Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [37]
12
ROZ
In her dream Roz is opening doors. Nothing in here, nothing in there, and she’s in a hurry, the airport limousine is waiting and she has no clothes on, no clothes on her big slack raw embarrassing body. Finally she finds the right door. There are clothes behind it all right, long coats that look like men’s overcoats, but the overhead light won’t turn on and the first coat she pulls from the hanger is damp and covered with live snails.
The alarm goes off, none too soon. “Holy Moly, Mother of God,” Roz mutters groggily. She hates clothing dreams. They’re like shopping, except that she never does find anything she wants. But she’d rather dream about snail-covered coats than about Mitch.
Or about Zenia. Especially Zenia. Sometimes she has a dream about Zenia, Zenia taking shape in the corner of Roz’s bedroom, reassembling herself from the fragments of her own body after the bomb explosion: a hand, a leg, an eye. She wonders whether Zenia was ever actually in this bedroom, when Roz wasn’t. When Mitch was.
Her throat tastes of smoke. She flings out an arm, groping for the clock, and knocks her latest trashy thriller off the night-table. Sex killings, sex killings; this year it’s all sex killings. Sometimes she longs to be back in the sedate English country houses of her youth, where the victim was always some venomous old miser who deserved it rather than an innocent plucked at random off the street. The misers were killed by poison or a single bullet hole, the corpses did not bleed. The detectives were genteel grey-haired ladies who knitted a lot, or very smart eccentrics with no bodily functions; they focused on tiny, harmless-looking clues: shirt buttons, candle ends, sprigs of parsley. What she truly enjoyed was the furniture: rooms and rooms of it, and so exotic! Things she didn’t know existed. Tea trollies. Billiard rooms. Chandeliers. Chaises longues. She wanted to live in houses like that! But when she goes back to these books, they no longer interest her; not even the décor can hold her attention. Maybe I’m getting hooked on blood, she thinks. Blood and violence and rage, like everyone else.
She rolls her legs over the side of her enormous four-poster bed – a mistake, she practically breaks her neck every time she has to climb down from the darn thing – and stuffs her feet into her terry-cloth slippers. Her landlady slippers, the twins call them, not realizing what disturbing echoes this word has for her. They’ve never seen a landlady in their lives. Or their life. It’s still hard for her to tell whether they have a life of their own each, or just one between the two of them. But she feels compelled to wear attractive shoes all day, shoes that match her outfits, shoes with high heels, so she deserves to have something more comfortable on her poor pinched feet at home, no matter what the twins say.
All this white in the bedroom is a mistake too – the white curtains, the white rug, the white ruffles on the bed. She doesn’t know what got into her. Trying for a girlish look, maybe; trying to go back in time, to create the perfect pre-teen bedroom she once longed for but never had. It was after Mitch had gone, vamoosed, skedaddled, checked out is more like it, he always did treat this place like a hotel, he treated her like a hotel, she needed to throw everything out that was there when he was; she needed to reassert herself. Though surely this isn’t herself! The bed looks like a bassinet or a wedding cake, or worse, like those huge ruffly altars they build in Mexico, for the Day of the Dead. She never found out (that time she was there, with Mitch, on their honeymoon, when they were so happy) whether it was all of the dead who came back, or just the ones you invited.
She can think of a couple of them she’d rather do without. That’s all she needs, gate-crashing dead people coming to dinner! And herself lying in the bed like a big piece of fruitcake. She’ll redo the whole