The Edible Woman

by Margaret Atwood

  I dialled the phone number. Since the survey wasn't actually being conducted till the next week, someone might have forgotten to hook up the record, and I didn't want to make an idiot of myself.

  After a preliminary ringing, buzzing and clicking a deep bass voice, accompanied by what sounded like an electric guitar, sang:

  Moose, Moose,

  From the land of pine and spruce,

  Tingly, heady, rough-and-ready....

  Then a speaking voice, almost as deep as the singer's, intoned persuasively to background music,

  Any real man, on a real man's holiday - hunting, fishing, or just plain old-fashioned relaxing - needs a beer with a healthy, hearty taste, a deep-down manly flavour. The first long cool swallow will tell you that Moose Beer is just what you've always wanted for true beer enjoyment. Put the tang of the wilderness in YOUR life today with a big satisfying glass of sturdy Moose Beer.

  The singer resumed:

  Tingly, heady,

  Rough-and-ready,

  Moose, Moose, Moose, Moose, BEER!!!

  and after a climax of sound the record clicked off. It was in satisfactory working order.

  I remembered the sketches I'd seen of the visual presentation, scheduled to appear in magazines and on posters: the label was to have a pair of antlers with a gun and a fishing rod crossed beneath them. The singing commercial was a reinforcement of this theme; I didn't think it was very original but I admired the subtlety of "just plain old-fashioned relaxing." That was so the average beer-drinker, the slope-shouldered pot-bellied kind, would be able to feel a mystical identity with the plaid-jacketed sportsman shown in the pictures with his foot on a deer or scooping a trout into his net.

  I had got to the last page when the telephone rang. It was Peter. I could tell from the sound of his voice that something was wrong.

  "Listen, Marian, I can't make it for dinner tonight."

  "Oh?" I said, wanting further explanation. I was disappointed, I had been looking forward to dinner with Peter to cheer me up. Also I was hungry again. I had been eating in bits and pieces all day and I had been counting on something nourishing and substantial. This meant another of the T. V. dinners Ainsley and I kept for emergencies. "Has something happened?"

  "I know you'll understand. Trigger" - his voice choked - "Trigger's getting married."

  "Oh," I said. I thought of saying "That's too bad," but it didn't seem adequate. There was no use in sympathizing as though for a minor mishap when it was really a national disaster. "Would you like me to come with you?" I asked, offering support.

  "God no," he said, "that would be even worse. I'll see you tomorrow. Okay?"

  When he had hung up I reflected upon the consequences. The most obvious one was that Peter would need careful handling the next evening. Trigger was one of Peter's oldest friends; in fact, he had been the last of Peter's group of oldest friends still left unmarried. It had been like an epidemic. Just before I'd met him two had succumbed, and in the four months since that another two had gone under without much warning. He and Trigger had found themselves more and more alone on their bachelor drinking sessions during the summer, and when the others did take an evening off from their wives to go along, I gathered from Peter's gloomy accounts that the flavour of the evening was a synthetic substitute for the irresponsible gaiety of the past. He and Trigger had clutched each other like drowning men, each trying to make the other the reassuring reflection of himself that he needed. Now Trigger had sunk and the mirror would be empty. There were the other law students of course, but most of them were married too. Besides, they belonged to Peter's post-university silver age rather than to his earlier golden one.

  I felt sorry for him, but I knew I would have to be wary. If the other two marriages had been any indication, he'd start seeing me after two or three drinks as a version of the designing siren who had carried off Trigger. I didn't dare ask how she had done it: he might think I was getting ideas. The best plan would be to distract him.

  While I was meditating Lucy came over to my desk. "Do you think you can write a letter to this lady for me?" she asked. "I'm getting a splitting headache and I really can't think of a thing to say." She pressed one elegant hand to her forehead; with the other she handed me a note written in pencil on a piece of cardboard. I read it:

  Dear Sir, The cereal was fine but I found this in with the raisins. Yours Truly, (Mrs.) Ramona Baldwin.

  A squashed housefly was scotch-taped to the bottom of the letter.

  "It was that raisin-cereal study," Lucy said faintly. She was playing on my sympathies.

