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 runry 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 wnsYy 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 Arpege 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.