The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

"What did he fix?" said Roz. She took it he didn't mean broken refrigerators.

  "To tell you the truth," says Uncle George slowly, "your father was a crook. Don't get me wrong, he was a hero, too. But if he hadn't of been a crook, he couldn't of been a hero. That's how it was."

  "A crook?" said Roz.

  "We was all crooks," said Uncle George patiently. "Everybody was a crook. They was stealing, all kinds of things, you wouldn't believe - paintings, gold, stuff you could hide and sell later. They could see how it was going, at the end they was grabbing anything. Every time there's a war, people steal. They steal whatever they can. That's what a war is - a war is stealing. Why should we be any different? Joe was the inside man, I was the driver, your father, he did the planning. When we would move, who to trust. Without him, nothing.

  "So, we'd get it out for them - not legal, with laws like they had I don't need to tell you - but we'd bribe the guards, everyone was on the take. Hide it somewhere safe, till after the war. But how did they know what was what, how did they know where we were putting it? So we kept some things back, for ourselves. Took it to different places. Picked it up afterwards. Some of them was dead, too, so we got theirs."

  "That's what he did?" said Roz. "He helped the Nazis?"

  "It was dangerous," said Uncle George reproachfully, as if danger was the main justification. "Sometimes we took out stuff we weren't supposed to take. We took out Jews. We had to be careful, go through our regulars. They let us do it because if we was caught, it was their neck too. Your father never pushed it too hard though. He knew when it was too dangerous. He knew when to stop."

  "Thank you for telling me," Roz said.

  "Don't thank me," Uncle George said. "Like I told you, he was a hero. Only, some wouldn't understand." He was tired; he closed his eyes. His eyelids were delicate and crinkled, like wet crepe paper. He raised two thin desiccated fingers, dismissing her.

  Roz made her way out through the white tiled maze of the hospital, heading for home and a stiff drink. What was she to conclude from all this, her new, dubious knowledge? That her money is dirty money, or that all money is? It's not her fault, she didn't do it, she was just a child. She didn't make the world. But she still has a sense of hands, bony hands, reaching up from under the earth, tugging at her ankles, wanting back what's theirs. And how old are those hands? Twenty, thirty years, or a thousand, two thousand? Who knows where money has been? Wash your hands when you touch it, her mother used to say. It's riddled with germs.

  She didn't tell Mitch, though. She never told Mitch. It would've been one up for him, and he was one up already, him and his old-money fastidiousness, his pretence of legal scruples. Clipping coupons yes, smuggling Jews no. Or that's what Roz would be willing to bet. He sneered discreetly at her money as it was, though she'd noticed he didn't mind spending it. But old money made a profit from human desperation too, as long as the desperation and the flesh and the blood were at several removes. Where the heck did people like Mitch think those dividends really came from? And how about the South African gold stocks he'd advised her to buy? In every conversation between the two of them there was a third party present: her money, sitting between them on the sofa like some troll or heavy barely sentient vegetable.

  At times it felt like part of her, part of her body, like a hump on her back. She was torn between the urge to cut it off from herself, to give it away, and the urge to make more of it, because wasn't it her protection? Maybe they were the same urge. As her father said, you couldn't give without getting first.

  Roz got with the left hand and gave away with the right, or was it the other way around? At first she gave to the body items, the hearts because of her father, the cancer because of her mother. She gave to World Hunger, she gave to the United Way, she gave to the Red Cross. That was in the sixties. But when the women's movement hit town in the early seventies, Roz was sucked into it like a dust bunny into a vacuum cleaner. She was visible, that was why. She was high-profile, and there weren't many women then who were, except for movie stars and the Queen of England. But also she was ready for the message, having been sandbagged twice already by Mitch and his things. The first time - the first time she found out, anyway - was when she was pregnant with Larry, and lower he couldn't go.

  Roz loved the consciousness-raising groups, she loved the free-ranging talk. It was like catching up on all the sisters she'd never had, it was like having a great big family in which the members, for once, had something in common; it was like being allowed, finally, into all the groups and cliques she'd never quite been able to crash before. No more mealy-mouth, no more my-hubby-is-better-than-your-hubby, no more beating about the bush! You could say anything!

