The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

What was their arrangement, her mother and her father? Did they love each other? They had a history, of course: they had a story. They met just as the war began. Did he sweep her off her feet? Not exactly. She had the rooming house even then, she'd inherited it from her own mother, who had run it since the father died, at the age of twenty-five, of polio, when Roz's mother was only two.

  Roz's mother was older than her father. She must have been already an old maid at the time she met him; already taciturn, already acid, already prim.

  She had been walking home, carrying a bag of groceries; she had to pass a tavern. It was late afternoon, closing time, when the drinkers were expelled onto the streets so they would be sure to eat their dinners, or so the theory went. Ordinarily Roz's mother would have crossed over to avoid this tavern, but she saw a fight in progress. Four against one: thugs, was what she called them. The one was Roz's father. He was roaring like a bear, but one of the thugs came up behind him and hit him over the head with a bottle, and when he fell down they all started kicking him.

  There were people on the street, but they just stood there watching. Roz's mother thought the man on the ground would be killed. She was by habit a silent woman, but she was not particularly timid, not in those days; she was used to telling men what for, because she had honed herself on the roomers, some of whom had tried to take advantage. Usually though she minded her own business and let other people mind theirs; usually she skirted bar fights and looked the other way. But that day was different. She could not just stand there and watch a man be killed. She screamed (for Roz, this was the best part - her laconic mother, screaming her head off, and in public too), and finally she waded in and swung her grocery bag, scattering apples and carrots, until a policeman came in sight and the thugs ran off.

  Roz's mother picked up her fruits and vegetables. She was quite shaken, but she didn't want to waste her purchases. Then she helped Roz's father up off the sidewalk. "There was blood running all over him," she said. "He looked like something the cat dragged in." Her house was nearby, and being a devout Christian and familiar with the story of the Good Samaritan, she felt she had to take him to it and clean him off, at least.

  Roz could see how it must have been. Who can withstand gratitude? (Although gratitude is a complicated emotion, as she has had reason to learn.) Still, what woman can resist a man she's rescued? There's something erotic about bandages, and of course clothing would have had to have been removed: jacket, shirt, undershirt. Then what? Her mother would have swung into her washing mode. And where was this poor man going to spend the night? He was on his way to join the army, he said (although he did not in fact join it, not officially); he was far from home - where was home? Winnipeg - and his money was gone. The thugs had taken it.

  For her mother, who'd spent her twenties taking care of her own ailing mother, who'd never seen a man without his shirt on, this must have been the most romantic thing that had ever happened to her. The only romantic thing. Whereas for her father it was just an episode. Or was it? Maybe he fell in love with her, this screaming, silent woman who had come to his aid. Maybe he fell in love with her house, a little. Maybe she meant shelter. In her father's rendition, it was the screaming he always mentioned, with considerable admiration. Whereas her mother mentioned the blood.

  Whatever it was, they did end up married, though it was not a Catholic wedding; which meant that in the eyes of the Church they were not married at all. For her father's sake, her mother had placed herself in an unremitting state of sin. No wonder she felt he owed her something.

  Ah, thinks Roz, sitting in the cellar in her orange bathrobe. God, you foxy old joker, you certainly do fool around. Changing the rules. Giving out contradictory instructions - save people, help people, love people; but don't touch. God is a good listener. He doesn't interrupt. Maybe this is why Roz likes talking to him.

  Soon after the ejection of Mrs. Morley, Mr. Carruthers vanishes too, leaving his room in a mess, taking only a suitcase, owing a month's rent. Uncle George moves into his room, and Uncle Joe into Mrs. Morley's old room, and then Miss Hines gives notice because the house is no longer respectable. "Where is the money going to come from?" asks Roz's mother.

  "Don't worry, Aggie," says her father. And somehow money does appear, not very much money but enough, and out of nowhere, it seems, because her father doesn't have a job and neither do Uncle George and Uncle Joe. Instead they go to the racetrack. Occasionally they take Roz with them, on Saturdays when she's not at school, and put a dollar on a horse for her. Roz's mother never goes, and neither - Roz concludes, looking around at the outfits - do any other mothers. The women there are babes.

