Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [190]
But that’s how Mitch tends to see Roz’s friends: scowly. And more lately, frumpy. He can’t resist commenting on how their faces are sliding down, as if his isn’t, though it’s true men can get away with looking older. Probably it’s revenge: he suspects Roz and her friends of talking him over behind his back, of analyzing him and providing remedies for him, as if he’s a stomach ailment. This was true once, granted, when Roz still thought she could change him, or when her friends thought she could change herself. When he was a project. Leave him, they’d say. Turf the bugger out! You can afford it! Why do you stay with him?
But Roz had her reasons, among them the children. Also she was still enough of a once-Catholic to be nervous about divorce. Also she didn’t want to admit to herself that she’d made a mistake. Also she was still in love with Mitch. So after a while she stopped discussing him with her friends, because what was left to say? It was an impasse, and chewing over solutions that she knew she would never implement made her feel guilty.
And then her friends gave up wearing overalls, and left the magazine, and went into dress-for-success tailored suits, and lost interest in Mitch, and discussed burnout instead, and Roz could permit herself to feel guilty about other things, such as being more energetic than they were. But Mitch keeps on saying, “Are you having lunch with that frumpy old man-hater?” whenever one of the friends from that era turns up again. He knows it gets to her.
He has a little more tolerance for Charis and Tony, maybe because Roz has known them so long and because they’re the twins’ godmothers. But he thinks Tony is a weirdo and Charis is a nut. That’s how he neutralizes them. As far as Roz knows he has never made a pass at either of them. Possibly he doesn’t place them in the category of woman but in some other category, not clearly defined. A sort of sexless gnome.
Roz calls up Tony at her History Department office. “You won’t believe this,” she says.
There is a pause while Tony tries to guess what it is she’s being called upon not to believe. “Probably not,” she says.
“Zenia’s back in town,” says Roz.
There’s another pause. “You were talking to her?” says Tony.
“I ran into her in a restaurant,” says Roz.
“You never just run into Zenia,” says Tony. “Look out, is my advice. What’s she up to? There must be something.”
“I think she’s changed,” says Roz. “She’s different from the way she used to be.”
“A leopard cannot change its spots,” says Tony. “Different how?”
“Oh, Tony, you’re so pessimistic!” says Roz. “She seemed – well, nicer. More human. She’s a freelance journalist now, she’s writing on women’s issues. Also” – Roz drops her voice – “her tits are bigger.”
“I don’t think tits can grow,” says Tony dubiously, having once looked into it.
“Most likely they didn’t,” says Roz. “They’re doing a lot of artificial ones now. I bet she got them implanted.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me,” says Tony. “She’s upping her strike capability. But tits or no tits, watch your back.”
“I’m just having her over for a drink,” says Roz. “I have to, really. She knew my father, during the war.” The full implications of which Tony could hardly be expected to understand.
So nobody could say, later, that Roz wasn’t warned. And nobody did say it, and nobody said, either, that Roz was warned, because Tony wasn’t one of those intolerable serves-you-right friends and she never reminded Roz of the precautions she had urged. But once the chips were down, Roz reminded herself. You walked into it with your eyes open, she would berate herself. Dimwit! What led you on?
She knows now what it was. It was Pride, deadliest of the Seven Deadlies; the sin of Lucifer, the wellspring of all the others. Vainglory, false courage, bravado. She must have thought she was some kind of a lion-tamer, some kind of a bullfighter; that she could succeed where her two friends had failed. Why not? She knew more than they’d known, because she knew