The Robber Bride

~XIX

Roz paces her office, to and fro, back and forth, smoking and eating the package of stale cheese straws she stashed in her desk last week and then forgot about, and waiting. Smoking, eating, waiting, the story of her life. Waiting for what? She can’t expect feedback this early. Harriet the Hungarian snoop is good, but surely it will take her days to sniff out Zenia, because Zenia won’t have hidden herself in any obvious place, or so you’d think. Though maybe she’s not hiding. Maybe she’s out in plain sight. There’s Roz, down on all fours looking under the bed, at the fluff balls and the dried-out bug carcasses that always seem to accumulate there despite Roz’s state-of-the-art vacuum cleaner, and all the time Zenia is standing right there in the middle of the room. What you see is what you get, she says to Roz. Only you didn’t see it. She likes to rub things in.

Over by the window Roz comes to a stop. Her office is a corner office, naturally, and on the top floor. Toronto company presidents are entitled to top-floor corner offices, even small-potatoes presidents like Roz. It’s a status thing: in this city there’s nothing higher on the totem pole than a room with a’ view, even if the view is mostly idle cranes and construction scaffolding and the freeway with its beetle-sized cars, and the spaghetti snarl of railroad tracks. But anyone who walks into Roz’s office gets the message at once. Let’s have a little respect around here! Harrumph, harrumph! Monarch of all she surveys:

Like shit. Nobody is monarch of anything any more. It’s all out of control.

From here Roz can see the lake, and the future marina they’re building out of termite-riddled landfill, and the Island, where Charis has her tiny falling-apart mouse nest of a house; and, from her other window, the CN Tower—tallest lightning rod in the world—with the SkyDome stadium beside it, nose and eye, carrot and onion’, phallus and ovum, pick your own symbolism, and it’s a good thing Roz didn’t invest in that one, rumour has it the backers are losing a shirt or two. If she stands in the angle of the two windows and looks north, there’s the university with its trees, golden at this time of year, and hidden behind it, Tony’s red-brick Gothic folly. Perfect for Tony though, what with the turret. She can hole herself up in there and pretend she’s invulnerable.

Roz wonders what the other two are doing right now. Are they pacing the floor like her, are they nervous? Seen from the air the three of them would form a triangle, with Roz as their apex. They could signal to each other with flashlights, like Nancy Drew the girl detective. Of course there’s always the phone.

Roz reaches for it, dials, sets it down. What can they tell her? They don’t know anything more about Zenia than she does. Less, most likely.

Roz’s hands are damp, and her underarms. Her body smells like rusty nails. Is this a hot flash, or merely the old rage coming back? She’s just jealous, people say, as if jealousy is something minor. But it’s not, it’s the worst, it’s the worst feeling there is—incoherent and confused and shameful, and at the same time self-righteous and focused and hard as glass, like the view through a telescope. A feeling of total concentration, but total powerlessness. Which must be why it inspires so much murder: killing is the ultimate control.

Roz thinks of Zenia dead. Her actual body, dead. Dead and melting.

Not very satisfying, because if Zenia were dead she wouldn’t know it. Better to think of her ugly. Roz takes Zenia’s face, pulls down on it as if it’s putty. Some nice jowls, a double chin, a permanent scowl. Blacken a few teeth, like children’s drawings of witches. Better.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most beautiful of us all? Depends, says the mirror. Beauty is only skin deep.

Right you are, says Roz, I’ll take some anyway. Now answer my question.

I think you’re a really terrific person, says the mirror. You’re warm and generous. You should have no di vculty at all finding some other man.

I don’t want some other man, says Roz, trying not to cry. I want Mitch.

Sorry, says the mirror. Can’t be done. It always ends like that,

Roz blows her nose and gathers up her jacket and purse, and locks her office door. Boyce is working late, bless his fussy little argyle socks: the light’s on under his door. She wonders whether she should knock and invite him out for a drink, which he wouldn’t find it politic to refuse, and take him to the King Eddie bar and bore the pants off him.

Better not. She’ll go home and bore her kids, instead. She has a vision of herself, running down Bay Street in nothing but her orange bathrobe, tossing big handfuls of money out of a burlap bag. Divesting herself of her assets. Getting rid of all her filthy lucre. After that she could join a cult, or something. Be a monk. A monkess. A monkette. Live on dried beans. Embarrass everybody, even more than she does now. But would there be electric toothbrushes? To be holy, would you need to get plaque?

The twins are watching TV in the family room, which is decorated in Nouveau Pueblo—sand, sage, ochre, and with a genuine cactus looming by the window, wrinkling like a morel, dying from overwatering. Roz must speak to Maria about that. Whenever Maria sees a plant, she waters it. Or else she dusts it. Roz once caught Maria going over that cactus with the vacuum cleaner, which can’t have done it any good.

“Hi Mom,” says Erin.

“Hi Mom,” says Paula. Neither of them looks at her; they’re channel-changing, snatching the zapper back and forth. “Dumb!” cries Erin. “So-o-o stupid! Look at that geek.”

“Brain snot!” says Paula. “C’est con, (a! Hey—my turn!”

“Hi kids,” says Roz. She kicks off her tight shoes and flops down in a chair, a dull purple chair the colour of New Mexican cliff rock just after sunset, or so said the decorator. Roz wouldn’t know. She wishes Boyce were here; he’d mix her a drink. Not even mix: pour. A single malt, straight up, is what she’d like, but all of a sudden she’s too tired to get it for herself. “What’re you watching?” she says to her beautiful children. “Mom, nobody watches TV any more,” says Paula.

“We’re looking for shampoo ads,” says Erin. “We want to get rid of our flaky dandruff.”

Paula pulls her hair over one eye, like a model. “Do you suffer from ... flaky crotch dandruff?” she intones in a phoney advertising voice. They both seem to find this riotously funny. But at the same time they’re scanning her, little fluttery sideways glances, checking for crisis.

“Where’s your brother?” Roz says wearily. “My turn,” says Erin, grabbing the zapper. “Out,” says Paula. “I think:”

“Planet X,” says Erin.

“Dancing and romancing,” they say together, and giggle.

If only they would settle down, rent a nice movie, something with duets in it, Roz could make popcorn, pour melted butter on it, sit with them in warm family companionship. As in days of yore. Mary Poppins was their favourite, once; back in their flannelette-nightie days. But now they’ve hit the music channel, and there’s some man in a torn undershirt hopping up and down and wiggling his scrawny hips and sticking out his tongue in what he must assume is a sexual manner, although to Roz he just looks like a mouth-disease illustration, and Roz doesn’t have the stamina for this, even without the sound, so she gets up and goes upstairs in her stocking feet and puts on her bathrobe and her trodden-down landlady slippers, then ambles down to the kitchen, where she finds a half-eaten Nanaimo bar in the refrigerator. She puts it on a plate—she will not revert to savagery, she will use a fork—and adds some individually wrapped Laughing Cow cheese triangles she bought for the kids’ lunches and a couple of Tomek’s Pickles, an Old Polish Recipe, drink the juice for hangovers. No point in asking the kids to join her for dinner. They will say they’ve eaten, whether they have or not. Thus provisioned, Roz wanders the house, from room to room, munching pickles and revising the wall colours in her head. Pioneer blue, she thinks. That’s what I’ need. Return to my roots. Her weedy and suspect roots, her entangled roots. Inferior to Mitch’s, like so many other intangibles. Mitch had roots on his roots.

Some time later she finds herself holding an empty plate and wondering why there is no longer anything on it. She’s standing in the cellar, the old part, the part she’s never had redone. The storage part, with the poured cement floor and the cobwebs. The remains of Mitch’s wine collection is over in one corner: not his best wines, he took those with him when he flew the coop. Probably he drank them with Zenia. Roz hasn’t touched a single bottle of what’s left, she can’t bear to. Nor can she bear to throw it out.

Some of Mitch’s books are down here, too; his old law textbooks, his Joseph Conrads, his yacht manuals. Poor baby, he loved his boats. He thought he was a sailor at heart, though every time they went sailing something conked out. Some motor part or piece of wood, search Roz, she never got used to saying prow and stern instead of front and back. She sees herself standing on one of those boats, the Rosalind it must have been, the first one, named after her, with her nose peeling from sunburn and her shoulders freckling and Mitch’s cap tilted on her head, waving some wrench or other—This one, honey?—while they drifted towards a rocky shore—where? Lake Superior?—and Mitch bent over the motor, swearing under his breath. Was it fun? No. But she would rather be there than here.

She turns her back on Mitch’s stuff so she won’t have to look at it. It’s too doleful. There are some of the twins’ old things down here too, and some of Larry’s: his baseball glove, his board games—Admirals, Strategy, Kamikaze—foisted on him by Tony because she thought those were the kind of games he should like. The children’s books, fondly saved by Roz in the hope that someday she will have grandchildren and will read them these very same books. Do you know, sweetie—this used to be your mommy’s! “en she was a little girl. (Or your daddy’s. But Roz, although she hopes, has trouble picturing Larry as a father.)

Larry used to sit gravely silent while she read to him. His favourites were about trains that talked and were a success, or good-for-you books about interspecies cooperation. Mr. Bear helps Mr. Beaver build a dam. Larry didn’t comment much. But with the twins she could barely get a word in edgewise. They would fight her for control of the story—Change the ending, Mom! Make them go back! I don’t like this part! They’d wanted Peter Part to end before Wendy grew up, they’d wanted Matthew in Anne of Green Gables to live forever.

She remembers one phase, when they were, what? Four, five, six, seven? It went on for a while. They’d decided that all the characters in every story had to be female. Winnie the Pooh was female, Piglet was female, Peter Rabbit was female: If Roz slipped up and said “he,” they would correct her: She! She! they would insist. All of their stuffed animals were female, too. Roz still doesn’t know why. When she asked them, the twins would give her looks of deep contempt. “Can’t you see?” they would say.

She used to worry that this belief of theirs was some reaction to Mitch and his absences, some attempt to deny his existence. But maybe it was simply the lack of penises, on the stuffed animals. Maybe that was it. In any case, they grew out of it.

Roz sits down on the cellar floor, in her orange bathrobe, never mind the cement dust and silverfish and webs. She pulls books off the shelves at random. To Paula and Erin, from Aunt Tony. There on the cover is the dark forest, the dark wolfish forest, where lost children wander and foxes lurk, and anything can happen; there is the castle turret, poking through the knobbly trees. The Three Little Pigs, she reads. The first little pig built his house of straw. Her house, her house, shout the small voices in her head. The Big Bad Wolf fell down the chimney, right into the cauldron of boiling water, and got his fur all burned off. Her fur! It’s odd what a difference it makes, changing the pronoun.

At one point the twins decided that the wolf should not be dropped into the cauldron of boiling water—it should be one of the little pigs, instead, because they had been the stupid ones. But when Roz suggested that maybe the pigs and the wolf could forget about the boiling water and make friends, the twins were scornful. Somebody had to be boiled.

It amazed Roz then, how bloodthirsty children could be. Not Larry; he didn’t like the more violent stories, they gave him nightmares. He didn’t take to the kinds of books Tony liked to contribute—those authentic fairy tales 1n the gnarlytree editions, not a word changed, all the pecked-out eyes and cooked bodies and hanged corpses and red-hot nails intact. Tony said they were more true to life that way.

“The Robber Bridegroom,” reads Tony, long ago, a twin at each elbow. The beautiful maiden, the search for a husband, the arrival of the rich and handsome stranger who lures innocent girls to his stronghold in the woods and then chops them up and eats them. “One day a suitor appeared. He was ...

“She! She!” clamour the twins.

“All right, Tony, let’s see you get out of this one,” says Roz, standing in the doorway.

“We could change it to The Robber Bride,” says Tony. “Would that be adequate?”

The twins give it some thought, and say it will do. They are fond of bridal costumes, and dress their Barbie dolls up in them; then they hurl the brides over the stair railings or drown them in the bathtub.

“In that case,” says Tony, “who do you want her to murder? Men victims, or women victims? Or maybe an assortment?” The twins remain true to their principles, they do not flinch. They opt for women, in every single role.

Tony never talked down to the children. She didn’t hug them or pinch their cheeks or tell them they were sweet. She spoke to them as if they were miniature adults. In turn, the twins accepted her as one of themselves. They let her in on things, on their various plots and conspiracies, their bad ideas—stuff they would never have shared with Roz. They used to put Tony’s shoes on and march around the house in them, one shoe for each twin, when they were six or seven. They were entranced by those shoes: grown-up shoes that fit them!

The Robber Bride, thinks Roz. Well, why not? Let the grooms take it in the neck for once. The Robber Bride, lurking in her mansion in the dark forest, preying upon the innocent, enticing youths to their doom in her evil cauldron. Like Zenia.

No. Too melodramatic for Zenia, who was, after all—who is surely nothing more than an up-market slut. The Rubber Broad is more like it—her and those pneumatic tits.

Roz is crying again. What she’s mourning is her own good will. She tried so hard, she tried so hard to be kind and nurturing, to do the best thing. But Tony and the twins were right: no matter what you do, somebody always gets boiled.

XL

The story of Roz and Zenia began on a lovely day in May, in 1983, when the sun was shining and the birds were singing and Roz was feeling terrific.

‘Well, not quite terrific. Baggy, to tell the truth: under the eyes, under the arms. But better than she’d felt when she’d turned forty. Forty had been truly depressing, she had despaired, she’d dyed her hair black, a tragic mistake. But she’d come to terms with herself since then, and her hair was back to auburn.

Also: the story of Roz and Zenia had actually begun some time before, inside Zenia’s head, but Roz had no idea.

Not quite that, either. She had an idea, but it was the wrong idea. It was hardly even an idea, just a white idea balloon with no writing inside it. She had an idea that something was up. She thought she knew what, but she didn’t know who. She told herself she didn’t much care: she was past that. As long as it didn’t disrupt, as long as it didn’t interfere, as long as she could come out of it with not very many ribs broken. Some men needed their little escapades. It kept them toned up. As an addiction it was preferable to alcohol or golf, and Mitch’s things—things, she called them, to distinguish them from people—never lasted long.

It was a lovely May day, though. That much was true.

Roz wakes up at first light. She often does this: wakes up, and sits up stealthily, and watches Mitch when he’s still sleeping. It’s one of the few chances she gets to look at him when he can’t catch her doing it and interpose his opaque blue stare. He doesn’t like being examined: it’s too close to an evaluation, which is too close to a judgment. If there are judgments going around he wants to be making them himself.

He sleeps on his back, legs flung wide, arms spread out as if to possess as much of the space as possible. The Royal Posture, Roz saw it called once, in a magazine. One of those psychocon articles that claim to tell all on the basis of how you tie your shoelaces. His Roman nose juts up, his slight double chin and the heaviness around.his jaw disappear in this position. There are white lines around his eyes, wrinkles where he isn’t tanned; some of the blunt hairs poking through his morning chin are grey.

Distinguished, thinks Roz. Distinguished as heck. Maybe she,,; should’ve married someone ugly. Some ugly toad of a man who’d never be able to believe his good luck, who’d appreciate her sterling qualities of character, who’d worship her baby finger. Instead she had to go for distinguished. Mitch should have married a cold blonde with homicidal eyes and a double string of real pearls grafted onto her neck, and a built-in pocket behind the left breast, for the bankbook. Such a woman would’ve been up to him. She would not have taken the kind of crap Roz takes.

She goes back to sleep, dreams about her father standing on a black mountain, a mountain of coal or of something burnt, hears Mitch’s alarm go off, hears it go off again, wakes finally. The space beside her is empty. She climbs out of bed, out of the king-sized bed with the brass bedstead in a curving art nouveau design and the raspberry-coloured sheets and duvet cover, onto the aubergine carpet, in the bedroom with its salmon walls and the priceless twenties dresser and mirror, faux Egyptian, and slips into her cream satin robe and pads barefoot into the bathroom. She loves this bathroom! It has everything: shower cubicle, jacuzzi, bidet, a heated towel rack, His and Hers sinks so the hairs from Roz’s head won’t get mixed up with the stubble from Mitch’s chin. She could live in this bathroom! So could several Southeast Asian families, come to that, she reflects morosely. Guilt sets in.

Mitch is already in here, taking a shower. His pink silhouette looms dimly through the steam and the pebble glass. Years ago—how many?—Roz would have scampered playfully into the shower, too; she would have soaped him all over, rubbed herself against his slippery body, pulled him down onto the tiled bathroom floor; back in the days when his skin fit him exactly, no sags, no bulges, and hers did too, and when he tasted like hazelnuts, a delicious roasted smell; but she doesn’t do such things now, now that she has become more reluctant to be viewed by daylight.

Anyway, if what she suspects is true, this is the wrong time to be putting herself on display. In Mitch’s cosmology Roz’s body represents possessions, solidity, the domestic virtues, hearth and home, long usage. Mother-of-his-children. The den. Whereas whatever other body may currently be occupying his field of vision will have other nouns attached to it: adventure, youth, freedom, the unknown, sex without strings. When the pendulum swings back—when that other body starts representing complications, decisions, demands, sulkiness, and weepy scenes—then it will be Roz’s turn again. This has been the pattern.

Intuition is not one of Roz’s strong suits, but she has intuitions about the onset of Mitch’s attacks. She thinks of them as attacks, as in attacks of malaria; or else as attacks of a different nature, for isn’t Mitch a predator, doesn’t he take advantage of these poor women, who are surely becoming younger and younger as Mitch gets older and older, isn’t it really more like a bear attack, a shark attack, aren’t these women savaged by him? Judging from some of the tearful phone calls Roz has fielded, some of the shoulders she’s patted in her hypocritical, maternal, there-there-ing way, they are.

It’s amazing the way Mitch can just write these women off. Sink his teeth into them, spit them out, and Roz is expected to clean up the mess. Fire off his loins and then wipe, like a blackboard, and after that he can barely remember their names.

Roz is the one who remembers. Their names, and everything else about them.

The beginnings of Mitch’s flings are never obvious. He never says blatant things such as “I’m working late at the office”; when he says that, he really is working late at the office. Instead, his habits undergo a subtle change. The numbers of conferences he goes to, the numbers of showers he takes, the amount he whistles in them, the quantity and kind of aftershave he uses and the places where he splashes it—the groin is a sure giveaway—such things are minutely observed by Roz, looking pleasantly out of her indulgent eyes, bristling like a bottlebrush within. He stands up straighter, pulls in his stomach more; she catches him glaring at himself, at his profile, in hall mirrors, in store windows, his eyes narrowing as if for a leonine pounce.

He’s more considerate of her, more attentive; he’s alert to her, watching her to see if she’s watching. He gives her little kisses on the back of her neck, on her fingertips—little homage kisses, little forgive-me kisses, but nothing that might be construed as foreplay, because in bed he becomes inert, he turns his back, he pleads minor illnesses, he takes up the jackknife position, oystering himself against her stroking fingers. His prick is a serial monogamist; a sure sign of a dyed-in-the-wool romantic, in Roz’s books. No cynical polygamy for it! One more, it wants, just one more woman, because a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, and Mitch is afraid of dying, and if he were ever to pause, to see himself as a man married to Roz, married only to Roz, married to Roz forever, in that instant his hair would fall out, his face would wrinkle up like a thousandyear-old mummy’s, his heart would stop. Or that is how Roz explains him, to herself.

