The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  Roz wonders what the other two are doing right now. Are they pacing the floor like her, are they nervous? Seen from the air the three of them would form a triangle, with Roz as their apex. They could signal to each other with flashlights, like Nancy Drew the girl detective. Of course there's always the phone.

  Roz reaches for it, dials, sets it down. What can they tell her? They don't know anything more about Zenia than she does. Less, most likely.

  Roz's hands are damp, and her underarms. Her body smells like rusty nails. Is this a hot flash, or merely the old rage coming back? She's just jealous, people say, as if jealousy is something minor. But it's not, it's the worst, it's the worst feeling there is - incoherent and confused and shameful, and at the same time self-righteous and focused and hard as glass, like the view through a telescope. A feeling of total concentration, but total powerlessness. Which must be why it inspires so much murder: killing is the ultimate control.

  Roz thinks of Zenia dead. Her actual body, dead. Dead and melting.

  Not very satisfying, because if Zenia were dead she wouldn't know it. Better to think of her ugly. Roz takes Zenia's face, pulls down on it as if it's putty. Some nice jowls, a double chin, a permanent scowl. Blacken a few teeth, like children's drawings of witches. Better.

  Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most beautiful of us all?

  Depends, says the mirror. Beauty is only skin deep.

  Right you are, says Roz, I'll take some anyway. Now answer my question.

  I think you're a really terrific person, says the mirror. You're warm and generous. You should have no difficulty at all finding some other man.

  I don't want some other man, says Roz, trying not to cry. I want Mitch.

  Sorry, says the mirror. Can't be done.

  It always ends like that.

  Roz blows her nose and gathers up her jacket and purse, and locks her office door. Boyce is working late, bless his fussy little argyle socks: the light's on under his door. She wonders whether she should knock and invite him out for a drink, which he wouldn't find it politic to refuse, and take him to the King Eddie bar and bore the pants off him.

  Better not. She'll go home and bore her kids, instead. She has a vision of herself, running down Bay Street in nothing but her orange bathrobe, tossing big handfuls of money out of a burlap bag. Divesting herself of her assets. Getting rid of all her filthy lucre. After that she could join a cult, or something. Be a monk. A monkess. A monkette. Live on dried beans. Embarrass everybody, even more than she does now. But would there be electric toothbrushes? To be holy, would you need to get plaque?

  The twins are watching TV in the family room, which is decorated in Nouveau Pueblo - sand, sage, ochre, and with a genuine cactus looming by the window, wrinkling like a morel, dying from over-watering. Roz must speak to Maria about that. Whenever Maria sees a plant, she waters it. Or else she dusts it. Roz once caught Maria going over that cactus with the vacuum cleaner, which can't have done it any good.

  "Hi Mom," says Erin.

  "Hi Mom," says Paula. Neither of them looks at her; they're channel-changing, snatching the zapper back and forth. "Dumb!" cries Erin. "So-o-o stupid! Look at that geek."

  "Brain snot!" says Paula. "C'est con, ca! Hey - my turn!"

  "Hi kids," says Roz. She kicks off her tight shoes and flops down in a chair, a dull purple chair the colour of New Mexican cliff rock just after sunset, or so said the decorator. Roz wouldn't know. She wishes Boyce were here; he'd mix her a drink. Not even mix: pour. A single malt, straight up, is what she'd like, but all of a sudden she's too tired to get it for herself. "What're you watching?" she says to her beautiful children.

  "Mom, nobody watches TV any more," says Paula.

  "We're looking for shampoo ads," says Erin. "We want to get rid of our flaky dandruff."

  Paula pulls her hair over one eye, like a model. "Do you suffer from ... flaky crotch dandruff?" she intones in a phoney advertising voice. They both seem to find this riotously funny. But at the same time they're scanning her, little fluttery sideways glances, checking for crisis.

  "Where's your brother?" Roz says wearily.

  "My turn," says Erin, grabbing the zapper.

  "Out," says Paula. "I think."

  "Planet X," says Erin.

  "Dancing and romancing," they say together, and giggle.

