Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [171]
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