  She loved sitting in a circle, though after a while she noticed that the circle was not quite circular. One woman would tell her problem and admit her pain, and then another one would do it, and then Roz would take her turn, and a sort of disbelieving glaze would come down over their eyes and someone would change the subject.

  What was it? Why was Roz's pain second-rate? It took her a while to figure it out: it was her money. Surely, they thought, anyone with as much money as Roz couldn't possibly be suffering. She remembered an old expression from her uncles: My heart bleeds for him. This was always said with extreme sarcasm, about someone who'd got lucky, which meant rich. Roz was expected to do the bleeding for, but she could not expect to be bled over in return.

  Still, there was one area in which Roz was in demand. In a movement so perennially cash-starved you could almost say she was indispensable. So it was natural that she was the one they had come to when Wise Woman World was about to go under because it couldn't attract big glossy lipstick-and-booze advertising. It was more than a magazine then, it was a friend; a friend that combined high ideals and hope with the sharing of down-and-dirty secrets. The truth about masturbation! The truth about wanting, sometimes, to shove your kids' heads into the wall! What to do when men rubbed themselves against you from behind, in the subway, and when your boss chased you around the desk, and when you had those urges to take all the pills in the medicine cabinet, the day before your period! Wise Woman World was all the sleepover parties Roz had once felt were going on behind her back, and of course she had to save it.

  The others wanted the magazine to be a cooperative, the way it already was. They wanted Roz to just give them the money, period, and no tax write-off either because it was too political. It wasn't peanuts either, what it would take. There was no point in a small cash injection. Not enough would be the same as nothing, she might as well flush it down the toilet.

  "I never invest in anything I can't control," she told them. "You have to issue shares. Then I'll buy a majority holding." They got angry at her for that, but Roz said, "Your leg's broken, you go to a doctor. You have money troubles, you come to me. You tried it your way and it didn't work, and frankly your books are a mess. This is something I know. You want me to fix it, or not?" She knew it would still lose money, but that being the case she at least wanted to take the business loss.

  They didn't like it either when Roz put Mitch on the board of directors and stuck on a couple of his legal buddies to keep him company, but it was the only way. If they wanted her help they had to realize what her life conditions were, and if Mitch couldn't participate, he would sabotage. Her home life would be turned into a maze of snares and booby traps, more than it already was. "It's just three meetings a year," she told them. "It's the price you pay." As prices went - as prices had gone, here and there in world history - it wasn't all that high.

  "I'm having Zenia over for a drink," Roz tells Mitch. If she doesn't tell him, he's sure to walk in on the two of them and then sulk because he's been left out of the picture. Being a woman with power doesn't mean Roz has to tread less softly around Mitch. She has to tread more softly, she has to diminish herself, pretend she's smaller than she is, apologize for her success, because everything she does is magnified.

  "Zenia who?" says Mitch.

  "You know,
we ran into her in that restaurant," says Roz. She's pleased Mitch doesn't remember.

  "Oh yes," says Mitch. "She's not like most of your friends."

  Mitch isn't that keen on Roz's friends. He thinks they're a bunch of man-hating hairy-legged whip-toting feminists, because at one point, in his early days on the board of Wise Woman World, they were. In vain does Roz tell him that everyone was then, it was a trend, and the overalls were just a fashion statement - not that Roz ever wore them herself, she would've looked like a truck driver. He knows better, he knows it wasn't just overalls. The women at Wise Woman had put up with him because of Roz, but they hadn't suffered him gladly. They wouldn't let him tell them how to be good feminists, much as he tried. Maybe it was because he said they should use humour and charm because otherwise men would be frightened of them, and they weren't in the mood to be charming, not to him, not just then. He must have been badly traumatized by that whole phase; though he wasn't above trying a few twists and ploys of his own.

