Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

But he’s wrong, thinks Roz, remembering. It was wits for Zenia also.

That was the beginning of the end of her marriage, although she didn’t realize it at the time. Or maybe it was the end of the end. Who knows? The end must have been a long time coming. These things are not sudden.

Roz wouldn’t have known it from Mitch, though. He made love to her that night with an urgency he hadn’t shown for a long time. No voluptuous ease, no lordly walrus-like wallowing: it was snatch and grab. There was nothing he wanted her to give; instead he wanted to take. Roz finds herself being bitten, and is pleased rather than otherwise. She didn’t know she was still that irresistible.

A week later she arranges an early dinner, at Scaramouche, for herself and Zenia and the current WiseWomanWorld editor, whose name is BethAnne, and they ingest radicchio salads and exotic parboiled vegetables and clever pastas, and go over Zenia’s resume and her file of magazine stories. First there are the ones written when she was on staff for a cutting-edge fashion magazine, in England. But she quit that job because she felt too tied down, and also she’d wanted to write about more political things. Libya, Mozambique, Beirut, the Palestinian camps; Berlin, Northern Ireland, Colombia, Bangladesh, El Salvador—Zenia has been to most of the hot spots Roz can remember, and a few she can’t. Zenia regales them with incidents, of stones and bullets that have whizzed past her head, of cameras that have been broken by policemen, of narrow escapes in jeeps. She names hotels.

A lot of the stories are under other names, men’s names, because, as Zenia says, the material in them is controversial, inflammatory even, and she didn’t want to open the door in the middle of the night and find some enraged Arab or Irish hit man or Israeli or drug lord standing on the other side of it. “I wouldn’t want this to get around,” she says, “but that’s the main reason I came back to Canada. It’s kind of a safe haven for me—you know? Things were getting just a little too interesting for me, over there. Canada is such a—such a gentle place.”

Roz and BethAnne exchange a look across the table. Both are deeply thrilled. A political reporter from the trouble zones of the world, right in their midst; and a female political reporter, at that! Of course they must shelter her. What are safe havens for? It doesn’t escape Roz that the opposite of interesting is not gentle, but boring. However, boring has something to offer, these days. Maybe they should export a little boring. It’s better than getting your head shot off.

“We’d love it if you’d do a story for us,” says BethAnne. “To tell you the truth,” says Zenia; “I’m sort of emptied out for now, story-wise. But I have a better idea:”

Her better idea is that she should help them out in the advertising department. “I’ve been through the magazine, and I’ve noticed you don’t have many ads,” she says. “You must be losing money, a lot of money.”

“Absolutely,” says Roz, who knows exactly how much because the money they’re losing is hers.

“I think I could double your ads, in, say, two months,” says Zenia. “I’ve had experience:”

She makes good her word. Roz isn’t sure quite how it happened, but Zenia is soon sitting in on editorial meetings, and when BethAnne leaves to have another baby, creating a power vacuum, Zenia is offered the job, because who else—be honest—is as qualified? It may even be that Roz set it up for her. Most likely; it was the kind of sucky shoot-yourself-in-thefoot thing she must have been doing around then. Part of her save-poor-Zenia project. She’d rather not remember the details.

Zenia has her photograph taken, a glamour shot in a Vnecked outfit; it appears on the editorial page. Women figure out how old she is and wonder how she manages to stay looking so good. Circulation goes up.

Zenia goes to parties now, a lot of parties. Why not? She has schlep, she has clout, she has—the men on the board are fond of saying—balls. Sharp as a tack, smart as a whip, and a great figure too, they can never resist adding, causing Roz to go home and frown at her dimpling grapefruit-peel leg skin in the mirror, and then to reproach herself for making odious comparisons.

Some of the parties Zenia goes to are given by Roz. Roz supervises the passing of the filo-bundle and stuffed-mushroom nibbles, and greets her friends with hugs and airy kisses, and watches Zenia work the room. She works it seriously, thoroughly; she seems to know by instinct just how much time any one person is worth. She spends some of her precious moments on Roz, though. She gets her off to one side and murmurs to her, and Roz murmurs back. Anyone watching them would think they were conspirators.

“You’re really good at this,” Roz tells Zenia. “Me, I always end up stuck for hours with some hard-luck story, but you never get cornered:”

Zenia smiles back at her. “All foxes dig back doors. I like to know where the exit sign is:” And Roz remembers the story of Zenia’s narrow escape from death, and feels sorry for her. Zenia always arrives alone. She leaves alone. It’s sad.

Mitch works the room too. Surprisingly, he doesn’t work the part of it with Zenia in it. Ordinarily he’d flirt with everyone; he’d flirt with a saluki if there was nothing else on offer. He likes to see his own charm reflected back at him from the eyes of every woman in the room; he goes from one to another as if they’re bushes and he’s a dog. But he stays away from Zenia, and, when she’s watching, pays extra attention to Roz. He keeps a hand on her whenever possible. Steadying himself, Roz thinks later.

Roz grows increasingly uneasy. There’s something not quite right about the turn things have taken, but what could it be? She set out to help Zenia, and it appears she has helped her, and

Zenia is certainly grateful, and she’s performing well; they have lunch once a week just to go over things, and so Zenia can ask Roz’s advice, because Roz has been around the magazine so much longer than Zenia has. Roz dismisses her own reaction as simple envy. Ordinarily if there was something bothering her, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, she’d discuss it with Tony or Charis. But she can’t do that, because she’s friends with Zenia now, and they might not understand that part of it. They might not understand how Roz could be friends with someone who is—face it—an enemy of theirs. They might see it as betrayal.

“I’ve been giving it some thought,” Zenia says at the next board of directors meeting. “We’re still losing money, despite the new ads. We can’t seem to hook the big spenders—the perfume companies, the cosmetics, high fashion. To be honest, I think we need to change the name. The concept we’re working with is too seventies. This is the eighties—we’re way beyond a lot of those old positions:”

“Change the name?” asks Roz, with fond memories of the early collective. What happened to those women? Where did they go? Why has she lost touch with them? Where did all these business suits come from?

“Yes,” says Zenia. “I’ve had a small survey done. We’d do better with Woman World, or, even better, just plain Woman.” It’s obvious to Roz what’s being dropped. The wisdom part, for one thing. Also the world. But how can she object to Woman without implying that there’s something wrong with being one?

So Zenia changes the name, and soon the magazine changes too. It changes so much that Roz hardly recognizes it. Gone are the mature achievers, the stories about struggling to overcome sexism and stacked odds. Gone too are the heavy-hitting health care stories. Now there are five-page spreads on spring fashions, and new diets and hair treatments and wrinkle creams, and quizzes about the man in your life and whether or not you’re handling your relationships well. Are these things unimportant? Roz would be the last to say so, but surely there’s something missing.