She asks him if he’s seeing someone.

He says no. He says he’s just tired. He’s under a lot of pressure; he says, a lot of stress, and to prove it he gets up in the middle of the night and goes into his study, where he shuts the door and works until dawn. Sometimes there is the murmur of his voice: dictating letters, or so he claims, offering unasked-for explanations at breakfast.

And thus it goes, until Mitch gets tired of whoever it is he really has been seeing. Then he becomes deliberately careless, then he starts to leave clues. The match folder from the restaurant where he and Roz have never been, the unknown-number long-distance phone-call entries on their home phone bill. Roz knows that at this point she is supposed to call him on it. She’s supposed to confront him, to rave and scream, to cry and accuse and grovel, to ask him if he still loves her and whether the children mean anything to him at all. She’s supposed to behave the way she did the first time (the second time, the fifth time), so he will be able to wriggle off the hook, so he can tell the other woman, the one with the haggard lines appearing around her eyes, the one with the pieces of love bitten out of her, that he will always adore her but he can’t bear to leave the kids; and so he will be able to tell Roz—magnanimously, and with a heroic air of self-sacrifice—that she is the most important woman in his life, no matter how badly and foolishly he may behave from time to time, and he’s given the other woman up for her, so how can she refuse to forgive him? The other women are just trivial adventures, he will imply: she’s the one he comes home to. Then he will throw himself into her as into a warm bath, as into a deep feather bed, and exhaust himself, and sink again into connubial torpor. Until the next time.

Lately, however, Roz has been refusing her move. She’s learned to keep her big fat mouth shut. She ignores the phone bills and the match covers, and after the midnight conversations she tells him sweetly that she hopes he’s not overdoing it with too much work. During his conference absences she finds other things to do. She has meetings to go to, she has plays to attend, she has detective novels to read, tucked up in bed with her night cream; she has friends, she has her business to keep up; her time is fully occupied with items other than him. She adopts absentmindedness: she forgets to send his shirts to the cleaners, and when he speaks to her she says, “What did you just say, sweetie?” She buys new dresses and new perfumes, and smiles at herself in mirrors when he can be supposed not to be looking, but is, and Mitch begins to sweat.

Roz knows why: his little piece of cotton candy is growing claws, she’s saying she doesn’t understand what’s going on with him, she’s whining, she’s babbling about coiiiinitment and divorce, both of them things he is now supposed to be doing, after all he’s promised. The net is closing around him and he’s not being rescued. He’s being thrown from the troika, thrown to the wolves, to the hordes of ravening bimbos snapping at his heels.

In desperation he resorts to more and more open ploys. He leaves private letters lying around—the women’s letters to him, and, worse, his letters to the women—he actually makes copies!—and Roz reads them and fumes, and goes to the gym to work out, and eats chocolate mud cake afterwards, and puts the letters back where she found them and does not mention them at all. He announces a separate vacation—maybe he will take the boat on a short trip around Georgian Bay, by himself, he needs some time to unwind—and Roz pictures some loosemouthed slut spread out on the deck of the Rosalind 77, and mentally rips up the snapshot, and tells him she thinks that’s a wonderful idea because each of them could use a little space.

God only knows how much she bites her tongue. She waits until the last minute, just before he really has to elope, or else get caught screwing his latest thing in Roz’s raspberry-coloured bed in order to get Roz’s attention. Only then will she reach out a helping hand, only then will she haul him back from the brink, only then will she throw the expected tantrum. The tears Mitch sheds then are not tears of repentance. They are tears of relief.

Does Roz secretly enjoy all this? She didn’t at first. The very first time it happened she felt scooped out, disjointed, scorned and betrayed, crushed by bulldozers. She felt worthless, useless, sexless. She thought she would die. But she’s developed a knack, and therefore a taste. It’s the same as a business negotiation or a poker game. She’s always been a whiz at poker. Yqu have to know when to up the stakes, when to call a bluff, when to fold. So she does enjoy it, some. It’s hard not to enjoy something you’re good at.

But does her enjoyment make it all right? On the contrary. It’s her enjoyment that makes it all wrong. Any old nun could tell you that, and many of them did tell Roz, once, in the earlier part of her life. If she could suffer through Mitch’s attacks like a martyr, weeping and flagellating herself—if she could let them be imposed on her, without participating at all, without colluding, without lying and concealing and smiling and playing Mitch like an oversized carp, how right it would be. She’d be suffering for love, suffering passively, instead of fighting. Fighting for herself, for her idea of who she is. The right kind of love should be selfless, for women at any rate, or so said the Sisters. The Self should be scrubbed like a floor: on both knees, with a harsh wire brush, until nothing is left of it at all.

Roz can’t do that. She can’t be selfless, she never could. Anyway her way is better. It’s harder on Mitch, perhaps, but it’s easier on her. She’s had to give up some love, of course; some of her once-boundless love for Mitch. You can’t keep a cool head when you’re drowning in love. You just thrash around a lot, and scream, and wear yourself out.

The May sunlight comes in through the window, and Mitch whistles “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and Roz flosses her teeth quickly so Mitch won’t see her doing it when he gets out of the shower. There is nothing so dampening to lust as dental floss, in Roz’s opinion: a wide-open mouth with a piece of. gooey string being manoeuvred around in it. She has always had good teeth, they are one of her features. Only recently has she begun to think they may not always be where they are right now, namely inside her mouth.

Mitch steps out of the shower and comes up behind her and encircles her with his arms, and presses her against himself, and nuzzles her hair aside and kisses her on the neck. If they hadn’t made love last night she would find this neck kiss conclusive: surely it is too courtly to be innocent! But at this preliminary stage, you never know.

“Good shower, honey?” she says. Mitch makes the noise he makes when he thinks Roz has asked a question so meaningless it doesn’t require an answer, not knowing that what she said wasn’t a question anyway but an inverted wish: translation, I hope you had a good shower, and here is your opening to complain about any little physical problem you may be having so I can offer sympathy.

“I thought we could have lunch,” says Mitch. Roz notes the formulation: not Would you like to have lunch or I am inviting you to lunch. No room here for a yes or no from her, no room for a rejection: Mitch is nothing if not directive. But at the same time her heart turns over, because she doesn’t get invitations like this from him very often. She looks at his face in the mirror, and he smiles at her. She always finds his mirror reflection disconcerting. Lopsided, because she isn’t used to seeing him that way around and he looks reversed. But nobody’s symmetrical.

She suppresses the desire to say, Judas Priest, how come I rate all of a sudden? Is hell freezing over, or what? Instead she says, “Honey, that would be great! I’d love it!”

Roz sits on the bath stool, a converted Victorian commode, and watches Mitch while he shaves. She adores watching him shave! All that wild white foam, a sort of caveman beard, and the way he contorts his face to get at the hidden stubble. She has to admit he’s not only distinguished, he’s still what you’d call handsome, though his skin is getting redder and his blue eyes are paling. Ruggedly handsome, they might say in a men’s clothing ad, though they’d be talking about the sheepskin coat. The sheepskin coat, the sheepskin gloves, the calfskin briefcase: that’s Mitch’s style. He has many items of good-taste expensive leather. He’s not going bald yet, praise the Lord, not that Roz would mind but men seem to, and she hopes if he does start to shed that he won’t get his armpit transplanted to the top of his head. Though he’s showing some pepper and salt in the sideburns. Roz checks him over for rust spots, the way she would a car.

What she’s really waiting for though is the aftershave. Which one will he pick, and where will he put it? Ah! Nothing too seductive, just some stuff he got in England, heather or something. The outdoor mode. And nothing below the neck. Roz sighs with relief.

She does love him. She loves him still. She can’t afford to go overboard, is all.

But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it’s her excessive love that pushes him away.

After Mitch is out of the bathroom Roz continues with her own preparations, the creams and lotions and perfumes that should never be seen by Mitch. They belong behind the scenes, as at theatres. Roz collects perfumes the way other people collect stamps, she’s a sucker for anything new that comes out. She has three rows of them, three rows of cunning little bottles, sorted into categories that she thinks of as Flower Arranging, Executive Briskness, and Heavy Petting. Today, in honour of her lunch with Mitch, she chooses Shalimar, from the Heavy

Petting section. But it’s a bit too sultry for the middle of the day so she cuts it with something from Flower Arranging. Then, suited and made up but wearing her bedroom slippers and carrying her high heels, she descends to do her mother routine in the kitchen. Mitch, needless to say, is already out the door. He has a breakfast meeting.

“Hi, kids,” says Roz. There they are, all three of them, bless their greedy overnourished hearts, gobbling down the Rice Krispies with brown sugar and bananas on top, supervised by Dolores, who is from the Philippines and is, Roz hopes, beginning to get over her culture shock. “Hi, Dolores.”

Dolores fills Roz with anxiety and misgiving: should Dolores be here? Will Western culture corrupt her? Is Roz paying her enough? Does Dolores secretly hate them all? Is she happy, and, if not, is it Roz’s fault? Roz has had spates of thinking they shouldn’t have a live-in housekeeper. But when they don’t, there’s no one to do the kids’ lunches and handle the illnesses and last-minute emergencies except Roz, and Roz becomes over-organized and can’t pay enough attention to Mitch, and Mitch gets very short-tempered.

Roz makes the rounds of the kitchen table, bestowing smooches. Larry is fourteen going on fifteen and embarrassed by her, but he endures. The twins kiss her back, briefly, milkily. “Mom,” says Erin. “you smell like room freshener.”

How wonderful! How exact! Roz glances around the kitchen, done in warm wood panelling with chopping-block counters where the three school lunches sit in their matching lunch boxes, blue for Erin, green for Paula, black for Larry, and she lights up within, she glows! This is why she goes through it, this is what it’s for! All the holy hell with Mitch has been worth it, for mornings like this, to be able to walk into the kitchen and say “Hi; kids,” and have—them continue scarfing down the breakfast food as if she’s practically not there. She extends her invisible wings, her warm feathery angel’s wings, her fluttery hen’s wings, undervalued and necessary, she enfolds them. Secure, is what she wants them to feel; and they do feel secure, she’s certain of it. They know this is a safe house, they know she’s there, planted solidly, two feet on the ground; and Mitch is there too, more or less, in his own way. They know it’s all right, so they can get on with whatever they’re doing, they don’t have to worry.

Maybe she’s wrong about Mitch, this time. Maybe there’s nothing going on. Maybe he’s finally settled down.

XLI

The lunch is at a restaurant called Nereids. It’s a small place, a done-over house on Queen East, with a large wellput-together stone man without any clothes on standing outside it. Roz has never been to it before, but Mitch has; she can tell by the way the hostess greets him, by the way he looks around with an amused, proprietorial eye. She can see too why he likes it: the whole place is decorated with paintings, paintings that twenty years ago could’ve got you arrested, because they are all of naked women. Naked women, and naked mermaids too, with enormous and statuesque breasts: not a droopy boob among them. Well, naked people, because the naked women do not lack for male company. Walking to their table Roz; gets a cock right in the eye, and averts her gaze.

“What is this?” she whispers, alight with curiosity and appalled glee, and with the sheer pleasure of being taken out to lunch by Mitch. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing? I mean, is this a porn shop, or what?”

Mitch chuckles, because he likes to shock Roz a little, he likes to show that he’s above her prejudices. (Not that she’s a prude, but there’s private and there’s public; and this is public. Public privates!) He explains that this is a seafood restaurant, a

Mediterranean seafood restaurant, one of the best in the city in his opinion, but that the owner is also a painter, and some of these paintings are by him and some are by his friends, who appear to share his interests. Venus is featured, because she was after all a goddess of the sea. The fish motif accounts too for the mermaids. Roz deduces that these are not just naked people, they are mythological naked people. She can deal with that, she took it at university. Proteus blowing his conch. Or getting it blown.

“Oh,” says Roz; in her mock-naive voice. “So this is capitalA Art! Does that make it legal?” and Mitch laughs again, uneasily, and suggests that maybe she should lower her voice because she wouldn’t want to hurt people’s feelings.

If anyone else told her to lower her voice, Roz would know what to do: scream louder. But Mitch has always been able to make her feel as if she were just off the boat, head wrapped in a shawl, wiping her nose on her sleeve, and lucky to have a sleeve at that. Which boat? There are many boats in her ancestral past, as far as she can tell. Everyone she’s descended from got kicked out of somewhere else, for being too poor or too politically uncouth or for having the wrong profile or accent or hair colour.

The boat her father came over on was more or less recent, though far enough back to have arrived before the Canadiarr government walled out the Jews, in the thirties and during the war. Not that her father was even a whole Jew. Why do you inheritJewishness through the mother’s side? Tony once asked Roz. Because so many Jewish women were raped by Cossacks and whathave-you that they could never be sure who the father was. But her father was Jewish enough for Hitler, who hated mixtures more than anything.

The boat on her mother’s side was much further back. Famine caused by landlessness caused by war drove them out, a hundred and fifty years ago, Irish and Scots both. One of those families set out with five children—and arrived with none, and then the father died of cholera in Montreal and the mother remarried, as fast as she could—an Irishman whose wife had died, so he needed a new one. Men needed wives then, for such enterprises. Off they went into the semi-cleared bush, to be overtaxed and to have other children and to plant potatoes, and to chop down trees with implements they’d never used before, because how many trees were left in Ireland? A lot of legs got chopped into, by those people. Tony, who is more interested in these details than Roz is, once showed Roz an old picture—the men standing in metal washtubs, to protect their legs from their own axes. Low comedy for the English middle classes, back home, living off the avails. Stupid bogtrottersi The Irish were always good for a smirk or two, then.

All of them came steerage, of course. Whereas Mitch’s ancestors, although not created by God from the sacred mud of Toronto—they had to have got here somehow—must have come cabin. Which means they threw up into a china basin instead of onto other people’s feet, on the way across.

Big deal, but Roz is intimidated anyway. She opens the mermaid-festooned menu, and reads the items, and asks Mitch to advise her, as if she can’t make up her own mind what to put into her mouth. Roz, she tells herself. You are a suck.

She remembers the time she first went out with Mitch. She was old, she was almost twenty-two, she was over the hill. A lot of girls she’d known in high school and then in university were already married, so why wasn’t she? It was a question that looked out at her from her mother’s increasingly baffled eyes.

Roz had already had a love affair, or rather a sex affair, and then another. She hadn’t even felt too guilty about them. Although the nuns had ground it in about sex and what a sin it was, Roz was no longer a Catholic. She was once a Catholic, though, and once a Catholic, always a Catholic, according to her mother; so she’d had some qualms, after the first exhilarating sense of transgression had faded. Strangely enough, these qualms focused less on the sex itself than on the condoms—things you had to buy under the counter, not that she ever did, that was a man’s job. Condoms seemed to her inherently wicked. But they were also inherently funny. They were like rubber gloves with only one finger, and every time she saw one she had to be severe with herself or she’d get the giggles, a terrifying thought because the man might think you were laughing at him, at his dick, at its size, and that would be fatal.

But the sex was great, it was something she was good at, though neither one of these men was her idea of bliss from the neck up. One had big sticking-out ears, the other one was two inches shorter than she was, and she didn’t see going through life in flats. She wanted children, but not runry ones with jug ears.

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 wnsYy 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 truckloads 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 sitting there and be given the once-over, 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 fa~ade was just that, a fa~ade, 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 offno 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 antimaterialism. 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 Miteh 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 long-haired, 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.”

1Vlitch 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 parry,” 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.

Now, finally, there’s a messenger, bringing news from that distant country, the country of the past, the country of the war. But why does that messenger have to be Zenia? It grates on Roz that Zenia has this news and Roz does not. It’s as if her father has left something in his will, some treasure, to a perfect stranger, some drifter he’d met in a bar, and nothing for his own daughter. Didn’t he know how much she wanted to know?

Maybe th~re’s nothing in it. On the other hand, what if there is? It’s at least worth a listen. It’s at least worth a flutter. “It’s a long story” says Zenia. “I’d love to tell you about it, when you’ve got the time. If you want to hear it, that is:” She smiles, nods at Mitch, and walks away. She moves confidently, nonchalantly, as if she knows she’s just made the one offer that Roz can’t possibly refuse.

XLII

Roz’s father, the Great Unknown. Great to others, unknown to her. Or let’s just say—thinks Roz, in her orange bathrobe, in the cellar, finishing off the crumbs of the Nanaimo bar, hungrily licking the plate—that he had nine lives, and she herself was only aware of three or four of them. You never knew when someone from one of her father’s previous lives might reappear.

Once upon a time Roz was not Roz. Instead she was Rosalind;—and her middle name was Agnes, after Saint Agnes and also her mother, though she didn’t. tell the girls at school about that because she didn’t want to be nicknamed Aggie, the way her mother was, behind her back, by the roomers. No one would dare call her mother Aggie to her face. She was far too respectable for that. She was Mrs. Greenwood, to them.

So Roz was Rosalind Greenwood instead of Roz Grunwald, and she lived with her mother in her mother’s rooming house on Huron Street. The house was tall and narrow and made of red brick, with a sagging porch on the front that Roz’s father was going to fix, maybe, sometime. Her father was away. He’d been away as long as Roz could remember. It was because of the war.

Roz could remember the war, although not very well. She remembered the air raid sirens, from before she went to school, because her mother had made her crawl underneath the bed and there was a spider. Her mother had saved up bacon fat and tin cans, though what the soldiers would do with those things Roz couldn’t imagine, and later, at school everyone gave nickels to the Red Cross because of all the orphans. The orphans stood on piles of rubble, and had raggedy clothes and huge, unsmiling eyes, appealing eyes, accusing eyes, because their parents had been killed by bombs. Sister Mary Paul showed pictures of them, in Grade One, and Roz cried because she was so sorry for them and was told to control herself, and couldn’t eat her lunch, and was told she had to finish it because of the orphans, and asked for a second helping because if finishing one lunch was going to help the orphans, then eating a second one would help them even more, although she wasn’t sure how. Maybe God had ways of arranging such things. Maybe the solid, visible food Roz ate got turned into invisible spiritual food and flown through the air, straight into the orphans, sort of like Communion, where the Host looked like a round soda cracker but was really Jesus. In any case, Roz was more than willing to help out.

Somewhere over there, behind the piles of rubble, out of sight among the dark dumps of trees in the distance, was her father. She hoped some of the food she ate would bypass the orphans and get into him. That was how Roz thought when she was in Grade One.

But the war was over, so where was Roz’s father now? “On his way,” said her mother. There was a third chair always placed ready at the kitchen table for him. Roz could hardly wait.

Because Roz’s father was away Roz’s mother had to run the rooming house all by herself. It was wearing her down, as she told Roz, almost every day. Roz could see it: her mother had a stringy look, as if the soft parts of her were being scraped away, as if her bones were getting closer and closer to the surface. She had a long face, grey-streaked brown hair pulled back and pinned, and an apron. She didn’t talk much, and when she did talk it was in short, dense clusters of words. “Least said soonest mended,” she would say. “A stitch in time saves nine. Scarce as hen’s teeth. Blood is thicker than water. Handsome is as handsome does. Safe as houses. Money doesn’t grow on trees. Little pitchers have big ears:” She said Roz was a chatterbox and her tongue wagged at both ends.