  In the evenings the uncles sit at the card table in Uncle George's new room, and drink and smoke and play poker. If Roz's mother isn't home her father sometimes joins them. Roz hangs around, looking over their shoulders, and eventually they teach her how to play. "Don't show what you're thinking," they tell her. "Play close to your chest. Know when to fold."

  After she's learned the game they show her how to gamble. At first it's just with poker chips; but one day Uncle George gives her five dollars. "That's your stake," he tells her. "Never bet more than your stake." It's not advice he follows, himself.

  Roz gets good. She learns to wait: she counts the drinks they have, she watches the level in the bottle go down. Then she moves in.

  "This little lady's a killer," says Uncle George admiringly. Roz beams.

  It helps that she's playing seriously, whereas the uncles and her father aren't, not really. They play as if they're expecting a phone call. They play as if they're filling in the time.

  All of a sudden there was a lot of money. "I won it at the track," said Roz's father, but Roz knew this couldn't be true because there was too much of it for that. There was enough for dinner at a restaurant, for all of them, her mother too, with ice cream afterwards. Her mother wore her best dress, which was a new best dress, pale green with a white daisy collar, because there was enough money for that as well. There was enough for a car; it was a blue Dodge, and the boys from down the street stood outside Roz's house for half an hour, gazing at it, while Roz watched them silently from her porch. Her triumph was so complete she didn't even have to jeer.

  Where had the money come from? Out of thin air. It was like magic; her father waved his hand and presto, there it was. "The ship came in," said Roz's father. The uncles got some too. It was for all three of them, said her father. Equal shares, because the ship belonged to all.

  Roz knew it wasn't a real ship. Still, she could picture it, an old-fashioned ship like a galleon, a treasure ship, its sails golden in the sunlight, pennants flying from its masts. Or something like that. Something noble.

  Her parents sold the rooming house and moved north, away from the streets of narrow cheek-by-jowl old houses and tiny lawns, into an enormous house with a semi-circular driveway in front and a three-car garage. Roz decided that they had become rich, but her mother told her not to use that word. "We're comfortable," was what she said.

  But she didn't seem comfortable at all. Instead she seemed afraid. She was afraid of the house, she was afraid of the cleaning lady Roz's father insisted on, she was afraid of the new furniture that she herself had bought - "Get the best," said Roz's father - she was afraid of her new clothes. She wandered around in her housecoat and slippers, from room to room, as if she was looking for something; as if she was lost. She had been much more comfortable back in the old neighbourhood, where things were the right size and she knew her way around.

  She said she had nobody to talk to. But when had she ever talked that much, before? And who had she ever talked to? Roz, Roz's father, the uncles. Now the uncles had places of their own. The roomers? There were no roomers any more, for her to complain about and boss around. When men came to the door delivering things they took one look at her and asked to speak to the lady of the house. But she had to pretend to be happy, because of Roz's father. "This is what we waited for," he said.

  Roz has new
clothes too, and a new name. She's no longer Rosalind Greenwood, she's Roz Grunwald. This, her parents explain, has been her real name all along. "Why wasn't I called that before, then?" she asks.

  "It was the war," they say. "That name was too Jewish. It wasn't safe."

  "Is it safe now?" she asks.

  Not entirely. Different things are safe, where they are living now. By the same token, different things are dangerous.

  Roz goes to a new school. She's in high school now so she goes to Forest Hill Collegiate Institute. She's no longer a Catholic: she's renounced all of that - not without qualms, not without residue - in favour of being a Jew. Since there are so clearly sides, she would rather be on that one. She reads up on it because she wants to do it right; then she asks her father to buy two sets of dishes, and refuses to eat bacon. Her father buys the dishes to humour her, but her mother won't separate the meat dishes from the milk ones, and gives her a wounded look if she brings it up. Nor will her father join a temple. "I was never religious," he says. "Like I always said - who owns God? If there was no religions there won't be all this trouble."

