The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

  And yes, they are pretty good together. Sometimes. Still. So she beams at him and returns the squeeze, and thinks they are as happy as can be. They are. They are as happy as they can be, given who they are. Though if they'd been different people they might have been happier.

  A girl, a pretty girl, a pretty girl in a scoop-neck jersey, appears with a platter of dead fish, from which Mitch selects. He's having the Catch of the Day, Roz is having the pasta done in sepia, because she has never eaten such a thing before and it sounds so bizarre. Spaghetti in Ink. There's a salad first, during which Roz sees fit to ask, tentatively enough, whether there's a specific topic Mitch wants to discuss. At previous lunches there has been one, a business topic usually, a topic having to do with Mitch getting more power on the board of Wise Woman World, of which he is the chairman, oops, chairperson.

  But Mitch says no, he was merely feeling that he hasn't been seeing enough of her lately, without the kids that is, and Roz, eager for scraps as always, laps it up. She will forgive, she will forget. Well anyway, forgive, because what you can or can't forget isn't under your control. Maybe Mitch has just been having a middle-aged crisis all these years; though twenty-eight was a little young to begin.

  The salad arrives, on a large plate borne by yet another longhaired, scoop-necked lovely, and Roz wonders whether the waitresses are chosen to go with the paintings. With so many nipples around she has the sensation of being watched by a myriad alien eyes. Pink ones. She flashes briefly on some flat-chested woman bringing a discrimination case against this restaurant for refusing to hire her. Even better, a flat-chested man. She'd love to be a fly on the wall.

  The waitress bends over, showing deep cleavage, and dishes out the salad, and stands there smiling while Roz takes a bite. "Terrific," says Roz, meaning the salad.

  "Absolutely," says Mitch, smiling up at the waitress. Oh God, thinks Roz. He's starting to flirt with waitresses. What'll she think of him? Sleazy old fart? And how soon before he really is a sleazy old fart?

  Mitch has always flirted with waitresses, in his restrained way. But that's like saying a ninety-year-old can-can dancer has always done the can-can. When do you know when to stop?

  After the salad the main course arrives. It's a different girl this time. Well, a different woman; she's a little older, but with a ravishing cloud of dark hair and amazing great tits, and a tiny little waist Roz would kill for. Roz looks hard at her and knows she's seen her before. Much earlier, in another life. "Zenia!" she exclaims, before she can help it.

  "Pardon me?" says the woman. Then she looks at Roz in turn, and smiles, and says, "Roz? Roz Grunwald? Is it you? You don't look like your pictures!"

  Roz has an overwhelming urge to deny it. She shouldn't have spoken in the first place, she should have dropped her purse on the floor and dived after it, anything to stay out of Zenia's sightlines. Who needs the evil eye?

  But the shock of seeing Zenia there, working as a waitress - a server - in Nereids, overrides all that, and "What the heck are you doing here?" Roz blurts out.

  "Research," says Zenia. "I'm a journalist, I've been freelance for years, in England mostly. But I wanted to come back, just to see - to see what things were like, over here. So I got myself commissioned to do a piece on sexual harassment in the workplace."

  Zenia must be different, thinks Roz, if she's writing about that stuff. She even looks different. She can't place it at first, and then she sees. It's the tits. And the nose too. The former have swelled, the latter has shrunk. Zenia's nose used to be more like Roz's. "Really?" says Roz, who has a professional interest. "Who for?"

  "Saturday Night," says Zenia. "It's mostly an interview format, but I thought it would be good to take a look at the locales." She smiles more at Roz than at Mitch. "I was in a factory last week, and the week before that I spent in a hospital. You wouldn't believe how many nurses get attacked by their patients! I don't mean just grabbing - they throw things, the bedpans and so forth, it's a real occupational hazard. They wouldn't let me do any actual nursing though; this is more hands-on."

  Mitch is beginning to look peevish at being sidelined, so Roz introduces him to Zenia. She doesn't want to say "an old friend," so instead she says, "We were at the same school." Not that we were ever what you'd call best buddies, thinks Roz. She scarcely knew Zenia then, except as an object of gossip. Lurid, sensational gossip.

