Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

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 strawbodied, 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.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, Who is the evilest of us all?

Take off a few pounds, cookie, and maybe I can do something for you.

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.

Tony 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

G” 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.