She had hard hands with enlarged knuckles, red from washing. “Look at my hands,” she would say, as if her hands proved something. Usually what they proved was that Roz had to help out more. “Your mother is a saint,” said little Miss Hines, who lived on the third floor. But if Roz’s mother was a saint, Roz did not especially want to be one.

When Roz’s father came back he would help out. If Roz was good, he would come back sooner, because God would be pleased with her and would answer her prayers. But sometimes she couldn’t always remember. When that happened, when she did a sin, she would get frightened; she would see her father in a boat, crossing the ocean, and a huge wave washing over him or a bolt of lightning striking him, which would be God’s way of punishing her. Then she needed to pray extra hard, until Sunday when she could go to confession. She would pray on her knees, beside her bed, with the tears running down her face. If it was a bad sin she would also scrub the toilet, even if it had just been done. God liked well-scrubbed toilets.

Roz wondered what her father would be like. She had no real memory of him, and the photo her mother kept on her dark, polished, forbidden bureau was just of a man, a large man in a black coat whose face Roz could scarcely make out because it was in shadow. This photo revealed none of the magic Roz ascribed to her father. He was important, he was doing important, secret things that could not be spoken about. They were war things, even though the war was over.

“Risking his neck,” said her mother. “How?” said Roz.

“Eat up your supper,” said her mother, “there are children starving in Europe.”

What he was doing was so important that he didn’t have much time to write letters, although letters did arrive at intervals, from faraway places: France, Spain, Switzerland, Argentina. Her mother read these letters to herself, turning an odd shade of mottled pink while she did it. Roz saved the stamps.

What Roz’s mother did mostly was cleaning. “This is a clean, respectable house,” she would say, when she was bawling out the roomers for something they’d done wrong, some mess they’d made in the hall or bathtub ring they’d failed to wipe off. She brushed the stair treads and vacuumed the second-floor hall runner, she scrubbed the linoleum in the front vestibule and waxed it and did the same with the kitchen floor. She cleaned the bathroom fixtures with Old Dutch cleanser and the toilets with Sani-Flush, and did the windows with Windex, and washed the lace curtains with Sunlight Soap, scrubbing them carefully by hand on a washboard, although she did the sheets and towels in the wringer-washer that was kept in the back shed adjoining the kitchen; there were a lot of sheets and towels, because of the roomers. She dusted twice a week and put drain cleaner down all the drains, because otherwise the roomers’ hair would clog them up. This hair was an obsession of hers; she acted as if the roomers tore great handfuls of it out of their heads and stuffed it down the drains on purpose.

Sometimes she stuck a crochet hook down the sink drain on the second floor and hauled up a wad of slimy, soap-covered, festering hair. “See?” she would say to Roz. “Riddled with germs.

„

She expected Roz to help her with all of this endless cleaning. “I work my fingers to the bone,” she’d say. “For you. Look at my hands,” and it was no good for Roz to say that she didn’t really care whether the second-floor toilet was clean or not because she didn’t use that one. Roz’s mother wanted the house to be decent for her father when he came, and since they never knew when that might be, it had to be decent all the time.

There were three roomers. Roz’s mother had the secondfloor front room, and Roz had one of the two rooms on the third floor—the attic, her mother called it. Little Miss Hines lived in the other attic room, with her woolly slippers and her Viyella plaid bathrobe, which she wore to go down to take her bath because the bathroom on the third floor had only a sink and a toilet. Miss Hines was not young. She worked in a shoe store in the daytime, and played the radio softly in her room at night—dance music—and read a lot of paperback detective novels. “There’s nothing like a good murder,” she would tell Roz. She seemed to find these books comforting. She read them in bed, and also in the bathtub; Roz would find them, opened and face down on the floor, their pages slightly damp. She would carry them back upstairs for Miss Hines, looking at the covers: mansions with storm clouds and lightning, men with felt hats pulled down over their faces, dead people with knives sticking into them, young women with large breasts, in their nightgowns, done in strange colours, dark but lurid, with the blood shiny and thick as molasses in a puddle on the floor.

If Miss Hines wasn’t in her room Roz would have a look inside her clothes closet, but Miss Hines didn’t have very many clothes and the ones she did have were navy blue and brown and grey. Miss Hines was a Catholic, but she had only one holy picture: the Virgin Mary, with the Baby Jesus in her lap, and John the Baptist, wearing fur because he would later live in the desert. The Virgin Mary always looked sad in pictures, except when Jesus was a baby. Babies were the one thing that cheered her up. Jesus, like Roz, was an only child; a sister would have been nice for him. Roz intended to have both kinds when she grew up. ‘

On the ground floor there was one bedroom that used to be the dining room. Mr. Carruthers lived in there. He was an old man with a pension; he’d been in the war, but it was a different one. He’d been wounded in the leg so he walked with a cane, and he still had some of the bullets inside him. “See this leg?” he’d say to Roz. “Full of shrapnel. When they run out of iron they can mine this leg:” It was the one joke he ever made. He read the newspapers a lot. When he went out, he went to the Legion to visit with his pals. He sometimes came back three sheets to the wind, said Roz’s mother. She couldn’t stop that, but she could stop him from drinking in his room.

The roomers were not allowed to eat in their rooms or drink either, except water. They couldn’t have hotplates because they might burn down the house. The other thing they couldn’t do was smoke. Mr. Carruthers did, though. He opened the window and blew the smoke out of it, and then flushed the butts down the toilet. Roz knew this, but she didn’t tell on him. She was a little afraid of him, of his bulgy face and grey bristling moustache and clumping shoes and beery breath, but also she didn’t want to tell, because telling on people was ratting, and the girls who did it at school were despised.

Was Mr. Carruthers a Protestant or a Catholic? Roz didn’t know. According to Roz’s mother, religion didn’t matter so much in a man. Unless he was a priest, of course. Then it mattered.

Miss Hines and Mr. Carruthers had been there as long as Roz; could remember, but the third roomer, Mrs. Morley, was more recent. She lived in the other second-floor bedroom, down the hall from the one where Roz’s mother slept. Mrs. Morley said she was thirty. She had low-slung breasts and a face tanned with pancake makeup, and black eyelashes and red hair. She worked in Eaton’s cosmetics, selling Elizabeth Arden, and she wore nail polish, and was divorced. Divorce was a sin, according to the nuns.

Roz was fascinated by Mrs. Morley. She let herself be lured into Mrs. Morley’s room, where Mrs. Morley gave her samples of cologne and Blue Grass hand lotion and showed her how to put her hair up in pincurls, and told her what a skunk Mr. Morley had been. “Honey, he cheated on me,” she said, “like there was no tomorrow.” She called Roz “honey” and “sweetie,” which Roz’s mother never did. “I wish I’d of had a little girl,” she’d say, “Just like you,” and Roz would grin with pleasure.

Mrs. Morley had a silver hand mirror with roses on it and her initials engraved on the back: G.M. Her first name was Giadys. Mr. Morley had given her that mirror for their first anniversary. “Not that he meant a word of it,” Mrs. Morley would say as she plucked out her eyebrows. She did this with tweezers, gripping each eyebrow stub and yanking hard. It made her sneeze. She plucked out almost all of them, leaving a thin line in the perfect curved shape of the new moon. It made her look surprised, or else incredulous. Roz would study her own eyebrows in the mirror. They were too dark and bushy, she decided, but she was too young yet to begin pulling them out.

Mrs. Morley still wore her wedding ring and her engagement ring as well, though occasionally she would take them off and put them into her jewel box. “I should just sell them,” she would say; “but I don’t know. Sometimes I still feel married to him, in spite of everything, you know what I mean? You want something to hang onto.” On some weekends she went out on dates, with men who rang the front doorbell and were let inside, grudgingly, by Roz’s mother, and who then had to stand in the vestibule and wait for Mrs. Morley because there was nowhere else for them to go.

Certainly Roz’s mother would not ask them back to sit in the kitchen. She did not approve of them, or of Mrs. Morley in general; though she sometimes let Roz go to the movies with her. Mrs. Morley preferred films in which women renounced things for the sake of other people, or in which they were loved and then abandoned. She followed these plots with relish, eating popcorn and dabbing at her eyes. “I’m a sucker for a good weepie,” she said to Roz. Roz didn’t understand why the things in the movies happened the ways they did, and would have preferred to have seen Robin Hood or else Abbott and Costello, but her mother felt an adult should he present. Things could happen in the flickering, sweet-smelling dark of movie theatres; men could take advantage. This was one subject on which Mrs. Morley and Roz’s mother were in agreement: the advantage men could take.

Roz went through Mrs. Morley’s jewel box when she wasn’t there, although she was careful not to move anything out of its place. It gave her a feeling of pleasure, not just because the things were pretty—they weren’t real jewels, most of them, they were costume jewellery, rhinestones and glass—but because there was something exciting about doing this. Although the brooches and earrings were exactly the same when Mrs. Morley wasn’t there as when she was, they seemed different in her absence—more alluring, secretive. Roz looked w into the closet as well: Mrs. Morley had many brightly coloured dresses, and the high-heeled shoes that went with them. When she was feeling more than normally daring Roz would slip on the shoes and hobble around in front of the mirror on Mrs. Morley’s closet door. The pair she liked best had sparkling clips on the toes that looked as if they were made of diamonds. Roz thought they were the height of glamour.

Sometimes there would be a little pile of dirty underwear in the corner of the closet, just thrown in there, not even put into a laundry bag: brassieres, stockings, satin slips. These were the things Mrs. Morley washed out by hand in the bathroom sink and draped over the radiator in her room to dry. But she should have picked them up off the floor first, as Roz had to do. Of course Mrs. Morley was a Protestant, so what could you expect? Roz’s mother would have liked to have had nobody in her rooming house except Catholics, nice clean well-behaved Catholic ladies like Miss Hines, but beggars couldn’t be choosers and in such times you had to take what you could get.

Roz had a round face and dark straight hair and bangs, and she was big for her age. She went to Redemption and Holy Spirit, which used to be two schools but now just had two names, and the nuns in their black-and-white habits taught her to read and write and sing and pray, with white chalk on a black blackboard and a ruler across the knuckles if you got out of line.

Catholics were the best thing because you would go to Heaven when you died. Her mother was a Catholic too, but she didn’t go to church. She would take Roz there and push her towards the door, but she wouldn’t go in. From the set of her face Roz knew better than to ask why.

Some of the other kids on the street were Protestants, or else Jews; whatever you were, the others chased you on your way home from school, though sometimes the boys might play baseball together. Boys would chase you if you were a girl: the religion didn’t matter then. There were a few Chinese kids as well, and there were also DPs.

The DP kids had the worst time of all. There was a DP girl at Roz’s school: she could hardly speak English, and the other girls whispered about her where she could see them, and said mean things to her, and she would say “What?” Then they would laugh.

DPs meant Displaced Persons. They came from the east, across the ocean; what had displaced them was the war. Roz’s mother said they should consider themselves lucky to be here. The grown-up DPs had odd clothes, dismal and shabby clothes, and strange accents, and a shuffling, defeated look to them. A confused look, as if they didn’t know where they were or what was going on. The children would shout after them on the street: “DP! DP! Go back where you come from!” Some of the older boys would shout “Dog Poop!”

The DPs didn’t understand, but they knew they were being shouted at. They would hurry faster, their heads hunched down into their coat collars; or they would turn around and glare. Roz would join the shouting packs, if she wasn’t near her house. Her mother didn’t like her running around on the street like a ragamuffin, screeching like a pack of hooligans. Afterwards, Roz was ashamed of herself for yelling at the DPs like that; but it was hard to resist when everyone else was doing it.

Sometimes Roz got called a DP herself, because of her dark skin. But it was just a bad name, like “moron,” or—much worse—“bugger.” It didn’t mean you were one. If Roz could get those kids cornered, and if they weren’t too much bigger than she was, she would give them a Chinese burn. That was two hands on the arm and then a twist, like wringing out the wash. It did burn, and it left a red mark. Or else she would kick them, or else she would yell back. She had a temper, said the nuns.

Still, even if Roz wasn’t a DP, there was something: There was something about her that set her apart, an invisible barrier, faint and hardly there, like the surface of water, but strong nevertheless. Roz didn’t know what it was but she could feel it. She wasn’t like the others, she was among them but she wasn’t part of them. So she would push and shove, trying to break her way in.

To school Roz wore a navy tunic and a white blouse, and on the front of the tunic there was a crest with a dove on it. The dove was the Holy Spirit. There was a picture of it in the chapel, coming down from Heaven with its wings outspread, on top of the Virgin Mary’s head, while the Virgin Mary rolled her eyes upwards in a way that Roz’s mother had told her never to do or they might get stuck that way; likewise crossing them. There was a second picture too, the Disciples and Apostles receiving the Holy Spirit at the Feast of Pentecost; this time the dove had red fire around it.

The dove made the Virgin Mary pregnant, but everyone knew that men couldn’t have babies, so the Disciples and Apostles didn’t get pregnant, they only talked in tongues and prophesied. Roz didn’t know what talking in tongues meant, and neither did Sister Conception, because when Roz asked about it Sister Conception told her not to be impertinent.

The Pentecost picture was in the long main corridor of the school, with its creaky wooden floors and smell of goodness, a smell composed of slippery floor wax and plaster dust and incense from the chapel that made a small cool pool of guilty fear collect in Roz’s stomach every time she smelled it, because God could see everything you did and also thought and most of these things annoyed him. He seemed to be angry much of the time, like Sister Conception.

But God was also Jesus, who got nailed to the cross. Who nailed him? Roman soldiers, who wore armour. There they were, three of them, looking brutal and making jokes, while Mary in blue and Mary Magdalene in red wept in the background.

It wasn’t really the Roman soldiers’ fault because they were just doing their job. Really it was the fault of the Jews. One of the prayers in chapel was a prayer for the conversion of the Jews, which meant they would switch over to being Catholic and then get forgiven. In the meantime God was still mad at them and they would have to keep on being punished. That’s what Sister Conception said.

Things were more complicated than that, thought Roz, because Jesus had arranged for himself to be crucified on purpose: It was a sacrifice, and a sacrifice was when you gave your life to save other people. Roz wasn’t sure why getting yourself crucified was such a favour to everyone but apparently it was. So if Jesus did it on purpose, why was it the fault of the Jews? Weren’t they helping him out? A question of Roz’s that went unanswered by Sister Conception, though Sister Cecilia, who was prettier and on the whole nicer to Roz, took a crack at it: a bad deed remained bad, she said, even if the result was good. There were lots of bad deeds that turned out to have good results, because God was a mystery, which meant he switched things around, but humans weren’t in control of that, they were only in control of their own hearts. It was what was in your heart that counted.

Roz knew what a heart looked like. She’d seen lots of pictures of hearts, mostly the heart of Jesus, inside his opened-up chest. They were nothing like Valentines; they were more like the cows’ hearts in the butcher store, brownish red and dotted and rubbery-looking. The heart of Jesus glowed, because it was holy. Holy things glowed in general.

Every sin people did was like another nail pounded into the cross. That was what the nuns said, especially at Easter. Roz was less concerned about Jesus, because she knew it would come out all right for him, than she was about the two thieves. One of them believed right away that Jesus was God, so that one would sit on Jesus’s right hand in Heaven. But what about the other one? Roz had a sneaking sympathy for the other thief. He must have been in just as much pain as Jesus and the first thief, but it wasn’t a sacrifice because he didn’t do it on purpose. It was worse to be crucified when you didn’t want to be. And anyway, what had he stolen? Maybe something small. It never said.

Roz felt that he deserved a place in Heaven, too. She knew something about the seating plan: God in the middle, Jesus to the right of him, the good thief to the right of Jesus. The right hand was the right hand, and you always had to use it to make the sign of the cross, even if you were left-handed. But who sat on the left hand of God? There must have been someone, because God had a left hand as well as a right hand, and nothing about God could possibly be bad because God was perfect, and Roz couldn’t see that side just being left empty. So the bad thief could sit there; he could feast along with the rest. (And where was the Virgin Mary in all of this? Was it a long dinner table, with maybe God at one end and the Virgin Mary at the other? Roz knew enough not to ask. She knew she would be called wicked and impious. But it was something she would have liked to know.)

Sometimes when Roz asked questions the nuns gave her funny looks. Or they gave each other funny looks, pursing their mouths, shaking their heads. Sister Conception said, “What can you expect?” Sister Cecilia took extra time to pray with Roz, when Roz had been bad and needed to do penance after school. “There is more joy in Heaven over the one lost lamb,” she said to Sister Conception.

Roz added sheep to Heaven. They would be outside the window, naturally. But she was glad to know about them. That meant dogs and cats stood a chance, too. Not that she was allowed to have either; they would have made too much trouble for her mother, who had enough things to do as it was.

XLIII

Roz is late coming home from school. She walks by herself, through the failing light, in the snow that is falling, not very much of it, down through the air like tiny white flakes of soap. She hopes the snow will stay around until Christmas.

She’s late because she’s been rehearsing for the Nativity play, in which she is the chief angel. She wanted to be the Virgin Mary, but she’s the chief angel instead because she’s so tall, and besides that she can remember all the lines. She has a white costume with a sparkly gold halo made out of a coat-hanger, and wings of stiff white cardboard with painted gold feather-tips, held on by straps.

Today was the first day they tried it with the costumes. Roz has to be careful walking or the wings will slip down, and she has to keep her head up and facing straight ahead because of the halo. She has to go up to the shepherds as they keep watch over their flocks by night, with a big tinsel Star of Bethlehem dangling from a string over their heads, and hold her right hand up while they are looking afraid, and say, Fear not; for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. Then she has to tell them about going to see the babe in swaddling clothes, lying in the manger, and then she has to say, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men, and then she has to point, with her whole arm held out, and guide the shepherds across the stage to where the manger is, while the school choir sings.

Roz is sorry for the girls who play the shepherds, because they have to wear grubby clothes and beards that hook over their ears with wires, like eyeglasses. These are the same beards that get used every year, and they’re dirty. She feels even sorrier for the little kids, who play the sheep. Their sheep costumes must have been white, once, but now they are grey, and they must be very hot.

The manger has blue curtains across the front. The shepherds have to stand in front of it until the choir is finished; meanwhile, Roz has gone around behind it and has climbed up on a stepstool, and is standing with both arms spread out. On her right side is Anne-Marie Roy, on her left is Eileen Shea; both of them are blowing trumpets, although they aren’t really blowing them, of course. They have to stand that way the whole time, while two little kids with cherubs’ wings open the curtains, showing stupid Julia Warden with her blonde hair and rosebud mouth and dumb simpering smile dressed up like the Virgin Mary, with a bigger halo than Roz’s and a china-doll Jesus, and Saint Joseph standing behind her leaning on his staff, and a bunch of hay bales. The shepherds kneel on one side, and then along come the Wise Men in glittering robes and turbans, one of them with her face blackened because one of the Wise Men was black, and they kneel on the other side, and the choir sings “Angels We Have Heard on High,” and then the main curtains close and Roz can put her arms down, which is a relief because it really hurts to keep them up in the air like that for so long.

