Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [184]
Where had the money come from? Out of thin air. It was like magic; her father waved his hand and presto, there it was. “The ship came in,” said Roz’s father. The uncles got some too. It was for all three of them, said her father. Equal shares, because the ship belonged to all.
Roz knew it wasn’t a real ship. Still, she could picture it, an old-fashioned ship like a galleon, a treasure ship, its sails golden in the sunlight, pennants flying from its masts. Or something like that. Something noble.
Her parents sold the rooming house and moved north, away from the streets of narrow cheek-by-jowl old houses and tiny lawns, into an enormous house with a semi-circular driveway in front and a three-car garage. Roz decided that they had become rich, but her mother told her not to use that word. “We’re comfortable,” was what she said.
But she didn’t seem comfortable at all. Instead she seemed afraid. She was afraid of the house, she was afraid of the cleaning lady Roz’s father insisted on, she was afraid of the new furniture that she herself had bought – “Get the best,” said Roz’s father – she was afraid of her new clothes. She wandered around in her housecoat and slippers, from room to room, as if she was looking for something; as if she was lost. She had been much more comfortable back in the old neighbourhood, where things were the right size and she knew her way around.
She said she had nobody to talk to. But when had she ever talked that much, before? And who had she ever talked to? Roz, Roz’s father, the uncles. Now the uncles had places of their own. The roomers? There were no roomers any more, for her to complain about and boss around. When men came to the door delivering things they took one look at her and asked to speak to the lady of the house. But she had to pretend to be happy, because of Roz’s father. “This is what we waited for,” he said.
Roz has new clothes too, and a new name. She’s no longer Rosalind Greenwood, she’s Roz Grunwald. This, her parents explain, has been her real name all along. “Why wasn’t I called that before, then?” she asks.
“It was the war,” they say. “That name was too Jewish. It wasn’t safe.”
“Is it safe now?” she asks.
Not entirely. Different things are safe, where they are living now. By the same token, different things are dangerous.
Roz goes to a new school. She’s in high school now so she goes to Forest Hill Collegiate Institute. She’s no longer a Catholic: she’s renounced all of that – not without qualms, not without residue – in favour of being a Jew. Since there are so clearly sides, she would rather be on that one. She reads up on it because she wants to do it right; then she asks her father to buy two sets of dishes, and refuses to eat bacon. Her father buys the dishes to humour her, but her mother won’t separate the meat dishes from the milk ones, and gives her a wounded look if she brings it up. Nor will her father join a temple. “I was never religious,” he says. “Like I always said – who owns God? If there was no religions there won’t be all this trouble.”
There are a lot of Jewish kids at Roz’s new school; in fact at this school Jewish is the thing to be. But whereas once Roz was not Catholic enough, now she isn’t Jewish enough. She’s an oddity, a hybrid, a strange half-person. Her clothes, although expensive, are subtly not right. Her accent is not right either. Her enthusiasms are not right, nor her skills: Chinese burns and kicking