  Roz remembers the dinner party she threw to celebrate the restructuring of Wise Woman World, when Mitch was sitting beside Alma the managing editor, and made the mistake of trying to run his hand up and down her leg under the table while carrying on a too-animated theoretical discussion with Edith the designer. Poor lamb, he thought Roz couldn't guess. But one look at Mitch's arm position - and his dampening, reddening, braised-looking face, and Alma's stern frown and the squint lines around her mouth - told all. Roz watched with furious interest as Alma struggled with her dilemma: whether to put up with it because Mitch was Roz's husband and she didn't want to jeopardize her job - a thing Mitch had counted on with others, in the past - or whether to call him on it. Principle won, and also outrage, and Alma said to him sharply, though in an undertone, "I am not a piccolo."

  "Pardon?" said Mitch, distantly, politely, bluffing it out, keeping his hand under the table. The poor baby hadn't realized yet that women had really changed. In days of yore, Alma would have felt guilty for attracting this kind of attention, but not any longer.

  "Get your goddamn hand off my fucking leg or I'll stab you with my fork," hissed Alma.

  Roz went into coughing mode to cover up that she'd heard, and Mitch's hand shot up above ground as if he'd been scalded, and after that night he started referring to Alma with pity and concern, as if she were a lost soul. A drug addict or something. "Too bad about that girl," he would say sadly. "She has such potential, but she has an attitude problem. She'd be quite good-looking if it weren't for the scowl." He hinted that she might be a lesbian; he hadn't figured out that this was no longer an insult. Roz waited a decent interval and then pulled strings to get Alma a raise.

  But that's how Mitch tends to see Roz's friends: scowly. And more lately, frumpy. He can't resist commenting on how their faces are sliding down, as if his isn't, though it's true men can get away with looking older. Probably it's revenge: he suspects Roz and her friends of talking him over behind his back, of analyzing him and providing remedies for him, as if he's a stomach ailment. This was true once, granted, when Roz still thought she could change him, or when her friends thought she could change herself. When he was a project. Leave him, they'd say. Turf the bugger out! You can afford it! Why do you stay with him?

  But Roz had her reasons, among them the children. Also she was still enough of a once-Catholic to be nervous about divorce. Also she didn't want to admit to herself that she'd made a mistake. Also she was still in love with Mitch. So after a while she stopped discussing him with her friends, because what was left to say? It was an impasse, and chewing over solutions that she knew she would never implement made her feel guilty.

  And then her friends gave up wearing overalls, and left the magazine, and went into dress-for-success tailored suits, and lost interest in Mitch, and discussed burnout instead, and Roz could permit herself to feel guilty about other things, such as being more energetic than they were. But Mitch keeps on saying, "Are you having lunch with that frumpy old man-hater?" whenever one of the friends from that era turns up again. He knows it gets to her.

  He has a little more tolerance for Charis and Tony, maybe because Roz has known them so long and because they're the twins' godmothers. But he thinks Tony is a weirdo and Charis is a nut. That's how he neutralizes them. As far as Roz knows he has never made a pass at either of them. Possibly he doesn't place them in the category of woman but in some other category, not clearly defined. A sort of sexless gnome.

  Roz calls up Tony at her History Department office. "You won't believe this," she says.

  There is a pause while Tony tries to guess what it is she's being called upon not to believe. "Probably not," she says.

  "Zenia's back in town," says Roz.

  There's another pause. "You were talking to her?" says Tony.

  "I ran into her in a restaurant," says Roz.

  "You never just run into Zenia," says Tony. "Look out, is my advice. What's she up to? There must be something."

  "I think she's changed," says Roz. "She's different from the way she used to be."

  "A leopard cannot change its spots," says Tony. "Different how?"

  "Oh, Tony, you're so pessimistic!" says Roz. "She seemed - well, nicer. More human. She's a freelance journalist now, she's writing on women's issues. Also" - Roz drops her voice - "her tits are bigger."

  "I don't think tits can grow," says Tony dubiously, having once looked into it.

  "Most likely they didn't," says Roz. "They're doing a lot of artificial ones now. I bet she got them implanted."

