Authors: Margaret Atwood
The boat her father came over on was more or less recent, though far enough back to have arrived before the Canadian government walled out the Jews, in the thirties and during the war. Not that her father was even a whole Jew.
Why do you inherit Jewishness through the mother’s side?
Tony once asked Roz.
Because so many Jewish women were raped by Cossacks and what-have-you that they could never be sure who the father was
. But her father was Jewish enough for Hitler, who hated mixtures more than anything.
The boat on her mother’s side was much further back. Famine caused by landlessness caused by war drove them out, a hundred
and fifty years ago, Irish and Scots both. One of those families set out with five children and arrived with none, and then the father died of cholera in Montreal and the mother remarried, as fast as she could – an Irishman whose wife had died, so he needed a new one. Men needed wives then, for such enterprises. Off they went into the semi-cleared bush, to be overtaxed and to have other children and to plant potatoes, and to chop down trees with implements they’d never used before, because how many trees were left in Ireland? A lot of legs got chopped into, by those people. Tony, who is more interested in these details than Roz is, once showed Roz an old picture – the men standing in metal washtubs, to protect their legs from their own axes. Low comedy for the English middle classes, back home, living off the avails. Stupid bogtrotters! The Irish were always good for a smirk or two, then.
All of them came steerage, of course. Whereas Mitch’s ancestors, although not created by God from the sacred mud of Toronto – they had to have got here somehow – must have come cabin. Which means they threw up into a china basin instead of onto other people’s feet, on the way across.
Big deal, but Roz is intimidated anyway. She opens the mermaid-festooned menu, and reads the items, and asks Mitch to advise her, as if she can’t make up her own mind what to put into her mouth.
Roz
, she tells herself.
You are a suck
.
She remembers the time she first went out with Mitch. She was old, she was almost twenty-two, she was over the hill. A lot of girls she’d known in high school and then in university were already married, so why wasn’t she? It was a question that looked out at her from her mother’s increasingly baffled eyes.
Roz had already had a love affair, or rather a sex affair, and then another. She hadn’t even felt too guilty about them. Although the nuns had ground it in about sex and what a sin it was, Roz was no
longer a Catholic. She was once a Catholic, though, and once a Catholic, always a Catholic, according to her mother; so she’d had some qualms, after the first exhilarating sense of transgression had faded. Strangely enough, these qualms focused less on the sex itself than on the condoms – things you had to buy under the counter, not that she ever did, that was a man’s job. Condoms seemed to her inherently wicked. But they were also inherently funny. They were like rubber gloves with only one finger, and every time she saw one she had to be severe with herself or she’d get the giggles, a terrifying thought because the man might think you were laughing at him, at his dick, at its size, and that would be fatal.
But the sex was great, it was something she was good at, though neither one of these men was her idea of bliss from the neck up. One had big sticking-out ears, the other one was two inches shorter than she was, and she didn’t see going through life in flats. She wanted children, but not runty ones with jug ears.
So she hadn’t taken either of them seriously. It helped that they hadn’t taken her seriously either. Maybe it was the clown face she put on, fairly constantly by then. She needed it, that happy heedless party face, because there she was, on the shelf, still living at home, still working in her father’s business.
You’ll be my right-hand man
, he’d tell her. It was meant as a compliment, so she wouldn’t feel bad about not being a son. But Roz didn’t want to be a son. She didn’t want to be a man at all, right-hand or otherwise. Such a strain, being one, from what she could see; such a pretence of dignity to maintain. She could never get away with her witless frivolity act if she were a man. But then, if she were one she might not need it.
Her job in the business was fairly basic; a moron could have done it. Essentially she was a glorified fetch-it. But her father believed that everyone, even the boss’s daughter, should start at the bottom and progress up to the top. That way you got acquainted with the real workings of the business, layer by layer. If something was wrong
with the secretaries, if something was wrong with Filing, there would be wrongness all the way through; and you had to know how to do those jobs yourself so you would know whether other people were doing them right or not. A lesson that has been useful to Roz, over the years.
