Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [177]
Walking home from school, Roz spends her time thinking about what she will do to Julia Warden tomorrow, to get even; until the last block, when the two Protestant boys who live on the corner see her and chase her along the sidewalk, yelling “The Pope stinks!” Almost to her house they catch her and rub snow in her face, and Roz kicks their legs. They let her go, laughing and yelling with mock pain, or real pain – “Ouch, ouch, she kicked me” – and then she picks up her snowy books and runs the rest of the way, not crying yet, and scrambles up her front steps onto her porch. “You’re not allowed on my property!” she yells. A snowball whizzes past her. If Roz’s mother were there, she would chase these boys off. “Ragamuffins!” she would say, and they would scatter. She sometimes takes the flat of her hand to Roz, but she won’t let anyone else lay a finger on her. Except the nuns, of course.
Roz brushes off the snow – she’s not supposed to track snow into the house – and goes inside, and down the hall to the kitchen. Two men are sitting at the kitchen table. They’re wearing DP clothes, not shabby ones, not worn out, but DP clothes all the same, Roz can tell because of the shape. On the table is a bottle that Roz knows straight away has liquor in it – she’s seen bottles like that on the sidewalk – and in front of each of the men there’s a glass. Roz’s mother is not in the room.
“Where’s my mother?” she says.
“She went to get food,” says one of the men. “She didn’t have nothing to eat.”
The other one says, “We’re your new uncles. Uncle George, Uncle Joe.”
Roz says, “I don’t have any uncles,” and Uncle George says, “Now, you do.” Then both of them laugh. They have loud laughs, and strange voices. DP voices, but with something else, some other accent. Something that’s like the movies.
“Sit,” says Uncle George hospitably, as if it’s his house, as if Roz is a dog. Roz is unsure of the situation – there have never been two men in the kitchen before – but she sits anyway.
Uncle George is the bigger one; he has a high forehead and light wavy hair slicked straight back. Roz can smell his hair goo, sweet, like theatres. He’s smoking a brown cigarette in a black holder. “Ebony,” he says to Roz. “You know what ebony is? It’s a tree.”
“She knows,” says Uncle Joe. “She’s a smart girl.” Uncle Joe is smaller, with hunched-up shoulders and spindly hands, and dark hair, almost black, and huge dark eyes. He has a tooth missing, off to one side. He sees Roz staring, and says, “Once, I had a gold tooth in this place. I keep it in my pocket.” And he does. He takes out a small wooden box, painted red with a design of tiny green flowers, and opens it, and there inside is a gold tooth.
“Why?” says Roz.
“You don’t want to leave a gold tooth lying around in your mouth, people get ideas,” says Uncle Joe.
Roz’s mother comes in, carrying two brown paper grocery bags, which she sets down on the counter. She is flushed, and pleased-looking. She says nothing at all about the drinking, nothing about the smoke. “These are friends of your father’s,” she says. “They were all in the war together. He’s coming, he’ll be here soon.” Then she bustles out again; she needs to go to the butcher’s, she says, because this is an occasion. Occasions call for meat.
“What did you do in the war?” says Roz, eager to find out more about her father.
The two uncles laugh, and look at each other. “We was horse thieves,” says Uncle George.
“The best horse