Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [196]
“So part of what I told Tony was true, I did work as a hooker. And I didn’t want to be Jewish, I didn’t want to be connected with all of that in any way. I guess I was running away from the past. That was then, this is now, right? I even got my nose done, after I’d gone to England and landed a magazine job and could afford it. I suppose I was ashamed. When those things get done to you, you feel more ashamed than if you’d done them yourself to other people. You think maybe you deserved it; or else that you should have been stronger – able to defend yourself, or something. You feel – well, beaten up.
“So I made up a different past for myself – it was better to be a White Russian. Denial, I guess you could call it. I lived with a White Russian, once, when I was sixteen, so I knew something about them.
“With Karen – with Charis – I must have been having some kind of a nervous breakdown. I needed to be mothered; my shrink says it was because my own mother was taken away. I shouldn’t have said I had cancer, because I didn’t. But I was sick, in another kind of way. Karen did wonders for me.
“It wasn’t a good thing – it was terrible, I suppose, to tell those stories. I owe both of them an apology. But I didn’t think I could’ve told them the real story, what really happened to me. They wouldn’t have understood it.”
She gives Roz a long look, straight out of her deep indigo eyes, and Roz is touched. She, Roz – she alone – has been chosen, to understand. And she does, she does.
“After I left Canada,” Zenia says, “things got worse. I had big ideas, but nobody seemed to share them. Looking the way I do doesn’t help, you know. Men don’t see you as a person, they just see the body, and so that’s all you see yourself. You think of your body as a tool, something to use. God, I’m tired of men! They’re so easy to amuse. All you have to do to get their attention is take off your clothes. After a while you want a bit more of a challenge, you know?
“I worked as a stripper for a year or so – that’s when I had my breasts done, this man I was living with paid for it – and I got into some bad habits. Coke first, and then heroin. It’s a wonder I’m not dead. Maybe I was trying to be, because of my family. You’d think that because I didn’t really know them it wouldn’t hurt. But it’s like being born minus a leg. There’s this terrible absence.
“It took me a long time, but I’ve finally come to terms with myself. I’ve worked it through. I was in therapy for years. It was hard, but now I know who I am.”
Roz is impressed. Zenia has not evaded, she hasn’t wriggled or squirmed. She has owned up, she has admitted, she’s confessed. That shows – what? Honesty? Good will? Maturity? Some admirable quality. The nuns used to put a high value on confessing, so much so that Roz once confessed to placing a dog turd in the cloakroom, something she had not actually done. They didn’t let you off punishment for confessing, though – she got the strap, all the same, and when you confessed to the priest you had to do penance – but they thought more highly of you, or so they said.
Also Zenia has been out in the world. The wide world, wider than Toronto; the deep world, deeper than the small pond where Roz is such a large and sheltered frog. Zenia makes Roz feel not only protected, but lax. Her own battles have been so minor.
“You’ve done really well,” Roz says. “I mean – what a story! It’s great material!” She’s thinking of the magazine, because this is the kind of story they like to run: inspirational, a success story. A story about overcoming fears and obstacles, about facing up to yourself and becoming a whole person. It’s like the story they did two months ago, about the woman who fought bulimia to a standstill. Roz finds stories about the one lost sheep who caused more joy in Heaven hard to resist. There’s a story in the aunt, as well: Wise Woman World appreciates real-life heroines, ordinary women who have been more than ordinarily courageous.
To her amazement, and also to her horror, Zenia begins to cry. Big tears roll from her eyes, which