After the rehearsal today Sister Cecilia told Roz she’d done very well. Roz had the only speaking lines in the whole play and it was important to say them clearly, in a nice loud voice. She was doing excellently and would be a credit to the school. Roz was pleased, because for once her loud voice wasn’t getting her in trouble—mostly when the nuns speak to her in public it’s about her rowdy behaviour. But while they were all taking their costumes off, Julia Warden said, “I think it’s dumb to have an angel with black hair.”

Roz said, “It’s not black, it’s brown,” and Julia Warden said, “It’s black. Anyways, you’re not a real Catholic, my Mum says,” and Roz told her to shut up or she’d make her, and Julia Warden said, “Where’s your father anyways? My Mum says he’s a DP,” and Roz grabbed Julia Warden’s arm and did the Chinese burn on her, and Julia Warden screamed. Sister Cecilia came rustling up and said what was all the commotion, and Julia Warden ratted, and Sister Cecilia told Roz that this was not the Christmas spirit and she shouldn’t pick on girls smaller than her, and she was lucky Sister Conception wasn’t there because if she was, Roz would get the strap. “Rosalind Greenwood, you just never learn, “ she said sadly.

Walking home from school, Roz spends her time thinking about what she will do to Julia Warden tomorrow, to get even; until the last block, when the two Protestant boys who live on the corner see her and chase her along the sidewalk, yelling “The Pope stinks!” Almost to her house they catch her and rub snow in her face, and Roz kicks their legs. They let her go, laughing and yelling with mock pain, or real pain—“Ouch, ouch, she kicked me”—and then she picks up her snowy books and runs the rest of the way, not crying yet, and scrambles up her front steps onto her porch. “You’re not allowed on my property!” she yells. A snowball whizzes past her. If Roz’s mother were there, she would chase these boys off: “Ragamuffins!” she would say, and they would scatter. She sometimes takes the flat of her hand to Roz, but she won’t let anyone else lay a finger on her. Except the nuns, of course.

Roz brushes off the snow—she’s not supposed to track snow into the house—and goes inside, and down the hall to the kitchen. Two men are sitting at the kitchen table. They’re wearing DP clothes, not shabby ones, not worn out, but DP clothes all the same, Roz can tell because of the shape. On the table is a bottle that Roz knows straight away has liquor in it—she’s seen bottles like that on the sidewalk—and in front of each of the men there’s a glass. Roz’s mother is not in the room. “Where’s my mother?” she says.

“She went to get food,” says one of the men. “She didn’t have nothing to eat:”

The other one says, “We’re your new uncles. Uncle George, Uncle Joe.”

Roz says, “I don’t have any uncles,” and Uncle George says, “Now, you do.” Then both of them laugh. They have loud laughs, and strange voices. DP voices, but with something else, some other accent. Something that’s like the movies.

“Sit,” says Uncle George hospitably, as if it’s his house, as if Roz is a dog. Roz is unsure of the situation—there have never been two men in the kitchen before—but she sits anyway.

Uncle George is the bigger one; he has a high forehead and light wavy hair slicked straight back. Roz can smell his hair goo, sweet, like theatres. He’s smoking a brown cigarette in a black holder. “Ebony,” he says to Roz. “You know what ebony is? It’s a tree.”

“She knows,” says Uncle Joe. “She’s a smart girl.” Uncle Joe is smaller, with hunched-up shoulders and spindly hands, and dark hair, almost black, and huge dark eyes. He has a tooth missing, off to one side. He sees Roz staring, and says, “Once, I had a gold tooth in this place. I keep it in my pocket:” And he does. He takes out a small wooden box, painted red with a design of tiny green flowers, and opens it, and there inside is a gold tooth.

“Why?” says Roz.

“You don’t want to leave a gold tooth lying around in your mouth, people get ideas,” says Uncle Joe.

Roz’s mother comes in, carrying two brown paper grocery bags, which she sets down on the counter. She is flushed, and pleased-looking. She says nothing at all about the drinking, nothing about the smoke. “These are friends of your father’s,” she says. “They were all in the war together. He’s coming, he’ll be here soon.” Then she bustles out again; she needs to go to the butcher’s, she says, because this is an occasion. Occasions call for meat.

“What did you do in the war?” says Roz, eager to find out more about her father.

The two uncles laugh, and look at each other. “We was horse thieves,” says Uncle George.

“The best horse thieves,” says Uncle Joe. “No. Your father, he was the best. He could steal a horse—”

“He could steal a horse from right between your legs, you wouldn’t notice,” says Uncle George. “He could lie—”

“He could lie like God himself:”

“Bite your tongue! God don’t lie.”

“You’re right, God says nothing. But your father, he never blinked. He could walk through a border like it wasn’t there,” says Uncle Joe.

“What’s a border?” asks Roz.

“A border is a line on a map,” says Uncle Joe.

“A border is where it gets dangerous,” says Uncle George. “It’s where you need a passport.”

“Passport. See?” says Uncle Joe. He shows Roz his passport, with his picture in it. Then he shows her another, with the same picture but a different name. He has three of them. He fans them out like a deck of cards. Uncle George has four.

“A man with only one passport is like a man with only one hand,” he says solemnly.

“Your father, he has more passports than anyone. The best, like I said.” They raise their glasses, and drink to Roz’s father.

Roz’s mother makes chicken, with mashed potatoes and gravy, and boiled carrots; she is cheerful, more cheerful than Roz has ever seen her, and urges the uncles to have more. Or maybe she’s not cheerful, maybe she’s nervous. She keeps looking at her watch. Roz is nervous, too: when will her father arrive? “He’ll be here when he’s here,” say the uncles.

Roz’s father comes back in the middle of the night. Her mother wakes her up, and whispers, “Your father’s back,” almost as if she’s apologizing for something, and takes Roz downstairs in her nightgown, and there he is, sitting at the table, in the third chair that was kept for him. He sits easily, filling the space, as if he’s always been there. He’s large and barrel-shaped, bearded, bear-headed. He smiles and holds out his arms. “Come, give Papa a kiss!”

Roz looks around: who is this Papa? Then she understands that he means himself. It’s true, what Julia Warden said: her father is a DP She can tell by the way he talks.

Now Roz’s life has been cut in two. On one side is Roz, and her mother, and the rooming house, and the nuns and the other girls at school. This part seems already in the past, although it’s still going on. That’s the side where there are mostly women, women who have power, which means they have power over Roz, because even though God and Jesus are men it’s her mother and the nuns who have the last word; except for the priests of course, but that’s just on Sundays. On the other side is her father, filling the kitchen with his bulk, his loud voice, his multilayered smell; filling the house with it, filling up all the space in her mother’s gaze so that Roz is pushed off to the edge, because her mother, who is so unbending, bends. She abdicates. She says, “Ask your father.” She looks at—Roz’s father mutely, the same kind of mushy coweyed look the Virgin Mary gives the Baby Jesus or the Holy Spirit in the pictures; she dishes up his food and sets the plate before him as if it’s some kind of offering.

And there isn’t less work for her now, there’s more, because there are three plates instead of two, there’s three of everything, and Roz’s father never has to clean up. “Help your mother,” he tells Roz, “in this family we help each other”; but Roz doesn’t see him helping. Roz catches them hugging and kissing in the kitchen, two days after he’s arrived, her father’s big bear arms around her thin angular mother, and is full of disgust at her mother for being so soft, and with sorrow and jealousy and the rage of banishment.

To punish her mother for such betrayals Roz turns away from her. She turns to the uncles, when they are there, and also, and especially, to her father. “Come sit on Papa’s knee,” he says. And she does, and from that safe place she regards her mother, working as hard as ever, hunched over the kitchen sink or kneeling in front of the oven, or scraping the bones off their plates into the pot of soup stock, or wiping the floor. “Make yourself useful,” her mother snaps, and once Roz would have obeyed. But now her father’s arms hold her tight. “I didn’t see her for so long,” he says. And her mother clenches her lips and says nothing, and Roz watches her with gloating triumph and thinks it serves her right.

But when her father isn’t there she has to work, the same as usual. She has to scrub and polish. If she doesn’t, her mother calls her a spoiled brat. “Who was your servant last year?” she jeers. “Look at my hands!”

The uncles move in. They’ve been having dinner every night, but now they move right into the house. They’re living in the cellar. They have two beds down there, two army surplus cots, and two army sleeping bags as well.

“Just till they get on their feet,” says Roz’s father. “Till the ship comes in:”

“What ship?” says Roz’s mother. “It’ll be a frosty Friday when any ship of theirs makes it to land:” But she says this indulgently, and she cooks for them and asks them to have some more, and washes their sheets, and says not a word about the smoking, and the drinking too, which goes on down in the cellar with roars of laughter coming up the stairs. The uncles don’t have to help clean up, either. When Roz asks why, all her mother will say is that they saved her father’s life, during the war.

“We saved each other’s life,” says Uncle George. “I saved Joe’s, Joe saved your father’s, your father saved mine.”

“They never caught us,” says Uncle Joe. “Not once.”

“Dummkopf, if they did we wouldn’t be here, says Uncle George.

Aggie’s grip on the roomers is slipping because it’s no longer the same rules for everyone. It doesn’t help that the uncles don’t pay rent, or that they slam the front door, hurrying in and out. They have places to go, they have things to do. Unnamed places, unspecified things. They have friends to meet, a friend from New York, a friend from Switzerland, a friend from Germany. They have lived in New York, and in London, and in Paris too. Other places. They refer with nostalgia to bars and hotels and racetracks in a dozen cities.

Miss Hines complains about the noise: do they have to shout at each other, and in foreign languages too? But Mrs. Morley jokes around with them, and sometimes joins them for a drink, when Roz’s father is home and they’re all in the kitchen. She comes mincing down the stairs in her high heels, jingling her bracelets, and says she doesn’t mind a drop, now and then.

“She can sure hold her liquor,” says Uncle Joe. “She’s a babe,” says Uncle George.

“What’s a babe?” says Roz.

“There’s ladies, there’s women; and there’s babes, says Uncle George. “Your mother is a lady. That one, she’s a babe.”

Mr. Carruthers knows about the drinking that’s going on in the cellar, and in the kitchen too. He can smell the smoke. He’s still not supposed to drink or smoke in his own room but he starts doing it, more than he did before. One afternoon he opens his door and corners Roz in the front hall.

“Those men are Jews,” he whispers. Beer fumes fill the air. “We sacrificed our life for this country and they’re handing it over to the Jews!”

Roz is galvanized. She runs to find the uncles, and asks them right away. If they really are Jews she might take a crack at converting them, and astonish Sister Conception.

“Me, I’m a U.S. citizen,” says Uncle George, laughing a little. “I got the passport to prove it. Joe, he’s a Jew”

“I’m a Hungarian, he’s a Pole,” says Uncle Joe. “I’m a Yugoslav, he’s a Dutchman. This other passport says I’m Spanish. Your father now, he’s half a German. The other half, that’s the Jew”

This is a shock to Roz. She feels disappointment—no spiritual triumphs for her, because she could never hope to change her father in any way, she can see that—and then guilt: what if the Sisters find out? Worse, what if they’ve known all along and haven’t told her? She pictures the malicious glee on Julia Warden’s face, the whisperings that will go on behind her back.

She must look dismayed, because Uncle George says, “Better to be a Jew than a murderer. They murdered six million, over there.”

“Five,” says Uncle Joe. “The rest was other things. Gypsies and homos.”

“Five, six, who’s counting?”

“Six what?” says Roz.

“Jews,” says Uncle George. “They burnt them in ovens, they piled them up in heaps. Little Rozzie-lind, you wouldn’t want to know. If they got their hands on you, back over there, they’d make you into a lampshade.”

He doesn’t explain to Roz that it would just be the skin. She has a picture of her entire body turned into a lampshade, with a lightbulb inside it and the light beaming out from her eyes and nostrils and ears and mouth. She must look terrified, because Uncle Joe says, “Don’t scare the kid. All of that, it’s over.

‘

“Why?” says Roz. “Why would they?” But neither of them answers.

“It’s not over till it’s over,” says Uncle George gloomily.

Roz has the feeling that someone has been lying to her. Not just about her father: about the war too, and about God. The starving orphans were bad enough but they weren’t the whole story. What else has been going on, with the ovens and the heaps and the lampshades, and why has God allowed it?

She doesn’t want to think about any of it any more because it’s too sad and confusing. Instead she takes to reading murder mysteries. She borrows them from Miss Hines and reads them at night, beside the streetlight coming through her attic window. She likes the furniture, and the outfits of the people in them, and the butlers and the maids. But mostly she likes the fact that there’s a reason for every death, and only one murderer at a time, and things get figured out at the end, and the murderer always gets caught.

XLIV

Roz walks home from school in an expectant mood. There’s something going on; she isn’t sure what, but she knows there’s something. Something is about to happen.

Last week, her mother said at breakfast: Mrs. Morley has been fired. What did that mean? Lost her job, but Roz had a brief vision of Mrs. Morley in flames, like an early martyr. Not that she wanted Mrs. Morley to burn up. She liked her, and also her accoutrements—her face cream samples, her costume jewellery, and especially her shoes.

Ever since then Mrs. Morley has been dragging around the house in her quilted pink satin dressing gown. Her eyelids are puffy, her face bare of makeup; the jingling from her usual festoons of necklaces and bangles has fallen silent. She isn’t supposed to eat in her room but she’s doing it anyway, out of paper bags brought to her by Mr. Carruthers; there are sandwich crusts and apple cores in her wastepaper basket, but although Roz’s mother must be aware of this, she isn’t knocking on Mrs. Morley’s door to issue the commands she’s normally so fond of giving. Sometimes these paper bags contain small flat bottles that don’t turn up in the wastepaper basket. in the late afternoons, still in her dressing gown, she goes down to the kitchen for short, fraught talks with Roz’s mother. What is she going to do? she asks. Roz’s mother purses her lips, and says she doesn’t know.

These talks are about money: without her job, Mrs. Morley won’t be able to pay the rent. Roz feels sorry for her, but at the same time less friendly, because Mrs. Morley is whining and it makes Roz disdainful. If girls whine at school they get poked or slapped by the other children, or stood in a corner by the nuns.

“She should pull herself together,” Roz’s mother says to Roz’s father at the dinner table. Once Roz would have been the audience for such comments, but now she is just a little pitcher with big ears.

“Have a heart, Aggie,” says Roz’s father. No one else ever calls Roz’s mother Aggie to her face.

“Having a heart is all very well,” says Roz’s mother, “but it won’t put food on the table.”

But there is food on the table. Beef stew, mashed potatoes and gravy, and cooked cabbage. Roz is eating it.

On top of Mrs. Morley being fired, Miss Hines is down with a cold. “Just pray to God she doesn’t catch pneumonia,” says Roz’s mother. “Then we’ll have two useless women on our hands.”

Roz goes into Mrs. Morley’s room. Mrs. Morley is in bed, eating a sandwich; she shoves it under the covers, but smiles when she sees it’s only Roz. “Honey, you should always knock before entering a lady’s chamber,” she says.

“I have an idea,” says Roz. “You could sell your shoes.” The ones Roz means are the red satin ones with the sparkly dips. They must be very expensive.

Mrs. Morley’s smile wavers and falls. “Oh, honey,” she says. “If only I could.”

As she rounds the corner to her house Roz sees a strange sight. The front lawn is covered with snow like all the other lawns, but scattered over it there are a number of coloured objects. As she gets closer she sees what they are: Mrs. Morley’s dresses. Mrs. Morley’s stockings, Mrs. Morley’s handbags, Mrs. Morley’s brassieres and underpants. Mrs. Morley’s shoes. A lurid light plays round them.

Roz goes inside, into the kitchen. Her mother is sitting white-faced and bolt upright at the kitchen table; her eyes are still as stone. In front of her is an untouched cup of tea. MissHines is sitting in Roz’s chair, patting her mother’s hand with small fluttery pats. She has a spot in pink in either cheek. She looks nervous, but also elated.

“Your mother’s had a shock,” she says to Roz. “Would you like a glass of milk, dear?”

“What are Mrs. Morley’s things doing on the lawn?” says Roz.

“What could I do?” says Miss Hines, to nobody in particular. “I couldn’t help seeing them. They didn’t even shut the door all the way.”

“Where is she?” asks Roz. “Where’s Mrs. Morley?” Mrs. Morley must have gone away without paying the rent. “Flown the coop,” is how her mother would put it. Roomers have flown the coop in that way before, leaving possessions behind them, though never out on the lawn.

“She won’t be showing her face in this house again,” says her mother.

“Can I have her shoes?” says Roz. She’s sorry she won’t be seeing Mrs. Morley again, but there is no need for the shoes to go to waste.

“Don’t touch her filthy things,” says her mother. “Don’t lay a finger on them! They belong in the garbage, like her. That whore! If all that junk’s not gone by tomorrow I’ll burn it in the incinerator!”

Miss Hines looks shocked by such strong language. “I will pray for her,” she says.

“I won’t,” says Roz’s mother.

Roz connects none of this with her father until he appears, later, in time for dinner. The fact that he’s on time is remarkable: he isn’t usually. He is subdued, and respectful towards Roz’s mother, but he doesn’t hug her or give her a kiss. For the first time since his return he seems almost afraid of her.

“Here’s the rent,” he says. He dumps a little heap of money on the table.

“Don’t think you can buy me off,” says Roz’s mother. “You and that slut! It’s hush money. I’m not touching one dirty cent.”

“It’s not hers,” says Roz’s father. “I won it at poker.”

“How could you?” says Roz’s mother. “After all I gave up for you! Look at my hands!”

“She was crying,” says Roz’s father, as if this explains everything.

“Crying!” says Roz’s mother with scorn, as if she herself would never do such a degrading thing. “Crocodile tears! She’s a maneater.”

“I felt sorry for her,” says Roz’s father. “She threw herself at me. What could I do?”

Roz’s mother turns her back on him. She hunches over the stove and dishes out the stew, hitting the spoon loudly on the side of the pot, and goes through the entire dinner without speaking. At first Roz’s father hardly touches his dinner—Roz knows the feeling, it’s anxiety and guilt—but Roz’s mother shoots him a look of concentrated disgust and points at his plate, meaning that if he doesn’t eat what she’s spent her whote life cooking for him he’ll be in even worse trouble than he is. When her back is turned Roz’s father smiles a little smile at Roz, and winks at her. Then she knows that all of this—his misery, his hangdog air—is an act, or partly an act, and that he’s all right really.

The money stays on the table. Roz eyes it: she has never seen so much money in a pile before. She would like to ask if she could have it, since neither of them seems to want it, but while she’s clearing off the plates—“Help your mother,” says. her father—it disappears. It’s in one of their pockets, she knows, but which one? Her mother’s, she suspects—her apron pocket, because in the following days she softens, and talks more, and life returns to normal.

Mrs. Morley however is never seen again. Neither are her clothes and shoes. Roz misses her; she misses the pet names and hand lotion; but she knows enough not to say so.

“A babe, like I said,” says Uncle George. “Your father has a strong weakness:”

“Better he should close the door,” says Uncle Joe.