  If only they would settle down, rent a nice movie, something with duets in it, Roz could make popcorn, pour melted butter on it, sit with them in warm family companionship. As in days of yore. Mary Poppins was their favourite, once; back in their flannelettenightie days. But now they've hit the music channel, and there's some man in a torn undershirt hopping up and down and wiggling his scrawny hips and sticking out his tongue in what he must assume is a sexual manner, although to Roz he just looks like a mouth-disease illustration, and Roz doesn't have the stamina for this, even without the sound, so she gets up and goes upstairs in her stocking feet and puts on her bathrobe and her trodden-down landlady slippers, then ambles down to the kitchen, where she finds a half-eaten Nanaimo bar in the refrigerator. She puts it on a plate - she will not revert to savagery, she will use a fork - and adds some individually wrapped Laughing Cow cheese triangles she bought for the kids' lunches and a couple of Tomek's Pickles, an Old Polish Recipe, drink the juice for hangovers. No point in asking the kids to join her for dinner. They will say they've eaten, whether they have or not. Thus provisioned, Roz wanders the house, from room to room, munching pickles and revising the wall colours in her head. Pioneer blue, she thinks. That's what I need. Return to my roots. Her weedy and suspect roots, her entangled roots. Inferior to Mitch's, like so many other intangibles. Mitch had roots on his roots.

  Some time later she finds herself holding an empty plate and wondering why there is no longer anything on it. She's standing in the cellar, the old part, the part she's never had re-done. The storage part, with the poured cement floor and the cobwebs. The remains of Mitch's wine collection is over in one corner: not his best wines, he took those with him when he flew the coop. Probably he drank them with Zenia. Roz hasn't touched a single bottle of what's left, she can't bear to. Nor can she bear to throw it out.

  Some of Mitch's books are down here, too; his old law textbooks, his Joseph Conrads, his yacht manuals. Poor baby, he loved his boats. He thought he was a sailor at heart, though every time they went sailing something conked out. Some motor part or piece of wood, search Roz, she never got used to saying prow and stern instead of front and back. She sees herself standing on one of those boats, the Rosalind it must have been, the first one, named after her, with her nose peeling from sunburn and her shoulders freckling and Mitch's cap tilted on her head, waving some wrench or other - This one, honey? - while they drifted towards a rocky shore - where? Lake Superior? - and Mitch bent over the motor, swearing under his breath. Was it fun? No. But she would rather be there than here.

  She turns her back on Mitch's stuff so she won't have to look at it. It's too doleful. There are some of the twins' old things down here too, and some of Larry's: his baseball glove, his board games - Admirals, Strategy, Kamikaze - foisted on him by Tony because she thought those were the kind of games he should like. The children's books, fondly saved by Roz in the hope that someday she will have grandchildren and will read them these very same books. Do you know, sweetie - this used to be your mommy's! When she was a little girl. (Or your daddy's. But Roz, although she hopes, has trouble picturing Larry as a father.)

  Larry used to sit gravely silent while she read to him. His favourites were about trains that talked and were a success, or good-for-you books about interspecies cooperation. Mr. Bear helps Mr. Beaver build a dam. Larry didn't comment much. But with the twins she could barely get a word in edgewise. They would fight her for control of the story - Change the ending, Mom! Make them go back! I don't like this part! They'd wanted Peter Pan to end before Wendy grew up, they'd wanted Matthew in Anne of Green Gables to live forever.

  She remembers one phase, wh
en they were, what? Four, five, six, seven? It went on for a while. They'd decided that all the characters in every story had to be female. Winnie the Pooh was female, Piglet was female, Peter Rabbit was female. If Roz slipped up and said "he," they would correct her: She! She! they would insist. All of their stuffed animals were female, too. Roz still doesn't know why. When she asked them, the twins would give her looks of deep contempt. "Can't you see?" they would say.

  She used to worry that this belief of theirs was some reaction to Mitch and his absences, some attempt to deny his existence. But maybe it was simply the lack of penises, on the stuffed animals. Maybe that was it. In any case, they grew out of it.

  Roz sits down on the cellar floor, in her orange bathrobe, never mind the cement dust and silverfish and webs. She pulls books off the shelves at random. To Paula and Erin, from Aunt Tony. There on the cover is the dark forest, the dark wolfish forest, where lost children wander and foxes lurk, and anything can happen; there is the castle turret, poking through the knobbly trees. The Three Little Pigs, she reads. The first little pig built his house of straw. Her house, her house, shout the small voices in her head. The Big Bad Wolf fell down the chimney, right into the cauldron of boiling water, and got his fur all burned off. Her fur! It's odd what a difference it makes, changing the pronoun.

