Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [205]
What is her secret? How does she do it? Where does it come from, her undeniable power over men? How does she latch hold of them, break their stride, trip them up, and then so easily turn them inside out? It must be something very simple and obvious. She tells them they’re unique, then reveals to them that they’re not. She opens her cloak with the secret pockets and shows them how the magic trick is worked, and that it is after all nothing more than a trick. Only by that time they refuse to see; they think the Water of Youth is real, even though she empties the bottle and fills it again from the tap, right before their very eyes. They want to believe.
“It won’t work,” Roz tells Mitch. She isn’t being vindictive. It’s the simple truth.
He must know it, because he doesn’t plead. He subsides into his crumpled clothing; his neck gets shorter, as though there’s a steady but inexorable weight pushing slowly down on the top of his head. “I guess not,” he says.
“Didn’t you keep the apartment?” says Roz. “Isn’t that where you’re living?”
“I couldn’t stay there,” says Mitch. His voice is reproachful, as if it’s crass of her, cruel of her even to suggest such a thing. Doesn’t she realize how much it would hurt him to be in a place he once shared with the fled beloved, a place where he would be reminded of the dear departed at every turn, a place where he was so happy?
Roz knows. She herself lives in such a place. But he obviously hasn’t thought of that. Those in pain have no time for the pain they cause.
Roz sees him out, into the front hall, into the overcoat, which almost does her in because it’s her overcoat too, she helped him buy it, she shared the life he led in it, that good-taste leather, that sheepskin, one-time container of such a rascally wolf. No longer, no more; he’s toothless now. Poor lamb, thinks Roz, and clenches her fists tight because she won’t let herself be fooled like that again.
He takes himself off, off into the freezing February dusk, off into the unknown. Roz watches him walk towards his parked car, lurching a little although he didn’t touch his drink. The sidewalks are icy. Or maybe he’s on something, some kind of pill, a tranquillizer. Most likely he shouldn’t be driving, though it’s no longer any of her business to stop him. She tells herself it’s not necessary to have qualms about him. He can stay at a hotel. It’s not as if he doesn’t have any money.
She leaves his red roses on the sideboard, still wrapped in their floral paper. Let them wilt. Dolores can find them tomorrow, and reproach Roz in her heart for carelessness, rich people don’t know what things cost, and throw them out. She pours herself another scotch and lights another cigarette, then gets down her old photo albums, those pictures she took so endlessly at backyard birthday parties, at graduations, on vacations, winters in the snow, summers on the boat, to prove to herself they were all indeed a family, and sits in the kitchen going through them. Pictures of Mitch, in non-living colour: Mitch and Roz at their wedding, Mitch and Roz and Larry, Mitch and Roz and Larry and the twins. She searches his face for some clue, some foreshadowing of the catastrophe that has befallen them. She finds none.
Some women in her place take their nail scissors and snip out the heads of the men in question, leaving only their bodies. Some snip out the bodies too. But Roz will not do this, because of the children. She doesn’t want them to come across a picture of their headless father, she doesn’t want to alarm them, any more than she already has. And it wouldn’t work anyway, because Mitch would still be there in the pictures, an outline, a blank shape, taking up the same amount of room, just as he does beside her in her bed. She never sleeps in the middle of that bed, she still sleeps off to one side. She can’t bring herself to occupy the whole space.
On the refrigerator, attached