A few years later, when she was a teenager and had the benefit of girlfriends, Roz put it together: Mrs. Morley was her father’s mistress. She’d read about mistresses in the murder mysteries. Mistress was the word she preferred, because it was more elevated than the other words available: “floozie,”

“whore,”

“easy lay.” Those other words implied nothing but legs apart, loose flabby legs at that—weak legs, legs that did nothing but lie there, legs for sale—and smells, and random coupling, and sexual goo. Whereas mistress hinted at a certain refinement, an expensive wardrobe, a well-furnished establishment, and also at the power and cunning and beauty it took to get such things.

Mrs. Morley hadn’t had the establishment or the refinement and her beauty had been a matter of opinion, but at least she’d had the clothes, and Roz wanted to give her father some credit: he wouldn’t have gone for just any old easy lay. She wanted to be proud of him. She knew her mother was in the right and her father was in the wrong; she knew her mother had been virtuous and had worked her fingers to the bone and had ruined her hands, and had been treated with ingratitude. But it was an ingratitude Roz shared. Maybe her father was a scoundrel, but he was the one she adored.

Mrs. Morley was not the only mistress. There were others, over the years: kindly, sentimental, soft-bodied women, lazy and fond of a drink or two and of tearful movies. In later life Roz deduced their presence, by her father’s intermittent jauntiness and by his absences; she even bumped into them sometimes on downtown streets, on the arm of her aging but still outrageous father. But such women came and went, whereas her mother was a constant.

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, screaining 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 iri-iiriigrant, 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 Roz 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.

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.”

“What did he fix?” said Roz. She took it he didn’t mean broken refrigerators.

“To tell you the truth,” says Uncle George slowly, “your father was a crook. Don’t get me wrong, he was a hero, too. But if he hadn’t of been a crook, he couldn’t of been a hero. That’s how it was.”

“A crook?” said Roz.

“We was all crooks,” said Uncle George patiently. “Everybody was a crook. They was stealing, all kinds of things, you wouldn’t believe—paintings, gold, stuff you could hide and sell later. They could see how it was going, at the end they was grabbing anything. Every time there’s a war, people steal. They steal whatever they can. That’s what a war is—a war is stealing. Why should we be any different? Joe was the inside man, I was the driver, your father, he did the planning. When we would move, who to trust. Without him, nothing.

“So, we’d get it out for them—not legal, with laws like they had I don’t need to tell you—but we’d bribe the guards, everyone was on the take. Hide it somewhere safe, till after the war. But how did they know what was what, how did they know where we were putting it? So we kept some things back, for ourselves. Took it to different places. Picked it up afterwards. Some of them was dead, too, so we got theirs.”

“That’s what he did?” said Roz. “He helped the Nazis?”

“It was dangerous,” said Uncle George reproachfully, as if danger was the main justification. “Sometimes we took out stuff we weren’t supposed to take. We took out Jews. We had to be careful, go through our regulars. They let us do it because if. we was caught, it was their neck too. Your father never pushed it too hard though. He knew when it was too dangerous. He knew when to stop:”

“Thank you for telling me,” Roz said.

“Don’t thank me,” Uncle George said. “Like I told you, he was a hero. Only, some wouldn’t understand:” He was tired; he closed his eyes. His eyelids were delicate and crinkled, like wet crepe paper. He raised two thin desiccated fingers, dismissing her.

Roz made her way out through the white tiled maze of the hospital, heading for home and a stiff drink. What was she to conclude froin all this, her new, dubious knowledge? That her money is dirty money, or that all money is? It’s not her fault, she didn’t do it, she was just a child. She didn’t make the world. But she still has a sense of hands, bony hands, reaching up from under the earth, tugging at her ankles, wanting back what’s theirs. And how old are those hands? Twenry, thirty years, or a thousand, two thousand? Who knows where money has been? Wash your hands when you touch it, her mother used to say. It’s riddled with germs.

She didn’t tell Mitch, though. She never told Mitch. It would’ve been one up for him, and he was one up already, him and his old-money fastidiousness, his pretence of legal scruples. Clipping coupons yes, smuggling Jews no. Or that’s what Roz would be willing to bet. He sneered discreetly at her money as it was, though she’d noticed he didn’t mind spending it. But old money made a profit from human desperation too, as long as the desperation and the flesh and the blood were at several removes. Where the heck did people like Mitch think those dividends really came from? And how about the South African gold stocks he’d advised her to buy? In every conversation between the two of them there was a third parry present: her money, sitting between them on the sofa like some troll or heavy barely sentient vegetable.

At times it felt like part of her, part of her body, like a hump on her back. She was torn between the urge to cut it off from herself, to give it away, and the urge to make more of it, because wasn’t it her protection? Maybe they were the same urge. As her father said, you couldn’t give without getting first.

Roz got with the left hand and gave away with the right, or was it the other way around? At first she gave to the body items, the hearts because of her father, the cancer because of her mother. She gave to World Hunger, she gave to the United Way, she gave to the Red Cross. That was in the sixties. But when the women’s movement hit town in the early seventies, Roz was sucked into it like a dust bunny into a vacuum cleaner. She was visible, that was why. She was high-profile, and there weren’t many women then who were, except for. movie stars and the Queen of England. But also she was ready for the message, having been sandbagged twice already by Mitch and his things. The first time—the first time she found out, anyway—was when she was pregnant with Larry, and lower he couldn’t go.

Roz loved the consciousness-raising groups, she loved the free-ranging talk. It was like catching up on all the sisters she’d never had, it was like having a great big family in which the members, for once, had something in common; it was like being allowed, finally, into all the groups and cliques she’d never quite been able to crash before. No more mealy-mouth, no more my-hubby-is-better-than-your-hubby, no more beating about the bush! You could say anything!

She loved sitting in a circle, though after a while she noticed that the circle was not quite circular. One woman would tell her problem and admit her pain, and then another one would do it, and then Roz would take her turn, and a sort of disbelieving glaze would come down over their eyes and someone would change the subject.

What was it? Why was Roz’s pain second-rate? It took her a while to figure it out: it was her money. Surely, they thought, anyone with as much money as Roz couldn’t possibly be suffering. She remembered an old expression from her uncles:

My heart bleeds for him. This was always said with extreme sarcasm, about someone who’d got lucky, which meant rich. Roz was expected to do the bleeding for, but she could not expect to be bled over in return.

Still, there was one area in which Roz was in demand. In a movement so perennially cash-starved you could almost say she was indispensable. So it was natural that she was the one they had come to when WiseWomanWorld was about to go under because it couldn’t attract big glossy lipstick-and-booze advertising. It was more than a magazine then, it was a friend; a friend that combined high ideals and hope with the sharing of down-and-dirty secrets. The truth about masturbation! The truth about wanting, sometimes, to shove your kids’ heads into the wall! What to do when men rubbed themselves against you from behind, in the subway, and when your boss chased you around the desk, and when you had those urges to take all the pills in the medicine cabinet, the day before your period! WiseWomanWorld was all the sleepover parties Roz had once felt were going on behind her back, and of course she had to save it.

The others wanted the magazine to be a cooperative, the way it already was. They wanted Roz to just give them the money, period, and no tax write-off either because it was too political. It wasn’t peanuts either, what it ,would take: There was no point in a small cash injection. Not enough would be the same as nothing, she might as well flush it down the toilet.

“I never invest in anything I can’t control,” she told them. “You have to issue shares. Then I’ll buy a majority holding:” They got angry at her for that, but Roz said, “Your leg’s broken, you go to a doctor. You have money troubles, you come to me. You tried it your way and it didn’t work, and frankly your books are a mess. This is something I know. You want me to fix it, or not?” She knew it would still lose money, but that being the case she at least wanted to take the business loss.

They didn’t like it either when Roz put Mitch on the board of directors and stuck on a couple of his legal buddies to keep him company, but it was the only way. If they wanted her help they had to realize what her life conditions were, and if Mitch couldn’t participate, he would sabotage. Her home life would be turned into a maze of snares and booby traps, more than it already was. “It’s just three meetings a year,” she told them. “It’s the price you pay.” As prices went—as prices had gone, here and there in world history—it wasn’t all that high.

“I’m having Zenia over for a drink,” Roz tells Mitch. If she doesn’t tell him, he’s sure to walk in on the two of them and then sulk because he’s been left out of the picture. Being a woman with power doesn’t mean Roz has to tread less softly around Mitch. She has to tread more softly, she has to diminish herself, pretend she’s smaller than she is, apologize for her success, because everything she does is magnified.

“Zenia who?” says Mitch.

“You know, we ran into her in that restaurant,” says Roz. She’s pleased Mitch doesn’t remember.

“Oh yes,” says Mitch. “She’s not like most of your friends:” Mitch isn’t that keen on Roz’s friends. He thinks they’re-a bunch of man-hating hairy-legged whip-toting feminists, because at one point, in his early days on the board of WiseWvmanWorld, they were. In vain does Roz tell him that everyone was then, it was a trend, and the overalls were just a fashion statement—not that Roz ever wore them herself, she would’ve looked like a truck driver. He knows better, he knows it wasn’t just overalls. The women at Wise Woman had put up with him because of Roz, but they hadn’t suffered him gladly. They wouldn’t let him tell them how to be good feminists, much as he tried. Maybe it was because he said they should use humour and charm because otherwise men would be frightened of them, and they weren’t in the mood to be charming, not to him, not just then. He must have been badly traumatized by that whole phase; though he wasn’t above trying a few twists and ploys of his own.

Roz remembers the dinner parry she threw to celebrate the restructuring of WiseWomanWorld, when Mitch was sitting beside Alma the managing editor, and made the mistake of trying to run his hand up and down her leg under the table while carrying on a too-animated theoretical discussion with Edith the designer. Poor lamb, he thought Roz couldn’t guess. But one look at Mitch’s arm position—and his dampening, reddening, braised-looking face, and Alma’s stern frown and the squint lines around her mouth—told all. Roz watched with furious interest as Alma struggled with her dilemma: whether to put up with it because Mitch was Roz’s husband and she didn’t want to jeopardize her job—a thing Mitch had counted on with others, in the past—or whether to call him. on it. Principle won, and also outrage, and Alma said to him sharply, though in an undertone, “I am not a piccolo.”

“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.

Zenia sees them, and says, “Are those yours? Did they fall in the food processor?” and it’s just like something Roz might have said herself, or thought at least, and Roz doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

She laughs, and they have the drink in the sun room, which Roz refuses to call the conservatory even though she’s always hankered after a conservatory, a conservatory with miniature orange trees in it, or orchids, like the ones in twenties murder mysteries, the kind with the map of the English mansion and an X where the body gets found, in the conservatory quite frequently. But although the sun room is glass and has a Victorian cupola thing on top it’s too small to be a real conservatory, arid the word itself is too highfalutin for the voice of Roz’s mother, which lives on intermittently inside Roz’s head and would sneer, although it’s full of plants, plants with limited lifespans, because whose responsibility are they exactly? Mitch says he doesn’t have the time, although he was the one who ordered all this vegetation; but Roz’s thumb is not green, it’s brown, the brown of withered sedges. It’s not that she doesn’t want the plants to live.

She even likes them, though she can’t tell the difference between a begonia and a rhododendron. But these things should be done by professionals: a plant service. They come, they see, they water, they cart away the dying, they bring fresh troops.

She has a service like that for the office, so why not here? Mitch says he doesn’t want yet more strangers tramping through the house—he’s suffering from decorator burnout—but it’s possible that he likes the image of Roz with an apron and a watering can, just as he likes the image of Roz with an apron and a frying pan, and an apron and a feather duster, even though Roz can’t cook her way out of a paper bag, why did God make restaurants if he intended her to cook, and she has a phobia aboutfeather dusters, having been force-fed on them in childhood. The constant is the apron, the Good Housekeeping guarantee that Roz will always be home whenever Mitch chooses to get back there.

Or there may be another agenda, another nuance to the guilt Roz is supposed to feel, and does feel, over the kaput plants, because Mitch wanted a swinnning pool instead of a sun room, so he could dive into a chlorine purification bath and sterilize his chest hair and kill whatever athlete’s foot and crotch fungus and tongue rot he may have picked up from plucking the ripening floozies; but Roz said an outdoor swimming pool’ was ridiculous in Canada, two months of swelter and ten of freeze-your-buns-off, and she refused to have an indoor one because she knew people who did and their houses smelled like gas refineries on a hot day because of all the chemicals, and there would be complicated machinery that would break down and that Roz would somehow be responsible for getting fixed. The worst thing about swimming pools as far as Roz is concerned is that they are one step too close to the great outdoors. Wildlife falls into them. Ants, moths, and such. Like the lake at summer camp, she’d be flailing along and suddenly there would be a bug, right at nose level. Swimming, in Roz’s opinion, is a major health hazard.

Zenia laughs and says she couldn’t agree more, and Roz talks on, because she’s nervous at seeing Zenia again after all these years, she remembers the reputation, the aura of green poison that encircled Zenia, the invisible incandescence, touch her and you’d get burned; and she remembers history, the stories of Tony and Charis. So she has to step carefully here, it’s no wonder she’s nervous, and when she’s nervous she talks. Talks; and also eats, and also drinks. Zenia takes one olive and chews it daintily, Roz gobbles the lot, and touches up Zenia’s martini, and pours herself another, and offers a cigarette, words pouring out of her like ink from a squid. Camouflage. She’s relieved to note that Zenia smokes. It would be intolerable if she were thin and well-dressed and unwrinkled and a knockout, and a nonsmoker as well.

“So,” says Roz, when she’s made a sufficient fool of herself to consider the ice broken. “My father.” Because this is what she wants, this is the point of the visit. Isn’t it?

“Yes,” says Zenia. She leans forward and sets down her glass, and rests her chin thoughtfully on one hand and frowns slightly. “I was only a baby, of course. So I have no real memories of that time. But my aunt always talked about your father, before she died. About how he got us out. I guess if it weren’t for him I’d just be ashes now.

“It was in Berlin. That’s where my parents lived, in a good neighbourhood, in a respectable apartment—it was one of those old Berlin buildings with the mosaic tiles in the front hall and the oblong staircase with the wooden banister, and the maid’s room and the back balcony overlooking a courtyard, for hanging out the wash. I know, because I saw it—I went back. I was there in the late seventies, I had an assignment in Berlin—the Berlin nightlife, for some travel magazine, you know the sort of thing, sexy cabaret, kinky strip clubs, telephones on the tables. So I took the afternoon off and I found it. I had the address, from some old papers of my aunt’s. The buildings all around were newer, they’d been rebuilt after the bombing, the whole place was practically levelled; it was amazing, but that one old building was still there.

“I rang all the buzzers and someone opened the door, and 1 went in and up the stairs, just as my parents must have done hundreds of times. I touched the same banister, I turned the same corners. I knocked at the door, and when it opened 1 said some relatives of mine had once lived there and could I look around—I speak a little German, because of my aunt, though my accent’s old-fashioned—and the people let me in. They were a young couple with a baby, they were very nice, but I couldn’t stay long. I really couldn’t stand it, the rooms, the light coming through the windows ... they were the same rooms, it was the same light. I think my parents became real to me for the first time. Everything, all of it became real. Before that, it was just a bad story.”

Zenia stops talking. This is what people often do when they come to the hard part, Roz has discovered. “A bad story,” she prompts.

“Yes,” says Zenia. “It was already the war. Things were in short supply. My aunt had never married, there was such a shortage of men after the first war a lot of women couldn’t, so she thought of our family as her family too, and she used to do things for us. Mother us—that’s how she put it. So on this one day, my aunt was going to my parents’ apartment; she was taking them some bread she’d baked. She went up the stairs as usual—there was a lift, one of those lifts like an iron cage, I saw it—but it was out of order. As she was about to knock, the door on the other side of the landing opened and the woman who lived there—my aunt knew her only by sight—this woman came out and grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her inside. ‘Don’t go in, don’t try to go in there,’ she said. ‘They’ve been taken away’

“‘Taken, where?’ said my aunt. She didn’t ask who by, she. didn’t need to ask that.

“‘Don’t try to find out,’ said the woman. ‘Better not: She had me in there with her because my mother had seen them coming, she’d looked out the window and she’d seen them coming along the street, and then when they’d turned in at the doorway and started up the stairs she’d guessed where they were headed and she’d runi out the back door, the maid’s door, and along the back balcony, with me wrapped up in a shawl—the balconies at the back adjoined one another—and she’d pounded at this woman’s kitchen door, and the woman had taken me in. It happened so fast she hardly knew what she was doing, and most likely if she’d had time to think she never would have done anything so dangerous. She was just an ordinary woman, obedient and so on, but I suppose if someone shoves a baby at you, you can’t just step back and let it fall to the ground.

“I was the only one saved, the others were all taken. I had an older brother, and an older sister too. I was much younger, I was a late baby. I have their picture; it’s something my aunt brought with her. See—” Zenia opens her purse, then her wallet, and slides out a snapshot. It’s a square picture with—a wide white border, the figures tiny and fading: a family group, father, mother, two young children, and another older woman, off to one side. The aunt, Roz assumes. Both of the children are ‘blond.

What amazes Roz is how contemporary they look: the knee-high skirts on the women, from the late twenties? the early thirties?—the smart hats, the makeup, it could be the retro look, in some fashion magazine, right now. Only the clothes of the children are archaic; that, and their haircuts. A suit and tie and short back and sides for the boy, and a fussy dress and ringlets for the girl. The smiles are a little tight, but smiles were, in those days. They are dress-up smiles. It must have been a special occasion: a vacation, a religious holiday, somebody’s birthday.

“That was before the war,” says Zenia. “It was before things got really bad. I was never part of that world. I was born right after the war started; I was a war baby. Anyway, that’s all I have, this picture. It’s all that’s left of them. My aunt searched, after the war. There was nothing left:” She slides the photo carefully back into her wallet.

“What about the aunt?” says Roz. “Why didn’t they take her, too?”

“She wasn’t Jewish,” says Zenia. “She was my father’s sister. My father wasn’t Jewish either, but after the Nuremberg laws were passed he was treated as one, because he was married to one. Hell, even my mother wasn’t Jewish! Not by religion. She was Catholic, as a matter of fact. But two of her four grandparents were Jewish, so she was classified as a mischling, first degree. A mixture. Did you know they had degrees?”

“Yes,” says Roz. So Zenia is a mixture, like herself?

“Some of those mischlings survived longer than the real Jews,” says Zenia. “My parents, for instance. I guess they thought it wouldn’t happen to them. They thought of themselves as good Germans. They weren’t in touch with the Jewish community,’—so they didn’t even hear the rumours; or if they did, they didn’t believe them. It’s astonishing what people will refuse to believe.”

“How about your aunt?” says Roz. “Why did she get out? If she wasn’t Jewish at all, wasn’t she safe?” Though come to think of it, safe is a silly word to use in such a context.

“Because of me,” says Zenia. “They would have figured out sooner or later that my parents had three children, not two. Or some neighbour of my aunt’s would have seen or heard me, and turned us in. A baby, in the home of an unmarried woman who just a little while before had no baby at all. People get a huge bang out of denunciation, you know. It makes them feel morally superior. God, how I hate that smug self-righteousness! People patting themselves on the back for murder.

