The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

  So she hadn't taken either of them seriously. It helped that they hadn't taken her seriously either. Maybe it was the clown face she put on, fairly constantly by then. She needed it, that happy heedless party face, because there she was, on the shelf, still living at home, still working in her father's business. You'll be my right-hand man, he'd tell her. It was meant as a compliment, so she wouldn't feel bad about not being a son. But Roz didn't want to be a son. She didn't want to be a man at all, right-hand or otherwise. Such a strain, being one, from what she could see; such a pretence of dignity to maintain. She could never get away with her witless frivolity act if she were a man. But then, if she were one she might not need it.

  Her job in the business was fairly basic; a moron could have done it. Essentially she was a glorified fetch-it. But her father believed that everyone, even the boss's daughter, should start at the bottom and progress up to the top. That way you got acquainted with the real workings of the business, layer by layer. If something was wrong with the secretaries, if something was wrong with Filing, there would be wrongness all the way through; and you had to know how to do those jobs yourself so you would know whether other people were doing them right or not. A lesson that has been useful to Roz, over the years.

  She was learning a lot, though. She was watching her father's style. Outrageous but effective, soft but hard, uproarious but dead serious underneath. He waited for his moment, he waited like a cat on a lawn; then he pounced. He liked to drive bargains, he liked to cut deals. Drive, cut, these verbs had an appeal for him. He liked risk, he liked walking the edge. Blocks of property disappeared into his pocket, then came out magically transformed into office buildings. If he could renovate - if there was something worth saving - he did. Otherwise it was the wrecking ball, despite whatever clutch of woolly-headed protesters might be marching around outside with Save Our Neighbourhood signs, done in crayon and stapled onto rake handles.

  Roz had some ideas of her own. She knew she could be good at this stuff if he'd give her the rope. But rope was not given by him, it was earned, so she was putting in her time.

  Meanwhile, what about her love life? There was nobody. Nobody suitable. Nobody even close. Nobody who wasn't either a jerk-off or basically after her money, a factor she had to keep in mind. Her future money, because right then she was only on salary like everybody else, and a fairly measly salary at that. Her father believed you should know just how measly a measly salary was, so you could figure out what a pay-raise negotiation was all about. He thought you should know the price of potatoes. Roz didn't at the moment because she was still living at home, on account of her measly salary. She'd looked at studio apartments, one room with a mingy kitchenette tucked in the corner and a view into somebody else's bathroom, but too squalid! What price freedom? Higher than what she was making right then. She would rather stay where she was, in the former servants' flat over her parents' three-car garage, and spend her measly salary on new clothes and her own phone line.

  She wanted to take a trip to Europe, by herself, but her father wouldn't let her. He said it was too dangerous. "What goes on over there, you don't need to know," he told her. He wanted to keep her walled up behind his money. He wanted to keep her safe.

  Mitch was a neophyte lawyer then, working for the firm that papered her father's deals. The first time she saw him he was walking through the outer office where Roz sat grindstoning her nose. He was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, the end man in the almost-daily suit-and-briefcase parade that followed her father around like a tail. There was a pause at Roz's desk, handshakes all round: Roz's father always introduced everyone to everyone else. Mitch shook Roz's hand, and Roz's hand shook. She took one look at him and thought, There's ugly and there's gorgeous and there's in-between, but this is gorgeous. Then she'd thought: Dream on, babe. Slobber on your pillow. This is not for you.

  But darned if he didn't phone her up! You didn't have to be Einstein to get the number, but it would've taken more than one step, because Roz had herself listed in the phone book as Rosie O'Grady, having tired of the hate calls that her father's last name sometimes attracted. The hoardings around the demolition sites didn't help, Grunwald Developments in foot-high print, she might as well go around with a red X painted on her forehead, Spit here, as list her right name in the phone book.

