She loved sitting in a circle, though after a while she noticed that the circle was not quite circular. One woman would tell her problem and admit her pain, and then another one would do it, and then Roz would take her turn, and a sort of disbelieving glaze would come down over their eyes and someone would change the subject.
What was it? Why was Roz’s pain second-rate? It took her a while to figure it out: it was her money. Surely, they thought, anyone with as much money as Roz couldn’t possibly be suffering. She remembered an old expression from her uncles:
My heart bleeds for him. This was always said with extreme sarcasm, about someone who’d got lucky, which meant rich. Roz was expected to do the bleeding for, but she could not expect to be bled over in return.
Still, there was one area in which Roz was in demand. In a movement so perennially cash-starved you could almost say she was indispensable. So it was natural that she was the one they had come to when WiseWomanWorld was about to go under because it couldn’t attract big glossy lipstick-and-booze advertising. It was more than a magazine then, it was a friend; a friend that combined high ideals and hope with the sharing of down-and-dirty secrets. The truth about masturbation! The truth about wanting, sometimes, to shove your kids’ heads into the wall! What to do when men rubbed themselves against you from behind, in the subway, and when your boss chased you around the desk, and when you had those urges to take all the pills in the medicine cabinet, the day before your period! WiseWomanWorld was all the sleepover parties Roz had once felt were going on behind her back, and of course she had to save it.
The others wanted the magazine to be a cooperative, the way it already was. They wanted Roz to just give them the money, period, and no tax write-off either because it was too political. It wasn’t peanuts either, what it ,would take: There was no point in a small cash injection. Not enough would be the same as nothing, she might as well flush it down the toilet.
“I never invest in anything I can’t control,” she told them. “You have to issue shares. Then I’ll buy a majority holding:” They got angry at her for that, but Roz said, “Your leg’s broken, you go to a doctor. You have money troubles, you come to me. You tried it your way and it didn’t work, and frankly your books are a mess. This is something I know. You want me to fix it, or not?” She knew it would still lose money, but that being the case she at least wanted to take the business loss.
They didn’t like it either when Roz put Mitch on the board of directors and stuck on a couple of his legal buddies to keep him company, but it was the only way. If they wanted her help they had to realize what her life conditions were, and if Mitch couldn’t participate, he would sabotage. Her home life would be turned into a maze of snares and booby traps, more than it already was. “It’s just three meetings a year,” she told them. “It’s the price you pay.” As prices went—as prices had gone, here and there in world history—it wasn’t all that high.
“I’m having Zenia over for a drink,” Roz tells Mitch. If she doesn’t tell him, he’s sure to walk in on the two of them and then sulk because he’s been left out of the picture. Being a woman with power doesn’t mean Roz has to tread less softly around Mitch. She has to tread more softly, she has to diminish herself, pretend she’s smaller than she is, apologize for her success, because everything she does is magnified.
“Zenia who?” says Mitch.
“You know, we ran into her in that restaurant,” says Roz. She’s pleased Mitch doesn’t remember.
“Oh yes,” says Mitch. “She’s not like most of your friends:” Mitch isn’t that keen on Roz’s friends. He thinks they’re-a bunch of man-hating hairy-legged whip-toting feminists, because at one point, in his early days on the board of WiseWvmanWorld, they were. In vain does Roz tell him that everyone was then, it was a trend, and the overalls were just a fashion statement—not that Roz ever wore them herself, she would’ve looked like a truck driver. He knows better, he knows it wasn’t just overalls. The women at Wise Woman had put up with him because of Roz, but they hadn’t suffered him gladly. They wouldn’t let him tell them how to be good feminists, much as he tried. Maybe it was because he said they should use humour and charm because otherwise men would be frightened of them, and they weren’t in the mood to be charming, not to him, not just then. He must have been badly traumatized by that whole phase; though he wasn’t above trying a few twists and ploys of his own.
Roz remembers the dinner parry she threw to celebrate the restructuring of WiseWomanWorld, when Mitch was sitting beside Alma the managing editor, and made the mistake of trying to run his hand up and down her leg under the table while carrying on a too-animated theoretical discussion with Edith the designer. Poor lamb, he thought Roz couldn’t guess. But one look at Mitch’s arm position—and his dampening, reddening, braised-looking face, and Alma’s stern frown and the squint lines around her mouth—told all. Roz watched with furious interest as Alma struggled with her dilemma: whether to put up with it because Mitch was Roz’s husband and she didn’t want to jeopardize her job—a thing Mitch had counted on with others, in the past—or whether to call him. on it. Principle won, and also outrage, and Alma said to him sharply, though in an undertone, “I am not a piccolo.”
“Pardon?” said Mitch, distantly, politely, bluffing it out, keeping his hand under the table. The poor baby hadn’t realized yet that women had really changed. In days of yore, Alma would have felt guilty for attracting this kind of attention, but not any longer.
“Get your goddamn hand off my fucking leg or I’ll stab you with my fork,” hissed Alma.
Roz went into coughing mode to cover up that she’d heard, and Mitch’s hand shot up above ground as if he’d been scalded, and after that night he started referring to Alma with pity and concern, as if she were a lost soul. A drug addict or something. “Too bad about that girl,” he would say sadly. “She has such potential, but she has an attitude problem. She’d be quite good-looking if it weren’t for the scowclass="underline" ’ He hinted that she might be a lesbian; he hadn’t figured out that this was no longer an insult. Roz waited a decent interval and then pulled strings to get Alma a raise.
But that’s how Mitch tends to see Roz’s friends: scowly. And more lately, frumpy. He can’t resist commenting on how their faces are sliding down, as if his isn’t, though it’s true men can get away with looking older. Probably it’s revenge: he suspects Roz and her friends of talking him over behind his back, of analyzing him and providing remedies for him, as if he’s a stomach ailment. This was true once, granted, when Roz still thought she could change him, or when her friends thought she could change herself. When he was a project. Leave him, they’d say. Turf the bugger out! You can afford it! Why do you stay with him?
But Roz had her reasons, among them the children. Also she was still enough of a once-Catholic to be nervous about divorce. Also she didn’t want to admit to herself that she’d made a mistake. Also she was still in love with Mitch. So after a while she stopped discussing him with her friends, because what was left to say? It was an impasse, and chewing over solutions that she knew she would never implement made her feel guilty.
And then her friends gave up wearing overalls, and left the magazine, and went into dress-for-success tailored suits, and lost interest in Mitch, and discussed burnout instead, and Roz could permit herself to feel guilty about other things, such as being more energetic than they were. But Mitch keeps on saying, “Are you having lunch with that frumpy old manhater?” whenever one of the friends from that era turns up again: He knows it gets to her.
He has a little more tolerance for Charis and Tony, maybe because Roz has known them so long and because they’re the twins’ godmothers. But he thinks Tony is a weirdo and Charis is a nut. That’s how he neutralizes them: As far as Roz knows he has never made a pass at either of them. Possibly he doesn’t place them in the category of woman but in some other category, not clearly defined: A sort of sexless gnome.