Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [162]
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.
41
The lunch is at a restaurant called Nereids. It’s a small place, a done-over house on Queen East, with a large well-put-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 capital-A 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 Canadian government walled out the Jews, in the thirties and during the war. Not that her father was even a whole Jew. Why do you inherit Jewishness through the mother’s side? Tony once asked Roz. Because so many Jewish women were raped by Cossacks and what-have-you that they could never be sure who the father was. But her father