  But all of a sudden there was Mitch on the phone, cool but persuasive, sounding as if he wanted to sell her some life insurance, reminding her of where she'd met him, as if she needed reminding, and he was so stiff at first that she'd wanted to yell at him, Hey, I am not your granny! Slip that poker out of your bum! Gorgeous or not, he sounded like a drag, a too-tight WASPy poop whose idea of a good time would be a hand of bridge with the crumbling in-laws or a walk in the cemetery on Sunday. It took him a lot longer to get to the point than it would've taken Roz, had she been leading, but he'd finally worked up to asking her out to dinner and then to a movie afterwards. Well, Hallelujah and Hail Mary, thought Roz. Wonders will never cease.

  But while she was getting ready to go, her joy evaporated. She wanted to float, to fly, but she was beginning to feel heavier and heavier, sitting there at her dressing table dabbing Arpege onto her pulse points and trying to decide what earrings to wear. Something that would make her face look less round. True, she had dimples, but they were the kind of dimples you saw in knees. More like puckers. She was a big-boned girl, a raw-boned girl (her mother's words), a girl with backbone (her father's), and a full, mature figure (the dress shops'). Dainty she would never be. Dear God, shrink my feet and I'll do anything for you. A size 6 would be nice, and while you're at it make me a blonde.

  The problem was that Mitch was simply too good-looking. The shoulders, the blue eyes, the bone structure - he looked like a movie mag starlet, male version, too good to be true. Roz was awed by this - nobody should be allowed out in public looking like that, it might cause car crashes - and by his aroma of decorum, and by his posture, bolt upright with squared corners, like a frozen fish fillet. She wouldn't be able to let herself go with him, crack jokes, fool around. She would worry about whether there were things caught in her teeth.

  Plus, she would be so squirrelly with desire - out with it, Lust, capital L, the best of the Seven Deadlies - that she'd scarcely be able to sit still. She wasn't usually so out of control, but Mitch was off the top of the charts in the looks department. Heads would turn, people would stare, they'd wonder what such a dreamboat was doing with the runner-up in the Miss Polish Turnip Contest. All in all it was shaping up to be a purgatorial evening. Get me through this, God, and I'll scrub a million toilets for you! Not that you'd be interested, because in Heaven, who shits?

  Things started out every bit as dreadful as Roz had expected. Mitch brought her flowers, not very many flowers but flowers, how old-fashioned could you get, and she didn't know what to do with the darn things, so she took them out to the kitchen - was she supposed to put them in a vase or what? Why hadn't he settled for chocolates? - and there was her mother brooding darkly over a cup of tea, in her dressing gown and metal curlers and hairnet, because she had to go out later to some banquet or other with Roz's father, some business thing, her mother hated that stuff, and she looked at Roz with the stricken gaze she'd been putting on ever since they got rich and moved into that barn of a house on Dunvegan, right near Upper Canada College, where male scions like Mitch were sent to be brainwashed and to have their spines fused so their pelvises would never move again, and she said to Roz, "Are you going out?" as in, "Are you dying?"

  And Roz had left Mitch standing in the cavernous living room, in the centre of the half-acre of broadloom, surrounded by three truck-loads of furniture in her mother's impeccable bad taste, it cost a mint but it looked straight out of a funeral parlour mail-order catalogue, in addition to which every single surface was covered with doilies, which didn't help, her mother had a doily fetish, she'd been deprived of them in youth, and what if Mitch were to follow Roz out to the kitchen and find Roz's mother sitt
ing there and be given the onceover, the aim of which was to determine religious affiliation and financial prospects, in that order? So Roz dumped the flowers into the sink, she'd deal with them later, and kissed her mother on the firming cream, too little too late, and frog-marched Mitch out of the house before he could get waylaid by Roz's father, who would put him through the same third degree he put all of Roz's dates through if he could catch them - where were they going, what would they be doing, when would they be back, that was too late - and tell him cryptic ethnic parables illustrating Life. "Two cripples do not make one dancer," he would say to them, shooting out a meaningful look from underneath the bushy eyebrows, and what were the poor goofs supposed to think? "Papa, I wish you wouldn't say that," she'd tell him afterwards. That was another thing, she had to call him Papa, he wouldn't answer to Dad. "So?" he would say, grinning at her. "It's true, or not?"

