Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

Where Mitch is, is in Lake Ontario. He’s been there a while. The police pick up his boat, the Rosalind II, drifting with sails furled, and eventually Mitch himself washes into shore off the Scarborough Bluffs. He has his lifejacket on, but at this time of year the hypothermia would have taken him very quickly. He must have slipped, they tell her. Slipped off and fallen in, and been unable to climb back on. There was a wind, the day he left harbour. An accident. If it had been suicide he wouldn’t have been wearing his lifejacket. Would he?

He would, he would, thinks Roz. He did that part of it for the kids. He didn’t want to leave a bad package for them. He did love them enough for that. But he knew all about the temperature of the water, he’d lectured her about it often. enough. Your body heat dissipates, quick as a wink. You numb, and then you die. And so he did. That it was deliberate Roz has no doubt, but she doesn’t say. It was an accident, she tells the children. Accidents happen.

She has to tidy up after him, of course. Pick up the odds and ends. Clean up the mess. She is, after all, still his wife.

The worst thing is the apartment, the apartment he shared with Zenia. He didn’t go, back to it after she left, after he chased off to Europe to find her. Some of his clothes are still in the closet—his impressive suits, his beautiful shirts, his ties. Roz = folds and packs, as so often before. His shoes, emptier than empty. Wherever else he is, he isn’t here.

Zenia is a stronger presence. Most of her things are gone, but a Chinese dressing gown, rose-coloured silk with dragons embroidered on it, is hanging over a chair in the bedroom. Opium, Roz thinks, smelling it. It’s the smell that bothers Roz the most. The tumbled sheets are still on the unmade bed, there are dirty towels in the bathroom. The scene of the crime. She should never have come here, this is torture. She should have sent Dolores.

Roz gives up going to the shrink. It’s the optimism that’s getting to her, the belief that things can be fixed, which right now feels like just one more burden: All this and she’s supposed to be hopeful, too? Thanks but no thanks. So, God, she says to herself. That was some number. Fooled me! Proud of yourself. What else have you got up your sleeve? Maybe a nice war, some genocide—hey, a plague or two? She knows she shouldn’t talk this way, even to herself, it’s tempting fate, but it gets her through the day.

Getting through the day is the main thing. She puts two pending real estate deals on hold; she’s in no shape to make major decisions. The magazine can run itself until she can get around to selling it, which shouldn’t be too hard, because ever since the changes Zenia brought in it’s showing a profit. If she can’t sell it she’ll fold it up. She doesn’t have the heart to go on with a publication that has made such extravagant claims, claims she has so calamitously failed to embody in herself. Superwoman she’s not, and failed is the key word. She’s been a success at many things, but not at the one thing. Not at standing by her man. Because if Mitch drowned himself—if there wasn’t enough left for him to live for—whose fault was it? Zenia’s, yes, but also her own. She should have remembered about his own father, who took the same dark road. She should have let him back in.

Getting through the day is one thing, getting through the night is another. She can’t brush her teeth in her splendid doublesinked bathroom without sensing Mitch beside her, she can’t take a shower without looking to see if his damp footprints are on the floor. She can’t sleep in the middle of her raspberrycoloured bed, because, more than ever, more than when he was alive but elsewhere, he is almost there. But he’s not there. He’s missing. He’s a missing person. He’s gone off someplace where she can’t get at him.

She can’t sleep in her raspberry-coloured bed at all. She lies down, gets up, puts on her bathrobe, wanders downstairs to the kitchen where she burrows through the refrigerator; or she tiptoes along the upstairs hall, listening for the breathing of her children. She’s anxious about them now, more than ever, and they are anxious about her. Despite her efforts to reassure them, to tell them that she is fine and everything will be all right, she frightens them. She can tell.

It must be the flatness of her voice, her face naked of makeup and disguise. She drags a blanket around the house with her in case sleep might choose to appear. Sometimes she falls asleep on the floor, in the family room, with the television on for company. Sometimes she drinks, hoping to relax herself, conk herself out. Sometimes it works.

Dolores quits. She says she’s found another job, one with a pension plan, but Roz doesn’t think it’s that. It’s the bad luck; Dolores is afraid of catching it. Roz will replace her, find someone else; but later, when she can think. After she’s had some sleep.

She goes to the doctor, the GP, the same one she uses for the children’s coughs, and asks for some sleeping pills. Just to get her through this period, she says. The doctor is understanding, the pills are granted. She’s careful with them at first, but then they don’t work so well and she takes more. One evening she takes a handful of them, and a triple scotch; not out of any’ desire to die, she doesn’t want to do that, but out of simple irritation at being awake. She ends up on the kitchen floor.

It’s Larry who finds her, coming back from a friend’s. He phones the ambulance. He’s old now, older than he should be. He’s responsible.

Roz comes to, and finds herself being walked around between two large nurses. Where is she? In a hospital. How weak, how embarrassing, she didn’t intend to end up in such a place. “I need to go home,” she says. “I need to get some rest.”

“She’s coming out of it,” says the one on the left. “You’ll be fine, dear,—says the other.

Roz has not been she or dear for a long time. There’s a flicker of humiliation. Then it subsides.

Roz floats up out of the fog. She can feel the bones of her skull, thin as a skin; inside them her brain is swollen and full of pulp. Her body is dark and vast as the sky, her nerves pinpricks of brightness: the stars, long strings of them, wavering like seaweed. She could drift, she could sink. Mitch would be there.

Then Charis is sitting beside her, beside her bed, holding her left hand. “Not yet,” says Charis. “You need to come back, it’s not your time. You still have things to do.”

When she’s herself, when she’s normal, Roz finds Charis an endearing nincompoop—let’s face it, a polymath she’s not—and mostly dismisses her gauzy metaphysics. Now, though, Charis reaches down with her other hand and takes hold of Roz’s foot, and Roz feels grief travelling through her like a wave, up through her body and along her arm and into her hand, and out into Charis’s hand, and out. Then she feels a tug, a pull, as if Charis is a long way away, on the shore, and has hold of something—something like a rope—and is hauling Roz in, out of the water, the water of the lake, where she has almost drowned. That’s life over there: a beach, the sun, some small figures. Her children, waving, shouting to her, though she can’t hear them. She concentrates on breathing, on forcing the air down into her lungs. She’s strong enough, she can make it.

“Yes,” says Charis. “You will:”

Tony has moved into Roz’s house, to be with the children. After Roz is let out of the hospital Charis moves in as well, just for a time; just until Roz is back on her feet.

“You don’t need to do this,” Roz protests.

“Somebody does,” says Tony briskly. “You have other suggestions?” She’s already phoned Roz’s office and told them that Roz has bronchitis; also laryngitis, so she can’t speak on the phone. Flowers arrive, and Charis puts them in vases and then forgets to add water. She goes to the health food store and brings back various capsules and extractions, which she feeds to Roz or else rubs onto her, and some breakfast cereals made from unknown seeds that need to be boiled a lot. Roz longs for chocolate, and Tony smuggles some in for her. “That’s a good sign,” she tells Roz.