  "Oh, all right," I said; "have you got her address?"

  I made several trial drafts:

  Dear Mrs. Baldwin; We are extremely sorry about the object in your cereal but these little mistakes will happen. Dear Mrs. Baldwin; We are so sorry to have inconvenienced you; we assure you however that the entire contents of the package was absolutely sterile. Dear Mrs. Baldwin; We are grateful to you for calling this matter to our attention as we always like to know about any errors we may have made.

  The main thing, I knew, was to avoid calling the housefly by its actual name.

  The phone rang again; this time it was an unexpected voice.

  "Clara!" I exclaimed, conscious of having neglected her. "How are you?"

  "Shitty, thanks," Clara said. "But I wonder if you can come to dinner. I'd really like to see an outside face."

  "I'd love to," I said, my enthusiasm half genuine: it would be better than a T. V. dinner. "About what time?"

  "Oh, you know," Clara said. "Whenever you come. We aren't what you'd call punctual around here." She sounded bitter.

  Now I was committed I was thinking rapidly of what this would involve: I was being invited as an entertainer and confidante, someone who would listen to a recital of Clara's problems, and I didn't feel like it. "Do you think I could bring Ainsley too?" I said. "That is, if she isn't doing anything." I told myself it would be good for Ainsley to have a wholesome dinner - she had only had a coffee at the coffee break - but secretly I wanted her along to take off a bit of the pressure. She and Clara could talk about child psychology.

  "Sure, why not?" Clara said. "The more the merrier, that's our motto."

  I called Ainsley at work, carefully asking her whether she was doing anything for dinner and listening to her accounts of the two invitations she had received and turned down - one from the toothbrush murder trial witness, the other from the dentistry student of the night before. To the latter she had been quite rude: she was never going out with him again. She claimed he had told her there would be artists at the party.

  "So you aren't doing anything then," I said, establishing the fact.

  "Well, no," said Ainsley, "unless something comes along."

  "Then why don't you come with me to Clara's for dinner?" I was expecting a protest, but she accepted calmly. I arranged to meet her at the subway station.

  I left the desk at five and headed for the cool pink Ladies' Room. I wanted a few minutes of isolation to prepare myself for coping before I set out for Clara's. But Emmy, Lucy and Millie were all there, combing their yellow hair and retouching their makeup. Their six eyes glittered in the mirrors.

  "Going out tonight, Marian?" Lucy asked, too casually. She shared my telephone line and naturally knew about Peter.

  "Yes," I said, without volunteering information. Their wistful curiosity made me nervous.

  4

  I walked down towards the subway station along the late-afternoon sidewalk through a thick golden haze of heat and dust. It was almost like moving underwater. From a distance I saw Ainsley shimmering beside a telephone pole, and when I had reached her she turned and we joined the lines of office workers who were tunnelling down the stairs into the cool underground caverns below. By quick manoeuvring we got seats, though on the opposite sides of the car, and I sat reading the advertisements as well as I could through the screen of lurching bodies. When we got off again and went out through the pastel cor
ridors the air felt less humid.

  Clara's house was a few blocks further north. We walked in silence; I thought about mentioning the Pension Plan, but decided not to. Ainsley wouldn't understand why I found it disturbing: she'd see no reason why I couldn't leave my job and get another one, and why this wouldn't be a final solution. Then I thought about Peter and what had happened to him; Ainsley, however, would only be amused if I told her. Finally I asked her if she was feeling better.

  "Don't be so concerned, Marian," she said, "you make me feel like an invalid."

  I was hurt and didn't answer.

  We were going uphill at a slight angle. The city slopes upwards from the lake in a series of gentle undulations, though at any given point it seems flat. This accounted for the cooler air. It was quieter here too; I thought Clara was lucky, especially in her condition, to be living so far away from the heat and noise of downtown. Though she herself thought of it as a kind of exile: they had started out in an apartment near the university, but the need for space had forced them further north, although they had not yet reached the real suburbia of modern bungalows and station wagons. The street itself was old but not as attractive as our street: the houses were duplexes, long and narrow, with wooden porches and thin back gardens.