  Once they'd made it past the door it turned out that Mitch didn't have a car, and what was the etiquette? Was she supposed to offer hers, or what? She couldn't see the man of her dreams taking a bus; much less could she see herself taking one. What was the use of upward mobility if you had to take a bus anyway? There were limits! She was about to suggest a taxi when it occurred to her in a blinding flash that maybe Mitch didn't have the money for one.

  In the end they took Roz's car, a little red Austin, a birthday present, Roz would've preferred a Jag but her father said that would have been spoiling her. Mitch didn't protest much when Roz gushingly urged the car keys on him so he could drive, because a man being driven by a woman might have felt diminished, she'd read the women's magazine articles about all the ways you could unwittingly diminish a man, it was terrible how easily they shrank, and though she usually liked to drive her own car herself she didn't want to scare Mitch off. This way too she could just sit back and admire his profile. He drove well - decisively, aggressively, but not without courtesy, and she liked that. She herself was a fast driver; a barger-in, a honker. But watching Mitch drive, she could see that there were smoother ways of getting where you wanted to go.

  The dinner was at a small quasi-French restaurant, with a red plush decor like a turn-of-the-century whorehouse and not very good food. Roz had the onion soup, which was a mistake because of the filaments of stringy cheese that came looping down from each spoonful. She did what she could with it, but she felt she was not passing the gracefulness test. Mitch didn't seem to notice; he was talking to her about his law firm.

  He doesn't like me, she thought, this is a fiasco, so she had another glass of white wine, and then she thought, What the hell, and told him a joke, the one about the girl who told another girl she'd got raped that summer, yes, and after that it was just rape rape rape, all summer long, and Mitch smiled at her slowly, and his eyes closed up a little like a cat when you stroke its ears, maybe despite the tin-soldier posture he had a hormone or two after all, maybe the WASPy facade was just that, a facade, and if it was she would be eternally grateful, and then she felt his hand on her knee, under the table, and that was the end of her self-control, she thought she was going to melt like a warm Popsicle, all over the red plush restaurant seat.

  After dinner they did start out in the direction of the movie, but somehow they ended up necking in Roz's car; and after that they were in Mitch's apartment, a three-bedroom he shared with two other law students who were conveniently out - Did he plan this? Roz thought fleetingly, because exactly who was seducing whom - and Roz was all set to wrestle with her panty girdle, having helped Mitch get the top half of her clothes off - no lady should ever be without a panty girdle, said her mother and the magazines both, control unsightly jiggle and you wouldn't want men to think you were a loose woman with a floppy bum, though the darn things were built like rat traps, pure cast-iron elastic, it was like trying to get out of a triple-wrapped rubber band - when Mitch took hold of her shoulders and gazed deeply into her eyes and told her he respected her too much. "I don't want to just make love with you," he said. "I want to marry you." Roz felt like protesting that these categories were not mutually exclusive, but that would have been immodest, in Mitch's eyes at least, and anyway she was too overcome with happiness, or was it fear, because was this a proposal?

  "What?" she said.

  He repeated the marrying part.

  "But I hardly know you," Roz stammered.

  "You'll get to know me better," said Mitch calmly. He was right about that.

  And this is how things went on: mediocre dinners, heavy petting, delayed gratification. If Roz had been able to get it over with, get Mitch out of her system, maybe she wouldn't have married him. Wrong: she would have, because after that first evening she was in over her depth and no was not an option. But the fact that he reduced her to a knee-wobbling jelly every time they went out, then gripped her hands when she tried to unzip him, added a certain element of suspense. For suspense read frustration. Read also abject humiliation. She felt like a big loose floozie, she felt like a puppy being whacked with a newspaper for trying to climb up trouser legs.

  When the time came - not in a church, not in a synagogue - considering the mixtures involved, in one of the banquet rooms of the Park Plaza Hotel - Roz didn't think she'd make it all the way down the aisle. She thought there might be an unseemly incident. But Mitch would never have forgiven her if she'd jumped him in public, or even given him a big smooch during the kiss-the-bride routine. He'd made it clear by then that there were jumpers and jumpees, kissers and kissees, and he was to be the former and she the latter.

