The Edible Woman

by Margaret Atwood

  As I hurried towards my office building, I found myself envying Ainsley her job. Though mine was better-paying and more interesting, hers was more temporary: she had an idea of what she wanted to do next. She could work in a shiny new air-conditioned office building, whereas mine was dingy brick with small windows. Also, her job was unusual. When she meets people at parties they are always surprised when she tells them she's a tester of defective electric toothbrushes, and she always says, "What else do you do with a B.A. these days?" Whereas my kind of job is only to be expected. I was thinking too that really I was better equipped to handle her job than she is. From what I see around the apartment, I'm sure I have much more mechanical ability than Ainsley.

  By the time I finally reached the office I was three-quarters of an hour late. None commented but all took note.

  2

  The humidity was worse inside. I waded among the ladies' desks to my own corner and had scarcely settled in behind the typewriter before the backs of my legs were stuck to the black leatherette of the chair. The air-conditioning system, I saw, had failed again, though since it is merely a fan which revolves in the centre of the ceiling, stirring the air around like a spoon in soup, it makes little difference whether it is going or not. But it was evidently bad for the ladies' morale to see the blades dangling up there unmoving: it created the impression that nothing was being done, spurring their inertia on to even greater stasis. They squatted at their desks, toad-like and sluggish, blinking and opening and closing their mouths. Friday is always a bad day at the office.

  I had begun to peck languidly at my damp typewriter when Mrs. Withers, the dietician, marched in through the back door, drew up, and scanned the room. She wore her usual Betty Grable hairdo and open-toed pumps, and her shoulders had an aura of shoulder pads even in a sleeveless dress. "Ah, Marian," she said, "you're just in time. I need another pre-test taster for the canned rice pudding study, and none of the ladies seem very hungry this morning."

  She wheeled and headed briskly for the kitchen. There is something unwiltable about dieticians. I unstuck myself from my chair, feeling like a volunteer singled out from the ranks; but I reminded myself that my stomach could use the extra breakfast.

  In the tiny immaculate kitchen she explained her problem while spooning equal portions of canned rice pudding into three glass bowls. "You work on questionnaires, Marian, maybe you can help us. We can't decide whether to have them taste all three flavours at the same meal, or each flavour separately at subsequent meals. Or perhaps we could have them taste in pairs - say, Vanilla and Orange at one meal, and Vanilla and Caramel at another. Of course we want to get as unbiased a sampling as possible, and so much depends on what else has been served - the colours of the vegetables for instance, and the tablecloth."

  I sampled the Vanilla.

  "How would you rate the colour on that?" she asked anxiously, pencil poised. "Natural, Somewhat Artificial, or Definitely Unnatural?"

  "Have you thought about putting raisins in it?" I said, turning to the Caramel. I didn't wish to offend her.

  "Raisins are too risky," she said. "Many don't like them."

  I set down the Caramel and tried the Orange. "Are you going to have them serve it hot?" I asked. "Or maybe with cream?"

  "Well, it's intended primarily for the time-saver market," she said. "They naturally would want to serve it cold. They can add cream if they like, later, I mean we've nothing really against it though it's not nutritionally necessary, it's fortified with vitamins already, but right now we want a pure taste test."

  "I think subsequent meals would be best," I said.

  "If we could only do it in the middle of the afternoon. But we need a family reaction...." She tapped her pencil thoughtfully on the edge of the stainless-steel sink.

  "Yes, well," I said, "I'd better be getting back." Deciding for them what they wanted to know wasn't part of my job.

  Sometimes I wonder just which things are part of my job, especially when I find myself calling up garage mechanics to ask them about their pistons and gaskets or handing out pretzels to suspicious old ladies on street corners. I know what Seymour Surveys hired me as - I'm supposed to spend my time revising the questionnaires, turning the convoluted and overly-subtle prose of the psychologists who write them into simple questions which can be understood by the people who ask them as well as the people who answer them. A question like "In what percentile would you place the visual impact value?" is not useful. When I got the job after graduation I considered myself lucky - it was better than many - but after four months its limits are still vaguely defined.

