“You’re spoiling me,” Roz tells them. Now that she’s feeling better she’s made uneasy by all the fussing. She is usually the one who does these things, the hen things, the taking care. She’s not used to being on the receiving end.
“You’ve been on a hard journey,” says Charis, in her gentlevoice. “You used up a lot of your energy. Now you can let go:”
“That’s not so easy,” says Roz.
“I know,” says Charis. “But you’ve never liked easy things.” By never, she means not for the past four thousand years. Which is about how old Roz feels.
Roz finds herself sitting on the cellar floor in the light from the one unshaded overhead bulb, an empty plate beside her, a children’s storybook open on her knees. She’s twisting and untwisting her wedding ring, the ring that once meant she was married, the ring that’s weighing her down, turning it on her finger as if she’s unscrewing it, or else expecting some genie or other to appear from nowhere and solve everything for her. Put the pieces back together, make everything right; slide Mitch alive back into her bed where she will find him when she goes upstairs—scrubbed and scented and brushed and cunning, filled to the brim with affectionate lies, lies she can see through, lies she can deal with, twenty years younger. Another chance. Now that she knows what to do she will do it better this time. Tell me, God—why don’t we get rehearsals?
How long has she been down here, whimpering in bad light? She must go upstairs and deal with reality, whatever that may be. She must pull herself together.
She does this by patting the pockets of her bathrobe, where she always used to keep a tissue before the twins outlawed them. Not finding any, she blots her eyes on her orange sleeve, leaving a black smear of mascara, then wipes her nose on the other sleeve. Well, who’s to see, except God? According to the nuns he had a preference for cotton hankies. God, she tells him, if you hadn’t wanted us to wipe our noses on our sleeves you wouldn’t have given us sleeves. Or noses. Or tears, as far as that goes. Or memory, or pain.
She slides the kids’ books back onto the shelf. She should donate these books to some charity, or maybe lend them—let them loose in the world to warp some small child’s mind, while she waits for her own grandchildren to appear. What grandchildren? Dream on, Roz. The twins are too young and will anyway probably grow up to be stock-car racers or women who go off to live among the gorillas, something fearless and non-progenitive; as for Larry, he’s in absolutely no hurry, and if the faux women he’s come up with so far are any sample of what the future holds in the daughter-in-law department, Roz would rather not hold her breath.
Life would be so much easier if there were still arranged marriages. She’d go out into the marriage market, cash in hand, bargain with a dependable marriage broker, secure a nice bride for Larry: bright but not bossy, sweet but not a pushover, and with a wide pelvic structure and a strong back. If her own marriage had been arranged, would things have’ turned out any worse than they did? Is it fair, to send inexperienced young girls out into the wild forest to fend for themselves? Girls with big bones and maybe not the smallest of feet. What would help would be a wise woman, some gnarly old crone who would step out from behind a tree, who would give advice, who would say No, not this one, who would say Beauty is only skin deep, in men as well as women, who would see down as far as the heart. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? An older woman knows. But how much older do you have to get before you acquire that kind of wisdom?
Roz keeps expecting it to sprout in her, grow all over her, sort of like age spots; but it hasn’t yet.
She hauls herself up off the floor and dusts her behind, a mistake because her hands are covered with book dirt, as she realizes too late when she looks at them, having encountered a squashed silverfish stuck to her velour-covered buttock, and Lord knows what’s been crawling over her while she’s been sitting here woolgathering. Woolgathering, her mother’s word, a word so old, rooted so far back in time, that although everyone knows what it means nobody knows where it came from. Why was gathering wool supposed to be lazy? Reading and thinking were both woolgathering, to her mother. Rosalind! Don’t just sit there woolgathering! Sweep the front walk!
Roz’s legs have gone to sleep. Every step she takes sends pins and needles shooting into them. She limps towards the cellar steps, pausing to wince. When she gets up to the kitchen she will open the refrigerator, just to see if there’s something in there she might like to eat. She hasn’t had a proper dinner, she often doesn’t. Nobody to cook for her, nobody to cook for, not that she ever cooked. Nobody to order in for. Food should be shared. Solitary eating can be like solitary drinking—a way of dulling the edge, of filling in the blanks. The blank; the empty man-shaped outline left by Mitch.
But there won’t be anything in the fridge that she wants; or’ rather, a few things maybe, but she will not stoop so low, she will not eat spoonfuls from the jar of chocolate-rum ice cream sauce, as she has done before, or blitz the can of pate de foie gras she’s been saving—up for God knows what mythical occasion, along with the bottle of champagne she keeps tucked away at the back. There’s a bunch of raw vegetables in there, roughage she bought in a fit of nutritional virtue, but right now they don’t appeal. She foresees their fate: they will turn slowly to green and orange goo in the crisper, and then she will buy more.
Maybe she could call up Charis or Tony, or both of them, invite them over; order up some red-hot chicken wings from the Indian tandoori take-out on Carlton, or some shrimp balls and garlic beans and fried won-ton from her favourite Szechuan place on Spadina, or both: have a sinful little multicultural feast. But Charis will already be back on the Island, and it’s dark by now, and she doesn’t like the thought of Charis out alone at night, there might be muggers, and Charis is such an obvious target, a long-haired middle-aged woman walking around covered with layers of printed textiles and bumping into things, she might as well have a sign pinned to her, Snatch my purse, and Roz can rarely persuade her to take taxis even if she offers to pay for them herself, because Charis goes on about the waste of gasoline. She will take a bus; or worse, she might decide to walk, through the wilds of Rosedale, past the rows of ersatz Georgian mansions, and get picked up by the police for vagrancy.
As for Tony, she’ll be at home in her turreted fortress, cooking up West’s dinner for him, some noodle casserole or other from The Joy of Cooking, the 1967 edition. It’s odd how Tony’s the only one of them who has actually ended up with a man. Roz can’t quite figure it out: tiny Tony, with her baby-bird eyes and her acidulated little smile, and, you’d think, the sex appeal of a fire hydrant, with more or less the same proportions. But love comes in odd boxes, as Roz has had occasion to learn. And maybe West was so badly frightened by Zenia in his youth that he’s never dared look at any other woman since.
Roz thinks wistfully of the dinnertime tableau at Tony’s house, then decides she is not exactly envious, because strawbodied, strange-minded, lantern jawed West isn’t her own idea of what she’d like to have sitting across the table from her. Instead she’s glad that Tony has a man, because Tony is her friend and you want your friends to be happy. According to the feminists, the ones in the overalls, in the early years, the only good man was a dead man, or better still none at all; yet Roz continues to wish her friends joy of them, these men who are supposed to be so bad for you. I met someone, a friend tells her, and Roz shrieks with genuine pleasure. Maybe that’s because a good man is hard to find, so it’s a real occasion when anyone actually finds one. But it’s difficult, it’s almost impossible, because nobody seems to know any more what “a good man” is. Not even men.