Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [13]
“So, what we need is a blender,” says Roz. “We’ll put in your waist and my thighs, and we’ll split the difference. Fine by you?”
If they had been younger such conversations might have pointed to serious dissatisfactions with their own bodies, serious longings. By this time they’re just repertoire. More or less.
There’s Roz now, waving to her outside the Toxique. Tony comes up to her and Roz stoops, and Tony stretches up her face, and they kiss the air on both sides of each other’s heads, as has lately become the fashion in Toronto, or in certain layers of it. Roz parodies the ritual by sucking in her cheeks so her mouth is a fish-mouth, and crossing her eyes. “Pretentious? Moi?” she says. Tony smiles, and they go in together.
The Toxique is one of their favourite places: not too expensive, and with a buzz; though it’s a little arch, a little grubby. Plates arrive with strange textures sticking to their undersides, the waiters may have eye shadow or nose rings, the waitresses tend to wear fluorescent leg-warmers and leather mini-shorts. There’s a long smoked-glass mirror along one side, salvaged from some wrecked hotel. Posters of out-of-date alternative-theatre events are glued to the walls, and people with pallid skin and chains hanging from their sombre, metal-studded clothing slouch through to the off-limits back rooms or confer together on the splintering stairs that lead down to the toilets. The Toxique specials are a chèvre-and-roasted-pepper sandwich, a Newfoundland cod-cake, and a sometimes mucilaginous giant salad with a lot of walnuts and shredded roots in it. There’s baklava and tiramisù, and strong, addictive espresso.
They don’t go there at night, of course, when the rock groups and the high decibels take over. But it’s good for lunch. It cheers them up. It makes them feel younger, and more daring, than they are.
Charis is already there, sitting in the corner at a red formica table with gold sprinkles baked into it and aluminum legs and trim, which is either authentic fifties or else a reproduction. She’s got them a bottle of white wine already, and a bottle of Evian water. She sees them and smiles, and airy kisses go round the table.
Today Charis is wearing a sagging mauve cotton jersey dress, with a fuzzy grey cardigan over top and an orange-and-aqua scarf with a design of meadow flowers draped around her neck. Her long straight hair is grey-blonde and parted in the middle; she has her reading glasses stuck up on top of her head. Her peach lipstick could be her real lips. She resembles a slightly faded advertisement for herbal shampoo – healthful, but verging on the antique. What Ophelia would have looked like if she’d lived, or the Virgin Mary when middle-aged – earnest and distracted, and with an inner light. It’s the inner light that gets her in trouble.
Roz is packed into a suit that Tony recognizes from the window of one of the more expensive designer stores on Bloor. She shops munificently and with gusto, but often on the run. The jacket is electric blue, the skirt is tight. Her face is carefully air-brushed, and her hair has just been re-coloured. This time it’s auburn. Her mouth is raspberry.
Her face doesn’t go with the outfit. It isn’t insouciant and lean, but plump, with cushiony pink milkmaid’s cheeks and dimples when she smiles. Her eyes, intelligent, compassionate, and bleak, seem to belong to some other face, a thinner one; thinner, and more hardened.
Tony settles into her chair, parking her big tote bag under it where she can use it as a footstool. Short kings once had special foot cushions so their legs wouldn’t dangle as they sat on their thrones. Tony sympathizes.
“So,” says Roz after the preliminaries, “we’re all in our places, with bright shiny faces. What’s new? Tony, I saw the cutest outfit in Holt’s, it would be so good for you. A mandarin collar – mandarin collars are back! – and brass buttons down the front.” She lights her usual cigarette, and Charis gives her usual tiny cough. This part of the Toxique is not a smoke-free