The Robber Bride (12 page)

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 room, add some pizazz, some texture. She’s had enough of white.

She shuffles into the bathroom, drinks two glasses of water to replenish her cells, takes her vitamin pill, brushes her teeth, creams, wipes, vivifies, and resurfaces her skin, and scowls at herself in the mirror. Her face is silting up, like a pond; layers are accumulating. Every once in a while, when she can afford the time, she spends a few days at a spa north of the city, drinking vegetable juice and having ultrasound treatments, in search of her original face, the one she knows is under there somewhere; she comes back feeling toned up and virtuous, and hungry. Also annoyed with herself. Surely she isn’t still trying; surely she isn’t still in the man-pleasing business. She’s given that up.
I
do it for me
, she tells Tony.

“Screw you, Mitch,” she says to the mirror. If it weren’t for him she could relax, she could be middle-aged. But if he were still around, she’d still be trying to please him. The key word is
trying
.

The hair has to go, though. It’s too red this time. It’s making her look raddled, a word she has always admired.
Raddled harridan
, she would read in those English detective stories, crouching on the steamer trunk that served as a window seat in her attic room, her feet tucked under her, with the room darkened for secrecy, as in air raids, angling the book so that the light from the streetlamp fell on
the page, in the dusk, in that Huron Street boarding house with the chestnut tree outside.
Roz! You still up? You get into that bed, right now, no fooling! Sneaky brat!

How could she hear Roz reading in the dark? Her mother the landlady, her mother the improbable martyr, standing at the foot of the attic stairs, yelling up in her hoarse washerwoman voice, and Roz mortified because the roomers might hear. Roz the toilet cleaner, Roz the down-market Cinderella, sullenly scrubbing.
You eat here
, said her mother,
so you help out
. That was before her father the hero turned rags into riches.
Raddled harridan
, Roz would mutter, with no sense that she might ever become one herself. It wasn’t that easy, growing up with one hero and one martyr. It didn’t leave much of a role for her.

That house is gone now. No, not gone: Chinese. They don’t like trees, she hears. They think the branches hold bad spirits, the sorrowful things that have happened to everyone who’s ever lived there before. Maybe there’s something of Roz herself, Roz as she was then, caught in the branches of that chestnut tree, if it still exists. Caught there and fluttering.

She wonders how much trouble it would be to have her hair dyed grey, the colour it would be if she let it grow in. With grey hair she’d get more respect. She’d be firmer. Less of a softie. An iron lady! Fat chance.

Roz’s latest bathrobe is hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Orange velour. Orange is the new colour this year; last year it was an acid yellow that she really couldn’t wear, try as she might. It made her look like a lemon lollipop. But the orange brings out a glow under her skin, or so she thought when she bought the darn thing. She believes in the little inner voice, the one that says,
It’s you! It’s you! Grab it now, or it may be gone!
But the little inner voice is getting
less and less trustworthy, and this time it must have been talking to someone else.

She puts on the bathrobe, over her hand-embroidered white-on-white batiste nightgown, bought to go with the bed, so who did she think was going to notice? She finds her purse, and transfers her half-empty pack of smokes to her pocket.
Not
before breakfast! Then she makes her way down the stairs, the back ones, the ones that used to be for maids, for toilet cleaners like her, clutching the banister so she won’t trip. The stairs go straight into the kitchen, the sparkling austere all-white kitchen (time for a change!), where the twins sit on high stools at the tile-topped counter, wearing long T-shirts and striped tights and gym socks. These are the outfits they find it chic to sleep in, these days. It used to be such fun to dress them up, when they were little; such ruffles, tiny hats you could die for! Gone are the downy sleepers with plastic soles to their feet, gone too the expensive English cotton flannel nighties with rows of Mother Geese in bonnets and aprons printed on them. Gone are the books Roz used to read to the two of them when they wore those nighties, snuggling up to her, one under each arm –
Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Arabian Nights
, the reissues of lavish turn-of-the-century fairy tales with Arthur Rackham illustrations. Or not completely gone: stored in the cellar. Gone are the pink jogging suits, the raccoon bedroom slippers, the velvet party dresses, each frill and extravaganza. Now they won’t let her buy them a thing. If she brings home even a black top, even a pair of underpants, they roll their eyes.

The two of them are drinking the yogourt-and-skim-milk-and-blueberry smoothies they’ve just made in the blender. She can see the melting package of frozen blueberries, and the puddle of blue milk lying like pale ink on the counter.

“So, you’ll do me a favour, for once you’ll put it in the dishwasher,” she can’t help saying to them.

They turn their identical eyes towards her, lambent eyes like those of forest cats, and smile their identical heartless heart-crushing smiles, showing their slightly feral faun’s teeth, blue at the moment, and shaking their moussey, fluffed-out manes; and she catches her breath, as she does almost every time she sees them, because they are so huge and so gorgeous and she still can’t quite understand how she managed to give birth to them. One such creature would have been unlikely enough, but two!

They laugh. “It’s the Big Mom!” one of them shouts, the one on the right. “The Big Mommy! Let’s give her a hug!”

They leap down from their stools and grab hold of her and squeeze. Her feet lift from the ground, and she rises perilously into the air.

“Put me down!” she shrieks. They know she doesn’t like this, they know she’s afraid they’ll drop her. They’ll drop her and she’ll break. Sometimes they have no sense of that; they think she’s unbreakable. Roz the Rock. Then they remember.

