Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [199]
Roz grows increasingly uneasy. There’s something not quite right about the turn things have taken, but what could it be? She set out to help Zenia, and it appears she has helped her, and Zenia is certainly grateful, and she’s performing well; they have lunch once a week just to go over things, and so Zenia can ask Roz’s advice, because Roz has been around the magazine so much longer than Zenia has. Roz dismisses her own reaction as simple envy. Ordinarily if there was something bothering her, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, she’d discuss it with Tony or Charis. But she can’t do that, because she’s friends with Zenia now, and they might not understand that part of it. They might not understand how Roz could be friends with someone who is – face it – an enemy of theirs. They might see it as betrayal.
“I’ve been giving it some thought,” Zenia says at the next board of directors meeting. “We’re still losing money, despite the new ads. We can’t seem to hook the big spenders – the perfume companies, the cosmetics, high fashion. To be honest, I think we need to change the name. The concept we’re working with is too seventies. This is the eighties – we’re way beyond a lot of those old positions.”
“Change the name?” asks Roz, with fond memories of the early collective. What happened to those women? Where did they go? Why has she lost touch with them? Where did all these business suits come from?
“Yes,” says Zenia. “I’ve had a small survey done. We’d do better with Woman World, or, even better, just plain Woman.”
It’s obvious to Roz what’s being dropped. The wisdom part, for one thing. Also the world. But how can she object to Woman without implying that there’s something wrong with being one?
So Zenia changes the name, and soon the magazine changes too. It changes so much that Roz hardly recognizes it. Gone are the mature achievers, the stories about struggling to overcome sexism and stacked odds. Gone too are the heavy-hitting health care stories. Now there are five-page spreads on spring fashions, and new diets and hair treatments and wrinkle creams, and quizzes about the man in your life and whether or not you’re handling your relationships well. Are these things unimportant? Roz would be the last to say so, but surely there’s something missing.
She no longer has lunch with Zenia once a week; Zenia is now too busy. She’s a busy bee, she has a lot of iron maidens in the fire. So, at the next board meeting, Roz pushes her about the shift in content. “This wasn’t the original idea,” she says.
Zenia smiles gently at her. “Most women don’t want to read about other women who achieve,” she says. “It makes them feel unsuccessful.”
Roz finds herself getting angry – surely this is a dig at her – but she controls herself. “What do they want to read about, then?”
“I’m not talking intellectuals,” says Zenia. “I’m talking about the average woman. The average magazine-buying woman. According to our demographics, they want to read about how to look. Oh, and sex, of course. Sex with the right accessories.”
“What are the right accessories?” asks Roz pleasantly. She thinks she’ll choke.
“Men,” says Zenia. The men on the board of directors laugh, Mitch included. So much for Roz. She has a flash of Zenia, wearing black fringed gloves with gauntlets, blowing the smoke off her six-shooter, sliding it back into her holster.
Roz is the majority shareholder. She could pull strings, she could stack the deck, she could force Zenia out. But she can’t do that without looking like a vindictive shrew.
And let’s face it, they’re making money, finally, and money talks.
One day Mitch is gone. He is just gone, in a snap of the fingers, in a wink. No prelude, no hints, no letters left lying around, none of the usual. But looking