  At times I'm certain I'm being groomed for something higher up, but as I have only hazy notions of the organizational structure of Seymour Surveys I can't imagine what. The company is layered like an ice-cream sandwich, with three floors: the upper crust, the lower crust, and our department, the gooey layer in the middle. On the floor above are the executives and the psychologists - referred to as the men upstairs, since they are all men - who arrange things with the clients; I've caught glimpses of their offices, which have carpets and expensive furniture and silk-screen reprints of Group of Seven paintings on the walls. Below us are the machines - mimeo machines, I.B.M. machines for counting and sorting and tabulating the information; I've been down there too, into that factory-like clatter where the operatives seem frayed and overworked and have ink on their fingers. Our department is the link between the two: we are supposed to take care of the human element, the interviewers themselves. As market research is a sort of cottage industry, like a hand-knit sock company, these are all housewives working in their spare time and paid by the piece. They don't make much, but they like to get out of the house. Those who answer the questions don't get paid at all; I often wonder why they do it. Perhaps it's the come-on blurb in which they're told they can help to improve the products they use right in their own homes, something like a scientist. Or maybe they like to have someone to talk to. But I suppose most people are flattered by having their opinions asked.

  Because our department deals primarily with housewives, everyone in it, except the unfortunate office-boy, is female. We are spread out in a large institutional-green room with an opaque glassed cubicle at one end for Mrs. Bogue, the head of the department, and a number of wooden tables at the other end for the motherly-looking women who sit deciphering the interviewers' handwriting and making crosses and checkmarks on the completed questionnaires with coloured crayons, looking with their scissors and glue and stacks of paper like a superannuated kindergarten class. The rest of us in the department sit at miscellaneous desks in the space between. We have a comfortable chintz-curtained lunchroom for those who bring paper bags, and a tea and coffee machine, though some of the ladies have their own teapots; we also have a pink washroom with a sign over the mirrors asking us not to leave our hairs or tea leaves in the sink.

  What, then, could I expect to turn into at Seymour Surveys? I couldn't become one of the men upstairs; I couldn't become a machine person or one of the questionnaire-marking ladies, as that would be a step down. I might conceivably turn into Mrs. Bogue or her assistant, but as far as I could see that would take a long time, and I wasn't sure I would like it anyway.

  I was just finishing the scouring-pad questionnaire, a rush job, when Mrs. Grot of Accounting came through the door. Her business was with Mrs. Bogue, but on her way out she stopped at my desk. She's a short tight woman with hair the colour of a metal refrigerator-tray.

  "Well, Miss MacAlpin," she grated, "you've been with us four months now, and that means you're eligible for the Pension Plan."

  "Pension Plan?" I had been told about the Pension Plan when I joined the company but I had forgotten about it. "Isn't it too soon for me to join the Pension Plan? I mean - don't you think I'm too young?"

  "Well, it's just as well to start early, isn't it," Mrs. Grot said. Her eyes behind their rimless spectacles were glittering: she would relish the chance of making yet another deduction from my paycheque.
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  "I don't think I'd like to join the Pension Plan," I said. "Thank you anyway."

  "Yes, well, but it's obligatory, you see," she said in a matter-of-fact voice.

  "Obligatory? You mean even if I don't want it?"

  "Yes, you see if nobody paid into it, nobody would be able to get anything out of it, would they? Now I've brought the necessary documents; all you have to do is sign here."

  I signed, but after Mrs. Grot had left I was suddenly quite depressed; it bothered me more than it should have. It wasn't only the feeling of being subject to rules I had no interest in and no part in making: you get adjusted to that at school. It was a kind of superstitious panic about the fact that I had actually signed my name, had put my signature to a magic document which seemed to bind me to a future so far ahead I couldn't think about it. Somewhere in front of me a self was waiting, pre-formed, a self who had worked during innumerable years for Seymour Surveys and was now receiving her reward. A pension. I foresaw a bleak room with a plug-in electric heater. Perhaps I would have a hearing aid, like one of my great-aunts who had never married. I would talk to myself; children would throw snowballs at me. I told myself not to be silly, the world would probably blow up between now and then; I reminded myself I could walk out of there the next day and get a different job if I wanted to, but that didn't help. I thought of my signature going into a file and the file going into a cabinet and the cabinet being shut away in a vault somewhere and locked.

