Authors: Margaret Atwood
The dinner was at a small quasi-French restaurant, with a red plush décor 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 façade was just that, a façade, 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.
And yes, they are pretty good together. Sometimes. Still. So she beams at him and returns the squeeze, and thinks they are as happy as can be. They are. They are as happy as they can be, given who they are. Though if they’d been different people they might have been happier.
A girl, a pretty girl, a pretty girl in a scoop-neck jersey, appears with a platter of dead fish, from which Mitch selects. He’s having the Catch of the Day, Roz is having the pasta done in sepia, because she has never eaten such a thing before and it sounds so bizarre. Spaghetti in Ink. There’s a salad first, during which Roz sees fit to ask, tentatively enough, whether there’s a specific topic Mitch wants to discuss. At previous lunches there has been one, a business topic usually, a topic having to do with Mitch getting more power on the board of
Wise Woman World
, of which he is the chairman, oops, chairperson.
But Mitch says no, he was merely feeling that he hasn’t been seeing enough of her lately, without the kids that is, and Roz, eager for scraps as always, laps it up. She will forgive, she will forget. Well anyway, forgive, because what you can or can’t forget isn’t under
your control. Maybe Mitch has just been having a middle-aged crisis all these years; though twenty-eight was a little young to begin.
The salad arrives, on a large plate borne by yet another longhaired, scoop-necked lovely, and Roz wonders whether the waitresses are chosen to go with the paintings. With so many nipples around she has the sensation of being watched by a myriad alien eyes. Pink ones. She flashes briefly on some flat-chested woman bringing a discrimination case against this restaurant for refusing to hire her. Even better, a flat-chested man. She’d love to be a fly on the wall.
The waitress bends over, showing deep cleavage, and dishes out the salad, and stands there smiling while Roz takes a bite. “Terrific,” says Roz, meaning the salad.
“Absolutely,” says Mitch, smiling up at the waitress. Oh God, thinks Roz. He’s starting to flirt with waitresses. What’ll she think of him? Sleazy old fart? And how soon before he really is a sleazy old fart?
Mitch has always flirted with waitresses, in his restrained way. But that’s like saying a ninety-year-old can-can dancer has always done the can-can. When do you know when to stop?
After the salad the main course arrives. It’s a different girl this time. Well, a different woman; she’s a little older, but with a ravishing cloud of dark hair and amazing great tits, and a tiny little waist Roz would kill for. Roz looks hard at her and knows she’s seen her before. Much earlier, in another life. “Zenia!” she exclaims, before she can help it.
“Pardon me?” says the woman. Then she looks at Roz in turn, and smiles, and says, “Roz? Roz Grunwald? Is it you? You don’t look like your pictures!”
Roz has an overwhelming urge to deny it. She shouldn’t have spoken in the first place, she should have dropped her purse on the
floor and dived after it, anything to stay out of Zenia’s sightlines. Who needs the evil eye?
But the shock of seeing Zenia there, working as a waitress – a
server –
in Nereids, overrides all that, and “What the heck are you doing here?” Roz blurts out.
“Research,” says Zenia. “I’m a journalist, I’ve been freelance for years, in England mostly. But I wanted to come back, just to see – to see what things were like, over here. So I got myself commissioned to do a piece on sexual harassment in the workplace.”
Zenia must be different, thinks Roz, if she’s writing about that stuff. She even looks different. She can’t place it at first, and then she sees. It’s the tits. And the nose too. The former have swelled, the latter has shrunk. Zenia’s nose used to be more like Roz’s. “Really?” says Roz, who has a professional interest. “Who for?”
“Saturday Night,”
says Zenia. “It’s mostly an interview format, but I thought it would be good to take a look at the locales.” She smiles more at Roz than at Mitch. “I was in a factory last week, and the week before that I spent in a hospital. You wouldn’t believe how many nurses get attacked by their patients! I don’t mean just grabbing – they throw things, the bedpans and so forth, it’s a real occupational hazard. They wouldn’t let me do any actual nursing though; this is more hands-on.”
Mitch is beginning to look peevish at being sidelined, so Roz introduces him to Zenia. She doesn’t want to say “an old friend,” so instead she says, “We were at the same school.” Not that we were ever what you’d call best buddies, thinks Roz. She scarcely knew Zenia then, except as an object of gossip. Lurid, sensational gossip.
Mitch does nothing to help Roz out, in the conversation department. He simply mutters something and stares at his plate. He obviously feels he’s been interrupted. “So, how’re the occupational hazards in this place?” says Roz, covering for him. “Has anyone called you ‘honeybun’ and pinched your butt?”
Zenia laughs. “Same old Roz. She was always the life of the party,” she says to Mitch.
While Roz is wondering what parties she ever attended at which Zenia was also present – none, as far as she can remember, but she used to drink more in those days, or more at once, and maybe she’s forgotten – Zenia puts her hand on Roz’s shoulder. Her voice changes, becomes lower, more solemn. “You know, Roz,” she says, “I’ve always wanted to tell you this. But I never could before.”
“What?” says Roz.
“Your father,” says Zenia.
“Oh dear,” says Roz, fearing some scam she’s never found out about, some buried scandal. Maybe Zenia is her long-lost half-sister, perish the thought. Her father was a sly old fox. “What did he do?”
“He saved my life,” says Zenia. “During the war.”
“Saved your life?” says Roz. “During the war?” Wait a minute – was Zenia even born, during the war? Roz hesitates, unwilling to believe. But this is what she’s longed for always – an eyewitness, someone involved but impartial, who could assure her that her father really was what he was rumoured to be: a hero. Or a semi-hero; at any rate, more than a shady trader. She’s heard accounts from others, her uncles for instance, but the two of them were hardly reliable; so she’s never been really sure, not really.