Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [189]
They didn’t like it either when Roz put Mitch on the board of directors and stuck on a couple of his legal buddies to keep him company, but it was the only way. If they wanted her help they had to realize what her life conditions were, and if Mitch couldn’t participate, he would sabotage. Her home life would be turned into a maze of snares and booby traps, more than it already was. “It’s just three meetings a year,” she told them. “It’s the price you pay.” As prices went – as prices had gone, here and there in world history – it wasn’t all that high.
“I’m having Zenia over for a drink,” Roz tells Mitch. If she doesn’t tell him, he’s sure to walk in on the two of them and then sulk because he’s been left out of the picture. Being a woman with power doesn’t mean Roz has to tread less softly around Mitch. She has to tread more softly, she has to diminish herself, pretend she’s smaller than she is, apologize for her success, because everything she does is magnified.
“Zenia who?” says Mitch.
“You know, we ran into her in that restaurant,” says Roz. She’s pleased Mitch doesn’t remember.
“Oh yes,” says Mitch. “She’s not like most of your friends.”
Mitch isn’t that keen on Roz’s friends. He thinks they’re a bunch of man-hating hairy-legged whip-toting feminists, because at one point, in his early days on the board of Wise Woman World, they were. In vain does Roz tell him that everyone was then, it was a trend, and the overalls were just a fashion statement – not that Roz ever wore them herself, she would’ve looked like a truck driver. He knows better, he knows it wasn’t just overalls. The women at Wise Woman had put up with him because of Roz, but they hadn’t suffered him gladly. They wouldn’t let him tell them how to be good feminists, much as he tried. Maybe it was because he said they should use humour and charm because otherwise men would be frightened of them, and they weren’t in the mood to be charming, not to him, not just then. He must have been badly traumatized by that whole phase; though he wasn’t above trying a few twists and ploys of his own.
Roz remembers the dinner party she threw to celebrate the restructuring of Wise Woman World, when Mitch was sitting beside Alma the managing editor, and made the mistake of trying to run his hand up and down her leg under the table while carrying on a too-animated theoretical discussion with Edith the designer. Poor lamb, he thought Roz couldn’t guess. But one look at Mitch’s arm position – and his dampening, reddening, braised-looking face, and Alma’s stern frown and the squint lines around her mouth – told all. Roz watched with furious interest as Alma struggled with her dilemma: whether to put up with it because Mitch was Roz’s husband and she didn’t want to jeopardize her job – a thing Mitch had counted on with others, in the past – or whether to call him on it. Principle won, and also outrage, and Alma said to him sharply, though in an undertone, “I am not a piccolo.”
“Pardon?” said Mitch, distantly, politely, bluffing it out, keeping his hand under the table. The poor baby hadn’t realized yet that women had really changed. In days of yore, Alma would have felt guilty for attracting this kind of attention, but not any longer.
“Get your goddamn hand off my fucking leg or I’ll stab you with my fork,” hissed Alma.
Roz went into coughing mode to cover up that she’d heard, and Mitch’s hand shot up above ground as if he’d been scalded, and after that night he started referring to Alma with pity and concern, as if she were a lost soul. A drug addict or something. “Too bad about that girl,” he would say sadly. “She has such potential, but she has an attitude problem. She’d be quite good-looking if it weren’t for the scowl.” He hinted that she might be a lesbian; he hadn’t figured out that this was no