  Mitch does nothing to help Roz out, in the conversation department. He simply mutters something and stares at his plate. He obviously feels he's been interrupted. "So, how're the occupational hazards in this place?" says Roz, covering for him. "Has anyone called you 'honeybun' and pinched your butt?"

  Zenia laughs. "Same old Roz. She was always the life of the party," she says to Mitch.

  While Roz is wondering what parties she ever attended at which Zenia was also present - none, as far as she can remember, but she used to drink more in those days, or more at once, and maybe she's forgotten - Zenia puts her hand on Roz's shoulder. Her voice changes, becomes lower, more solemn. "You know, Roz," she says, "I've always wanted to tell you this. But I never could before."

  "What?" says Roz.

  "Your father," says Zenia.

  "Oh dear," says Roz, fearing some scam she's never found out about, some buried scandal. Maybe Zenia is her long-lost half-sister, perish the thought. Her father was a sly old fox. "What did he do?"

  "He saved my life," says Zenia. "During the war."

  "Saved your life?" says Roz. "During the war?" Wait a minute - was Zenia even born, during the war? Roz hesitates, unwilling to believe. But this is what she's longed for always - an eyewitness, someone involved but impartial, who could assure her that her father really was what he was rumoured to be: a hero. Or a semi-hero; at any rate, more than a shady trader. She's heard accounts from others, her uncles for instance, but the two of them were hardly reliable; so she's never been really sure, not really.

  Now, finally, there's a messenger, bringing news from that distant country, the country of the past, the country of the war. But why does that messenger have to be Zenia? It grates on Roz that Zenia has this news and Roz does not. It's as if her father has left something in his will, some treasure, to a perfect stranger, some drifter he'd met in a bar, and nothing for his own daughter. Didn't he know how much she wanted to know?

  Maybe there's nothing in it. On the other hand, what if there is? It's at least worth a listen. It's at least worth a flutter.

  "It's a long story," says Zenia. "I'd love to tell you about it, when you've got the time. If you want to hear it, that is." She smiles, nods at Mitch, and walks away. She moves confidently, nonchalantly, as if she knows she's just made the one offer that Roz can't possibly refuse.

  42

  Roz's father, the Great Unknown. Great to others, unknown to her. Or let's just say - thinks Roz, in her orange bathrobe, in the cellar, finishing off the crumbs of the Nanaimo bar, hungrily licking the plate - that he had nine lives, and she herself was only aware of three or four of them. You never knew when someone from one of her father's previous lives might reappear.

  Once upon a time Roz was not Roz. Instead she was Rosalind, and her middle name was Agnes, after Saint Agnes and also her mother, though she didn't tell the girls at school about that because she didn't want to be nicknamed Aggie, the way her mother was, behind her back, by the roomers. No one would dare call her mother Aggie to her face. She was far too respectable for that. She was Mrs. Greenwood, to them.

  So Roz was Rosalind Greenwood instead of Roz Grunwald, and she lived with her mother in her mother's rooming house on Huron Street. The house was tall and narrow and made of red brick, with a sagging porch on the front that Roz's father was going to fix, maybe, sometime. Her father was away. He'd been away as long as Roz could remember. It was because of the war.

  Roz could remember the war, although not very well. She remembered the air raid sirens, from before she went to school, because her mother had made her crawl underneath the bed and there was a spid
er. Her mother had saved up bacon fat and tin cans, though what the soldiers would do with those things Roz couldn't imagine, and later, at school everyone gave nickels to the Red Cross because of all the orphans. The orphans stood on piles of rubble, and had raggedy clothes and huge, unsmiling eyes, appealing eyes, accusing eyes, because their parents had been killed by bombs. Sister Mary Paul showed pictures of them, in Grade One, and Roz cried because she was so sorry for them and was told to control herself, and couldn't eat her lunch, and was told she had to finish it because of the orphans, and asked for a second helping because if finishing one lunch was going to help the orphans, then eating a second one would help them even more, although she wasn't sure how. Maybe God had ways of arranging such things. Maybe the solid, visible food Roz ate got turned into invisible spiritual food and flown through the air, straight into the orphans, sort of like Communion, where the Host looked like a round soda cracker but was really Jesus. In any case, Roz was more than willing to help out.

