an oddity to be taken out and observed for fun. Even then, her passion is studying war tactics and strategies. Another loner in her dorm is Charis—then named Karen—who is scattered and forgetful. One night, Tony sees Charis climbing down the dorm fire escape in her nightgown and wandering through piles of leaves. Assuming she is sleepwalking, Tony follows to ensure her safety. Only after meandering around the yard and sitting under a tree does Charis admit she is not asleep, an admission that annoys Tony. While Roz can be obnoxious, she is at least quantifiable, unlike Charis whose elusive quality unsettles Tony.

Tony’s first encounters with Zenia usually involve lending her money, a gift she is willing to give with no strings attached just to be noticed by her. Looking back, she shudders at her own naiveté. She meets Zenia through West, a classmate who gradually becomes a friend. After a few months of friendship—sharing coffee, beer, and polite conversation—West invites her to a party. Reluctantly, she attends and initially regrets it. The party is populated by avant-garde beatnik types, but West in nowhere in sight. Feeling out of place, she is about to leave when she spots Zenia, a vision in white standing out against the all-black décor. Retreating into the kitchen, she finds a drunk West who asks her stay, but this West is not the young man she knows. Suddenly, Zenia appears in the kitchen, and she and West snuggle over beers and teasing conversation. Their relationship is more than friendly, and their open displays of intimacy make Tony uncomfortable. The half beer she’s just drunk makes her woozy, and she longs for some intimacy herself. As Tony is about to leave, Zenia asks her about her “obsessions.” She replies “war,” and Zenia seems fascinated and delighted by the answer, telling her, “Let’s have coffee” (143).

Looking back, Tony doesn’t understand the invitation to coffee. She wonders if Zenia sensed a chink in Tony’s armor—her love for West, perhaps—and took advantage of it. Zenia’s conversational topics tend to the extreme—What would cause you to kill yourself or someone else?—and Tony realizes now that, even then, Zenia was probing for weakness. They spend evenings at a dumpy coffee shop populated with sex workers and drunk people, and Tony finds a secret thrill in this tawdry new world Zenia has opened up for her.

Roz tries to warn her about Zenia, but Tony won’t listen; she is too enamored of her new privileged status. All the same, she senses her friendship with Zenia is too sudden. She feels herself spinning out of control, but with no tangible evidence of harm—it’s only conversation, after all—she ignores the feeling.

During their conversations, Zenia prods Tony on the subject of her mother Anthea’s death and “makes all the right noises, curious and amazed, horrified, indulgent, and relentless” (150) to gain Tony’s confidence. Even in life, Tony’s relationship with her mother was difficult, like when she takes five-year-old Tony tobogganing and pressures her to try it despite her daughter’s fearful protests. Determined that Tony should have a “lovely” time, her mother rockets down the hill at a furious speed, leaving her young daughter alone at the top.

In school and at home, Tony is discouraged from writing left-handed. One teacher goes so far as to tie her left hand to the desk. Considered slow and remedial by her teachers but “gifted” by her mother, Tony changes schools frequently at her mother’s whim. Piano lessons are foisted upon her despite her lack of musicality in order to strengthen her right hand. One afternoon, Anthea comes home drunk and professes her love for Tony, but Tony is so unused to hearing those words, she does not know how to react.

Tony sits in her father Griff’s study and watches him work. She thinks about Anthea’s parents who died in a blitzkrieg raid over London and how she humiliates Griff for only joining the war at the very end. Griff and Anthea meet when he is stationed in London. She claims to be a “war bride,” marrying him to escape the devastation of her home country—and now resenting him for it. She deplores Toronto, and Tony is just another reminder of how her life is tethered to a foreign country. Meanwhile, Griff is a closed book to his daughter, refusing to discuss the war or his life prior to it.

As her parents argue during dinner, Tony retreats to her room, imagining herself leading a horde of barbarians into battle, eating with her bare hands, and drinking from a hollowed-out skull. The next day, Tony comes home from school and finds a note from her mother: She has left without revealing where she has gone. Tony feels responsible.