  There are a lot of Jewish kids at Roz's new school; in fact at this school Jewish is the thing to be. But whereas once Roz was not Catholic enough, now she isn't Jewish enough. She's an oddity, a hybrid, a strange half-person. Her clothes, although expensive, are subtly not right. Her accent is not right either. Her enthusiasms are not right, nor her skills: Chinese burns and kicking people in the shins and playing a nifty hand of poker cut no ice here. Added to that, she's too big; also too loud, too clumsy, too eager to please. She has no smoothness, no boredom, no class.

  She finds herself in a foreign country. She's an immigrant, a displaced person. Her father's ship has come in, but she's just off the boat. Or maybe it's something else: maybe it's the money. Roz's money is plentiful, but it needs to be aged, like good wine or cheese. It's too brash, too shiny, too exclamatory. It's too brazen.

  She is sent off to Jewish summer camp by her father because he's found out that it's the right thing to do with your children, here, in this country, in this city, in this neighbourhood, in the summer. He wants Roz to be happy, he wants her to fit in. He equates these things. But at camp she's even more of an interloper, an obvious intruder: she has never played tennis, she's never ridden a horse, she doesn't know any of the cute folk dances from Israel or any of the mournful minor-key Yiddish songs. She falls off sailboats, into the freezing blue northern water of Georgian Bay, because she's never been on a boat before; when she tries to water-ski she chickens out at the last minute, just before they gun the motor, and sinks like a stone. The first time she appears in a bathing suit, not that she really knows how to swim, a graceless flail is her basic style, she realizes you're supposed to shave your armpits. Who could have been expected to tell her? Not her mother, who does not discuss the body. She has never been outside the city in her life. The other kids act as if they were born paddling a canoe and sleeping in smelly tents, but Roz can't get used to the bugs.

  She sits at the breakfast table in the log-cabin dining room, listening in silence while the other girls complain languidly about their mothers. Roz wants to complain about her mother too, but she's found that her complaints don't count because her mother isn't Jewish. When she begins, with her rooming house stories, her stories of toilets and scrubbing, they roll their eyes and yawn delicately, like kittens, and change the subject back to their own mothers. Roz can't possibly know, they imply. She can't understand.

  In the afternoons they do their hair up in rollers and lacquer their nails, and after the folk dances and singsongs and marshmallow roasts and Beatnik dress-up parties they are walked slowly back to their sleeping cabin by various boys, through the aromatic, painful dark, with its owl sounds and mosquitoes and its smell of pine needles, its flashlights blinking like fireflies, its languorous murmurs. None of these boys saunters over to joke with Roz, none stands with his arm propped on a tree, over her head. Well, not many of them are tall enough to do that, and anyway who wants to be seen with a part-shiksa hippo-hips fool? So Roz stays behind, to help clean up. God knows she's an expert at that.

  During arts and crafts, which Roz is no good at - her clay ashtrays look like cow patties, her belt woven on a primitive Inca-type hand loom like the cat got into it - she says she has to go to the bathroom, and wanders off to the kitchen to wheedle a pre-dinner snack. She has befriended the pastry cook, an old man who can make a row of ducks across a cake with butter icing in one burst of calligraphy, without lifting the decorator once. He shows Roz how, and how to make an icing rose too, and a stem with a leaf. "A rose without a leaf is like a woman without honour," he says, bowing to her in a courtly, old-fashioned, European way, handing her the cake decorator to let her try. He lets her lick out the bowl, and tells her she is the right shape for a woman, not all bones like some here, he can tell she appreciates good food. He has an accent, like her uncles, and a faint blue number on his arm. It's left over from the war, but Rose doesn't ask about that, because nobody talks about the war here, not yet. The war is unmentionable.