  "Christ it's hot," Ainsley said as we turned up the walk that led to Clara's house. The grass on the doormat-sized lawn had not been cut for some time. On the steps lay a neatly decapitated doll and inside the baby carriage was a large teddy bear with the stuffing coming out. I knocked, and after several minutes Joe appeared behind the screen door, harried and uncombed, doing up the buttons on his shirt.

  "Hi Joe," I said, "here we are. How's Clara feeling?"

  "Hi, come on through," he said, stepping aside to let us past. "Clara's out back."

  We walked the length of the house, which was arranged in the way such houses usually are - living room in front, then dining room with doors that can be slid shut, then kitchen - stepping over some of the scattered obstacles and around the others. We negotiated the stairs of the back porch, which were overgrown with empty bottles of all kinds, beer bottles, milk bottles, wine and scotch bottles, and baby bottles, and found Clara in the garden, sitting in a round wicker basket-chair with metal legs. She had her feet up on another chair and was holding her latest baby somewhere in the vicinity of what had once been her lap. Clara's body is so thin that her pregnancies are always bulgingly obvious, and now in her seventh month she looked like a boa constrictor that has swallowed a watermelon. Her head, with its aureole of pale hair, was made to seem smaller and even more fragile by the contrast.

  "Oh hi," she said wearily as we came down the back steps. "Hello Ainsley, nice to see you again. Christ it's hot."

  We agreed, and sat down on the grass near her, since there were no chairs. Ainsley and I took off our shoes; Clara was already barefoot. We found it difficult to talk: everyone's attention was necessarily focussed on the baby, which was whimpering, and for some time it was the only person who said anything.

  When she telephoned Clara had seemed to be calling me to some sort of rescue, but I felt now that there was nothing much I could do, and nothing she had even expected me to do. I was to be only a witness, or perhaps a kind of blotter, my mere physical presence absorbing a little of the boredom.

  The baby had ceased to whine and was now gurgling. Ainsley was plucking bits of grass.

  "Marian," Clara said at last, "could you take Elaine for a while? She doesn't like going on the ground and my arms are just about falling off."

  "I'll take her," said Ainsley unexpectedly.

  Clara pried the baby away from her body and transferred it to Ainsley, saying "Come on, you little leech. I sometimes think she's all covered with suckers, like an octopus." She lay back in her chair and closed her eyes, looking like a strange vegetable growth, a bulbous tuber that had sent out four thin white roots and a tiny pale-yellow flower. A cicada was singing in a tree nearby, its monotonous vibration like a hot needle of sunlight between the ears.

  Ainsley held the baby awkwardly, gazing with curiosity into its face. I thought how closely the two faces resembled each other. The baby stared back up with eyes as round and blue as Ainsley's own; the pink mouth was drooling slightly.

  Clara raised her head and opened her eyes. "Is there anything I can get you?" she asked, remembering she was the hostess.

  "Oh no, we're fine," I said hastily, alarmed by the image of her struggling up out of the chair. "Is there anything I can get you?" I would have felt better doing something positive.

  "Joe will come out soon," she said as if explaining. "Well, talk to me. What's new?"

  "Nothing much," I said. I sat trying to think of things that would entertain her, but anything I could mention, the office or places I had been or the furnishings of the apartment, would only remind Clara of her own inertia, her lack of room and time, her days made claustrophobic with small necessary details.

  "Are you still going out with that nice boy? The good-looking one. What's-his-name. I remember he came by once to get you."

  "You mean Peter?"

  "Yes she is," said Ainsley, with a hint of disapproval. "He's monopolized her." She was sitting cross-legged, and now she put the baby down in her lap so she could light a cigarette.

  "That sounds hopeful," Clara said gloomily. "By the way, guess who's back in town? Len Slank. He called up the other day."

  "Oh really? When did he get in?" I was annoyed that he hadn't called me too.

  "About a week ago, he said. He said he'd tried to phone you but couldn't get hold of your number."

  "He might have tried Information," I said drily. "But I'd love to see him. How did he seem? How long is he staying?"

  "Who is he?" Ainsley asked.

  "Oh, no one you'd be interested in," I said quickly. I couldn't think of two people who would be worse for each other. "He's just an old friend of ours from college."

