Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [55]
She watches them walk away, Tony scuttling along her invisible trajectory, Charis ambling, a hesitant lope. Both smarter than she is, yes; Tony has a brilliant mind, within limits, and Charis has something else, harder to put your finger on but uncanny; sometimes she gives Roz the creeps because she knows things she has no way of knowing. But neither one of them has any street smarts. Roz keeps expecting them to wander out into the traffic and be squashed by trucks, or to be mugged, right before her very eyes. Excuse me, ma’am, this is a mugging. Pardon? A what? What is a mugging? Can I help you with it?
No street smarts at all, and Zenia is a street fighter. She kicks hard, she kicks low and dirty, and the only counterploy is to kick her first, with metal cleats on your boots. If there’s going to be knife play, Roz will have to rely on herself alone. She doesn’t need Tony’s analysis of knives through the ages or Charis’s desire not to discuss sharp items of cutlery because they are so negative. She just needs to know where the jugular is, so she can go for it.
The difficulty is that Zenia doesn’t have a jugular. Or if she does Roz has never been able to figure out where it is, or how to get at it. Zenia of old had no discernible heart, and by now she may not even have blood. Pure latex flows in her veins. Or molten steel. Unless she’s changed, and it hardly looks that way. In any case this is the second time round, and Roz is ready for it, and much less vulnerable, because this time there’s no more Mitch.
All of this resolution and bravura is very well, but when Roz gets back to her car she finds a little message scratched in her paint, on the driver’s door. Rich Bitch. A neatly lettered message, relatively polite – in the States it would have been Cunt – and ordinarily Roz would merely have calculated the cost of the repair and how much time it would take to get it done, and whether it’s deductible. Also she would take out her annoyance by making a scene with the parking lot attendant. Who did this? What do you mean, you don’t know? What were you, asleep? Darn it, what the heck do they pay you for?
But today she’s not in the mood. She unlocks her car, checks the back seat to make sure nobody’s in there – she hasn’t read all those sex-killing thrillers for nothing – gets in, locks the door again, and has a small cry, in her usual position, with her forehead on the steering wheel and her new cotton hankie at the ready. (The twins have outlawed paper tissues. They’re relentless, they don’t give two hoots about Maria’s extra ironing. Pretty soon Roz won’t even be allowed toilet paper, they’ll make her use old T-shirts. Or something.)
Her tears are not tears of mourning, nor of despair. They are tears of rage. Roz knows the flavour well. But at her age, rage for the sake of rage is becoming less and less worth it, because every time you grind your teeth a few of them could break off. So she blots her face, finishing with her sleeve because her hankie is soaked, re-does her lipstick (Rubicon, here I come), touches up her mascara, and guns her motor, gravel spewing from beneath her wheels. She half hopes she can graze a fender on the way out, pass along some anger – Oops! So-o-o sorry! It would be a substitute, the next best thing to strangling Zenia. But there’s no car in a prime position, and the attendant’s looking. Oh well, it’s the thought that counts.
Roz goes up to her office – Hi Nicki, Hi Suzy, How’s it going Boyce, anything important, is there some more coffee, hold the calls, say I’m in a meeting – and shuts the door. She sits in her leather chair and lights up, and ferrets in her in-basket for a chocolate, one of those round Viennese things with portraits of Mozart on them, Mozart Balls is what the kids call them, and chews and swallows, and drums her fingers on her unsatisfactory desk. Mitch is staring at her and it bothers her, so she gets up and turns the picture around, averting his gaze. You aren’t going to like this, she tells him. He didn’t the last time, either. Once he found out what she’d