  "That wouldn't surprise me," says Tony. "She's upping her strike capability. But tits or no tits, watch your back."

  "I'm just having her over for a drink," says Roz. "I have to, really. She knew my father, during the war." The full implications of which Tony could hardly be expected to understand.

  So nobody could say, later, that Roz wasn't warned. And nobody did say it, and nobody said, either, that Roz was warned, because Tony wasn't one of those intolerable serves-you-right friends and she never reminded Roz of the precautions she had urged. But once the chips were down, Roz reminded herself. You walked into it with your eyes open, she would berate herself. Dimwit! What led you on?

  She knows now what it was. It was Pride, deadliest of the Seven Deadlies; the sin of Lucifer, the wellspring of all the others. Vainglory, false courage, bravado. She must have thought she was some kind of a lion-tamer, some kind of a bullfighter; that she could succeed where her two friends had failed. Why not? She knew more than they'd known, because she knew their stories. Forewarned was forearmed. Also she was overconfident. She must have thought she would be guarded and adroit. She must have thought she could handle Zenia. She'd once had pretty much the same attitude towards Mitch, come to think of it.

  Not that she'd felt the pride working in her at the time. Not at all. That was the thing about sins - they could dress up, they could disguise themselves so you hardly knew them. She hadn't thought she was being proud, merely hospitable. Zenia wanted to say thank you, because of Roz's father, and it would have been very wrong of Roz to deny her the opportunity.

  There had been another kind of pride, too. She'd wanted to be proud of her father. Her flawed father, her cunning father, her father the fixer, her father the crook. She'd told little bits of his war story when people were interviewing her for magazine profiles, Roz the Business Whiz, how did you get your start, how do you juggle all your different lives, what do you do about daycare, how does your husband cope, what do you do about the housework, but even while she was telling about him, her father the hero, her father the rescuer, she knew she was sprucing him up, shining a good light on him, pinning posthumous medals onto his chest. He himself had refused to discuss it, this shadowy part of his life. What do you need to know for? he'd say. That time is over. People could get hurt. Waiting for Zenia, she'd been more than a little nervous about what she might find out.

  46

  When Zenia does come for a drink, finally - she hasn't rushed it - it's
a Friday and Roz is wiped because it's been a vile week at the office, input overload times ten, and the twins have chosen this day to give each other haircuts because they want to be punk rockers, even though they're only seven, and Roz has been intending to parade them for Zenia but now they look as if they have a bad case of mange, and they show no signs of repentance at all, and anyway Roz doesn't feel she should display anger because girls should not be given the idea that being pretty is the only thing that counts and that other people's opinions of how they ought to arrange their bodies are more important than their own.

  So after her first yelp of surprise and dismay she has tried to act as if everything is normal, which in a way it is, although her tongue is just a stub because she's bitten it so hard, and she has dutifully repressed her strong desire to send them upstairs to take baths or play in their playroom, and when Zenia arrives at the front door, wearing amazing lizard-skin shoes, three hundred bucks at least and with heels so high her legs are a mile long, and a cunning fuchsia-and-black raw silk suit with a little nipped-in waist and a tight skirt well above the knees - Roz is so disgusted that mini-skirts have come back, what are you supposed to do if you have serious thighs, and she remembers those skirts from the last time around, in the sixties, you had to sit down with your legs glued together or all would be on view, the once-unmentionable, the central item, the foul and disgraceful blot, the priceless treasure, an invitation to male peering, to lustful pinching and leering, to foaming at the mouth, to rape and pillage, just as the nuns always warned - there are the twins, wearing Roz's cast-off slips from their dress-up box and running down the hall with Mitch's electric shaver, chasing the cat, because they want it to be a punk rock mascot, although Roz has told them before that the shaver is strictly out of bounds and they will be in deep trouble if Mitch discovers cat fur caught in it, it's bad enough when Roz can't find her own shaver and uses Mitch's on her legs and pits and isn't careful enough washing the stubble out of it. The twins pay no attention to her because they assume she'll cover for them, lie herself blue, hurl her body in front of the bullets, and they're right, she will.