The Robber Bride (60 page)

“That’s not so easy,” says Roz.

“I know,” says Charis. “But you’ve never liked easy things.” By
never
, she means
not for the past four thousand years
. Which is about how old Roz feels.

R
oz finds herself sitting on the cellar floor in the light from the one unshaded overhead blub, an empty plate beside her, a children’s storybook open on her knees. She’s twisting and untwisting her wedding ring, the ring that once meant she was married, the ring that’s weighing her down, turning it on her finger as if she’s unscrewing it, or else expecting some genie or other to appear from nowhere and solve everything for her. Put the pieces back together, make everything right; slide Mitch alive back into her bed where she will find him when she goes upstairs – scrubbed and scented and brushed and cunning, filled to the brim with affectionate lies, lies she can see through, lies she can deal with, twenty years younger. Another chance. Now that she knows what to do she will do it better this time.
Tell me, God – why don’t we get rehearsals?

How long has she been down here, whimpering in bad light? She must go upstairs and deal with reality, whatever that may be. She must pull herself together.

She does this by patting the pockets of her bathrobe, where she always used to keep a tissue before the twins outlawed them. Not
finding any, she blots her eyes on her orange sleeve, leaving a black smear of mascara, then wipes her nose on the other sleeve. Well, who’s to see, except God? According to the nuns he had a preference for cotton hankies.
God
, she tells him,
if you hadn’t wanted us to wipe our noses on our sleeves you wouldn’t have given us sleeves
. Or noses. Or tears, as far as that goes. Or memory, or pain.

She slides the kids’ books back onto the shelf. She should donate these books to some charity, or maybe lend them – let them loose in the world to warp some small child’s mind, while she waits for her own grandchildren to appear. What grandchildren?
Dream on, Roz
. The twins are too young and will anyway probably grow up to be stock-car racers or women who go off to live among the gorillas, something fearless and non-progenitive; as for Larry, he’s in absolutely no hurry, and if the
faux
women he’s come up with so far are any sample of what the future holds in the daughter-in-law department, Roz would rather not hold her breath.

Life would be so much easier if there were still arranged marriages. She’d go out into the marriage market, cash in hand, bargain with a dependable marriage broker, secure a nice bride for Larry: bright but not bossy, sweet but not a pushover, and with a wide pelvic structure and a strong back. If her own marriage had been arranged, would things have turned out any worse than they did? Is it fair, to send inexperienced young girls out into the wild forest to fend for themselves? Girls with big bones and maybe not the smallest of feet. What would help would be a wise woman, some gnarly old crone who would step out from behind a tree, who would give advice, who would say
No, not this one
, who would say
Beauty is only skin deep
, in men as well as women, who would see down as far as the heart. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? An older woman knows. But how much older do you have to get before you acquire that kind of wisdom? Roz keeps expecting it to sprout in her, grow all over her, sort of like age spots; but it hasn’t yet.

She hauls herself up off the floor and dusts her behind, a mistake because her hands are covered with book dirt, as she realizes too late when she looks at them, having encountered a squashed silverfish stuck to her velour-covered buttock, and Lord knows what’s been crawling over her while she’s been sitting here woolgathering.
Woolgathering
, her mother’s word, a word so old, rooted so far back in time, that although everyone knows what it means nobody knows where it came from. Why was gathering wool supposed to be lazy? Reading and thinking were both woolgathering, to her mother.
Rosalind! Don’t just sit there woolgathering! Sweep the front walk!

Roz’s legs have gone to sleep. Every step she takes sends pins and needles shooting into them. She limps towards the cellar steps, pausing to wince. When she gets up to the kitchen she will open the refrigerator, just to see if there’s something in there she might like to eat. She hasn’t had a proper dinner, she often doesn’t. Nobody to cook for her, nobody to cook for, not that she ever cooked. Nobody to order in for. Food should be shared. Solitary eating can be like solitary drinking – a way of dulling the edge, of filling in the blanks. The blank; the empty man-shaped outline left by Mitch.

