Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [206]
Snap out of it, Roz, she tells herself. You are not old. Your life is not over.
It only feels like that.
Mitch is in the city. He’s around. He comes to see the children and Roz arranges to be out, her skin prickling the whole time with awareness of him. When she walks into the house after he’s gone she can smell him – his aftershave, the English heather stuff, could it be he’s sprinkled some of it around just to get to her? She glimpses him in restaurants, or at the yacht club. She stops going to those places. She picks up the phone and he’s on the other line with one of the kids. The whole world is booby-trapped. She is the booby.
Their lawyers talk. A separation agreement is suggested, though Mitch stalls; he doesn’t want Roz – or else he would be here, wouldn’t he, on the doorstep again, wouldn’t he at least be asking? – but he doesn’t want to be separated from her either. Or maybe he’s just bargaining, maybe he’s just trying to get the price up. Roz grits her teeth and holds the line. This is going to cost her but it will be worth it to cut the string, the tie, the chain, whatever this heavy thing is that’s holding her down. You need to know when to fold. At any rate she’s functioning. More or less. Though she’s done better.
She goes off to see a shrink, to see if she can improve herself, make herself over into a new woman, one who no longer gives a shit. She would like that. The shrink is a nice person; Roz likes her. Together the two of them labour over Roz’s life as if it’s a jigsaw puzzle, a mystery story with a solution at the end. They arrange and rearrange the pieces, trying to get them to come out better. They are hopeful: if Roz can figure out what story she’s in, then they will be able to spot the erroneous turns she took, they can retrace her steps, they can change the ending. They work out a tentative plot. Maybe Roz married Mitch because, although she thought at the time that Mitch was very different from her father, she sensed he was the same underneath. He would cheat on her the way her father had cheated on her mother, and she would keep forgiving him and taking him back just the way her mother had. She would rescue him, over and over. She would play the saint and he the sinner.
Except that her parents ended up together and Roz and Mitch did not, so what went wrong? Zenia went wrong. Zenia switched the plot on Roz, from rescue to running away, and then when Mitch wanted to be rescued again Roz was no longer up to it. Whose fault was that? Who was to blame? Ah. Didn’t Roz think that too much time was spent apportioning blame? Did she blame, perhaps, herself? In a word, yes. Maybe she still can’t quite leave God out of it, and the notion that she’s being punished.
Maybe it was nobody’s fault, the shrink suggests. Maybe these things just happen, like plane crashes.
If Roz wants Mitch back that badly – and it appears that she does, now that she has a greater insight into the dynamics of their relationship – maybe she should ask him to come for counselling. Maybe she should forgive him, at least to that extent.
All this is very reasonable. Roz thinks of making the phone call. She is almost nerved up to it, she is almost there. Then, in drizzly March, Zenia dies. Is killed in Lebanon, blown up by a bomb; comes back in a tin can, and is buried. Roz does not cry. Instead she rejoices fiercely – if there was a bonfire she’d dance around it, shaking a tambourine if one was provided. But after that she’s afraid, because Zenia is nothing if not