Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [192]
She laughs, and they have the drink in the sun room, which Roz refuses to call the conservatory even though she’s always hankered after a conservatory, a conservatory with miniature orange trees in it, or orchids, like the ones in twenties murder mysteries, the kind with the map of the English mansion and an X where the body gets found, in the conservatory quite frequently. But although the sun room is glass and has a Victorian cupola thing on top it’s too small to be a real conservatory, and the word itself is too highfalutin for the voice of Roz’s mother, which lives on intermittently inside Roz’s head and would sneer, although it’s full of plants, plants with limited lifespans, because whose responsibility are they exactly? Mitch says he doesn’t have the time, although he was the one who ordered all this vegetation; but Roz’s thumb is not green, it’s brown, the brown of withered sedges. It’s not that she doesn’t want the plants to live. She even likes them, though she can’t tell the difference between a begonia and a rhododendron. But these things should be done by professionals: a plant service. They come, they see, they water, they cart away the dying, they bring fresh troops.
She has a service like that for the office, so why not here? Mitch says he doesn’t want yet more strangers tramping through the house – he’s suffering from decorator burnout – but it’s possible that he likes the image of Roz with an apron and a watering can, just as he likes the image of Roz with an apron and a frying pan, and an apron and a feather duster, even though Roz can’t cook her way out of a paper bag, why did God make restaurants if he intended her to cook, and she has a phobia about feather dusters, having been force-fed on them in childhood. The constant is the apron, the Good Housekeeping guarantee that Roz will always be home whenever Mitch chooses to get back there.
Or there may be another agenda, another nuance to the guilt Roz is supposed to feel, and does feel, over the kaput plants, because Mitch wanted a swimming pool instead of a sun room, so he could dive into a chlorine purification bath and sterilize his chest hair and kill whatever athlete’s foot and crotch fungus and tongue rot he may have picked up from plucking the ripening floozies; but Roz said an outdoor swimming pool was ridiculous in Canada, two months of swelter and ten of freeze-your-buns-off, and she refused to have an indoor one because she knew people who did and their houses smelled like gas refineries on a hot day because of all the chemicals, and there would be complicated machinery that would break down and that Roz would somehow be responsible for getting fixed. The worst thing about swimming pools as far as Roz is concerned is that they are one step too close to the great outdoors. Wildlife falls into them. Ants, moths, and such. Like the lake at summer camp, she’d be flailing along and suddenly there would be a bug, right at nose level. Swimming, in Roz’s opinion, is a major health hazard.
Zenia laughs and says she couldn’t agree more, and Roz talks on, because she’s nervous at seeing Zenia again after all these years, she remembers the reputation, the aura of green poison that encircled Zenia, the invisible incandescence, touch her and you’d get burned; and she remembers history, the stories of Tony and Charis. So she has to step carefully here, it’s no wonder she’s nervous, and when she’s nervous she talks. Talks, and also eats, and also drinks. Zenia takes one olive and chews it daintily, Roz gobbles the lot, and touches up Zenia’s martini, and pours herself another, and offers a cigarette, words pouring out of her like ink from a squid. Camouflage. She’s relieved to note that Zenia smokes. It would be intolerable if she were thin and well-dressed and unwrinkled and a knockout, and a non-smoker as well.
“So,” says Roz, when she’s made a sufficient fool of herself to consider the ice broken. “My father.” Because this is what she wants, this is the point of the visit. Isn’t it?
“Yes,” says