Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [212]
Sometimes Roz gets herself down. It’s her own worthiness that does it, the pressure on her to be nice, to be ethical, to behave well; it’s the rays of good behaviour, of good nature, of cluck-clucking good-as-gold goody-goodness beaming out from around her head. It’s her best intentions. If she is so goldarned worthy, why isn’t she having more fun? Sometimes she would like to cast off her muffling Lady Bountiful cloak, stop tiptoeing through the scruples, cut loose, not in minor ways as she does now – a little swearing inside her head, some bad verbiage – but something really big. Some great whopping thoroughly despicable sin.
Random sex would have done the trick once, but plain garden-variety sex hardly counts any more, it’s just a form of mood therapy or calisthenics, she’d have to go in for bloodthirsty kink. Or something else, something devious and archaic and complicated and mean. Seduction followed by slow poisoning. Treachery. Betrayal. Cheating and lies.
To do that she would need another body, it goes without saying, because the one she has is too clumsy, too lumberingly honest, and the sort of evil she has in mind would require grace. To be truly malevolent she would have to be thinner.
Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Who is the evilest of us all?
Take off a few pounds, cookie, and maybe I can do something for you.
Or maybe she could go in for superhuman goodness, instead. Hair shirts, stigmata, succouring the poor, a kind of outsized Mother Teresa. Saint Roz, it sounds good, though Saint Rosalind would be classier. A few thorns, one or two body parts on a plate, to show how she’d been martyred: an eye, a hand, a tit, tits were favourites, the ancient Romans seemed to have a thing about cutting off women’s breasts, sort of like plastic surgeons. She can see herself in a halo, with her hand languidly on her heart and a wimple, great for sagging chins, and her eyes rolled up in ecstasy. It’s the extremes that attract her. Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.
Either way, she would like to be someone else. But not just anyone. Sometimes – for a day at least, or even for an hour, or if nothing else was available then five minutes would do – sometimes she would like to be Zenia.
She hobbles up the cellar stairs on prickling feet, one step at a time, holding onto the banister and wondering if this is what it will be like to be ninety, should she get that far. She makes it to the top finally, opens the door. Here is the white kitchen, just as she left it. She feels as if she’s been away from it for a long time. Wandering lost in the dark wood with its twisted trees, enchanted.
The twins are sitting on high stools at the counter, wearing shorts with tights underneath, a fashionable hole in each knee, drinking strawberry smoothies out of tall glasses. Pink moustaches adorn their upper lips. The frozen yogourt container melts near the sink.
“Gollee, Mom, you look like a car accident!” says Paula. “What’s that smeary stuff all over your face?”
“It’s just my face,” says Roz. “It’s coming off.”
Erin jumps down and runs over to her. “Sit down, sweetie,” she says, in a parody of Roz herself in her mothering mode. “Do you have a temperature? Let us feel your forehead!”
The two of them propel her across the floor, up onto a stool. They wet the dishtowel and wipe her face – “Ooh, messy messy!” It’s obvious to them she’s been crying, but of course they don’t mention it. Then they try to get her to drink one of their smoothies, laughing and giggling because it’s funny to them, their mother as a big baby, themselves as mothers. Wait for it, Roz thinks. Wait till I lose my marbles and start to drool, and you find yourselves doing this for real. It won’t be so funny then.
But what a burden it must be to them, her bereft condition. Why shouldn’t they put on clown faces to cover up their distress? It’s a trick they’ve learned from her. It’s a trick that works.
THE TOXIQUE
50
Tony is playing the piano but no music comes out. Her feet don’t reach the pedals, her hands don’t span