But there won’t be anything in the fridge that she wants; or rather, a few things maybe, but she will not stoop so low, she will not eat spoonfuls from the jar of chocolate-rum ice cream sauce, as she has done before, or blitz the can of
pâté de foie gras
she’s been saving up for God knows what mythical occasion, along with the bottle of champagne she keeps tucked away at the back. There’s a bunch of raw vegetables in there, roughage she bought in a fit of nutritional virtue, but right now they don’t appeal. She foresees their fate: they will turn slowly to green and orange goo in the crisper, and then she will buy more.

Maybe she could call up Charis or Tony, or both of them, invite them over; order up some red-hot chicken wings from the Indian tandoori take-out on Carlton, or some shrimp balls and garlic beans
and fried won-ton from her favourite Szechuan place on Spadina, or both: have a sinful little multicultural feast. But Charis will already be back on the Island, and it’s dark by now, and she doesn’t like the thought of Charis out alone at night, there might be muggers, and Charis is such an obvious target, a long-haired middle-aged woman walking around covered with layers of printed textiles and bumping into things, she might as well have a sign pinned to her,
Snatch my purse
, and Roz can rarely persuade her to take taxis even if she offers to pay for them herself, because Charis goes on about the waste of gasoline. She will take a bus; or worse, she might decide to walk, through the wilds of Rosedale, past the rows of ersatz Georgian mansions, and get picked up by the police for vagrancy.

As for Tony, she’ll be at home in her turreted fortress, cooking up West’s dinner for him, some noodle casserole or other from
The Joy of Cooking
, the 1967 edition. It’s odd how Tony’s the only one of them who has actually ended up with a man. Roz can’t quite figure it out: tiny Tony, with her baby-bird eyes and her acidulated little smile, and, you’d think, the sex appeal of a fire hydrant, with more or less the same proportions. But love comes in odd boxes, as Roz has had occasion to learn. And maybe West was so badly frightened by Zenia in his youth that he’s never dared look at any other woman since.

Roz thinks wistfully of the dinnertime tableau at Tony’s house, then decides she is not exactly envious, because straw-bodied, strange-minded, lantern-jawed West isn’t her own idea of what she’d like to have sitting across the table from her. Instead she’s glad that Tony has a man, because Tony is her friend and you want your friends to be happy. According to the feminists, the ones in the overalls, in the early years, the only good man was a dead man, or better still none at all; yet Roz continues to wish her friends joy of them, these men who are supposed to be so bad for you.
I
met someone
, a friend tells her, and Roz shrieks with genuine pleasure. Maybe that’s because a good man is hard to find, so it’s a real occasion when anyone actually finds one.
But it’s difficult, it’s almost impossible, because nobody seems to know any more what “a good man” is. Not even men.

Or maybe it’s because so many of the good men have been eaten, by man-eaters like Zenia. Most women disapprove of man-eaters; not so much because of the activity itself, or the promiscuity involved, but because of the greed. Women don’t want all the men eaten up by man-eaters; they want a few left over so they can eat some themselves.

This is a cynical view, worthy of Tony but not of Roz. Roz must preserve some optimism, because she needs it; it’s a psychic vitamin, it keeps her going. “The Other Woman will soon be with
us,”
the feminists used to say. But how long will it take, thinks Roz, and why hasn’t it happened yet?

Meanwhile the Zenias of this world are abroad in the land, plying their trade, cleaning out male pockets, catering to male fantasies. Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur. The Zenias of this world have studied this situation and turned it to their own advantage; they haven’t let themselves be moulded into male fantasies, they’ve done it themselves. They’ve slipped sideways into dreams; the dreams of women too, because women are fantasies for other women, just as they are for men. But fantasies of a different kind.

Sometimes Roz gets herself down. It’s her own worthiness that does it, the pressure on her to be nice, to be ethical, to behave well; it’s the rays of good behaviour, of good nature, of cluck-clucking good-as-gold goody-goodness beaming out from around her head. It’s her best intentions. If she is so goldarned worthy, why isn’t she having more fun? Sometimes she would like to cast off her muffling Lady Bountiful cloak, stop tiptoeing through the scruples, cut loose, not in minor ways as she does now – a little swearing inside her head, some bad verbiage – but something really big. Some great whopping thoroughly despicable sin.