She was learning a lot, though. She was watching her father’s style. Outrageous but effective, soft but hard, uproarious but dead serious underneath. He waited for his moment, he waited like a cat on a lawn; then he pounced. He liked to drive bargains, he liked to cut deals.
Drive, cut
, these verbs had an appeal for him. He liked risk, he liked walking the edge. Blocks of property disappeared into his pocket, then came out magically transformed into office buildings. If he could renovate – if there was something worth saving – he did. Otherwise it was the wrecking ball, despite whatever clutch of woolly-headed protesters might be marching around outside with
Save Our Neighbourhood
signs, done in crayon and stapled onto rake handles.
Roz had some ideas of her own. She knew she could be good at this stuff if he’d give her the rope. But rope was not given by him, it was earned, so she was putting in her time.
Meanwhile, what about her love life? There was nobody. Nobody suitable. Nobody even close. Nobody who wasn’t either a jerk-off or basically after her money, a factor she had to keep in mind. Her future money, because right then she was only on salary like everybody else, and a fairly measly salary at that. Her father believed you should know just how measly a measly salary was, so you could figure out what a pay-raise negotiation was all about. He thought you should know the price of potatoes. Roz didn’t at the moment because she was still living at home, on account of her measly salary. She’d looked at studio apartments, one room with a mingy kitchenette tucked in the corner and a view into somebody else’s bathroom,
but too squalid! What price freedom? Higher than what she was making right then. She would rather stay where she was, in the former servants’ flat over her parents’ three-car garage, and spend her measly salary on new clothes and her own phone line.
She wanted to take a trip to Europe, by herself, but her father wouldn’t let her. He said it was too dangerous. “What goes on over there, you don’t need to know,” he told her. He wanted to keep her walled up behind his money. He wanted to keep her safe.
Mitch was a neophyte lawyer then, working for the firm that papered her father’s deals. The first time she saw him he was walking through the outer office where Roz sat grindstoning her nose. He was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, the end man in the almost-daily suit-and-briefcase parade that followed her father around like a tail. There was a pause at Roz’s desk, handshakes all round: Roz’s father always introduced everyone to everyone else. Mitch shook Roz’s hand, and Roz’s hand shook. She took one look at him and thought, There’s ugly and there’s gorgeous and there’s in-between, but this is gorgeous. Then she’d thought: Dream on, babe. Slobber on your pillow. This is not for you.
But darned if he didn’t phone her up! You didn’t have to be Einstein to get the number, but it would’ve taken more than one step, because Roz had herself listed in the phone book as Rosie O’Grady, having tired of the hate calls that her father’s last name sometimes attracted. The hoardings around the demolition sites didn’t help,
Grunwald Developments
in foot-high print, she might as well go around with a red X painted on her forehead,
Spit here
, as list her right name in the phone book.
But all of a sudden there was Mitch on the phone, cool but persuasive, sounding as if he wanted to sell her some life insurance, reminding her of where she’d met him, as if she needed reminding, and he was so stiff at first that she’d wanted to yell at him,
Hey, I am
not your granny! Slip that poker out of your bum!
Gorgeous or not, he sounded like a drag, a too-tight WASPy poop whose idea of a good time would be a hand of bridge with the crumbling in-laws or a walk in the cemetery on Sunday. It took him a lot longer to get to the point than it would’ve taken Roz, had she been leading, but he’d finally worked up to asking her out to dinner and then to a movie afterwards. Well, Hallelujah and Hail Mary, thought Roz. Wonders will never cease.
But while she was getting ready to go, her joy evaporated. She wanted to float, to fly, but she was beginning to feel heavier and heavier, sitting there at her dressing table dabbing Arpège onto her pulse points and trying to decide what earrings to wear. Something that would make her face look less round. True, she had dimples, but they were the kind of dimples you saw in knees. More like puckers. She was a big-boned girl, a raw-boned girl (her mother’s words), a girl with backbone (her father’s), and a full, mature figure (the dress shops’). Dainty she would never be.
Dear God, shrink my feet and I’ll do anything for you. A size 6 would be nice, and while you’re at it make me a blonde
.