  I welcomed the coffee break at ten-thirty. I knew I ought to have skipped it and stayed to expiate my morning's lateness, but I needed the distraction.

  I go for coffee with the only three people in the department who are almost my own age. Sometimes Ainsley walks over from her office to join us, when she is tired of the other toothbrush-testers. Not that she's especially fond of the three from my office, whom she calls collectively the office virgins. They aren't really very much alike, except that they are all artificial blondes - Emmy, the typist, whisk-tinted and straggly; Lucy, who has a kind of public-relations job, platinum and elegantly coiffured, and Millie, Mrs. Bogue's Australian assistant, brassy from the sun and cropped - and, as they have confessed at various times over coffee grounds and the gnawed crusts of toasted Danishes, all virgins - Millie from a solid girl-guide practicality ("I think in the long run it's better to wait until you're married, don't you? Less bother."), Lucy from social quailing ("What would people say?"), which seems to be rooted in a conviction that all bedrooms are wired for sound, with society gathered at the other end tuning its earphones; and Emmy, who is the office hypochondriac, from the belief that it would make her sick, which it probably would. They are all interested in travelling: Millie has lived in England, Lucy has been twice to New York, and Emmy wants to go to Florida. After they have travelled enough they would like to get married and settle down.

  "Did you hear the laxative survey in Quebec has been cancelled?" Millie said when we were seated at our usual table at the wretched, but closest, restaurant across the street. "Great big job it was going to be, too - a product test in their own home and thirty-two pages of questions." Millie always gets the news first.

  "Well I must say that's a good thing," Emmy sniffed. "I don't see how they could ask anybody thirty-two pages about that." She went back to peeling the nail polish off her thumbnail. Emmy always looks as though she is coming unravelled. Stray threads trail from her hems, her lipstick sloughs off in dry scales, she sheds wispy blonde hairs and flakes of scalp on her shoulders and back; everywhere she goes she leaves a trail of assorted shreds.

  I saw Ainsley come in and waved to her. She squeezed into the booth, saying "Hi" all round, then pinned up a strand of hair that had come down. The office virgins responded, but without marked enthusiasm.

  "They've done it before," Millie said. She's been at the company longer than any of us. "And it works. They figure anybody you could take past page three would be a sort of laxative addict, if you see what I mean, and they'd go right on through."

  "Done what before?" said Ainsley.

  "What do you want to bet she doesn't wipe the table?" Lucy said, loudly enough so the waitress would overhear. She carries on a running battle with the waitress, who wears Woolworth earrings and a sullen scowl and is blatantly not an office virgin.

  "The laxative study in Quebec," I said privately to Ainsley.

  The waitress arrived, wiped the table savagely, and took our orders. Lucy made an issue of the toasted Danish - she definitely wanted one without raisins this time. "Last time she brought me one with raisins," she informed us, "and I told her I just couldn't stand them. I've never been able to stand raisins. Ugh."

  "Why only Quebec?" Ainsley said, breathing smoke out through her nostrils. "Is there some psychological reason?" Ainsley majored in psychology at college.

  "Gosh, I don't know," said Millie, "I guess people are just more constipated there. Don't they eat a lot of potatoes?"

  "Would potatoes make you that constipated?" asked Emmy, leaning forward across the table. She pushed several straws of hair back from her forehead and a cloud of tiny motes detached themselves from her and settled gently down through the air.

  "It can't be only the potatoes," Ainsley pronounced. "It must be their collective guilt complex. Or maybe the strain of the language problem; they must be horribly repressed."