  "He went to England and got into television," said Clara. "I'm not just sure what he does. A nice type though, but he's horrible with women, sort of a seducer of young girls. He says anything over seventeen is too old."

  "Oh, one of those," Ainsley said. "They're such a bore." She stubbed out her cigarette in the grass.

  "You know, I got the feeling that's why he's back," Clara said, with something like vivacity. "Some kind of a mess with a girl; like the one that made him go over in the first place."

  "Ah," I said, not surprised.

  Ainsley gave a little cry and deposited the baby on the lawn. "It's wet on my dress," she said accusingly.

  "Well, they do, you know," said Clara. The baby began to howl, and I picked her up gingerly and handed her over to Clara. I was prepared to be helpful, but only up to a point.

  Clara joggled the baby. "Well, you goddamned fire hydrant," she said soothingly. "You spouted on mummy's friend, didn't you? It'll wash out, Ainsley. But we didn't want to put rubber pants on you in all this heat, did we, you stinking little geyser? Never believe what they tell you about maternal instinct," she added grimly to us. "I don't see how anyone can love their children till they start to be human beings."

  Joe appeared on the back porch, a dishtowel tucked apron-like into the belt of his trousers. "Anybody for a beer before dinner?"

  Ainsley and I said Yes eagerly, and Clara said, "A little vermouth for me, darling. I can't drink anything else these days, it upsets my bloody stomach. Joe, can you just take Elaine in and change her?"

  Joe came down the steps and picked up the baby. "By the way," he said, "you haven't seen Arthur around anywhere, have you?"

  "Oh god, now where has the little bugger got to now?" Clara asked as Joe disappeared into the house; it seemed a rhetorical question. "I think he's found out how to open the back gate. The little bastard. Arthur! Come here, darling," she called languidly.

  Down at the end of the narrow garden the line of washing that hung almost brushing the ground was parted by two small grubby hands, and Clara's firstborn eme
rged. Like the baby he was naked except for a pair of diapers. He hesitated, peering at us dubiously.

  "Come here love, and let mummy see what you've been up to," Clara said. "Take your hands off the clean sheets," she added without conviction.

  Arthur picked his way over the grass towards us, lifting his bare feet high with every step. The grass must have been ticklish. His diaper was loose, suspended as though by willpower alone below the bulge of his stomach with its protruding navel. His face was puckered in a serious frown.

  Joe returned carrying a tray. "I stuck her in the laundry basket," he said. "She's playing with the clothespins."

  Arthur had reached us and stood beside his mother's chair, still frowning, and Clara said to him, "Why have you got that funny look, you little demon?" She reached down behind him and felt his diaper. "I should have known," she sighed, "he was so quiet. Husband, your son has shat again. I don't know where, it isn't in his diaper."

  Joe handed round the drinks, then knelt and said to Arthur firmly but kindly, "Show Daddy where you put it." Arthur gazed up at him, not sure whether to whimper or smile. Finally he stalked portentously to the side of the garden, where he squatted down near a clump of dusty red chrysanthemums and stared with concentration at a patch of ground.

  "That's a good boy," Joe said, and went back into the house.

  "He's a real nature-child, he just loves to shit in the garden," Clara said to us. "He thinks he's a fertility-god. If we didn't clean it up this place would be one big manure field. I don't know what he's going to do when it snows." She closed her eyes. "We've been trying to toilet-train him, though according to some of the books it's too early, and we got him one of those plastic potties. He hasn't the least idea what it's for; he goes around wearing it on his head. I guess he thinks it's a crash helmet."

  We watched, sipping our beer, as Joe crossed the garden and returned with a folded piece of newspaper. "After this one I'm going on the pill," said Clara.

  When Joe had finally finished cooking the dinner we went into the house and ate it, seated around the heavy table in the dining room. The baby had been fed and exiled to the carriage on the front porch, but Arthur sat in a high chair, where he evaded with spastic contortions of his body the spoonfuls of food Clara poked in the direction of his mouth. Dinner was wizened meat balls and noodles from a noodle mix, with lettuce. For dessert we had something I recognized.