“Let’s put her on a stool,” they say. They carry her over and deposit her, and climb back onto their own stools, like circus animals who have done their trick.

“Mom, you look like a pumpkin in that,” says one. It’s Erin. Roz has always been able to tell them apart, or so she claims. Two guesses and she’s right every time. Mitch used to have trouble. But then, he only ever saw them for about fifteen minutes a day.

“Pumpkin, that’s me,” says Roz, with heavy jocularity. “Fat, orange, big friendly grin, hollow in the centre and glows in the dark.” She needs her coffee, right now! She pulls open the freezer door, sticks the frozen blueberry package back in there, finds the bag of magic beans, and fumbles around in one of the roll-out drawers for the electric grinder. Having everything stowed away in drawers wasn’t such a hot idea, she can never find anything any more.
Especially not the pot lids.
The uncluttered look
, said that fool of a designer. They always intimidate her.

“Aww,” says the other one. Paula. Errie and Pollie, they call each other, or Er and La, or, when they’re speaking collectively, Erla. It’s creepy when they do that.
Erla’s going out tonight
. That means both of them. “Aww. You rotten twin! You hurt the Mommy’s feelings! You are just rotten, rotten to the core!” This last is an imitation of Roz imitating her own mother, who used to say that. Roz feels a sudden need for her, for her harsh, embattled, once-scorned, long-dead mother. She’s tired of being a mother, she wants to be a child for a change. She missed out on that. It looks like way more fun.

The twins laugh delightedly. “Selfish rotten cesspool,” one says to the other.

“Unshaved armpit!”

“Festering tampon!”

“Used panty liner!” They can go on this way for hours, thinking up worse and worse insults for each other, laughing so hard they roll on the floor and kick their feet in the air with delight at their own outrageous humour. What puzzles her is how so many of their insults can be so – well, so sexist.
Bitch
and
slut
are among their mildest; she wonders if they’d let boys call them that. When they think she’s not listening, they can get much more obscene, or what she thinks of as obscene.
Cunt gum
. Such a thing could never even have been thought of, when she was growing up. And they’re only fifteen!

But people carry their vocabularies with them through their lives, like turtle shells, thinks Roz. She has a sudden flash of the twins at eighty, their beautiful faces raddled, their by-then-withered legs still encased in coloured tights, gym socks on their bunioned feet, still saying
cunt gum
. She shudders.

Touch wood, she corrects herself. They should live so long.

The coffee grinder isn’t there; not where she put it yesterday. “Darn it, kids,” she says. “Did you move my grinder?” Maybe it was Maria. Yesterday was one of Maria’s days to clean.

“Darn it!” says Paula. “Oh, my darned
grinder
. Oh gosh darn to heck!”

“Oh golly jeez, oh Holy Moly,” says Erin. They think it’s hilarious, the way Roz can’t bring herself to really swear. But she can’t. The words are in her head, all right, but they don’t come out.
You want people to think you’re trash?

She must seem so archaic to them. So obsolete, so foreign. She spent the first half of her life feeling less and less like an immigrant, and now she’s spending the second half feeling more and more like one. A refugee from the land of middle age, stranded in the country of the young.

“Where’s your big brother?” she says. This sobers them up.

“Where he usually is at this time of day,” says Erin with a hint of scorn. “Stoking up on his energy.”

“Zizzing,” says Paula, as if she wants them to get back to joking.

“Dreamland,” says Erin pensively.

“Larryland,” says Paula. “Greetings, Earthling, I come from a distant planet.”

Roz wonders whether she should wake Larry up, decides not to. She feels safer about him when he’s asleep. He is the firstborn, the firstborn son. Not a lucky thing to be. Fingered for sacrifice, he would have been, once. It’s very bad news that he was named after Mitch. Laurence Charles Mitchell, such a weighty and pompous combination for such a vulnerable little boy. Even though he’s twenty-two and has a moustache, she can’t help thinking of him as that.

Roz finds the coffee grinder, in the pull-out drawer under the convection oven, among the roasting pans. She should speak to Maria. She grinds her beans, measures the coffee, turns on her cute Italian espresso maker. While waiting she peels herself an orange.

“I think he’s got something going,” says Erin. “Some romance or other.”

Paula has made herself some false teeth out of Roz’s orange peel.
“Pouf, qui sait, c’est con ça, je m’en fiche,”
she says, with elaborate shrugs, lisping and spitting. That’s about all the two of them have picked up from French immersion: loose talk. Roz doesn’t know most of the words and she’s just as glad.

“I think I spoiled you,” Roz says to them.

“Spoiled,
moi?”
says Erin.

“Erla’s
not
spoiled,” says Paula with fake pouty innocence, taking out the orange-peel teeth. “Is she, Erla?”

“Holy Moly, gee whizzikers, Mommy, no!” says Erin. The two of them peer out at her through the underbrush of their hair, their bright eyes assessing her. Their kibitzing, their mimicry, their vulgar idiocies, their laughter, all of it is a distraction they put on, for her benefit. They tease her, but not too much: they know she has a breaking point. They never mention Mitch, for instance. They carry on as if he’s never existed. Do they miss him, did they love him, do they resent him, did they hate him? Roz doesn’t know. They don’t let her know. Somehow that’s harder.

They are so wonderful! She gazes at them with ferocious love.
Zenia
, she thinks,
you bitch! Maybe you had everything else, but you never had such a blessing. You never had daughters
. She starts to cry, resting her head in her hands, her elbows on the cold white tiles of the kitchen counter, the tears rolling hopelessly down.