  At one point the twins decided that the wolf should not be dropped into the cauldron of boiling water - it should be one of the little pigs, instead, because they had been the stupid ones. But when Roz suggested that maybe the pigs and the wolf could forget about the boiling water and make friends, the twins were scornful. Somebody had to be boiled.

  It amazed Roz then, how bloodthirsty children could be. Not Larry; he didn't like the more violent stories, they gave him nightmares. He didn't take to the kinds of books Tony liked to contribute - those authentic fairy tales in the gnarly-tree editions, not a word changed, all the pecked-out eyes and cooked bodies and hanged corpses and red-hot nails intact. Tony said they were more true to life that way.

  "The Robber Bridegroom," reads Tony, long ago, a twin at each elbow. The beautiful maiden, the search for a husband, the arrival of the rich and handsome stranger who lures innocent girls to his stronghold in the woods and then chops them up and eats them. "One day a suitor appeared. He was ..."

  "She! She!" clamour the twins.

  "All right, Tony, let's see you get out of this one," says Roz, standing in the doorway.

  "We could change it to The Robber Bride," says Tony. "Would that be adequate?"

  The twins give it some thought, and say it will do. They are fond of bridal costumes, and dress their Barbie dolls up in them; then they hurl the brides over the stair railings or drown them in the bathtub.

  "In that case," says Tony, "who do you want her to murder? Men victims, or women victims? Or maybe an assortment?"

  The twins remain true to their principles, they do not flinch. They opt for women, in every single role.

  Tony never talked down to the children. She didn't hug them or pinch their cheeks or tell them they were sweet. She spoke to them as if they were miniature adults. In turn, the twins accepted her as one of themselves. They let her in on things, on their various plots and conspiracies, their bad ideas - stuff they would never have shared with Roz. They used to put Tony's shoes on and march around the house in them, one shoe for each twin, when they were six or seven. They were entranced by those shoes: grown-up shoes that fit them!

  The Robber Bride, thinks Roz. Well, why not? Let the grooms take it in the neck for once. The Robber Bride, lurking in her mansion in the dark forest, preying upon the innocent, enticing youths to their doom in her evil cauldron. Like Zenia.

  No. Too melodramatic for Zenia, who was, after all - who is surely nothing more than an up-market slut. The Rubber Broad is more like it - her and those pneumatic tits.

  Roz is crying again. What she's mourning is her own good will. She tried so hard, she tried so hard to be kind and nurturing, to do the best thing. But Tony and the twins were right: no matter what you do, somebody always gets boiled.

  40

  The story of Roz and Zenia began on a lovely day in May, in 1983, when the sun was shining and the birds were singing and Roz was feeling terrific.

  Well, not quite terrific. Baggy, to tell the truth: under the eyes, under the arms. But better than she'd felt when she'd turned forty. Forty had been truly depressing, she had despaired, she'd dyed her hair black, a tragic mistake. But she'd come to terms with herself since then, and her hair was back to auburn.

  Also: the story of Roz and Zenia had actually begun some time before, inside Zenia's head, but Roz had no idea.

  Not quite that, either. She had an idea, but it was the wrong idea. It was hardly even an idea, just a white idea balloon with no writing inside it. She had an idea that something was up. She thought she knew what, but she didn't know who. She told herself she didn't much care: she was past that. As long as it didn't disrupt, as long as it didn't interfere, as long as she could come out of it with not very many ribs broken. Some men needed their little escapades. It kept them toned up. As an addiction it was preferable to alcohol or golf, and Mitch's things - things, she called them, to distinguish them from people - never lasted long.

  It was a lovely May day, though. That much was true.

  Roz wakes up at first light. She often does this: wakes up, and sits up stealthily, and watches Mitch when he's still sleeping. It's one of the few chances she gets to look at him when he can't catch her doing it and interpose his opaque blue stare. He doesn't like being examined: it's too close to an evaluation, which is too close to a judgment. If there are judgments going around he wants to be making them himself.