  Somewhere over there, behind the piles of rubble, out of sight among the dark clumps of trees in the distance, was her father. She hoped some of the food she ate would bypass the orphans and get into him. That was how Roz thought when she was in Grade One.

  But the war was over, so where was Roz's father now? "On his way," said her mother. There was a third chair always placed ready at the kitchen table for him. Roz could hardly wait.

  Because Roz's father was away Roz's mother had to run the rooming house all by herself. It was wearing her down, as she told Roz, almost every day. Roz could see it: her mother had a stringy look, as if the soft parts of her were being scraped away, as if her bones were getting closer and closer to the surface. She had a long face, grey-streaked brown hair pulled back and pinned, and an apron. She didn't talk much, and when she did talk it was in short, dense clusters of words. "Least said soonest mended," she would say. "A stitch in time saves nine. Scarce as hen's teeth. Blood is thicker than water. Handsome is as handsome does. Safe as houses. Money doesn't grow on trees. Little pitchers have big ears." She said Roz was a chatterbox and her tongue wagged at both ends.

  She had hard hands with enlarged knuckles, red from washing. "Look at my hands," she would say, as if her hands proved something. Usually what they proved was that Roz had to help out more. "Your mother is a saint," said little Miss Hines, who lived on the third floor. But if Roz's mother was a saint, Roz did not especially want to be one.

  When Roz's father came back he would help out. If Roz was good, he would come back sooner, because God would be pleased with her and would answer her prayers. But sometimes she couldn't always remember. When that happened, when she did a sin, she would get frightened; she would see her father in a boat, crossing the ocean, and a huge wave washing over him or a bolt of lightning striking him, which would be God's way of punishing her. Then she needed to pray extra hard, until Sunday when she could go to confession. She would pray on her knees, beside her bed, with the tears running down her face. If it was a bad sin she would also scrub the toilet, even if it had just been done. God liked well-scrubbed toilets.

  Roz wondered what her father would be like. She had no real memory of him, and the photo her mother kept on her dark, polished, forbidden bureau was just of a man, a large man in a black coat whose face Roz could scarcely make out because it was in shadow. This photo revealed none of the magic Roz ascribed to her father. He was important, he was doing important, secret things that could not be spoken about. They were war things, even though the war was over.

  "Risking his neck," said her mother.

  "How?" said Roz.

  "Eat up your supper," said her mother, "there are children starving in Europe."

  What he was doing was so important that he didn't have much time to write letters, although letters did arrive at intervals, from faraway places: France, Spain, Switzerland, Argentina. Her mother read these letters to herself, turning an odd shade of mottled pink while she did it. Roz saved the stamps.

  What Roz's mother did mostly was cleaning. "This is a clean, respectable house," she would say, when she was bawling out the roomers for something they'd done wrong, some mess they'd made in the hall or bathtub ring they'd failed to wipe off. She brushed the stair treads and vacuumed the second-floor hall runner, she scrubbed the linoleum in the front vestibule and waxed it and did the same with the kitchen floor. She cleaned the bathroom fixtures with Old Dutch cleanser and the toilets with Sani-Flush, and did the windows with Windex, and washed the lace curtains with Sunlight Soap, scrubbing them carefully by hand on a washboard, although she did the sheets and towels in the wringer-washer that was kept in the back shed adjoining the kitchen; there were a lot of sheets and towels, because of the roomers. She dusted twice a week and put drain cleaner down all the drains, because otherwise the roomers' hair would clog them up. This hair was an obsession of hers; she acted as if the roomers tore great handfuls of it out of their heads and stuffed it down the drains on purpose. Sometimes she stuck a crochet hook down the sink drain on the second floor and hauled up a wad of slimy, soap-covered, festering hair. "See?" she would say to Roz. "Riddled with germs."

  She expected Roz to help her with all of this endless cleaning. "I work my fingers to the bone," she'd say. "For you. Look at my hands," and it was no good for Roz to say that she didn't really care whether the second-floor toilet was clean or not because she didn't use that one. Roz's mother wanted the house to be decent for her father when he came, and since they never knew when that might be, it had to be decent all the time.

