Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [155]
“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, ça! 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 flannelettenightie 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 re-done. 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