Roz gets good. She learns to wait: she counts the drinks they have, she watches the level in the bottle go down. Then she moves in.
“This little lady’s a killer,” says Uncle George admiringly. Roz beams.
It helps that she’s playing seriously, whereas the uncles and her father aren’t, not really. They play as if they’re expecting a phone call. They play as if they’re filling in the time.
All of a sudden there was a lot of money. “I won it at the track,” said Roz’s father, but Roz knew this couldn’t be true because there was too much of it for that. There was enough for dinner at a restaurant, for all of them, her mother too, with ice cream afterwards. Her mother wore her best dress, which was a new best dress, pale green with a white daisy collar. because there was enough money for that as well. There was enough for a car; it was a blue Dodge, and the boys from down the street stood outside Roz’s house for half an hour, gazing at it, while Roz watched them silently from her porch. Her triumph was so complete she didn’t even have to jeer.
Where had the money come from? Out of thin air. It was like magic; her father waved his hand and presto, there it was. “The ship came in,” said Roz’s father. The uncles got some too. It was for all three of them, said her father. Equal shares, because the ship belonged to all.
Roz knew it wasn’t a real ship. Still, she could picture it, an old-fashioned ship like a galleon, a treasure ship, its sails golden in the sunlight, pennants flying from its masts. Or something like that. Something noble.
Her parents sold the rooming house and moved north, away from the streets of narrow cheek-by-jowl old houses and tiny lawns, into an enormous house with a semi-circular driveway in front and a three-car garage. Roz decided that they had become rich, but her mother told her not to use that word. “We’re comfortable,” was what she said.
But she didn’t seem comfortable at all. Instead she seemed afraid. She was afraid of the house, she was afraid of the cleaning lady Roz’s father insisted on, she was afraid of the new furniture that she herself had bought—“Get the best,” said Roz’s father—she was afraid of her new clothes. She wandered around in her housecoat and slippers, from room to room, as if she was looking for something; as if she was lost. She had been much more comfortable back in the old neighbourhood, where things were the right size and she knew her way around.
She said she had nobody to talk to. But when had she ever talked that much, before? And who had she ever talked to? Roz, Roz’s father, the uncles. Now the uncles had places of their own. The roomers? There were no roomers any more, for her to complain about and boss around. When men came to the door delivering things they took one look at her and asked to speak to the lady of the house. But she had to pretend to be happy, because of Roz’s father. “This is what we waited for,” he said.
Roz has new clothes too, and a new name. She’s no longer Rosalind Greenwood, she’s Roz Grunwald. This, her parents explain, has been her real name all along. “Why wasn’t I called that before, then?” she asks.
“It was the war,” they say. “That name was too Jewish. It wasn’t safe.”
“Is it safe now?” she asks.
Not entirely. Different things are safe, where they are living now. By the same token, different things are dangerous.
Roz goes to a new school. She’s in high school now so she goes to Forest Hill Collegiate Institute. She’s no longer a Catholic: she’s renounced all of that—not without qualms, not without residue—in favour of being a Jew. Since there are so clearly sides, she would rather be on that one. She reads up on it because she wants to do it right; then she asks her father to—buy two sets of dishes, and refuses to eat bacon. Her father buys the dishes to humour her, but her mother won’t separate the meat dishes from the milk ones, and gives her a wounded look if she brings it up. Nor will her father join a temple. “I was never religious,” he says. “Like I always said—who owns God? If there was no religions there won’t be all this trouble:”
There are a lot of Jewish kids at Roz’s new school; in fact at this school Jewish is the thing to be. But whereas once Roz was not Catholic enough, now she isn’t Jewish enough. She’s an oddity, a hybrid; a strange half-person. Her clothes, although expensive, are subtly not right. Her accent is not right either. Her enthusiasms are not right, nor her skills: Chinese burns and kicking people in the shins and playing a nifty hand of poker cut no ice here. Added to that, she’s too big; also too loud, too clumsy, too eager to please. She has no smoothness, no boredom, no class.
She finds herself in a foreign country. She’s an iri-iiriigrant, a displaced person. Her father’s ship has come in, but she’s just off the boat. Or maybe it’s something else: maybe it’s the money. Roz’s money is plentiful, but it needs to be aged, like good wine or cheese. It’s too brash, too shiny, too exclamatory. It’s too brazen.
She is sent off to Jewish summer camp by her father because he’s found out that it’s the right thing to do with your children, here, in this country, in this city, in this neighbourhood, in the summer. He wants Roz to be happy, he wants her to fit in. He equates these things. But at camp she’s even more of an interloper, an obvious intruder: she has never played tennis, she’s never ridden a horse, she doesn’t know any of the cute folk dances from Israel or any of the mournful minor-key Yiddish songs. She falls off sailboats, into the freezing blue northern water of Georgian Bay, because she’s never been on a boat before; when she tries to water-ski she chickens out at the last minute, just before they gun the motor, and sinks like a stone. The first time she appears in a bathing suit, not that she really knows how to swim, a graceless flail is her basic style, she realizes you’re supposed to shave your armpits. Who could have been expected to tell her? Not her mother, who does not discuss the body. She has never been outside the city in her life. The other kids act as if they were born paddling a canoe and sleeping in smelly tents, but Roz can’t get used to the bugs.
She sits at the breakfast table in the log-cabin dining room, listening in silence while the other girls complain languidly about their mothers. Roz wants to complain about her mother too, but she’s found that her complaints don’t count because her mother isn’t Jewish. When she begins, with her rooming house stories, her stories of toilets and scrubbing, they roll their eyes and yawn delicately, like kittens, and change the subject back to their own mothers. Roz can’t possibly know, they imply. She can’t understand.
In the afternoons they do their hair up in rollers and lacquer their nails, and after the folk dances and singsongs and marshmallow roasts and Beatnik dress-up parties they are walked slowly back to their sleeping cabin by various boys, through the aromatic, painful dark, with its owl sounds and mosquitoes and its smell of pine needles, its flashlights blinking like fireflies, its languorous murmurs. None of these boys saunters over to joke with Roz, none stands with his arm propped on a tree, over her head. Well, not many of them are tall enough to do that, and anyway who wants to be seen with a part-shiksa hippo-hips fool? So Roz stays behind, to help clean up. God knows she’s an expert at that.
During arts and crafts, which Roz is no good at—her clay ashtrays look like cow patties, her belt woven on a primitive Inca-type hand loom like the cat got into it—she says she has to go to the bathroom, and wanders off to the kitchen to’ wheedle a pre-dinner snack. She has befriended the pastry cook, an old man who can make a row of ducks across a cake with butter icing in one burst of calligraphy, without lifting the decorator once. He shows Roz how, and how to make an icing rose too, and a stem with a leaf, “A rose without a leaf is like a woman without honour,” he says, bowing to her in a courtly, old-fashioned, European way, handing her the cake decorator to let her try. He lets her lick out the bowl, and tells her she is the right shape for a woman, not all bones like some here, he can tell she appreciates good food. He has an accent, like her uncles, and a faint blue number on his arm. It’s left over from the war, but Roz doesn’t ask about that, because nobody talks about the war here, not yet. The war is unmentionable.