  There were three roomers. Roz's mother had the second-floor front room, and Roz had one of the two rooms on the third floor - the attic, her mother called it. Little Miss Hines lived in the other attic room, with her woolly slippers and her Viyella plaid bathrobe, which she wore to go down to take her bath because the bathroom on the third floor had only a sink and a toilet. Miss Hines was not young. She worked in a shoe store in the daytime, and played the radio softly in her room at night - dance music - and read a lot of paperback detective novels. "There's nothing like a good murder," she would tell Roz. She seemed to find these books comforting. She read them in bed, and also in the bathtub; Roz would find them, opened and face down on the floor, their pages slightly damp. She would carry them back upstairs for Miss Hines, looking at the covers: mansions with storm clouds and lightning, men with felt hats pulled down over their faces, dead people with knives sticking into them, young women with large breasts, in their nightgowns, done in strange colours, dark but lurid, with the blood shiny and thick as molasses in a puddle on the floor.

  If Miss Hines wasn't in her room Roz would have a look inside her clothes closet, but Miss Hines didn't have very many clothes and the ones she did have were navy blue and brown and grey. Miss Hines was a Catholic, but she had only one holy picture: the Virgin Mary, with the Baby Jesus in her lap, and John the Baptist, wearing fur because he would later live in the desert. The Virgin Mary always looked sad in pictures, except when Jesus was a baby. Babies were the one thing that cheered her up. Jesus, like Roz, was an only child; a sister would have been nice for him. Roz intended to have both kinds when she grew up.

  On the ground floor there was one bedroom that used to be the dining room. Mr. Carruthers lived in there. He was an old man with a pension; he'd been in the war, but it was a different one. He'd been wounded in the leg so he walked with a cane, and he still had some of the bullets inside him. "See this leg?" he'd say to Roz. "Full of shrapnel. When they run out of iron they can mine this leg." It was the one joke he ever made. He read the newspapers a lot. When he went out, he went to the Legion to visit with his pals. He sometimes came back three sheets to the wind, said Roz's mother. She couldn't stop that, but she could stop him from drinking in his room.

  The roomers were not allowed to eat in their rooms or drink either, except water. They couldn't have hotplates because they might burn down the house. The other thing they couldn't do was smoke. Mr. Carruthers did, though. He opened the window a
nd blew the smoke out of it, and then flushed the butts down the toilet. Roz knew this, but she didn't tell on him. She was a little afraid of him, of his bulgy face and grey bristling moustache and clumping shoes and beery breath, but also she didn't want to tell, because telling on people was ratting, and the girls who did it at school were despised.

  Was Mr. Carruthers a Protestant or a Catholic? Roz didn't know. According to Roz's mother, religion didn't matter so much in a man. Unless he was a priest, of course. Then it mattered.

  Miss Hines and Mr. Carruthers had been there as long as Roz could remember, but the third roomer, Mrs. Morley, was more recent. She lived in the other second-floor bedroom, down the hall from the one where Roz's mother slept. Mrs. Morley said she was thirty. She had low-slung breasts and a face tanned with pancake makeup, and black eyelashes and red hair. She worked in Eaton's cosmetics, selling Elizabeth Arden, and she wore nail polish, and was divorced. Divorce was a sin, according to the nuns.

  Roz was fascinated by Mrs. Morley. She let herself be lured into Mrs. Morley's room, where Mrs. Morley gave her samples of cologne and Blue Grass hand lotion and showed her how to put her hair up in pincurls, and told her what a skunk Mr. Morley had been. "Honey, he cheated on me," she said, "like there was no tomorrow." She called Roz "honey" and "sweetie," which Roz's mother never did. "I wish I'd of had a little girl," she'd say, "just like you," and Roz would grin with pleasure.

  Mrs. Morley had a silver hand mirror with roses on it and her initials engraved on the back: G.M. Her first name was Gladys. Mr. Morley had given her that mirror for their first anniversary. "Not that he meant a word of it," Mrs. Morley would say as she plucked out her eyebrows. She did this with tweezers, gripping each eyebrow stub and yanking hard. It made her sneeze. She plucked out almost all of them, leaving a thin line in the perfect curved shape of the new moon. It made her look surprised, or else incredulous. Roz would study her own eyebrows in the mirror. They were too dark and bushy, she decided, but she was too young yet to begin pulling them out.