  The others looked at her with hostility: I could tell they thought she was showing off. "It's awfully hot out today," said Millie, "the office is like a furnace."

  "Anything happening at your office?" I asked Ainsley, to break the tension.

  Ainsley ground out her cigarette. "Oh yes, we've had quite a bit of excitement," she said. "Some woman tried to bump off her husband by short-circuiting his electric toothbrush, and one of our boys has to be at the trial as a witness; testify that the thing couldn't possibly short-circuit under normal circumstances. He wants me to go along as a sort of special assistant, but he's such a bore. I can tell he'd be rotten in bed."

  I suspected Ainsley of making this story up, but her eyes were at their bluest and roundest. The office virgins squirmed. Ainsley has an offhand way of alluding to the various men in her life that makes them uncomfortable.

  Luckily our orders arrived. "That bitch brought me one with raisins again," Lucy wailed, and began picking them out with her long perfectly shaped iridescent fingernails and piling them at the side of her plate.

  As we were walking back to the office I complained to Millie about the Pension Plan. "I didn't realize it was obligatory," I said. "I don't see why I should have to pay into their Pension Plan and have all those old crones like Mrs. Grot retire and feed off my salary."

  "Oh yes, it bothered me too at first," Millie said without interest. "You'll get over it. Gosh, I hope they've fixed the air conditioning."

  3

  I had returned from lunch and was licking and stamping envelopes for the coast-to-coast instant-pudding-sauce study, behind schedule because someone in mimeo had run one of the question sheets backwards, when Mrs. Bogue came out of her cubicle.

  "Marian," she said with a sigh of resignation, "I'm afraid Mrs. Dodge in Kamloops will have to be removed. She's pregnant." Mrs. Bogue frowned slightly: she regards pregnancy as an act of disloyalty to the company.

  "That's too bad," I said. The huge wall map of the country, sprinkled with red thumbtacks like measles, is directly above my desk, which means that the subtraction and addition of interviewers seems to have become part of my job. I climbed up on the desk, located Kamloops, and took out the thumbtack with the paper flag marked DODGE.

  "While you're up there," Mrs. Bogue said, "could you just take off Mrs. Ellis in Blind River? I hope it's only temporary, she's always done good work, but she writes that some lady chased her out of the house with a meat cleaver and she fell on the steps and broke her leg. Oh, and add this new one - a Mrs. Gauthier in Charlottetown. I certainly hope she's better than the last one there; Charlottetown is always so difficult."

  When
I had climbed down she smiled at me pleasantly, which put me on guard. Mrs. Bogue has a friendly, almost cosy manner that equips her perfectly for dealing with the interviewers, and she is at her most genial when she wants something. "Marian," she said, "we have a little problem. We're running a beer study next week - you know which one, it's the telephone-thing one - and they've decided upstairs that we need to do a pre-test this weekend. They're worried about the questionnaire. Now, we could get Mrs. Pilcher, she's a dependable interviewer, but it is the long weekend and we don't like to ask her. You're going to be in town, aren't you?"

  "Does it have to be this weekend?" I asked, somewhat pointlessly.

  "Well, we absolutely have to have the results Tuesday. You only need to get seven or eight men."

  My lateness that morning had given her leverage. "Fine," I said, "I'll do them tomorrow."

  "You'll get overtime, of course," Mrs. Bogue said as she walked away, leaving me wondering whether that had been a snide remark. Her voice is always so bland it's hard to tell.

  I finished licking the envelopes, then got the beer questionnaires from Millie and went through the questions, looking for trouble-spots. The initial selection questions were standard enough. After that, the questions were designed to test listener response to a radio jingle, part of the advertising campaign for a new brand of beer one of the large companies was about to launch on the market. At a certain point the interviewer had to ask the respondent to pick up the telephone and dial a given number, whereupon the jingle would play itself to him over the phone. Then there were a number of questions asking the man how he liked the commercial, whether he thought it might influence his buying habits, and so on.