“So my aunt started looking for a way to get me out, and then she found herself in a whole other world—the underground world, the black market world. She’d always lived above ground, but she had to go into that other world in order to protect me. There isn’t a place on earth where that world doesn’t exist; all you have to do is take a few steps off to the side, a few steps down, and there it is, side by side with the world people like to think of as normal. Remember the fifties, remember trying to get an abortion? It only took three phone calls. Provided you could pay, of course. You’d get handed along the line, to somebody who knew someone. It was the same in Germany at that time, for things like passports, only you had to be careful who you asked.

“What my aunt needed was some fake papers saying I was her daughter, by a husband killed in France, and she got some; but they wouldn’t have stood up to much serutiny. I mean, look at me! I’m hardly Aryan. My brother and my sister were both blond, and my father had light hair; my mother too. I must be some kind of throwback. So she knew she had to get me away, she had to get me right out. If they caught her she’d be up for treachery, because she was helping me. Some treachery! Christ, I was only six months old!”

Roz doesn’t—know what to say. “Poor you,” which is what she murmurs to the stories of workplace crises or personal mishap or romantic catastrophe, as told to her by her friends, hardly seems to cover it. “How awful,” she says,

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” says Zenia. “I was hardly conscious. I didn’t know what was going on, so it was no strain on me; though I must have registered that things had changed and my mother wasn’t there any more. Anyway my aunt got in touch with your father, or I should say your father’s friends. It was through the man who arranged the papers for her—that man knew someone who knew someone else, and after they’d checked her out and skimmed some money off her they passed her on. All black markets work that way. Try buying drugs, it’s the same thing: they check you out, they pass you on. Luckily my aunt had some money, and her desperation must have been convincing. As I said, she’d never married, so I became her cause; she risked her life for me. It was for her brother, too. She didn’t know then he’d been killed, she thought he might come back. Then, if he did and if she’d failed, what could she say?

“So your father and his friends got her out, through Denmark and then through Sweden. They told her it was relatively easy. She didn’t have an accent or anything, and she looked as German as they come.

“My aunt was a kind of mother to me. She brought me up, she did her best, but she wasn’t a happy woman. She’d been ruined, destroyed really, by the war. The loss of her brother and his family, and then the guilt also—that she hadn’t been able to stop any of it, that she had somehow participated. She talked about your father a lot—what a hero he was. It gave her back a little bit of faith. So I used to pretend that your father was my father, and that some day he would come to get me, and I’d move into his house. I wasn’t even sure where he lived.”

Roz is practically in tears. She remembers her father, the old rascal; she’s glad to know that his dubious talents were of service, because he’s still her favourite parent and. she welcomes the chance to think well of him. The two martinis aren’t helping, in the get-a-grip department. How lucky she herself has been, with her three children and her husband, her money, her work, her house. How unfair life is! Where was God when all of this was happening, in sordid Europe—the injustice, the merciless brutality, the suffering? In a meeting, is where. Not answering the phone. Guilt wells up out of her eyes. She would like to give Zenia something, just a little something, to make up to her for God’s neglect, but what could possibly be adequate?

Then she hears a small voice, a small voice clear as ice-water, right at the back of her head. It’s the voice of experience. It’s the voice of Tony. Zenia lies, it says.

“Do you remember Tony?” Roz blurts out, before she can stop herself. “Tony Fremont from McClung Hall?” How can she be such a jerk, such a shit, as to question Zenia’s story, even in her head? No one would he about such a thing. It would be too mean, it would be too cynical, it would be virtually sacrilegious!

“Oh yes,” Zenia laughs. “That was a million years ago! Tony and her funny war collection! I see she’s written a couple of books. She was always a bright little thing.”

Bright little thing causes Roz to feel, by comparison, large and dim. But she trudges forward. “Tony told me you were a White Russian,” she says. “A child prostitute, in Paris. And Charis says your mother was a gypsy, and was stoned to death by Roumanian peasants:”

“Charis?” says Zenia.

“She used to be Karen,” says Roz. “You lived with her on the Island. You told her you had cancer,” she adds, pressing relentlessly on.

Zenia looks out the window of the sun room, and sips at the edge of her martini. “Oh yes, Charis,” she says. “I’m afraid I told some awful—I didn’t always tell the truth, when I was younger. I think I was emotionally disturbed. After my aunt died I had some hard times. She had nothing, no money; we lived over storefronts. And when she was gone, nobody would help me. This was in Waterloo, in the fifties. It wasn’t a good time or place for orphans who didn’t fit in.

“So part of what I told Tony was true, I did work as a hooker. And I didn’t want to be Jewish, I didn’t want to be connected with all of that in any way. I guess I was running away from the past. That was then, this is now, right? I even got my nose done, after I’d gone to England and landed a magazine job and could afford it. I suppose I was ashamed. When those things get done to you, you feel more ashamed than if you’d done them yourself to other people. You think maybe you deserved it; or else that you should have been stronger—able to defend yourself, or something. You feel—well, beaten up.

“So I made up a different past for myself—it was better to be a White Russian. Denial, I guess you could call it. I lived with a White Russian; once, when I was sixteen, so I knew something about them.

“With Karen—with Charis—I must have been having some kind of a nervous breakdown. I needed to be mothered; my shrink says it was because my own mother was taken away. I shouldn’t have said I had cancer, because I didn’t. But I was sick, in another kind of way. Karen did wonders for me.

“It wasn’t a good thing—it was terrible, I suppose, to tell those stories. I owe both of them an apology. But I didn’t think I could’ve told them the real story, what really happened to me. They wouldn’t have understood it.”

She gives Roz a long look, straight out of her deep indigo eyes, and Roz is touched. She, Roz—she alone—has been chosen, to understand. And she does, she does.

“After I left Canada,” Zenia says, “things got worse. I had big ideas, but nobody seemed to share them. Looking the way I do doesn’t help, you know. Men don’t see you as a person, they just see the body, and so that’s all you see yourself. You think of your body as a tool, something to use. God, I’m tired of men! They’re so easy to amuse. All you have to do to get their attention is take off your clothes. After a while you want a bit more of a challenge, you know?

“I worked as a stripper for a year or so—that’s when I had my breasts done, this man I was living with paid for it—and I got into some bad habits. Coke first, and then heroin. It’s a wonder I’m not dead. Maybe I was trying to be, because of my family. You’d think that because I didn’t really know them it wouldn’t hurt. But it’s like being born minus a leg. There’s this terrible absence.

“It took me a long time, but I’ve finally come to terms with myself. I’ve worked it through. I was in therapy for years. It was hard, but now I know who I am.”

Roz is impressed. Zenia has not evaded, she hasn’t wriggled or squirmed. She has owned up, she has admitted, she’s confessed. That shows—what? Honesty? Good will? Maturity? Some admirable quality. The nuns used to put a high value on confessing, so much so that Roz once confessed to placing a dog turd in the cloakroom, something she had not actually done. They didn’t let you off punishment for confessing, though—she got the strap, all the same, and when you confessed to the priest you had to do penance—but they thought more highly of you, or so they said.

Also Zenia has been out in the world. The wide world, wider than Toronto; the deep world, deeper than the small pond where Roz is such a large and sheltered frog. Zenia makes Roz feel not only protected, but lax. Her own battles have been so minor.

“You’ve done really well,” Roz says. “I mean—what a story! It’s great material!” She’s thinking of the magazine, because this is the kind of story they like to run: inspirational, a success story. A story about overcoming fears and obstacles, about facing up to yourself and becoming a whole person. It’s like the story they did two months ago, about the woman who fought bulimia to a standstill. Roz finds stories about the one lost sheep who caused more joy in Heaven hard to resist.

There’s a story in the aunt, as well: Wise Woman World appreciates real-life heroines, ordinary women who have been more than ordinarily courageous.

To her amazement, and also to her horror, Zenia begins to cry. Big tears roll from her eyes, which remain open and fixed on Roz. “Yeah,” she says. “I guess that’s all it amounts to. It’s just a story, it’s just material. Something to use:”

Roz, for gosh sake, get your big fat foot out of your mouth, thinks Roz. Miss Tact of 1983. “Oh honey, I didn’t mean it that way,” she says.

“No,” says Zenia. “I know. Nobody does. It’s just, I’m so strung out. I’ve been on the edge, I’ve been out there so long; I’ve had to do it alone. I can’t work it out with men, they all want the same thing from me, I just can’t make those kinds of compromises any more. I mean, you’ve got all this, you’ve got a home, a husband, you’ve got your kids. You’re a family, you’ve got solid ground under your feet. I’ve never had any of that, I’ve never fitted in. I’ve lived out of a suitcase, all my life; even now it’s hand-to-mouth, that’s what freelancing means, and I’m running out of energy, you know? There’s just no base, there’s no permanence!”

How badly Roz has misjudged Zenia! Now she sees her in a new light. It’s a tempestuous light, a bleak light, a lonely, rainy fight; in the midst of it Zenia struggles on, buffeted by men, blown by the winds of fate. She’s not what she appears, a beautiful and successful career woman. She’s a waif, a’ homeless wandering waif, she’s faltering by the wayside, she’s falling. Roz opens her heart, and spreads her wings, her cardboard angel’s wings, her invisible dove’s wings, her warm sheltering wings, and takes her in.

“Don’t you worry” she says, in her most reassuring voice. “We’ll work something out.”

XLVII

Mitch passes Zenia in the front hall as she is leaving and he is coming in. She gives him only the briefest and chilliest of nods. “Your old friend is certainly hostile,” he says to Roz.

“I don’t think so,” says Roz. “I think she’s just tired:”

She doesn’t want to share Zenia’s dismaying life story with him. It’s a story told just to her, for her, for her ears alone, by one outsider to another. Only Roz can understand it. Not Mitch, because what would he know about being outside?

“Tired?” says Mitch. “She didn’t look too tired:”

“Tired of men coming on to her,” says Roz.

“Don’t believe it,” says Mitch. “Any-way, I wasn’t coming on to her. But I bet she’d like it if I did. She’s an adventuress, she has the look:”

“Poetess, songstress, adventuress,” says Roz lightly. Mitch is such an authority, he can tell what a woman thinks by the shape of her bottom. “Why not just call her an adventurer?” Roz is teasing, she knows the feminist terminology stuff drives him nuts. But also she thinks of herself as an adventurer, at least in some areas of life. The financial ones. Gentleman adventurer was once a term.

“It’s not the same,” says Mitch. “Adventurers live by their wits.”

“And adventuresses?” says Roz. “By their tits,” says Mitch. “Point,” says Roz, laughing. He set her up for it.

But he’s wrong, thinks Roz, remembering. It was wits for Zenia also.

That was the beginning of the end of her marriage, although she didn’t realize it at the time. Or maybe it was the end of the end. Who knows? The end must have been a long time coming. These things are not sudden.

Roz wouldn’t have known it from Mitch, though. He made love to her that night with an urgency he hadn’t shown for a long time. No voluptuous ease, no lordly walrus-like wallowing: it was snatch and grab. There was nothing he wanted her to give; instead he wanted to take. Roz finds herself being bitten, and is pleased rather than otherwise. She didn’t know she was still that irresistible.

A week later she arranges an early dinner, at Scaramouche, for herself and Zenia and the current WiseWomanWorld editor, whose name is BethAnne, and they ingest radicchio salads and exotic parboiled vegetables and clever pastas, and go over Zenia’s resume and her file of magazine stories. First there are the ones written when she was on staff for a cutting-edge fashion magazine, in England. But she quit that job because she felt too tied down, and also she’d wanted to write about more political things. Libya, Mozambique, Beirut, the Palestinian camps; Berlin, Northern Ireland, Colombia, Bangladesh, El Salvador—Zenia has been to most of the hot spots Roz can remember, and a few she can’t. Zenia regales them with incidents, of stones and bullets that have whizzed past her head, of cameras that have been broken by policemen, of narrow escapes in jeeps. She names hotels.

A lot of the stories are under other names, men’s names, because, as Zenia says, the material in them is controversial, inflammatory even, and she didn’t want to open the door in the middle of the night and find some enraged Arab or Irish hit man or Israeli or drug lord standing on the other side of it. “I wouldn’t want this to get around,” she says, “but that’s the main reason I came back to Canada. It’s kind of a safe haven for me—you know? Things were getting just a little too interesting for me, over there. Canada is such a—such a gentle place.”

Roz and BethAnne exchange a look across the table. Both are deeply thrilled. A political reporter from the trouble zones of the world, right in their midst; and a female political reporter, at that! Of course they must shelter her. What are safe havens for? It doesn’t escape Roz that the opposite of interesting is not gentle, but boring. However, boring has something to offer, these days. Maybe they should export a little boring. It’s better than getting your head shot off.

“We’d love it if you’d do a story for us,” says BethAnne. “To tell you the truth,” says Zenia; “I’m sort of emptied out for now, story-wise. But I have a better idea:”

Her better idea is that she should help them out in the advertising department. “I’ve been through the magazine, and I’ve noticed you don’t have many ads,” she says. “You must be losing money, a lot of money.”

“Absolutely,” says Roz, who knows exactly how much because the money they’re losing is hers.

“I think I could double your ads, in, say, two months,” says Zenia. “I’ve had experience:”

She makes good her word. Roz isn’t sure quite how it happened, but Zenia is soon sitting in on editorial meetings, and when BethAnne leaves to have another baby, creating a power vacuum, Zenia is offered the job, because who else—be honest—is as qualified? It may even be that Roz set it up for her. Most likely; it was the kind of sucky shoot-yourself-in-thefoot thing she must have been doing around then. Part of her save-poor-Zenia project. She’d rather not remember the details.

Zenia has her photograph taken, a glamour shot in a Vnecked outfit; it appears on the editorial page. Women figure out how old she is and wonder how she manages to stay looking so good. Circulation goes up.

Zenia goes to parties now, a lot of parties. Why not? She has schlep, she has clout, she has—the men on the board are fond of saying—balls. Sharp as a tack, smart as a whip, and a great figure too, they can never resist adding, causing Roz to go home and frown at her dimpling grapefruit-peel leg skin in the mirror, and then to reproach herself for making odious comparisons.

Some of the parties Zenia goes to are given by Roz. Roz supervises the passing of the filo-bundle and stuffed-mushroom nibbles, and greets her friends with hugs and airy kisses, and watches Zenia work the room. She works it seriously, thoroughly; she seems to know by instinct just how much time any one person is worth. She spends some of her precious moments on Roz, though. She gets her off to one side and murmurs to her, and Roz murmurs back. Anyone watching them would think they were conspirators.

“You’re really good at this,” Roz tells Zenia. “Me, I always end up stuck for hours with some hard-luck story, but you never get cornered:”

Zenia smiles back at her. “All foxes dig back doors. I like to know where the exit sign is:” And Roz remembers the story of Zenia’s narrow escape from death, and feels sorry for her. Zenia always arrives alone. She leaves alone. It’s sad.

Mitch works the room too. Surprisingly, he doesn’t work the part of it with Zenia in it. Ordinarily he’d flirt with everyone; he’d flirt with a saluki if there was nothing else on offer. He likes to see his own charm reflected back at him from the eyes of every woman in the room; he goes from one to another as if they’re bushes and he’s a dog. But he stays away from Zenia, and, when she’s watching, pays extra attention to Roz. He keeps a hand on her whenever possible. Steadying himself, Roz thinks later.

Roz grows increasingly uneasy. There’s something not quite right about the turn things have taken, but what could it be? She set out to help Zenia, and it appears she has helped her, and

Zenia is certainly grateful, and she’s performing well; they have lunch once a week just to go over things, and so Zenia can ask Roz’s advice, because Roz has been around the magazine so much longer than Zenia has. Roz dismisses her own reaction as simple envy. Ordinarily if there was something bothering her, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, she’d discuss it with Tony or Charis. But she can’t do that, because she’s friends with Zenia now, and they might not understand that part of it. They might not understand how Roz could be friends with someone who is—face it—an enemy of theirs. They might see it as betrayal.

“I’ve been giving it some thought,” Zenia says at the next board of directors meeting. “We’re still losing money, despite the new ads. We can’t seem to hook the big spenders—the perfume companies, the cosmetics, high fashion. To be honest, I think we need to change the name. The concept we’re working with is too seventies. This is the eighties—we’re way beyond a lot of those old positions:”

“Change the name?” asks Roz, with fond memories of the early collective. What happened to those women? Where did they go? Why has she lost touch with them? Where did all these business suits come from?

“Yes,” says Zenia. “I’ve had a small survey done. We’d do better with Woman World, or, even better, just plain Woman.” It’s obvious to Roz what’s being dropped. The wisdom part, for one thing. Also the world. But how can she object to Woman without implying that there’s something wrong with being one?

So Zenia changes the name, and soon the magazine changes too. It changes so much that Roz hardly recognizes it. Gone are the mature achievers, the stories about struggling to overcome sexism and stacked odds. Gone too are the heavy-hitting health care stories. Now there are five-page spreads on spring fashions, and new diets and hair treatments and wrinkle creams, and quizzes about the man in your life and whether or not you’re handling your relationships well. Are these things unimportant? Roz would be the last to say so, but surely there’s something missing.

She no longer has lunch with Zenia once a week; Zenia is now too busy. She’s a busy bee, she has a lot of iron maidens in the fire. So, at the next board meeting, Roz pushes her about the shift in content. “This wasn’t the original idea,” she says.

Zenia smiles gently at her. “Most women don’t want to read about other women who achieve,” she says. “It makes them feel unsuccessful.”

Roz finds herself getting angry—surely this is a dig at her—but she controls herself. “What do they want to read about, then?”

“I’m not talking intellectuals,” says Zenia. “I’m talking about the average woman. The average magazine-buying woman. According to our demographics, they want to read about how to look. Oh, and sex, of course. Sex with the right accessories:”

“What are the right accessories?” asks Roz pleasantly. She thinks she’ll choke.

“Men,” says Zenia. The men on the board of directors laugh, Mitch included. So much for Roz. She has a flash of Zenia, wearing black fringed gloves with gauntlets, blowing the smoke off her six-shooter, sliding it back into her holster.

Roz is the majority shareholder. She could pull strings, she could stack the deck, she could force Zenia out. But she can’t do that without looking like a vindictive shrew.

And let’s face it, they’re making money, finally, and money talks.

One day Mitch is gone. He is just gone, in a snap of the fingers, in a wink. No prelude, no hints, no letters left lying around, none of the usual. But looking back, Roz realizes he must have been gone for some time.

Where has he gone? He’s gone to live with Zenia. A whole courtship, a whole romance, has taken place right under Roz’s very nose and she hasn’t noticed a thing. It must have been going on for months.

But no, that isn’t it. Mitch tells her—he seems to want to tell her—that it was all very sudden. Unexpected to him. Zenia came to his office one evening, after work, to consult him about some financials, and then ...

“I don’t want to hear about it,” says Roz, who is familiar with the pleasures of narration. She doesn’t intend to give him the satisfaction.

“I just want you to understand,” says Mitch.

“Why?” says Roz. “Why is that important? Who gives a shit whether I understand or not?”

