Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [191]
Not that she’d felt the pride working in her at the time. Not at all. That was the thing about sins – they could dress up, they could disguise themselves so you hardly knew them. She hadn’t thought she was being proud, merely hospitable. Zenia wanted to say thank you, because of Roz’s father, and it would have been very wrong of Roz to deny her the opportunity.
There had been another kind of pride, too. She’d wanted to be proud of her father. Her flawed father, her cunning father, her father the fixer, her father the crook. She’d told little bits of his war story when people were interviewing her for magazine profiles, Roz the Business Whiz, how did you get your start, how do you juggle all your different lives, what do you do about daycare, how does your husband cope, what do you do about the housework, but even while she was telling about him, her father the hero, her father the rescuer, she knew she was sprucing him up, shining a good light on him, pinning posthumous medals onto his chest. He himself had refused to discuss it, this shadowy part of his life. What do you need to know for? he’d say. That time is over. People could get hurt. Waiting for Zenia, she’d been more than a little nervous about what she might find out.
46
When Zenia does come for a drink, finally – she hasn’t rushed it – it’s a Friday and Roz is wiped because it’s been a vile week at the office, input overload times ten, and the twins have chosen this day to give each other haircuts because they want to be punk rockers, even though they’re only seven, and Roz has been intending to parade them for Zenia but now they look as if they have a bad case of mange, and they show no signs of repentance at all, and anyway Roz doesn’t feel she should display anger because girls should not be given the idea that being pretty is the only thing that counts and that other people’s opinions of how they ought to arrange their bodies are more important than their own.
So after her first yelp of surprise and dismay she has tried to act as if everything is normal, which in a way it is, although her tongue is just a stub because she’s bitten it so hard, and she has dutifully repressed her strong desire to send them upstairs to take baths or play in their playroom, and when Zenia arrives at the front door, wearing amazing lizard-skin shoes, three hundred bucks at least and with heels so high her legs are a mile long, and a cunning fuchsia-and-black raw silk suit with a little nipped-in waist and a tight skirt well above the knees – Roz is so disgusted that mini-skirts have come back, what are you supposed to do if you have serious thighs, and she remembers those skirts from the last time around, in the sixties, you had to sit down with your legs glued together or all would be on view, the once-unmentionable, the central item, the foul and disgraceful blot, the priceless treasure, an invitation to male peering, to lustful pinching and leering, to foaming at the mouth, to rape and pillage, just as the nuns always warned – there are the twins, wearing Roz’s cast-off slips from their dress-up box and running down the hall with Mitch’s electric shaver, chasing the cat, because they want it to be a punk rock mascot, although Roz has told them before that the shaver is strictly out of bounds and they will be in deep trouble if Mitch discovers cat fur caught in it, it’s bad enough when Roz can’t find her own shaver and uses Mitch’s on her legs and pits and isn’t careful enough washing the stubble out of it. The twins pay no attention to her because they assume she’ll cover for them, lie herself blue, hurl her body in front of the bullets, and they’re right, she will.
Zenia sees them, and says, “Are those yours? Did they fall in the food processor?” and it’s just like something Roz might have said herself, or thought at