Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

“Pardon?” said Mitch, distantly, politely, bluffing it out, keeping his hand under the table. The poor baby hadn’t realized yet that women had really changed. In days of yore, Alma would have felt guilty for attracting this kind of attention, but not any longer.

“Get your goddamn hand off my fucking leg or I’ll stab you with my fork,” hissed Alma.

Roz went into coughing mode to cover up that she’d heard, and Mitch’s hand shot up above ground as if he’d been scalded, and after that night he started referring to Alma with pity and concern, as if she were a lost soul. A drug addict or something. “Too bad about that girl,” he would say sadly. “She has such potential, but she has an attitude problem. She’d be quite good-looking if it weren’t for the scowl:’ He hinted that she might be a lesbian; he hadn’t figured out that this was no longer an insult. Roz waited a decent interval and then pulled strings to get Alma a raise.

But that’s how Mitch tends to see Roz’s friends: scowly. And more lately, frumpy. He can’t resist commenting on how their faces are sliding down, as if his isn’t, though it’s true men can get away with looking older. Probably it’s revenge: he suspects Roz and her friends of talking him over behind his back, of analyzing him and providing remedies for him, as if he’s a stomach ailment. This was true once, granted, when Roz still thought she could change him, or when her friends thought she could change herself. When he was a project. Leave him, they’d say. Turf the bugger out! You can afford it! Why do you stay with him?

But Roz had her reasons, among them the children. Also she was still enough of a once-Catholic to be nervous about divorce. Also she didn’t want to admit to herself that she’d made a mistake. Also she was still in love with Mitch. So after a while she stopped discussing him with her friends, because what was left to say? It was an impasse, and chewing over solutions that she knew she would never implement made her feel guilty.

And then her friends gave up wearing overalls, and left the magazine, and went into dress-for-success tailored suits, and lost interest in Mitch, and discussed burnout instead, and Roz could permit herself to feel guilty about other things, such as being more energetic than they were. But Mitch keeps on saying, “Are you having lunch with that frumpy old manhater?” whenever one of the friends from that era turns up again: He knows it gets to her.

He has a little more tolerance for Charis and Tony, maybe because Roz has known them so long and because they’re the twins’ godmothers. But he thinks Tony is a weirdo and Charis is a nut. That’s how he neutralizes them: As far as Roz knows he has never made a pass at either of them. Possibly he doesn’t place them in the category of woman but in some other category, not clearly defined: A sort of sexless gnome.

Roz calls up Tony at her History Department office. “You won’t believe this,” she says.

There is a pause while Tony tries to guess what it is she’s being called upon not to believe. “Probably not,” she says. “Zenia’s back in town,” says Roz.

There’s another pause. “You were talking to her?” says Tony. “I ran into her in a restaurant,” says Roz.

“You never just run into Zenia,” says Tony. “Look out, is my advice. What’s she up to? There must be something.”

“I think she’s changed,” says Roz. “She’s different from the way she used to be:”

“A leopard cannot change its spots,” says Tony. “Different how?”

“Oh, Tony, you’re so pessimistic!” says Roz. “She seemed—well, nicer. More human. She’s a freelance journalist now, she’s writing on women’s issues. Also”—Roz drops her voice—“her tits are bigger.”

“I don’t think tits can grow,” says Tony dubiously, having once looked into it.

“Most likely they didn’t,” says Roz. “They’re doing a lot of artificial ones now. I bet she got them implanted.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me,” says Tony. “She’s upping her strike capabilitST But tits or no tits, watch your back.”

“I’m just having her over for a drink,” says Roz. “I have to, really. She knew my father, during the war.” The full implications of which Tony could hardly be expected to understand.

So nobody could say, later, that Roz wasn’t warned. And nobody did say it, and nobody said, either, that Roz was warned, because Tony wasn’t one of those intolerable servesyou-right friends and she never reminded Roz of the precautions she had urged. But once the chips were down, Roz reminded herself. You walked into it with your eyes open, she would berate herself. Dimwit! What led you on?

She knows now what it was. It was Pride, deadliest of the Seven Deadlies; the sin of Lucifer, the wellspring of all the others. Vainglory, false courage, bravado. She must have thought she was some kind of a lion-tamer, some kind of a bullfighter; that she could succeed where her two friends had failed. Why not? She knew more than they’d known, because she knew their stories. Forewarned was forearmed. Also she was overconfident. She must have thought she would be guarded and adroit. She must have thought she could handle Zenia. She’d once had pretty much the same attitude towards Mitch, come to think of it.

Not that she’d felt the pride working in her at the time. Not at all. That was the thing about sins—they could dress up, they could disguise themselves so you hardly knew them. She hadn’t thought she was being proud, merely hospitable. Zenia wanted to say thank you, because of Roz’s father, and it would have been very wrong of Roz to deny her the opportunity.

There had been another kind of pride, too. She’d wanted to be proud of her father. Her flawed father, her cunning father, her father the fixer, her father the crook. She’d told little bits of his war story when people were interviewing her for magazine profiles, Roz the Business Whiz, how did you get your start, how do you juggle all your different lives, what do you do about daycare, how does your husband cope, what do you do about the housework, but even while she was telling about him, her father the hero, her father the rescuer, she knew she was sprucing him up, shining a good light on him, pinning posthumous medals onto his chest. He himself had refused to discuss it, this shadowy part of his life. What do you need to know for? he’d say. That time is over. People could get hurt. Waiting for Zenia, she’d been more than a little nervous about what she might find out.

XLVl

When Zenia does come for a drink, finally—she hasn’t rushed it—it’s a Friday and Roz is wiped because it’s been a vile week at the office, input overload times ten, and the twins have chosen this day to give each other haircuts because they want to be punk rockers, even though they’re only seven, and Roz has been intending to parade them for Zenia but now they look as if they have a bad case of mange, and they show no signs of repentance at all, and anyway Roz doesn’t feel she should display anger because girls should not be given the idea that being pretty is the only thing that counts and that other people’s opinions of how they ought to arrange their bodies are more important than their own:

So after her first yelp of surprise and dismay she has tried to act as if everything is normal, which in a way it is, although her tongue is just a stub because she’s bitten it so hard, and she has ,dutifully repressed her strong desire to send them upstairs to take baths or play in their playroom, and when Zenia arrives at the front door, wearing amazing lizard-skin shoes, three hundred bucks at least and—with heels so high her legs are a mile long, and a cunning fuchsia-and-black raw silk suit with a little nipped-in waist and a tight skirt well above the knees—Roz is so disgusted that mini-skirts have come back, what are you supposed to do if you have serious thighs, and she remembers those skirts from the last time around, in the sixties, you had to sit down with your legs glued together or all would be on view, the once-unmentionable, the central item, the foul and disgraceful blot, the priceless treasure, an invitation to male peering, to lustful pinching and leering, to foaming at the mouth, to rape and pillage, just as the nuns always warned—there are the twins, wearing Roz’s cast-off slips from their dress-up box and running down the hall with Mitch’s electric shaver, chasing the cat, because they want it to be a punk rock mascot, although Roz has told them before that the shaver is strictly out of bounds and they will be in deep trouble if Mitch discovers cat fur caught in it, it’s bad enough when Roz can’t find her own shaver and uses Mitch’s on her legs and pits and isn’t careful enough washing the stubble out of it. The twins pay no attention to her because they assume she’ll cover for them, he herself blue, hurl her body in front of the bullets, and they’re right, she will.