Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

“Didn’t you keep the apartment?” says Roz. “Isn’t that where you’re living?”

“I couldn’t stay there,” says Mitch. His voice is reproachful. as if it’s crass of her, cruel of her even to suggest such a thing. Doesn’t she realize how much it would hurt him to be in a place he once shared with the fled beloved, a place where he would be reminded of the dear departed at every turn, a place where he was so happy?

Roz knows. She herself lives in such a place. But he obviously hasn’t thought of that. Those in pain have no time for the pain they cause.

Roz sees him out, into the front hall, into the overcoat, which almost does her in because it’s her overcoat too, she helped him buy it, she shared the life he led in it, that goodtaste leather, that sheepskin, one-time container of such a rascally wolf. No longer, no more; he’s toothless now. Poor lamb, thinks Roz, and clenches her fists tight because she won’t let herself be fooled like that again.

He takes himself off, off into the freezing February dusk, off into the unknown. Roz watches him walk towards his parked car, lurching a little although he didn’t touch his drink. The sidewalks are icy. Or maybe he’s on something, some kind of pill, a tranquillizer. Most likely he shouldn’t be driving, though it’s no longer any of her business to stop him. She tells herself it’s not necessary to have qualms about him. He can stay at a hotel. It’s not as if he doesn’t have any money.

She leaves his red roses on the sideboard, still wrapped in their floral paper. Let them wilt. Dolores can find them tomorrow, and reproach Roz in her heart for carelessness, rich people don’t know what things cost, and throw them out. She pours herself another scotch and lights another cigarette, then gets down her old photo albums, those pictures she took so endlessly at backyard birthday parties, at graduations, on vacations, winters in the snow, summers on the boat, to prove to herself they were all indeed a family, and sits in the kitchen going through them. Pictures of Mitch, in non-living colour: Mitch and Roz at their wedding, Mitch and Roz and Larry, Mitch and Roz and Larry and the twins. She searches his face for some clue, some foreshadowing of the catastrophe that has befallen them. She finds none.

Some women in her place take their nail scissors and snip out the heads of the men in question, leaving only their bodies.

Some snip out the bodies too. But Roz will not do this, because of the children. She doesn’t want them to come across a picture of their headless father, she doesn’t want to alarm them, any more than she already has. And it wouldn’t work anyway, because Mitch would still be there in the pictures, an outline, a blank shape, taking up the same amount of room, just as he does beside her in her bed. She never sleeps in the middle of that bed, she still sleeps off to one side. She can’t bring herself to occupy the whole space.

On the refrigerator, attached to it by magnets in the form of smiling pigs and cats, are the Valentines the twins made for her at school. The twins are clinging these days, they want her around. They don’t like her going out at night. They didn’t wait for Valentine’s Day, they brought their Valentines home and gave them to her right away, as if there was some urgency. These are the only Valentines she will get. Probably they are the only ones she will get ever again. They should be enough for her. What does she want with glowing hearts, with incandescent lips and rapid breathing, at her age?

Snap out of it, Roz, she tells herself, You are not old. Your life is not over.

It only feels like that.

Mitch is in the city. He’s around. He comes to see the children and Roz arranges to be out, her skin prickling the whole time with awareness of him. When, she walks into the house after he’s gone she can smell him—his aftershave, the English heather stuff, could it be he’s sprinkled some of it around just to get to her? She glimpses him in restaurants, or at the yacht club. She stops going to those places. She picks up the phone and he’s on the other line with one of the kids. The whole world is boobytrapped. She is the booby.

Their lawyers talk. A separation agreement is suggested, though Mitch stalls; he doesn’t want Roz—or else he would be here, wouldn’t he, on the doorstep again, wouldn’t he at least be asking?—but he doesn’t want to be separated from her either. Or maybe he’s just bargaining, maybe he’s just trying to get the price up. Roz grits her teeth and holds the line. This is going to cost her but it will be worth it to cut the string, the tie; the chain, whatever this heavy thing is that’s holding her down. You need to know when to fold. At any rate she’s functioning. More or less. Though she’s done better.

She goes off to see a shrink, to see if she can improve herself,’ make herself over into a new woman, one who no longer gives a shit. She would like that. The shrink is a nice person; Roz likes her. Together the two of them labour over Roz’s life as if it’s a jigsaw puzzle, a mystery story with a solution at the end. They arrange and rearrange the pieces, trying to get them to come out better. They are hopeful: if Roz can figure out what story she’s in, then they will be able to spot the erroneous turns she took, they can retrace her steps, they can change the ending. They work out a tentative plot. Maybe Roz married Mitch because, although she thought at the time that Mitch was very different from her father, she sensed he was the same underneath. He would cheat on her the way her father had cheated on her mother, and she would keep forgiving him and taking him back just the way her mother had. She would rescue him, over and over. She would play the saint and he the sinner. Except that her parents ended up together and Roz and Mitch did not, so what went wrong? Zenia went wrong. Zenia switched the plot on Roz, from rescue to running away, and then when Mitch wanted to be rescued again Roz was no longer up to it. Whose fault was that? Who was to blame? Ah. Didn’t Roz think that too much was spent apportioning blame? Did she blame, perhaps, herself? In a word, yes. Maybe she still can’t quite leave God out of it, and the notion that she’s being punished.

Maybe it was nobody’s fault, the shrink suggests. Maybe these things just happen, like plane crashes.

If Roz wants Mitch back that badly—and it appears that she does, now that she has a greater insight into the dynamics of their relationship—maybe she should ask him to come for counselling. Maybe she should forgive him, at least to that extent.

All this is very reasonable. Roz thinks of making the phone call. She is almost nerved up to it, she is almost there. Then, in drizzly March, Zenia dies. Is killed in Lebanon, blown up by a bomb; comes back in a tin can, and is buried. Roz does not cry. Instead she rejoices fiercely—if there was a bonfire she’d dance around it, shaking a tambourine if one was provided. But after that she’s afraid, because Zenia is nothing if not vengeful. Being dead won’t alter that. She’ll think of something.

Mitch isn’t at the funeral. Roz cranes her neck, scanning for him, but there’s only a bunch of men she doesn’t know. And Tony and Charis, of course.

She wonders whether Mitch has heard, and if he has, how he’s taking it. She ought to feel that Zenia has been cleared out of the way, like a moth-eaten fur coat, a tree branch fallen across the path, but she doesn’t. Zenia dead is more of a barrier than Zenia alive; though, as she tells the shrink, she can’t explain why. Could it be remorse, because Zenia the hated rival is dead and Roz wanted her to be, and Roz is not? Possibly. You aren’t responsible for everything, says the shrink.

Surely Mitch will now change, appear, react. Wake up, as if from hypnotism. But he doesn’t phone. He makes no sign, and now it’s April, the first week, the second week, the third. When Roz calls his lawyer, finally, to find out where he is, the lawyer can’t say. Something was mentioned about a trip, he seems to recall. Where? The lawyer doesn’t know.