  He sleeps on his back, legs flung wide, arms spread out as if to possess as much of the space as possible. The Royal Posture, Roz saw it called once, in a magazine. One of those psycho-con articles that claim to tell all on the basis of how you tie your shoelaces. His Roman nose juts up, his slight double chin and the heaviness around his jaw disappear in this position. There are white lines around his eyes, wrinkles where he isn't tanned; some of the blunt hairs poking through his morning chin are grey.

  Distinguished, thinks Roz. Distinguished as heck. Maybe she should've married someone ugly. Some ugly toad of a man who'd never be able to believe his good luck, who'd appreciate her sterling qualities of character, who'd worship her baby finger. Instead she had to go for distinguished. Mitch should have married a cold blonde with homicidal eyes and a double string of real pearls grafted onto her neck, and a built-in pocket behind the left breast, for the bankbook. Such a woman would've been up to him. She would not have taken the kind of crap Roz takes.

  She goes back to sleep, dreams about her father standing on a black mountain, a mountain of coal or of something burnt, hears Mitch's alarm go off, hears it go off again, wakes finally. The space beside her is empty. She climbs out of bed, out of the king-sized bed with the brass bedstead in a curving art nouveau design and the raspberry-coloured sheets and duvet cover, onto the aubergine carpet, in the bedroom with its salmon walls and the priceless twenties dresser and mirror, faux Egyptian, and slips into her cream satin robe and pads barefoot into the bathroom. She loves this bathroom! It has everything: shower cubicle, Jacuzzi, bidet, a heated towel rack, His and Hers sinks so the hairs from Roz's head won't get mixed up with the stubble from Mitch's chin. She could live in this bathroom! So could several Southeast Asian families, come to that, she reflects morosely. Guilt sets in.

  Mitch is already in here, taking a shower. His pink silhouette looms dimly through the steam and the pebble glass. Years ago - how many? - Roz would have scampered playfully into the shower, too; she would have soaped him all over, rubbed herself against his slippery body, pulled him down onto the tiled bathroom floor; back in the days when his skin fit him exactly, no sags, no bulges, and hers did too, and when he tasted like hazelnuts, a delicious roasted smell; but she doesn't do such things now, now that she has become more reluctant
to be viewed by daylight.

  Anyway, if what she suspects is true, this is the wrong time to be putting herself on display. In Mitch's cosmology Roz's body represents possessions, solidity, the domestic virtues, hearth and home, long usage. Mother-of-his-children. The den. Whereas whatever other body may currently be occupying his field of vision will have other nouns attached to it: adventure, youth, freedom, the unknown, sex without strings. When the pendulum swings back - when that other body starts representing complications, decisions, demands, sulkiness, and weepy scenes - then it will be Roz's turn again. This has been the pattern.

  Intuition is not one of Roz's strong suits, but she has intuitions about the onset of Mitch's attacks. She thinks of them as attacks, as in attacks of malaria; or else as attacks of a different nature, for isn't Mitch a predator, doesn't he take advantage of these poor women, who are surely becoming younger and younger as Mitch gets older and older, isn't it really more like a bear attack, a shark attack, aren't these women savaged by him? Judging from some of the tearful phone calls Roz has fielded, some of the shoulders she's patted in her hypocritical, maternal, there-there-ing way, they are.

  It's amazing the way Mitch can just write these women off. Sink his teeth into them, spit them out, and Roz is expected to clean up the mess. Fire of his loins and then wipe, like a blackboard, and after that he can barely remember their names. Roz is the one who remembers. Their names, and everything else about them.

  The beginnings of Mitch's flings are never obvious. He never says blatant things such as "I'm working late at the office"; when he says that, he really is working late at the office. Instead, his habits undergo a subtle change. The numbers of conferences he goes to, the numbers of showers he takes, the amount he whistles in them, the quantity and kind of aftershave he uses and the places where he splashes it - the groin is a sure giveaway - such things are minutely observed by Roz, looking pleasantly out of her indulgent eyes, bristling like a bottle-brush within. He stands up straighter, pulls in his stomach more; she catches him glaring at himself, at his profile, in hall mirrors, in store windows, his eyes narrowing as if for a leonine pounce.