  Roz can see that she will never be prettier, daintier, thinner, sexier, or harder to impress than these girls are. She decides instead to be smarter, funnier, and richer, and once she has managed that they can all kiss her fanny. She takes to making faces; she resorts to the old rudeness of Huron Street, to get attention. Soon she has bulldozed a place for herself in the group: she is the joker. At the same time, she imitates. She picks up their accents, their intonations, their vocabulary; she adds layers of language to herself, sticking them on like posters on a fence, one glued over the top of the next, covering up the bare boards. As for the clothes, as for the accessories, those can be studied.

  Roz made it through high school, which was not exactly an abode of bliss, understatement of the year. Much later she'd discovered - at a class reunion she couldn't resist, because she had a great outfit for it and wanted to show off - that most of the other girls there had been as miserable as she was. Nor could they credit her own distress. "You were always so cheerful," they said.

  After high school Roz went to university. She took Art and Archaeology, which her father didn't consider practical but which came in handy later in the renovation business; you never knew which little doodads from the past could be recycled. She arranged to live in residence, even though, as her mother pointed out, she had a perfectly good home to live in. But she wanted out, she wanted out from under, and she got her father to spring for it by threatening to run away to Europe or to some other university a million miles away unless he did. She picked McClung Hall because it was non-denominational. By that time she had dumped her excess Jewishness overboard, along with her excess Catholicism. Or so she thought. She wanted to travel light, and was happiest in a mixed bag.

  The day Roz got her degree her father took her out for a treat, along with her mother and her increasingly seedy uncles. They went to a fancy restaurant where the menu was in French, with the English in small print underneath. For dessert there was ice cream, in various French flavours: cassis, fraise, citron, pistache.

  "French was not one of my passports," said Uncle Joe. "I'll have the pastiche."

  That was me, thinks Roz. I was the pastiche.

  45

  A long time later, after Roz was a married woman, after her mother had died - slowly and disapprovingly, since death was immodest, male doctors prying into your body being next door to sin - and after her father had followed, in jerky, painful stages, like a train shunting - after all this had happened and Roz was an orphan, she found out about the money. Not the later money, she knew about that; the first money. The root, the seedling, the stash.

  She'd gone to visit Uncle George in the hospital, because he too was dying. He didn't have a room of his own, or even a semi-private; he was in a ward. Neither of the uncles had done well at all. Both had ended up in rooming houses. After blowing their own money, they'd blown some of Roz's father's as well. They'd gambled
, they'd borrowed; or they'd called it borrowing, though everyone must have known they would never pay it back. But her father never said no, to any request of theirs.

  "It's the prostrate," Uncle Joe told her, over the phone. "Better you shouldn't mention it." So Roz didn't, because the uncles too had their areas of modesty. She took flowers, and a vase to put them in because hospitals never had vases; she put on a bright smile and a bustling, efficient manner, but she dropped both immediately when she saw how terrible Uncle George looked. He was shrivelled away, he was wasted. Already his head was a skull. Roz sat beside him, inwardly mourning. The man in the bed next to him was asleep and snoring.

  "That one, he's not going anyplace," said Uncle George, as if he himself had plans.

  "You want a private room?" said Roz. She could arrange it for him, easy.

  "Nah," said Uncle George. "I like the company. I like to have people. You know? Anyway, it costs a bundle. I never had the talent."

  "The talent for what?" said Roz.

  "Not like your father," said Uncle George. "He could start in the morning with a dollar, end of the day he'd have five. Me, I'd always just take that dollar and put it on a horse. I was more for the good times."

  "Where did he get it?" said Roz.

  Uncle George looked at her out of his wizened yellow eyes. "Get what?" he said innocently, craftily.

  "The first dollar," said Roz. "What did the three of you really do, in the war?"

  "You don't need to know that," said Uncle George.

  "I do," said Roz. "It's okay, he's dead now. You can tell me, you're not going to hurt my feelings."

  Uncle George sighed. "Yeah, well," he said. "It's a long time ago."

  "It's me who's asking," said Roz, having heard the uncles use this expression on each other, always with effect.

  "Your father was a fixer," said Uncle George. "He fixed things. He was a fixer before the war, he was a fixer in the war, and after the war he was also a fixer."