Random sex would have done the trick once, but plain garden-variety sex hardly counts any more, it’s just a form of mood therapy or calisthenics, she’d have to go in for bloodthirsty kink. Or something else, something devious and archaic and complicated and mean. Seduction followed by slow poisoning. Treachery. Betrayal. Cheating and lies.

To do that she would need another body, it goes without saying, because the one she has is too clumsy, too lumberingly honest, and the sort of evil she has in mind would require grace. To be truly malevolent she would have to be thinner.

Or maybe she could go in for superhuman goodness, instead. Hair shirts, stigmata, succouring the poor, a kind of outsized Mother Teresa. Saint Roz, it sounds good, though Saint Rosalind would be classier. A few thorns, one or two body parts on a plate, to show how she’d been martyred: an eye, a hand, a tit, tits were favourites, the
ancient Romans seemed to have a thing about cutting off women’s breasts, sort of like plastic surgeons. She can see herself in a halo, with her hand languidly on her heart and a wimple, great for sagging chins, and her eyes rolled up in ecstasy. It’s the extremes that attract her. Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.

Either way, she would like to be someone else. But not just anyone. Sometimes – for a day at least, or even for an hour, or if nothing else was available then five minutes would do – sometimes she would like to be Zenia.

She hobbles up the cellar stairs on prickling feet, one step at a time, holding onto the banister and wondering if this is what it will be like to be ninety, should she get that far. She makes it to the top finally, opens the door. Here is the white kitchen, just as she left it. She feels as if she’s been away from it for a long time. Wandering lost in the dark wood with its twisted trees, enchanted.

The twins are sitting on high stools at the counter, wearing shorts with tights underneath, a fashionable hole in each knee, drinking strawberry smoothies out of tall glasses. Pink moustaches adorn their upper lips. The frozen yogourt container melts near the sink.

“Gollee, Mom, you look like a car accident!” says Paula. “What’s that smeary stuff all over your face?”

“It’s just my face,” says Roz. “It’s coming off.”

Erin jumps down and runs over to her. “Sit down, sweetie,” she says, in a parody of Roz herself in her mothering mode. “Do you have a temperature? Let us feel your forehead!”

The two of them propel her across the floor, up onto a stool. They wet the dishtowel and wipe her face – “Ooh, messy messy!” It’s obvious to them she’s been crying, but of course they don’t mention it. Then they try to get her to drink one of their smoothies, laughing and giggling because it’s funny to them, their mother as a big baby,
themselves as mothers. Wait for it, Roz thinks. Wait till I lose my marbles and start to drool, and you find yourselves doing this for real. It won’t be so funny then.

But what a burden it must be to them, her bereft condition. Why shouldn’t they put on clown faces to cover up their distress? It’s a trick they’ve learned from her. It’s a trick that works.

T
ony is playing the piano but no music comes out. Her feet don’t reach the pedals, her hands don’t span the keys, but she plays on because if she stops a terrible thing will happen. In the room is a dry burning smell, the smell of the flowers on the chintz curtains. They are large pink roses, they open and close their petals, which are now like flames; already they are spreading to the wallpaper. They aren’t the flowers from her own curtains, they’ve come here from somewhere else, some place Tony can’t remember.

Her mother walks into the darkening room, the heels of her shoes ticking on the floor, wearing her maroon hat with the spotted veil. She sits down on the piano bench beside Tony; her face glimmers, obscured, its features blurring. Her leather hand, cool as mist, brushes Tony’s face, and Tony turns and holds onto her, holds on ferociously because she knows what happens next; but out of the front of her dress her mother takes an egg, an egg that smells like seaweed. If Tony can have this egg and keep it safe, the burning in the house will stop, the future can be avoided. But her mother lifts the egg up into the air, teasingly overhead, and Tony isn’t tall
enough to reach it. “Poor thing, poor thing,” says her mother; or is it
poor twin?
Her voice is like a pigeon cooing, soothing and inexorable and infinitely mournful.