The problem was that Mitch was simply too good-looking. The shoulders, the blue eyes, the bone structure – he looked like a movie mag starlet, male version, too good to be true. Roz was awed by this – nobody should be allowed out in public looking like that, it might cause car crashes – and by his aroma of decorum, and by his posture, bolt upright with squared corners, like a frozen fish fillet. She wouldn’t be able to let herself go with him, crack jokes, fool around. She would worry about whether there were things caught in her teeth.
Plus, she would be so squirrelly with desire – out with it,
Lust
, capital L, the best of the Seven Deadlies – that she’d scarcely be able to sit still. She wasn’t usually so out of control, but Mitch was off the top of the charts in the looks department. Heads would turn, people
would stare, they’d wonder what such a dreamboat was doing with the runner-up in the Miss Polish Turnip Contest. All in all it was shaping up to be a purgatorial evening.
Get me through this, God, and I’ll scrub a million toilets for you! Not that you’d be interested, because in Heaven, who shits?
Things started out every bit as dreadful as Roz had expected. Mitch brought her flowers, not very many flowers but flowers, how old-fashioned could you get, and she didn’t know what to do with the darn things, so she took them out to the kitchen – was she supposed to put them in a vase or what? Why hadn’t he settled for chocolates? – and there was her mother brooding darkly over a cup of tea, in her dressing gown and metal curlers and hairnet, because she had to go out later to some banquet or other with Roz’s father, some business thing, her mother hated that stuff, and she looked at Roz with the stricken gaze she’d been putting on ever since they got rich and moved into that barn of a house on Dunvegan, right near Upper Canada College, where male scions like Mitch were sent to be brainwashed and to have their spines fused so their pelvises would never move again, and she said to Roz, “Are you going out?” as in, “Are you dying?”
And Roz had left Mitch standing in the cavernous living room, in the centre of the half-acre of broadloom, surrounded by three truck-loads of furniture in her mother’s impeccable bad taste, it cost a mint but it looked straight out of a funeral parlour mail-order catalogue, in addition to which every single surface was covered with doilies, which didn’t help, her mother had a doily fetish, she’d been deprived of them in youth, and what if Mitch were to follow Roz out to the kitchen and find Roz’s mother sitting there and be given the onceover, the aim of which was to determine religious affiliation and financial prospects, in that order? So Roz dumped the flowers into the sink, she’d deal with them later, and kissed her mother on the
firming cream, too little too late, and frog-marched Mitch out of the house before he could get waylaid by Roz’s father, who would put him through the same third degree he put all of Roz’s dates through if he could catch them – where were they going, what would they be doing, when would they be back, that was too late – and tell him cryptic ethnic parables illustrating Life. “Two cripples do not make one dancer,” he would say to them, shooting out a meaningful look from underneath the bushy eyebrows, and what were the poor goofs supposed to think? “Papa, I wish you wouldn’t say that,” she’d tell him afterwards. That was another thing, she had to call him Papa, he wouldn’t answer to Dad. “So?” he would say, grinning at her. “It’s true, or not?”
Once they’d made it past the door it turned out that Mitch didn’t have a car, and what was the etiquette? Was she supposed to offer hers, or what? She couldn’t see the man of her dreams taking a bus; much less could she see herself taking one. What was the use of upward mobility if you had to take a bus anyway? There were limits! She was about to suggest a taxi when it occurred to her in a blinding flash that maybe Mitch didn’t have the money for one.
In the end they took Roz’s car, a little red Austin, a birthday present, Roz would’ve preferred a Jag but her father said that would have been spoiling her. Mitch didn’t protest much when Roz gushingly urged the car keys on him so he could drive, because a man being driven by a woman might have felt diminished, she’d read the women’s magazine articles about all the ways you could unwittingly diminish a man, it was terrible how easily they shrank, and though she usually liked to drive her own car herself she didn’t want to scare Mitch off. This way too she could just sit back and admire his profile. He drove well – decisively, aggressively, but not without courtesy, and she liked that. She herself was a fast driver; a barger-in, a honker. But watching Mitch drive, she could see that there were smoother ways of getting where you wanted to go.