Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [169]
Mitch has always flirted with waitresses, in his restrained way. But that’s like saying a ninety-year-old can-can dancer has always done the can-can. When do you know when to stop?
After the salad the main course arrives. It’s a different girl this time. Well, a different woman; she’s a little older, but with a ravishing cloud of dark hair and amazing great tits, and a tiny little waist Roz would kill for. Roz looks hard at her and knows she’s seen her before. Much earlier, in another life. “Zenia!” she exclaims, before she can help it.
“Pardon me?” says the woman. Then she looks at Roz in turn, and smiles, and says, “Roz? Roz Grunwald? Is it you? You don’t look like your pictures!”
Roz has an overwhelming urge to deny it. She shouldn’t have spoken in the first place, she should have dropped her purse on the floor and dived after it, anything to stay out of Zenia’s sightlines. Who needs the evil eye?
But the shock of seeing Zenia there, working as a waitress – a server – in Nereids, overrides all that, and “What the heck are you doing here?” Roz blurts out.
“Research,” says Zenia. “I’m a journalist, I’ve been freelance for years, in England mostly. But I wanted to come back, just to see – to see what things were like, over here. So I got myself commissioned to do a piece on sexual harassment in the workplace.”
Zenia must be different, thinks Roz, if she’s writing about that stuff. She even looks different. She can’t place it at first, and then she sees. It’s the tits. And the nose too. The former have swelled, the latter has shrunk. Zenia’s nose used to be more like Roz’s. “Really?” says Roz, who has a professional interest. “Who for?”
“Saturday Night,” says Zenia. “It’s mostly an interview format, but I thought it would be good to take a look at the locales.” She smiles more at Roz than at Mitch. “I was in a factory last week, and the week before that I spent in a hospital. You wouldn’t believe how many nurses get attacked by their patients! I don’t mean just grabbing – they throw things, the bedpans and so forth, it’s a real occupational hazard. They wouldn’t let me do any actual nursing though; this is more hands-on.”
Mitch is beginning to look peevish at being sidelined, so Roz introduces him to Zenia. She doesn’t want to say “an old friend,” so instead she says, “We were at the same school.” Not that we were ever what you’d call best buddies, thinks Roz. She scarcely knew Zenia then, except as an object of gossip. Lurid, sensational gossip.
Mitch does nothing to help Roz out, in the conversation department. He simply mutters something and stares at his plate. He obviously feels he’s been interrupted. “So, how’re the occupational hazards in this place?” says Roz, covering for him. “Has anyone called you ‘honeybun’ and pinched your butt?”
Zenia laughs. “Same old Roz. She was always the life of the party,” she says to Mitch.
While Roz is wondering what parties she ever attended at which Zenia was also present – none, as far as she can remember, but she used to drink more in those days, or more at once, and maybe she’s forgotten – Zenia puts her hand on Roz’s shoulder. Her voice changes, becomes lower, more solemn. “You know, Roz,” she says, “I’ve always wanted to tell you this. But I never could before.”
“What?” says Roz.
“Your father,” says Zenia.
“Oh dear,” says Roz, fearing some scam she’s never found out about, some buried scandal. Maybe Zenia is her long-lost half-sister, perish the thought. Her father was a sly old fox. “What did he do?”
“He saved my life,” says Zenia. “During the war.”
“Saved your life?” says Roz. “During the war?” Wait a minute – was Zenia even born, during the war? Roz hesitates, unwilling to believe. But this is what she’s longed for always – an eyewitness, someone involved but impartial, who could assure her that her father really was what he was rumoured to be: a hero. Or a semi-hero; at any rate, more