Anthony’s Mother Character Analysis

Anthony listens to the asthmatic wheeze of the leather chair his father’s just vacated, sucking back air into itself as if desperate for breath, the only noise in the room for a few seconds. In the deoxygenated silence, he feels what he thinks of as Evil Rays, like something in one of his old comics, jagged lightning bolts shooting across the room. They’re crackling from the fingertips of the archenemies seated on either side of him. Take that, Ice Maiden! No, you take THAT, Bitch Crone!

She can get every secret weapon into those rays—contempt, accusation, disdain, puzzled faux-innocence, the works. Anthony is determined, fully determined, to thwart her with unrelenting good cheer today.

She flashes him a smile as she heads for the door. The ghost of an old smile, one he misses; she’s trained herself not to do it because it shows the tooth she’s convinced is crooked. He’s told her he loves that tooth, but she just rolls her eyes. In every one of their wedding photos, stored over there in the handtooled leather albums, she has on the other smile, the trained one—lips closed and chin raised like a model of cool serenity, a perfected study of herself. But somewhere in a drawer, Anthony has an old photo of her, pulling off her mask and snorkel at the Great Barrier Reef, just out of the water and her grin broad and unselfconscious. Years ago.

How to broach it with Margaret, how to offer? Tell her he never uses the one in the bedroom? Yeah, tell her it’s been sitting in the guest bedroom gathering dust, be great if she could take it off his hands. A loan. As long as they’d like it. His fault for buying the gadget. Anthony has to squeeze his hands together between his knees to stop himself grabbing Tom and hugging him as hard as he can. A thin boy. Too troubled for a ten-year-old. Reading out those stupid knock-knock jokes at the table, trying his best to do just what's expected of him, to decipher all those signals and stand in the firing line of all those deadly rays.

[…] Anthony’s praying for her to just shut up for a minute, just one fucking minute for once in her life, but she can't, of course, she has to start in on how he’s got to look after it because it cost a lot of money and he can’t take it to school, it’s just to be played with at his house, and she accepts Tom’s muted kiss on the cheek without even looking at him, not really, because what she wants are babies, she only likes them when they're babies, by the time they’re Tom’s and Hannah’s age they’ve learned to be wary and submissive and not to trust her, and who can blame them?

Anthony listens to the asthmatic wheeze of the leather chair his father’s just vacated, sucking back air into itself as if desperate for breath, the only noise in the room for a few seconds. In the deoxygenated silence, he feels what he thinks of as Evil Rays, like something in one of his old comics, jagged lightning bolts shooting across the room. They’re crackling from the fingertips of the archenemies seated on either side of him. Take that, Ice Maiden! No, you take THAT, Bitch Crone!

She can get every secret weapon into those rays—contempt, accusation, disdain, puzzled faux-innocence, the works. Anthony is determined, fully determined, to thwart her with unrelenting good cheer today.

She flashes him a smile as she heads for the door. The ghost of an old smile, one he misses; she’s trained herself not to do it because it shows the tooth she’s convinced is crooked. He’s told her he loves that tooth, but she just rolls her eyes. In every one of their wedding photos, stored over there in the handtooled leather albums, she has on the other smile, the trained one—lips closed and chin raised like a model of cool serenity, a perfected study of herself. But somewhere in a drawer, Anthony has an old photo of her, pulling off her mask and snorkel at the Great Barrier Reef, just out of the water and her grin broad and unselfconscious. Years ago.

How to broach it with Margaret, how to offer? Tell her he never uses the one in the bedroom? Yeah, tell her it’s been sitting in the guest bedroom gathering dust, be great if she could take it off his hands. A loan. As long as they’d like it. His fault for buying the gadget. Anthony has to squeeze his hands together between his knees to stop himself grabbing Tom and hugging him as hard as he can. A thin boy. Too troubled for a ten-year-old. Reading out those stupid knock-knock jokes at the table, trying his best to do just what's expected of him, to decipher all those signals and stand in the firing line of all those deadly rays.

[…] Anthony’s praying for her to just shut up for a minute, just one fucking minute for once in her life, but she can't, of course, she has to start in on how he’s got to look after it because it cost a lot of money and he can’t take it to school, it’s just to be played with at his house, and she accepts Tom’s muted kiss on the cheek without even looking at him, not really, because what she wants are babies, she only likes them when they're babies, by the time they’re Tom’s and Hannah’s age they’ve learned to be wary and submissive and not to trust her, and who can blame them?