“I do,” says Mitch. “Because I still love you. I love both of you. This is really difficult for me.”

“Get stuffed,” says Roz.

Mitch came to the house when Roz wasn’t there. He came furtively because he couldn’t face her. He came and went, soft as a thief, and he removed things: his suits from the mirror-door bedroom closet, his boat clothes, his best bottles of wine, his pictures. Roz would come back after work to find these blanks, these piercing eloquent spaces, where something of Mitch’s used ‘ to be. But he left some things behind: an overcoat, his anorak, some books, his old boots, boxes of this and that in the storage room down in the cellar. What was it supposed to mean? That he was of two minds? That he still had one foot in the door? Roz almost wished he would take everything away at once, make a clean sweep. On the other hand, where there were boots there was hope. But hope was the worst. As long as she had hope, how was she supposed to get on with her life? Which was what women in her situation were constantly urged to do.

Mitch didn’t take anything that wasn’t his. He didn’t take anything Roz had bought for the house, bought for them to share. Roz was surprised to discover how little he had actually been involved in all that shopping, how few choices he’d helped her make; or, look at it another way, how little he’d contributed. Well, how could he have helped her? She’d always forestalled him; she’d seen a need or a desire and supplied it instantly, with a wave of her magic chequebook. Maybe it had grated on him after a while, her munificence, her largesse, her heaps of pearls, her outpourings. Ask and it shall be given. Heck, Mitch didn’t even ask! All he had to do was lie on the lawn with his mouth open while Roz climbed the tree and shook down the golden apples.

Maybe that was Zenia’s trick. Maybe she presented herself as vacancy, as starvation, as an empty beggar’s bowl. Maybe the posture she’d assumed was on her knees, hands upstretched for alms. Maybe Mitch wanted the opportunity to do a little coinscattering, an opportunity never provided by Roz. He was tired of being given to, of being forgiven, of being rescued; maybe he wanted to do a little giving and rescuing of his own. Even better than a beautiful woman on her knees would be a grateful beautiful woman on her knees. But hadn’t Roz been grateful enough?

Apparently not.

Roz stoops low. She gives in to her gnawing hunger for dirt and hires a private detective, a woman named Harriet; Harriet the Hungarian, someone she learned about, way back, through Uncle Joe, who had some Hungarian connections. “I just want to know what they’re up to,” she tells Harriet.

“What sort of thing?” asks Harriet.

“Where they’re living, what they do,” says Roz. “Whether she’s real:”

“Real?” says Harriet.

“Where she came from,” says Roz.

Harriet finds out sufficient. Sufficient to make Roz even more miserable than she is. Zenia and Mitch live in a penthouse apartment overlooking the harbour, near where Mitch moors his boat. That way they can go for quick little sails on it, Roz supposes, though she can’t see Zenia putting up with too much of that. Getting wet, chipping her polish. Not as much as Roz put up with. What else do they do? They eat out, they eat in. Zenia goes shopping. What’s to see?

The question of whether Zenia is real or not is more difficult to solve. She doesn’t seem to have been born, at least not under that name; but how can anyone say, since so much of Berlin went up in smoke? Inquiries in Waterloo produce nothing. She didn’t go to school there, or not under her present name. Is she even Jewish? It’s anybody’s guess, says Harriet.

“—‘But what about the picture?” says Roz. “Her family?”

“Oh, Roz,” says Harriet. “Pictures are a dime a dozen. Whose word have you got for it that those people were her family?”

“She knew about my father,” says Roz. She’s reluctant to let go. “So did I,” said Harriet. “Come on, Roz, there are hints about all that in every magazine interview you’ve ever given. What did she tell you about him that any twelve-year-old with an active imagination wouldn’t have been able to make up?”

“You’re right,” sighs Roz, “but there was so much detail.”

“She’s very good,” Harriet agrees.

London proves more fruitful: Zenia did indeed work for a magazine there; she appears to have written some of the articles she’s claimed as hers, though by no means all of them. The ones on clothing, yes; the ones on political hot spots, no. The ones with men’s names actually seem to have been written by the men in question, although three out of the five are dead. She made a brief traverse through the gossip columns when her name was linked with that of a cabinet minister; the phrase “good friend” was used, and marriage was subsequently hinted at but did not take place. Then there was a scandal when it came to light that Zenia had been seeing a Soviet cultural attache at the same time. “Seeing” was a euphemism. There was a lot of political name-calling, and the usual English tabloid fox-hunting and muckraking. After that incident Zenia had dropped out of sight.

“Did she really travel to all those countries?” says Roz. “How much money do you want to spend?” asks Harriet.

Knowing about the flimsiness of Zenia’s fa~ade is no help to Roz at all. She’s stalemated. If she tells Mitch about the lies it will just come across as jealousy.

It is jealousy. Roz is so jealous she can’t think straight. Some nights she cries with rage, others with sorrow. She walks around in a red fog of anger, in a grey mist of self-pity, and she hates herself for both. She calls on her stubbornness, her will to fight, but who exactly is her enemy? She can’t fight Mitch, because she wants him back. Maybe if she holds her fire long enough, this will all blow over. Mitch will fizzle out like a barbecue in the rain, he’ll come back home as he has before, wanting her to disentangle him from Zenia, wanting to be saved. And Roz will do it, though this time it won’t be so easy. He’s violated something, some unwritten contract, some form of trust. He’s never moved out before. The other women were a game to him but Zenia is serious business.

There’s another way it could play: Zenia would divest herself of Mitch. She would throw him out the window, as he has thrown many. Mitch would get his comeuppance. Roz would get revenge.

In public Roz maintains her grin, her tooth-filled grin. The muscles of her jaws ache with it. She wishes to preserve her dignity, put up a bold front. But that’s not so easy, with her chest ripped open like this and her heart exposed for all to surely see; her heart, which is on fire and dripping blood.

She can’t expect much pity from her friends, the ones who used to tell her to dump Mitch. She sees now what they’d meant: Dump him before he dumps you!

But she didn’t listen. Instead she’d kept on playing the knifethrower’s assistant, in her sparkly costume, with her arms and legs splayed out, standing still and smiling while the knives thudded into the wall, tracing the outline of her body. Flinch and you’re dead. It was inevitable that one day, by accident or on purpose, she’d get hit.

Tony phones her. So does Charis. She hears the concern in their voices: they know something, they’ve heard. But she puts them off; she holds them at arm’s length. One touch of their compassion now would do her in.

Three months go by. Roz straightens her back and tightens her lips and clenches her jaws so hard she’s sure her teeth are being ground to stumps, and tints her hair maroon, and buys a new outfit, an Italian leather suit in an opulent shade of vermilion. She has several unsatisfactory flings with men. She rolls about with them, fitfully, self-consciously, as if her bedroom’s wired for sound: she knows she’s acting. She hopes the news of her reckless unfaithfulness will get back to Mitch and make him writhe, but any writhing he does is in the privacy of his own home, if the viper’s nest he’s living in can be called that. Worst case: maybe he’s not writhing. Maybe he’s delighted at the possibility that some hapless fall guy might take her off his hands.

Harriet phones: she thinks Roz might like to know that Zenia is seeing another man, in the afternoons, while Mitch is out. “What sort of other man?” says Roz. Adrenalin rushes through her brain. ‘

“Let’s just say he wears a black leather jacket and drives a Harley, and has two arrests but no convictions. Lack of witnesses willing to come forward:”

“—Arrests for what?” says Roz.

“Dealing coke,” says Harriet. ,

Roz asks for a written report, and pops it into an envelope, and addresses it anonymously to Mitch, and waits for the other shoe to drop; and it does drop, because one Monday just before lunchtime Harriet calls her at the office.

“She’s taken a plane,” says Harriet. “Three big suitcases.”

“Where to?” says Roz. Her whole body is tingling. “Was Mitch with her?”

“No,” says Harriet. “To London.”

“Maybe he’ll join her there later,” says Roz. Well, well, she thinks. Bye bye black sheep. Three bags full.

“I don’t think so,” says Harriet. “She didn’t have that look.”

“What look did she have?” says Roz.

“The dark glasses look,” says Harriet. “The scarf-aroundthe-neck look. I’d lay money on a black eye, and two to one he tried to throttle her. Or somebody did. I’d say from all appearances she’s on the run:”

“He’ll go after her,” says Roz, who doesn’t want to get her hopes up. “He’s obsessed.”

But that evening, when she walks into her house, into her living room with its deep pink-and-mauve carpets and its subtle off-green accents, neo-forties revival with postmod undertones, there is Mitch, sitting in his favoured armchair as if he’s never been away.

Sitting in his favoured armchair, at least. But as for away, yes, that’s where he’s been. Far away. Some cinder of a planet in a distant galaxy. He looks as if he’s been drifting around in deep space, where it’s cold and empty and there are things with tentacles, and has just barely made it back to Earth. A stunned look, a conked-on-the-head look. Mugged, pushed face first against a brick wall, crammed into a trunk, tossed half-naked onto the stony roadside, and he didn’t even see who did it.

Glee leaps up in Roz, but she stifles it. “Mitch,” she says, in her best hen voice. “Honey, what’s wrong?”

“She’s gone,” says Mitch.

“Who is?” says Roz, because although she won’t demand a pound of flesh, not at this juncture, she does want a little blood, just a drop or two, because she’s thirsty.

“You know who,” says Mitch in a choking voice. Is this sorrow or fury? Roz can’t tell.

“I’ll get you a drink,” she says. She pours one for each of them, then sits down opposite Mitch in the matching armchair, their usual position for conversations like this. Have-it-out conversations. He will explain, she will be hurt; he will pretend to repent, she will pretend to believe him. They face each other, two card sharps, two poker players.

Roz opens. “Where did she go?” she says, although she knows the answer; but she wants to know if he knows. If he doesn’t know it won’t be her that tells him. He can hire his own detective.

“She took her clothes,” says Mitch, in a sort of groan. He puts one hand to his head, as if he has a headache. So, he doesn’t know.

What is Roz expected to do? Sympathize with her husband because the woman he loves, loves instead of her, has flown the coop? Console him? Kiss him better? Yes, that’s what, all right. She hovers on the edge of doing it—Mitch looks so battered—but she hangs back. Let him wait.

Mitch looks across at her. She bites her tongue. Finally he says, “There’s something else.”

Zenia, it appears, has forged some cheques, on the Woman operating account. She’s made off with the entire allowable overdraft. How much? Fifty thousand dollars, give or take; but in cheques under a thousand dollars each. She cashed them through different banks. She knows the system.

Roz calculates: she can afford it, and the disappearance of Zenia is cheap at the price. “Whose name did she use?” she asks. She knows who the signing officers are. For small cheques like that, it’s Zenia herself and any one of three board members.

“Mine,” says Mitch.

What could be crystal clearer? Zenia is a cold and treacherous bitch. She never loved Mitch. All she wanted was the pleasure of winning, of taking him away, from Roz. Also the money. This is obvious to Roz, but not, apparently, to Mitch. “She’s in some kind of trouble:” he says. “I ought to find her.” He must be thinking about the coke dealer.

Roz loses it. “Oh, spare me,” she says.

“I’m not asking you to do anything,” Mitch says, as if Roz would be too mean-spirited to lend a helping hand. “I know where that envelope came from:”

“You’re not actually going after her,” says Roz. “I mean, haven’t you got the message? She’s wiped her spikes on you. She’s made a fool of you. She’s lied and cheated and stolen, and she’s written you off. Believe me, there’s no place in her life for a used dupe.”

Mitch shoots her a glance of intense dislike. This is far too much truth for him. He’s not used to getting dumped, to being betrayed, because it’s never happened to him before. Maybe, thinks Roz, I should give lessons.

“You don’t understand,” he says. But Roz does understand. What she understands is that no matter what went on before this, there was never anyone more important to Mitch than she was, and now there is.

Harriet calls: Mitch has taken the Wednesday-night plane to London. Roz’s heart hardens. It ceases to burn and drip. The rent in her chest closes over it. She can feel an invisible hand there, tight as a bandage, holding her body shut. That’s it, she thinks. That finally tears it. She buys five murder novels and takes a week off, and goes to Florida, and lies in the sun crying.

XLVIII

Mitch comes back. He comes back from the hunt. He comes back in the middle of February, having phoned first; having booked himself a time slot, like any client or petitioner. He turns up on Roz’s doorstep in his sheepskin coat, looking like an empty sack. In his hand he holds a plaintive bouquet of flowers.

For that, Roz would like to kick him—does he think she’s such a cheap date?—but she’s shocked by his appearance. He’s rumpled like a park-bench drunk, his skin is grey from travel, dark hollows ring his eyes. He’s lost weight, his flesh is loose, his face is starting to cave in, like some old guy without his false teeth, like the kids’ Hallowe’en pumpkins a few days after the holiday is over and the candles inside have burned out. That softening, that subsiding inwards towards a damp central emptiness.

Roz feels she should stand in the doorway, a barrier between the cold outside air he brings with him and her own warm house, blocking him, keeping him out. The children need to be protected from this leftover, this sagging echo, this shadowy copy of their real father, with his sinkhole eyes and his smile like crumpled paper. But she owes him a hearing, at least: Wordlessly she takes the flowers—roses, red, a mockery, because she does not delude herself, passion is not what he feels. Not, at least, for her. She lets him in.

“I want to come back,” he tells her, gazing around the high, wide living room, the spacious domain that Roz has made, that was once his to share. Not Will you let me come back? Not I want you back. Nothing to do with Roz, no mention of her at all. It’s the room he’s claiming, the territory. He is deeply mistaken. He thinks he has rights.

“You didn’t find her, did you?” says Roz. She hands him the drink she’s poured for him, as in days of yore: a singlemalt scotch, no ice. That’s what he used to like, long long ago; that’s what she’s been drinking these days, and more of it than she should. The gesture of handing the glass to him softens her, because it’s their old habit. Nostalgia for him seizes her by the throat. She fights against choking. He has a new tie on, an unfamiliar one, with grisly pastel tulips. The fingerprints of Zenia are all over it, like unseen scorch marks.

“No,” says Mitch. He won’t look at her.

“And if you had,” says Roz, hardening herself again, lighting her own cigarette—she won’t ask him to do it, they are way beyond such whimsical courtship gestures, not that he’s leaping forward with arm outstretched—“what would you have done? Beat the shit out of her, or sicked the lawyers onto her, or given her a big sloppy kiss?”

Mitch looks in her direction. He can’t meet her eyes. It’s as if she’s semi-invisible, a kind of hovering blur. “I don’t know,” he says.

“Well, at least that’s honest,” says Roz. “I’m glad you aren’t lying to me.” She’s trying to keep her voice soft, to avoid the bitter cutting edge. He isn’t lying to her, he isn’t doing anything to her. There is no her, as far as he’s concerned; she might as well not be here. Whatever he’s doing is to himself She has never felt so non-existent in her life. “So, what do you want?” She may as well ask, she may as well find out what’s being demanded of her.

But he shakes his head: he doesn’t know that, either. He isn’t even drinking from the glass she’s poured. It’s as if he can’t take anything from her. Which means there’s nothing she can give him. “Maybe when you figure it out,” she says, “you could let me in on it:”

Now he does finally look at her. God knows who he sees. Some avenging angel, some giantess with a bared arm and a sword—it can’t be Roz, tender and feathery Roz, not the way he’s staring at her. His eyes are frightening because they’re frightened. He’s scared shitless, of her or of someone or something, and she can’t bear the sight. Whatever else has been going on, all those years he played In and Out the Bimbos and she raged at him and wept, she’s always depended on him not to lose his nerve. But now there’s a crack in him, like a crack in glass; a little beat and he’ll shatter. But why should it be Roz’s job to sweep up?

“Just let me stay here,” he says. “Let me stay in the house. I could sleep downstairs, in the family room. I won’t bother you:’

He’s begging, but Roz hears this only in retrospect. At the moment she finds the idea intolerable: Mitch on the floor, in a sleeping bag, like the twins’ friends at group sleepovers, demoted to transience, demoted to adolescence. Locked out of her bedroom, or worse, not wishing to go into it. That’s it—he’s rejecting her, he’s rejecting her big, eager, clumsy, ardent, and solid body; it’s no longer good enough for him, not even as a feather bed, not even as a fallback. He must find her repellent.

But she does have some pride left, though God knows how she’s managed to hang onto it, and if she’s going to let him come back it has to be on full terms. “You can’t treat me like a rest stop,” she says. “Not any more.”

Because that’s exactly what he’d do, he’d move in, she’d dish out the nourishing lunches, feed him, build him up again, and he’d get his strength back and be off, off in his longboat, off in his galleon, scouring the seven seas for the Holy Grail, for Helen of Troy, for Zenia, peering through the spyglass, on the watch for her pirate flag. Roz can see it in his eyes, which are focused on the horizon, not on her. Even if he came back, into her bedroom, in between her raspberrycoloured sheets, into her body, it wouldn’t be her underneath him, on top of him, around him, not ever again. Zenia has stolen something from him, the one thing he always kept safe before, from all women, even from Roz. Call it his soul. She slipped it out of his breast pocket when he wasn’t looking, easy as rolling a drunk, and looked at it, and bit it to see if it was genuine, and sneered at it for being so small after all, and then tossed it away, because she’s the kind of woman who wants what she doesn’t have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets.

What is her secret? How does she do it? Where does it come from, her undeniable power over men? How does she latch hold of them, break their stride, trip them up, and then so easily turn them inside out? It must be something very simple and obvious. She tells them they’re unique, then reveals to them that they’re not. She opens her cloak with the secret pockets and shows them how the magic trick is worked, and that it is after all nothing more than a trick. Only by that time they refuse to see; they think the Water of Youth is real, even though she empties the bottle and fills it again from the tap, right before their very eyes. They want to believe.

“It won’t work,” Roz tells Mitch. She isn’t being vindictive. It’s the simple truth.

He must know it, because he doesn’t plead. He subsides into his crumpled clothing; his neck gets shorter, as though there’s a steady but inexorable weight pushing slowly down on the top of his head. “I guess not,” he says.

“Didn’t you keep the apartment?” says Roz. “Isn’t that where you’re living?”

“I couldn’t stay there,” says Mitch. His voice is reproachful. as if it’s crass of her, cruel of her even to suggest such a thing. Doesn’t she realize how much it would hurt him to be in a place he once shared with the fled beloved, a place where he would be reminded of the dear departed at every turn, a place where he was so happy?

Roz knows. She herself lives in such a place. But he obviously hasn’t thought of that. Those in pain have no time for the pain they cause.

Roz sees him out, into the front hall, into the overcoat, which almost does her in because it’s her overcoat too, she helped him buy it, she shared the life he led in it, that goodtaste leather, that sheepskin, one-time container of such a rascally wolf. No longer, no more; he’s toothless now. Poor lamb, thinks Roz, and clenches her fists tight because she won’t let herself be fooled like that again.

He takes himself off, off into the freezing February dusk, off into the unknown. Roz watches him walk towards his parked car, lurching a little although he didn’t touch his drink. The sidewalks are icy. Or maybe he’s on something, some kind of pill, a tranquillizer. Most likely he shouldn’t be driving, though it’s no longer any of her business to stop him. She tells herself it’s not necessary to have qualms about him. He can stay at a hotel. It’s not as if he doesn’t have any money.

