Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [188]
At times it felt like part of her, part of her body, like a hump on her back. She was torn between the urge to cut it off from herself, to give it away, and the urge to make more of it, because wasn’t it her protection? Maybe they were the same urge. As her father said, you couldn’t give without getting first.
Roz got with the left hand and gave away with the right, or was it the other way around? At first she gave to the body items, the hearts because of her father, the cancer because of her mother. She gave to World Hunger, she gave to the United Way, she gave to the Red Cross. That was in the sixties. But when the women’s movement hit town in the early seventies, Roz was sucked into it like a dust bunny into a vacuum cleaner. She was visible, that was why. She was high-profile, and there weren’t many women then who were, except for movie stars and the Queen of England. But also she was ready for the message, having been sandbagged twice already by Mitch and his things. The first time – the first time she found out, anyway – was when she was pregnant with Larry, and lower he couldn’t go.
Roz loved the consciousness-raising groups, she loved the free-ranging talk. It was like catching up on all the sisters she’d never had, it was like having a great big family in which the members, for once, had something in common; it was like being allowed, finally, into all the groups and cliques she’d never quite been able to crash before. No more mealy-mouth, no more my-hubby-is-better-than-your-hubby, no more beating about the bush! You could say anything!
She loved sitting in a circle, though after a while she noticed that the circle was not quite circular. One woman would tell her problem and admit her pain, and then another one would do it, and then Roz would take her turn, and a sort of disbelieving glaze would come down over their eyes and someone would change the subject.
What was it? Why was Roz’s pain second-rate? It took her a while to figure it out: it was her money. Surely, they thought, anyone with as much money as Roz couldn’t possibly be suffering. She remembered an old expression from her uncles: My heart bleeds for him. This was always said with extreme sarcasm, about someone who’d got lucky, which meant rich. Roz was expected to do the bleeding for, but she could not expect to be bled over in return.
Still, there was one area in which Roz was in demand. In a movement so perennially cash-starved you could almost say she was indispensable. So it was natural that she was the one they had come to when Wise Woman World was about to go under because it couldn’t attract big glossy lipstick-and-booze advertising. It was more than a magazine then, it was a friend; a friend that combined high ideals and hope with the sharing of down-and-dirty secrets. The truth about masturbation! The truth about wanting, sometimes, to shove your kids’ heads into the wall! What to do when men rubbed themselves against you from behind, in the subway, and when your boss chased you around the desk, and when you had those urges to take all the pills in the medicine cabinet, the day before your period! Wise Woman World was all the sleepover parties Roz had once felt were going on behind her back, and of course she had to save it.
The others wanted the magazine to be a cooperative, the way it already was. They wanted Roz to just give them the money, period, and no tax write-off either because it was too political. It wasn’t peanuts either, what it would take. There was no point in a small cash injection. Not enough would be the same as nothing, she might as well flush it down the toilet.
“I never invest in anything I can’t control,” she told them. “You have to issue shares. Then I’ll buy a majority holding.” They got angry at her for that, but Roz said, “Your leg’s broken, you go to a doctor. You have