The Robber Bride

Tony rises in the morning and climbs out of bed. West, her partner, is still sleeping, and Tony is grateful for his presence. She heads to her study to grade papers for an hour and to catch a glimpse of the sunrise. Her study, a bright, tropical décor chosen by Roz contrasts with the more academic setting of books bursting from shelves and papers littering the floor. She makes tea and brings a cup to West, a “frangible” partner “subject to breakage” (10).

Tony makes breakfast, half expecting Zenia to come back from the dead: “[…][A]ll that malign vitality must have gone somewhere” (11). This is an odd precognition for the eminently logical Tony. She recalls Zenia’s funeral five years prior, attended mostly by men trying to remain anonymous. She remembers looking for Mitch and Billy, Roz and Charis’s respective ex-partners but doesn’t see them. Zenia’s lawyer reads a short tribute, noting Zenia’s “courage.” Zenia was killed by a terrorist attack in Beirut, though Tony does not know the specific circumstances surrounding her death. Equally puzzling are Zenia’s last wishes: to have her ashes buried under a tree and to have Tony, Roz, and Charis among the first to be informed of her death.

After Zenia’s ashes are buried, Tony ruminates on how, in the past, when a hated or feared person died, anything close to that person might be sacrificed as well—friends, slaves, prized animals—to appease the deceased’s spirit. Tony imagines doing the same for Zenia. She does not tell West about the memorial, fearing he will be too distraught. They eat breakfast together, but Tony, feeling protective of West, does not tell him about her lunch date with Roz and Charis: “They make him nervous. He feels—rightly—that they know too much about him” (16).

After breakfast, Tony grades more papers, and West, a musicologist, retires to his study to work, researching the effect of music on the human brain. He would like to study Tony’s brain while she plays the piano, but she resists, finding it too intrusive. She prepares to meet Roz and Charis for lunch, carefully selecting an outfit she hopes will elude Roz’s withering scrutiny. As she does so, she thinks of her fascination with historical battlefields and the souvenirs she collects from them: flowers that she presses and saves in a scrapbook. She boards the subway, indulging in her obsession with reading words backward, a sign of evil to the Fundamentalists, she notes wryly. Tony’s “evil” language, in her own estimation, is nostalgia.

She gets off at the St. George stop and walks to her office housed in a former women’s residence. The various departments brim with court intrigue, but Tony stays above the fray. She is an outlier within her department, one of the few women historians studying war as opposed to social history, as some believe a woman should. As she enters grades into her gradebook, she ruminates on one of her more popular lecture topics: how flaws in military uniform design lead to failure on the battlefield. Grades completed, she heads to her monthly lunch date. 

Tony walks through a gentrifying neighborhood on her way to The Toxique, a hip but not-too-upscale bistro. There, she meets Roz and Charis. Over lunch and wine, they discuss their lives, current events, but not the one thing they have in common: Zenia. Nevertheless, Zenia’s presence lingers, implicit and unspoken. As the buildup to the Gulf War approaches, Tony hypothesizes about the political gamesmanship, the military strategies, and the inevitable tragic results. Charis’s delicate sensibilities are disturbed by the discussion, and Tony, cynical realist that she is, has little patience for her useless, hope-based approach to the world.

Glancing into a mirror, Tony spies Zenia, alive and strolling to a table. The three women want to remain invisible, but at the same time they want to demand justice. As they pay the bill, Zenia stares right back at Tony. She sees all three of them—through them—without a moment of noticeable regret. Tony wonders what Zenia is doing there and what she wants.