She leaves his red roses on the sideboard, still wrapped in their floral paper. Let them wilt. Dolores can find them tomorrow, and reproach Roz in her heart for carelessness, rich people don’t know what things cost, and throw them out. She pours herself another scotch and lights another cigarette, then gets down her old photo albums, those pictures she took so endlessly at backyard birthday parties, at graduations, on vacations, winters in the snow, summers on the boat, to prove to herself they were all indeed a family, and sits in the kitchen going through them. Pictures of Mitch, in non-living colour: Mitch and Roz at their wedding, Mitch and Roz and Larry, Mitch and Roz and Larry and the twins. She searches his face for some clue, some foreshadowing of the catastrophe that has befallen them. She finds none.

Some women in her place take their nail scissors and snip out the heads of the men in question, leaving only their bodies.

Some snip out the bodies too. But Roz will not do this, because of the children. She doesn’t want them to come across a picture of their headless father, she doesn’t want to alarm them, any more than she already has. And it wouldn’t work anyway, because Mitch would still be there in the pictures, an outline, a blank shape, taking up the same amount of room, just as he does beside her in her bed. She never sleeps in the middle of that bed, she still sleeps off to one side. She can’t bring herself to occupy the whole space.

On the refrigerator, attached to it by magnets in the form of smiling pigs and cats, are the Valentines the twins made for her at school. The twins are clinging these days, they want her around. They don’t like her going out at night. They didn’t wait for Valentine’s Day, they brought their Valentines home and gave them to her right away, as if there was some urgency. These are the only Valentines she will get. Probably they are the only ones she will get ever again. They should be enough for her. What does she want with glowing hearts, with incandescent lips and rapid breathing, at her age?

Snap out of it, Roz, she tells herself, You are not old. Your life is not over.

It only feels like that.

Mitch is in the city. He’s around. He comes to see the children and Roz arranges to be out, her skin prickling the whole time with awareness of him. When, she walks into the house after he’s gone she can smell him—his aftershave, the English heather stuff, could it be he’s sprinkled some of it around just to get to her? She glimpses him in restaurants, or at the yacht club. She stops going to those places. She picks up the phone and he’s on the other line with one of the kids. The whole world is boobytrapped. She is the booby.

Their lawyers talk. A separation agreement is suggested, though Mitch stalls; he doesn’t want Roz—or else he would be here, wouldn’t he, on the doorstep again, wouldn’t he at least be asking?—but he doesn’t want to be separated from her either. Or maybe he’s just bargaining, maybe he’s just trying to get the price up. Roz grits her teeth and holds the line. This is going to cost her but it will be worth it to cut the string, the tie; the chain, whatever this heavy thing is that’s holding her down. You need to know when to fold. At any rate she’s functioning. More or less. Though she’s done better.

She goes off to see a shrink, to see if she can improve herself,’ make herself over into a new woman, one who no longer gives a shit. She would like that. The shrink is a nice person; Roz likes her. Together the two of them labour over Roz’s life as if it’s a jigsaw puzzle, a mystery story with a solution at the end. They arrange and rearrange the pieces, trying to get them to come out better. They are hopeful: if Roz can figure out what story she’s in, then they will be able to spot the erroneous turns she took, they can retrace her steps, they can change the ending. They work out a tentative plot. Maybe Roz married Mitch because, although she thought at the time that Mitch was very different from her father, she sensed he was the same underneath. He would cheat on her the way her father had cheated on her mother, and she would keep forgiving him and taking him back just the way her mother had. She would rescue him, over and over. She would play the saint and he the sinner. Except that her parents ended up together and Roz and Mitch did not, so what went wrong? Zenia went wrong. Zenia switched the plot on Roz, from rescue to running away, and then when Mitch wanted to be rescued again Roz was no longer up to it. Whose fault was that? Who was to blame? Ah. Didn’t Roz think that too much was spent apportioning blame? Did she blame, perhaps, herself? In a word, yes. Maybe she still can’t quite leave God out of it, and the notion that she’s being punished.

Maybe it was nobody’s fault, the shrink suggests. Maybe these things just happen, like plane crashes.

If Roz wants Mitch back that badly—and it appears that she does, now that she has a greater insight into the dynamics of their relationship—maybe she should ask him to come for counselling. Maybe she should forgive him, at least to that extent.

All this is very reasonable. Roz thinks of making the phone call. She is almost nerved up to it, she is almost there. Then, in drizzly March, Zenia dies. Is killed in Lebanon, blown up by a bomb; comes back in a tin can, and is buried. Roz does not cry. Instead she rejoices fiercely—if there was a bonfire she’d dance around it, shaking a tambourine if one was provided. But after that she’s afraid, because Zenia is nothing if not vengeful. Being dead won’t alter that. She’ll think of something.

Mitch isn’t at the funeral. Roz cranes her neck, scanning for him, but there’s only a bunch of men she doesn’t know. And Tony and Charis, of course.

She wonders whether Mitch has heard, and if he has, how he’s taking it. She ought to feel that Zenia has been cleared out of the way, like a moth-eaten fur coat, a tree branch fallen across the path, but she doesn’t. Zenia dead is more of a barrier than Zenia alive; though, as she tells the shrink, she can’t explain why. Could it be remorse, because Zenia the hated rival is dead and Roz wanted her to be, and Roz is not? Possibly. You aren’t responsible for everything, says the shrink.

Surely Mitch will now change, appear, react. Wake up, as if from hypnotism. But he doesn’t phone. He makes no sign, and now it’s April, the first week, the second week, the third. When Roz calls his lawyer, finally, to find out where he is, the lawyer can’t say. Something was mentioned about a trip, he seems to recall. Where? The lawyer doesn’t know.

Where Mitch is, is in Lake Ontario. He’s been there a while. The police pick up his boat, the Rosalind II, drifting with sails furled, and eventually Mitch himself washes into shore off the Scarborough Bluffs. He has his lifejacket on, but at this time of year the hypothermia would have taken him very quickly. He must have slipped, they tell her. Slipped off and fallen in, and been unable to climb back on. There was a wind, the day he left harbour. An accident. If it had been suicide he wouldn’t have been wearing his lifejacket. Would he?

He would, he would, thinks Roz. He did that part of it for the kids. He didn’t want to leave a bad package for them. He did love them enough for that. But he knew all about the temperature of the water, he’d lectured her about it often. enough. Your body heat dissipates, quick as a wink. You numb, and then you die. And so he did. That it was deliberate Roz has no doubt, but she doesn’t say. It was an accident, she tells the children. Accidents happen.

She has to tidy up after him, of course. Pick up the odds and ends. Clean up the mess. She is, after all, still his wife.

The worst thing is the apartment, the apartment he shared with Zenia. He didn’t go, back to it after she left, after he chased off to Europe to find her. Some of his clothes are still in the closet—his impressive suits, his beautiful shirts, his ties. Roz = folds and packs, as so often before. His shoes, emptier than empty. Wherever else he is, he isn’t here.

Zenia is a stronger presence. Most of her things are gone, but a Chinese dressing gown, rose-coloured silk with dragons embroidered on it, is hanging over a chair in the bedroom. Opium, Roz thinks, smelling it. It’s the smell that bothers Roz the most. The tumbled sheets are still on the unmade bed, there are dirty towels in the bathroom. The scene of the crime. She should never have come here, this is torture. She should have sent Dolores.

Roz gives up going to the shrink. It’s the optimism that’s getting to her, the belief that things can be fixed, which right now feels like just one more burden: All this and she’s supposed to be hopeful, too? Thanks but no thanks. So, God, she says to herself. That was some number. Fooled me! Proud of yourself. What else have you got up your sleeve? Maybe a nice war, some genocide—hey, a plague or two? She knows she shouldn’t talk this way, even to herself, it’s tempting fate, but it gets her through the day.

Getting through the day is the main thing. She puts two pending real estate deals on hold; she’s in no shape to make major decisions. The magazine can run itself until she can get around to selling it, which shouldn’t be too hard, because ever since the changes Zenia brought in it’s showing a profit. If she can’t sell it she’ll fold it up. She doesn’t have the heart to go on with a publication that has made such extravagant claims, claims she has so calamitously failed to embody in herself. Superwoman she’s not, and failed is the key word. She’s been a success at many things, but not at the one thing. Not at standing by her man. Because if Mitch drowned himself—if there wasn’t enough left for him to live for—whose fault was it? Zenia’s, yes, but also her own. She should have remembered about his own father, who took the same dark road. She should have let him back in.

Getting through the day is one thing, getting through the night is another. She can’t brush her teeth in her splendid doublesinked bathroom without sensing Mitch beside her, she can’t take a shower without looking to see if his damp footprints are on the floor. She can’t sleep in the middle of her raspberrycoloured bed, because, more than ever, more than when he was alive but elsewhere, he is almost there. But he’s not there. He’s missing. He’s a missing person. He’s gone off someplace where she can’t get at him.

She can’t sleep in her raspberry-coloured bed at all. She lies down, gets up, puts on her bathrobe, wanders downstairs to the kitchen where she burrows through the refrigerator; or she tiptoes along the upstairs hall, listening for the breathing of her children. She’s anxious about them now, more than ever, and they are anxious about her. Despite her efforts to reassure them, to tell them that she is fine and everything will be all right, she frightens them. She can tell.

It must be the flatness of her voice, her face naked of makeup and disguise. She drags a blanket around the house with her in case sleep might choose to appear. Sometimes she falls asleep on the floor, in the family room, with the television on for company. Sometimes she drinks, hoping to relax herself, conk herself out. Sometimes it works.

Dolores quits. She says she’s found another job, one with a pension plan, but Roz doesn’t think it’s that. It’s the bad luck; Dolores is afraid of catching it. Roz will replace her, find someone else; but later, when she can think. After she’s had some sleep.

She goes to the doctor, the GP, the same one she uses for the children’s coughs, and asks for some sleeping pills. Just to get her through this period, she says. The doctor is understanding, the pills are granted. She’s careful with them at first, but then they don’t work so well and she takes more. One evening she takes a handful of them, and a triple scotch; not out of any’ desire to die, she doesn’t want to do that, but out of simple irritation at being awake. She ends up on the kitchen floor.

It’s Larry who finds her, coming back from a friend’s. He phones the ambulance. He’s old now, older than he should be. He’s responsible.

Roz comes to, and finds herself being walked around between two large nurses. Where is she? In a hospital. How weak, how embarrassing, she didn’t intend to end up in such a place. “I need to go home,” she says. “I need to get some rest.”

“She’s coming out of it,” says the one on the left. “You’ll be fine, dear,—says the other.

Roz has not been she or dear for a long time. There’s a flicker of humiliation. Then it subsides.

Roz floats up out of the fog. She can feel the bones of her skull, thin as a skin; inside them her brain is swollen and full of pulp. Her body is dark and vast as the sky, her nerves pinpricks of brightness: the stars, long strings of them, wavering like seaweed. She could drift, she could sink. Mitch would be there.

Then Charis is sitting beside her, beside her bed, holding her left hand. “Not yet,” says Charis. “You need to come back, it’s not your time. You still have things to do.”

When she’s herself, when she’s normal, Roz finds Charis an endearing nincompoop—let’s face it, a polymath she’s not—and mostly dismisses her gauzy metaphysics. Now, though, Charis reaches down with her other hand and takes hold of Roz’s foot, and Roz feels grief travelling through her like a wave, up through her body and along her arm and into her hand, and out into Charis’s hand, and out. Then she feels a tug, a pull, as if Charis is a long way away, on the shore, and has hold of something—something like a rope—and is hauling Roz in, out of the water, the water of the lake, where she has almost drowned. That’s life over there: a beach, the sun, some small figures. Her children, waving, shouting to her, though she can’t hear them. She concentrates on breathing, on forcing the air down into her lungs. She’s strong enough, she can make it.

“Yes,” says Charis. “You will:”

Tony has moved into Roz’s house, to be with the children. After Roz is let out of the hospital Charis moves in as well, just for a time; just until Roz is back on her feet.

“You don’t need to do this,” Roz protests.

“Somebody does,” says Tony briskly. “You have other suggestions?” She’s already phoned Roz’s office and told them that Roz has bronchitis; also laryngitis, so she can’t speak on the phone. Flowers arrive, and Charis puts them in vases and then forgets to add water. She goes to the health food store and brings back various capsules and extractions, which she feeds to Roz or else rubs onto her, and some breakfast cereals made from unknown seeds that need to be boiled a lot. Roz longs for chocolate, and Tony smuggles some in for her. “That’s a good sign,” she tells Roz.

Charis has brought August with her, and the three girls play Barbie doll games together in the twins’ playroom, violent games in which Barbie goes on the warpath and takes over the world and bosses everyone else around, and other games in which she comes to a nasty end. Or they dress up in Roz’s old slips and sneak around the house, three princesses on an expedition. Roz rejoices to hear the loud voices again, the arguments; the twins have been far too quiet lately.

Tony makes cups of tea, and, for dinner, olden-days tuna casseroles with cheese and potato-chip toppings, Roz thought such things had vanished from the world, and Charis massages Roz’s feet with mint essence and rose oil. She tells Roz that she’s an ardent soul, with connections to Peru. These things that have happened to her, which look like tragedy, are past lives working themselves out. Roz must learn from them, because that is why we return to earth: to learn. “You don’t stop being who you are, in your next life,” she says, “but you add things.” Roz bites her tongue, because she’s returning to herself again and she thinks this is diarrhea, but she would never dream of saying so because Charis means well, and Charis runs baths for her that have sticks of cinnamon and leaves floating in them, as if Roz is about to be turned into chicken stock.

“You’re spoiling me,” Roz tells them. Now that she’s feeling better she’s made uneasy by all the fussing. She is usually the one who does these things, the hen things, the taking care. She’s not used to being on the receiving end.

“You’ve been on a hard journey,” says Charis, in her gentlevoice. “You used up a lot of your energy. Now you can let go:”

“That’s not so easy,” says Roz.

“I know,” says Charis. “But you’ve never liked easy things.” By never, she means not for the past four thousand years. Which is about how old Roz feels.

Roz finds herself sitting on the cellar floor in the light from the one unshaded overhead bulb, an empty plate beside her, a children’s storybook open on her knees. She’s twisting and untwisting her wedding ring, the ring that once meant she was married, the ring that’s weighing her down, turning it on her finger as if she’s unscrewing it, or else expecting some genie or other to appear from nowhere and solve everything for her. Put the pieces back together, make everything right; slide Mitch alive back into her bed where she will find him when she goes upstairs—scrubbed and scented and brushed and cunning, filled to the brim with affectionate lies, lies she can see through, lies she can deal with, twenty years younger. Another chance. Now that she knows what to do she will do it better this time. Tell me, God—why don’t we get rehearsals?

How long has she been down here, whimpering in bad light? She must go upstairs and deal with reality, whatever that may be. She must pull herself together.

She does this by patting the pockets of her bathrobe, where she always used to keep a tissue before the twins outlawed them. Not finding any, she blots her eyes on her orange sleeve, leaving a black smear of mascara, then wipes her nose on the other sleeve. Well, who’s to see, except God? According to the nuns he had a preference for cotton hankies. God, she tells him, if you hadn’t wanted us to wipe our noses on our sleeves you wouldn’t have given us sleeves. Or noses. Or tears, as far as that goes. Or memory, or pain.

She slides the kids’ books back onto the shelf. She should donate these books to some charity, or maybe lend them—let them loose in the world to warp some small child’s mind, while she waits for her own grandchildren to appear. What grandchildren? Dream on, Roz. The twins are too young and will anyway probably grow up to be stock-car racers or women who go off to live among the gorillas, something fearless and non-progenitive; as for Larry, he’s in absolutely no hurry, and if the faux women he’s come up with so far are any sample of what the future holds in the daughter-in-law department, Roz would rather not hold her breath.

Life would be so much easier if there were still arranged marriages. She’d go out into the marriage market, cash in hand, bargain with a dependable marriage broker, secure a nice bride for Larry: bright but not bossy, sweet but not a pushover, and with a wide pelvic structure and a strong back. If her own marriage had been arranged, would things have’ turned out any worse than they did? Is it fair, to send inexperienced young girls out into the wild forest to fend for themselves? Girls with big bones and maybe not the smallest of feet. What would help would be a wise woman, some gnarly old crone who would step out from behind a tree, who would give advice, who would say No, not this one, who would say Beauty is only skin deep, in men as well as women, who would see down as far as the heart. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? An older woman knows. But how much older do you have to get before you acquire that kind of wisdom?

Roz keeps expecting it to sprout in her, grow all over her, sort of like age spots; but it hasn’t yet.

She hauls herself up off the floor and dusts her behind, a mistake because her hands are covered with book dirt, as she realizes too late when she looks at them, having encountered a squashed silverfish stuck to her velour-covered buttock, and Lord knows what’s been crawling over her while she’s been sitting here woolgathering. Woolgathering, her mother’s word, a word so old, rooted so far back in time, that although everyone knows what it means nobody knows where it came from. Why was gathering wool supposed to be lazy? Reading and thinking were both woolgathering, to her mother. Rosalind! Don’t just sit there woolgathering! Sweep the front walk!

Roz’s legs have gone to sleep. Every step she takes sends pins and needles shooting into them. She limps towards the cellar steps, pausing to wince. When she gets up to the kitchen she will open the refrigerator, just to see if there’s something in there she might like to eat. She hasn’t had a proper dinner, she often doesn’t. Nobody to cook for her, nobody to cook for, not that she ever cooked. Nobody to order in for. Food should be shared. Solitary eating can be like solitary drinking—a way of dulling the edge, of filling in the blanks. The blank; the empty man-shaped outline left by Mitch.

But there won’t be anything in the fridge that she wants; or’ rather, a few things maybe, but she will not stoop so low, she will not eat spoonfuls from the jar of chocolate-rum ice cream sauce, as she has done before, or blitz the can of pate de foie gras she’s been saving—up for God knows what mythical occasion, along with the bottle of champagne she keeps tucked away at the back. There’s a bunch of raw vegetables in there, roughage she bought in a fit of nutritional virtue, but right now they don’t appeal. She foresees their fate: they will turn slowly to green and orange goo in the crisper, and then she will buy more.

Maybe she could call up Charis or Tony, or both of them, invite them over; order up some red-hot chicken wings from the Indian tandoori take-out on Carlton, or some shrimp balls and garlic beans and fried won-ton from her favourite Szechuan place on Spadina, or both: have a sinful little multicultural feast. But Charis will already be back on the Island, and it’s dark by now, and she doesn’t like the thought of Charis out alone at night, there might be muggers, and Charis is such an obvious target, a long-haired middle-aged woman walking around covered with layers of printed textiles and bumping into things, she might as well have a sign pinned to her, Snatch my purse, and Roz can rarely persuade her to take taxis even if she offers to pay for them herself, because Charis goes on about the waste of gasoline. She will take a bus; or worse, she might decide to walk, through the wilds of Rosedale, past the rows of ersatz Georgian mansions, and get picked up by the police for vagrancy.

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.