The Robber Bride

In the end they took Roz’s car, a little red Austin, a birthday present, Roz would’ve preferred a jag but her father said that would have been spoiling her. Mitch didn’t protest much when Roz gushingly urged the car keys on him so he could drive, because a man being driven by a woman might have felt diminished, she’d read the women’s magazine articles about all the ways you could unwittingly diminish a man, it was terrible how easily they shrank, and though she usually liked to drive her own car herself she didn’t want to scare Mitch off. This way too she could just sit back and admire his profile. He drove well—decisively, aggressively, but not without courtesy, and she liked that. She herself was a fast driver; a barger-in, a honker.

But watching Mitch drive, she could see that there were smoother ways of getting where you wanted to go.

The di

He doesn’t like me, she thought, this is a fiasco, so she had another glass of white wine, and then she thought, What the hell, and told him a joke, the one about the girl who told another girl she’d got raped that summer, yes, and after that it was just rape rape rape, all summer long, and Mitch smiled at her slowly, and his eyes closed up a little like a cat when you stroke its ears, maybe despite the tin-soldier posture he had a hormone or two after all, maybe the WASPY fa~ade was just that, a fa~ade, and if it was she would be eternally grateful, and then she felt his hand on her knee, under the table, and that was the end of her self-control, she thought she was going to melt like a warm Popsicle, all over the red plush restaurant seat.

After di

“What?” she said.

He repeated the marrying part.

“But I hardly know you,” Roz stammered.

“You’ll get to know me better,” said Mitch calmly. He was right about that.

And this is how things went on: mediocre di

When the time came—not in a church, not in a synagogue—considering the mixtures involved, in one of the banquet rooms of the Park Plaza Hotel—Roz didn’t think she’d make it all the way down the aisle. She thought there might be an unseemly incident. But Mitch would never have forgiven her if she’d jumped him in public, or even given him a big smooch during the kiss-the-bride routine. He’d made it clear by then that there were jumpers and jumpees, kissers and kissees, and he was to be the former and she the latter.

Sex-role stereotyping, thinks Roz now, having learned a thing or two in the interim. The cu

Her father was suspicious about that even at the time. “How much is he making?” he queried Roz.

“Papa, that is not the point!” cried Roz, in an excess of antimaterialism. Anyway, wasn’t Mitch the golden boy? Guaranteed to do well? Wasn’t he about to rise in his law—firm like a soap bubble?

“All I’m asking is, do I need to support him?” said her father. To Mitch he said, “Two cripples do not make one dancer,” glowering out from under his eyebrows.

“Pardon me, sir?” said Mitch, with urbanity, too much urbanity, urbanity that bordered on condescension and that meant he was willing to overlook Roz’s parents, the immigrant taint of the one, the boiled-potato doily-ridden rooming-house aftertaste of the other. Roz was new money, Mitch was old money; or he would have been old money if he’d had any money. His own father was dead, somewhat too early and too vaguely for total comfort. How was Roz to know then that he’d blown the family fortune on a war widow he’d run away with and then jumped off a bridge? She was not a mind-reader, and Mitch didn’t tell her, not for years, not for years and years. Neither did his prune of a mother, who was not dead yet but (thinks Roz, in the cellar) might as well have been. Roz has never forgiven her those delicate, cutting post-bridal hints about toning down her wardrobe and the proper way to set a di

“Papa, I am not a cripple!” Roz said to her father afterwards. “I mean, that is so insulting!”

“One cripple and one who is not a cripple don’t make a dancer either,” said her father.

What was he trying to tell me? thinks Roz, at this distance. What had he seen, what crack or fault line, what incipient limp?

But Roz wasn’t listening then, she was holding her hands over her ears, she didn’t want to hear. Her father gave her a long, sombre look. “You know what you’re doing?”

Roz thought she did; or rather she didn’t care whether she did or not, because this was it, this was It, and she was floating finally, she was up there on cloud nine, light as a feather despite her big raw bones. Her mother was on her side, because Roz was almost twenty-three now and any marriage was better than no marriage as far as she was concerned; though once she saw it was really going to happen, she became scornful of Mitch’s good ma

Mitch didn’t marry Roz just for her money. She’s sure of that. She remembers their actual honeymoon, in Mexico, all those Day of the Dead sugar skulls in the market, the flowers, the colours, herself giddy with pleasure, her sense of novelty and release because look, she had done it, she wasn’t a potential old maid any more but a bride, a married woman; and during the hot nights the window open to the sea, the curtains blowing, the wind moving over her skin like muslin, and the dark shape of Mitch above her, faceless and intense. It was different when you were in love, it was no longer a game; there was more at stake. She cried afterwards because she was so happy, and Mitch must have felt it too, because you can’t fake that kind of Passion completely. Can you?