“Pardon me?” says the woman. Then she looks at Roz in turn, and smiles, and says, “Roz? Roz Grunwald? Is it you? You don’t look like your pictures!”
Roz has an overwhelming urge to deny it. She shouldn’t have spoken in the first place, she should have dropped her purse on the floor and dived after it, anything to stay out of Zenia’s sightlines. Who needs the evil eye?
But the shock of seeing Zenia there, working as a waitress—a server—in Nereids, overrides all that, and “What the heck are you doing here?” Roz blurts out.
“Research,” says Zenia. “I’m a journalist, I’ve been freelance for years, in England mostly. But I wanted to come back, just to see—to see what things were like, over here. So I got myself commissioned to do a piece on sexual harassment in the workplace.”
Zenia must be different, thinks Roz, if she’s writing about that stuff. She even looks different. She can’t place it at first, and then she sees. It’s the tits. And the nose too. The former have swelled, the latter has shrunk. Zenia’s nose used to be more like Roz’s. “Really?” says Roz, who has a professional interest. “Who for?”
“Saturday Night,” says Zenia. “It’s mostly an interview format, but I thought it would be good to take a look at the locales:” She smiles more at Roz than at Mitch. “I was in a factory last week, and the week before that I spent in a hospital. You wouldn’t believe how many nurses get attacked by their patients! I don’t mean just grabbing—they throw things, the bedpans and so forth, it’s a real occupational hazard. They wouldn’t let me do any actual nursing though; this is more hands-on.”
1Vlitch is beginning to look peevish at being sidelined, so Roz introduces him to Zenia. She doesn’t want to say “an old friend,” so instead she says, “We were at the same school.” Not that we were ever what you’d call best buddies, thinks Roz. She scarcely knew Zenia then, except as an object of gossip. Lurid, sensational gossip.
Mitch does nothing to help Roz out, in the conversation department. He simply mutters something and stares at his plate. He obviously feels he’s been interrupted. “So, how’re the occupational hazards in this place?” says Roz, covering for him. “Has anyone called you ‘honeybun’ and pinched your butt?”
Zenia laughs. “Same old Roz. She was always the life of the parry,” she says to Mitch.
While Roz is wondering what parties she ever attended at which Zenia was also present—none, as far as she can remember, but she used to drink more in those days, or more at once; and maybe she’s forgotten—Zenia puts her hand on Roz’s shoulder. Her voice changes, becomes lower, more solemn. “You know, Roz,” she says, “I’ve always wanted to tell you this. But I never could before:”
“What?” says Roz. “Your father,” says Zenia.
“Oh dear,” says Roz, fearing some scam she’s never found out about, some buried scandal. Maybe Zenia is her long-lost half-sister, perish the thought. Her father was a sly old fox. “What did he do?”
“He saved my life,” says Zenia. “During the war.”
“Saved your life?” says Roz. “During the war?” Wait a minute—was Zenia even born, during the war? Roz hesitates, unwilling to believe. But this is what she’s longed for always—an eyewitness, someone involved but impartial, who could assure her that her father really was what he was rumoured to be: a hero. Or a semi-hero; at any rate, more than a shady trader. She’s heard accounts from others, her uncles for instance, but the two of them were hardly reliable; so she’s never been really sure, not really.
Now, finally, there’s a messenger, bringing news from that distant country, the country of the past, the country of the war. But why does that messenger have to be Zenia? It grates on Roz that Zenia has this news and Roz does not. It’s as if her father has left something in his will, some treasure, to a perfect stranger, some drifter he’d met in a bar, and nothing for his own daughter. Didn’t he know how much she wanted to know?
Maybe th~re’s nothing in it. On the other hand, what if there is? It’s at least worth a listen. It’s at least worth a flutter. “It’s a long story” says Zenia. “I’d love to tell you about it, when you’ve got the time. If you want to hear it, that is:” She smiles, nods at Mitch, and walks away. She moves confidently, nonchalantly, as if she knows she’s just made the one offer that Roz can’t possibly refuse.
XLII
Roz’s father, the Great Unknown. Great to others, unknown to her. Or let’s just say—thinks Roz, in her orange bathrobe, in the cellar, finishing off the crumbs of the Nanaimo bar, hungrily licking the plate—that he had nine lives, and she herself was only aware of three or four of them. You never knew when someone from one of her father’s previous lives might reappear.
Once upon a time Roz was not Roz. Instead she was Rosalind;—and her middle name was Agnes, after Saint Agnes and also her mother, though she didn’t. tell the girls at school about that because she didn’t want to be nicknamed Aggie, the way her mother was, behind her back, by the roomers. No one would dare call her mother Aggie to her face. She was far too respectable for that. She was Mrs. Greenwood, to them.
So Roz was Rosalind Greenwood instead of Roz Grunwald, and she lived with her mother in her mother’s rooming house on Huron Street. The house was tall and narrow and made of red brick, with a sagging porch on the front that Roz’s father was going to fix, maybe, sometime. Her father was away. He’d been away as long as Roz could remember. It was because of the war.
Roz could remember the war, although not very well. She remembered the air raid sirens, from before she went to school, because her mother had made her crawl underneath the bed and there was a spider. Her mother had saved up bacon fat and tin cans, though what the soldiers would do with those things Roz couldn’t imagine, and later, at school everyone gave nickels to the Red Cross because of all the orphans. The orphans stood on piles of rubble, and had raggedy clothes and huge, unsmiling eyes, appealing eyes, accusing eyes, because their parents had been killed by bombs. Sister Mary Paul showed pictures of them, in Grade One, and Roz cried because she was so sorry for them and was told to control herself, and couldn’t eat her lunch, and was told she had to finish it because of the orphans, and asked for a second helping because if finishing one lunch was going to help the orphans, then eating a second one would help them even more, although she wasn’t sure how. Maybe God had ways of arranging such things. Maybe the solid, visible food Roz ate got turned into invisible spiritual food and flown through the air, straight into the orphans, sort of like Communion, where the Host looked like a round soda cracker but was really Jesus. In any case, Roz was more than willing to help out.
Somewhere over there, behind the piles of rubble, out of sight among the dark dumps of trees in the distance, was her father. She hoped some of the food she ate would bypass the orphans and get into him. That was how Roz thought when she was in Grade One.
But the war was over, so where was Roz’s father now? “On his way,” said her mother. There was a third chair always placed ready at the kitchen table for him. Roz could hardly wait.
Because Roz’s father was away Roz’s mother had to run the rooming house all by herself. It was wearing her down, as she told Roz, almost every day. Roz could see it: her mother had a stringy look, as if the soft parts of her were being scraped away, as if her bones were getting closer and closer to the surface. She had a long face, grey-streaked brown hair pulled back and pinned, and an apron. She didn’t talk much, and when she did talk it was in short, dense clusters of words. “Least said soonest mended,” she would say. “A stitch in time saves nine. Scarce as hen’s teeth. Blood is thicker than water. Handsome is as handsome does. Safe as houses. Money doesn’t grow on trees. Little pitchers have big ears:” She said Roz was a chatterbox and her tongue wagged at both ends.