  Sex-role stereotyping, thinks Roz now, having learned a thing or two in the interim. The cunning bastard. He held out on me, he wore me down. He knew exactly what he was doing. Probably had a little side dish for himself tucked away in some typing pool so he wouldn't get gangrene of the male member. But he pulled it off, he married me. He got the brass ring. She knows by this time that her money has to have been a factor.

  Her father was suspicious about that even at the time. "How much is he making?" he queried Roz.

  "Papa, that is not the point!" cried Roz, in an excess of anti-materialism. Anyway, wasn't Mitch the golden boy? Guaranteed to do well? Wasn't he about to rise in his law firm like a soap bubble?

  "All I'm asking is, do I need to support him?" said her father. To Mitch he said, "Two cripples do not make one dancer," glowering out from under his eyebrows.

  "Pardon me, sir?" said Mitch, with urbanity, too much urbanity, urbanity that bordered on condescension and that meant he was willing to overlook Roz's parents, the immigrant taint of the one, the boiled-potato doily-ridden rooming-house aftertaste of the other. Roz was new money, Mitch was old money; or he would have been old money if he'd had any money. His own father was dead, somewhat too early and too vaguely for total comfort. How was Roz to know then that he'd blown the family fortune on a war widow he'd run away with and then jumped off a bridge? She was not a mind-reader, and Mitch didn't tell her, not for years, not for years and years. Neither did his prune of a mother, who was not dead yet but (thinks Roz, in the cellar) might as well have been. Roz has never forgiven her those delicate, cutting post-bridal hints about toning down her wardrobe and the proper way to set a dinner table.

  "Papa, I am not a cripple!" Roz said to her father afterwards. "I mean, that is so insulting!"

  "One cripple and one who is not a cripple don't make a dancer either," said her father.

  What was he trying to tell me? thinks Roz, at this distance. What had he seen, what crack or fault line, what incipient limp?

  But Roz wasn't listening then, she was holding her hands over her ears, she didn't want to hear. Her father gave her a long, sombre look. "You know what you're doing?"

  Roz thought she did; or rather she didn't care whether she did or not, because this was it, this was It, and she was floating finally, she was up there on cloud nine, light as a feather despite her big raw bones. Her mother was on her side, because Roz was almost twenty-three now and any marriage was better than no marriage as far as
she was concerned; though once she saw it was really going to happen, she became scornful of Mitch's good manners - la-di-da and excuse me, and who does he think he is - and made it known that she would have preferred a Catholic to an Anglican. But having married Roz's father, who was not exactly the Pope, she couldn't put up much of an argument.

  Mitch didn't marry Roz just for her money. She's sure of that. She remembers their actual honeymoon, in Mexico, all those Day of the Dead sugar skulls in the market, the flowers, the colours, herself giddy with pleasure, her sense of novelty and release because look, she had done it, she wasn't a potential old maid any more but a bride, a married woman; and during the hot nights the window open to the sea, the curtains blowing, the wind moving over her skin like muslin, and the dark shape of Mitch above her, faceless and intense. It was different when you were in love, it was no longer a game; there was more at stake. She cried afterwards because she was so happy, and Mitch must have felt it too, because you can't fake that kind of passion completely. Can you?

  So it wasn't only the money. But she could put it this way - he wouldn't have married her without it. Maybe that's what keeps him with her, what keeps him anchored. She hopes it's not the only thing. Mitch raises his glass of white wine to her and says, "To us," and reaches across the table and takes her left hand, the one with the ring, a modest ring because that's what he could afford at the time and he'd refused to accept any contribution from her father for a bigger one, and smiles at her, and says, "It hasn't been so bad, has it? We're pretty good, together," and Roz knows he's consoling himself for hidden disappointments, for time that marches on, for all the worlds he will, now, never be able to conquer, for the fact that there are thousands of nubile young women in the world, millions of them, more every minute, and no matter what he does he will never be able to get into all of them, because art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.