The Edible Woman

by Margaret Atwood

  "This is that new canned rice pudding; it saves a lot of time," Clara said defensively. "It's not too bad with cream, and Arthur loves it."

  "Yes," I said. "Pretty soon they'll be having Orange and Caramel too."

  "Oh?" Clara deftly intercepted a long drool of pudding and returned it to Arthur's mouth.

  Ainsley got out a cigarette and held it for Joe to light. "Tell me," she said to him, "do you know this friend of theirs - Leonard Slank? They're being so mysterious about him."

  Joe had been up and down all during the meal, taking off the plates and tending things in the kitchen. He looked dizzy. "Oh yes, I remember him," he said, "though he's really a friend of Clara's." He finished his pudding quickly and asked Clara whether she needed any help, but she didn't hear him. Arthur had just thrown his bowl on the floor.

  "But what do you think of him?" Ainsley asked, as though appealing to his superior intelligence.

  Joe stared at the wall, thinking. He didn't like giving negative judgments, I knew, but I also knew he wasn't fond of Len. "He's not ethical," he said at last. Joe is an Instructor in Philosophy.

  "Oh, that's not quite fair," I said. Len had never been unethical towards me.

  Joe frowned at me. He doesn't know Ainsley very well, and tends anyway to think of all unmarried girls as easily victimized and needing protection. He had several times volunteered fatherly advice to me, and now he emphasized his point. "He's not someone to get ... mixed up with," he said sternly. Ainsley gave a short laugh and blew out smoke, unperturbed.

  "That reminds me," I said, "you'd better give me his phone number."

  After dinner we went to sit in the littered living room while Joe cleared the table. I offered to help, but Joe said that was all right, he would rather I talked to Clara. Clara had settled herself on the chesterfield in a nest of crumpled newspapers with her eyes closed; again I could think of little to say. I sat staring up at the centre of the ceiling where there was an elaborately-scrolled plaster decoration, once perhaps the setting for a chandelier, remembering Clara at high school: a tall fragile girl who was always getting exempted from Physical Education. She'd sit on the sidelines watching the rest of us in our blue-bloomered gymsuits as though anything so sweaty and ungainly was foreign enough to her to be a mildly amusing entertainment. In that classroom full of oily potato-chip-fattened adolescents she was everyone's ideal of translucent perfume-advertisement femininity. At university she had been a little healthier, but had grown her blonde hair long, which made her look more medieval than ever: I had thought of her in connection with the ladies sitting in rose gardens on tapestries. Of course her mind wasn't like that, but I've always been influenced by appearances.

  She married Joe Bates in May at the end of our second year, and at first I thought it was an ideal match. Joe was then a graduate student, almost seven years older than she was, a tall shaggy man with a slight stoop and a protective attitude towards Clara. Their worship of each other before the wedding was sometimes ridiculously idealistic; one kept expecting Joe to spread his overcoat on mud puddles or drop to his knees to kiss Clara's rubber boots. The babies had been unplanned: Clara greeted her first pregnancy with astonishment that such a thing could happen to her, and her second with dismay; now, during her third, she had subsided into a grim but inert fatalism. Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.

  I looked at her, feeling a wave of embarrassed pity sweep over me; what could I do? Perhaps I could offer to come over some day and clean up the house. Clara simply had no practicality, she wasn't able to control the more mundane aspects of life, like money or getting to lectures on time. When we lived in residence together she used to become hopelessly entangled in her room at intervals, unable to find matching shoes or enough clean clothes to wear, and I would have to dig her out of the junk pile she had allowed to accumulate around her. Her messiness wasn't actively creative like Ainsley's, who could devastate a room in five minutes if she was feeling chaotic; it was passive. She simply stood helpless while the tide of dirt rose round her, unable to stop it or evade it. The babies were like that too; her own body seemed somehow beyond her, going its own way without reference to any directions of hers. I studied the pattern of bright flowers on the maternity smock she was wearing; the stylized petals and tendrils moved with her breathing, as though they were coming alive.

  We left early, after Arthur had been carried off to bed screaming after what Joe called "an accident" behind the living-room door.

  "It was no accident," Clara remarked, opening her eyes. "He just loves peeing behind doors. I wonder what it is. He's going to be secretive when he grows up, an undercover agent or a diplomat or something. The furtive little bastard."

  Joe saw us to the door, a pile of dirty laundry in his arms. "You must come and see us again soon," he said, "Clara has so few people she can really talk to."

  5

  We walked down towards the subway in the semi-dusk, through the sound of crickets and muffled television sets (in some of the houses we could see them flickering blue through the open windows) and a smell of warm tar. My skin felt stifled, as though I was enclosed in a layer of moist dough. I was afraid Ainsley hadn't enjoyed herself: her silence was negative.

  "Dinner wasn't bad," I said, wanting to be loyal to Clara, who was after all an older friend than Ainsley; "Joe's turning into quite a good cook."

  "How can she stand it?" Ainsley said with more vehemence than usual. "She just lies there and that man does all the work! She lets herself be treated like a thing!"

  "Well, she is seven months pregnant," I said. "And she's never been well."

  "She's not well!" Ainsley said indignantly. "She's flourishing; it's him that's not well. He's aged even since I've known him and that's less than four months. She's draining all his energy."

  "What do you suggest?" I said. I was annoyed with Ainsley: she couldn't see Clara's position.

  "Well, she should do something; if only a token gesture. She never finished her degree, did she? Wouldn't this be a perfect time for her to work on it? Lots of pregnant women finish their degrees."

  I remembered poor Clara's resolutions after the first baby: she had thought of it as only a temporary absence. After the second she had wailed, "I don't know what we're doing wrong! I always try to be so careful." She had always been against the pill - she thought it might change her personality - but gradually she had become less adamant. She had read a French novel (in translation) and a book about archaeological expeditions in Peru and had talked about night school. Lately she had taken to making bitter remarks about being "just a housewife." "But Ainsley," I said, "you're always saying that a degree is no real indication of anything."

  "Of course the degree in itself isn't," Ainsley said, "it's what it stands for. She should get organized."

  When we were back at the apartment I thought of Len, and decided it wasn't too late to call him. He was in, and after we'd exchanged greetings I told him I would love to see him.

  "Great," he said, "when and where? Make it some place cool. I didn't remember it was so bloody hot in the summers over here."

  "Then you shouldn't have come back," I said, hinting that I knew why he had and giving him an opening.

  "It was safer," he said with a touch of smugness. "Give them an inch and they'll take a mile." He had acquired a slight English accent. "By the way, Clara tells me you've got a new roommate."

  "She isn't your type," I said. Ainsley had gone into the living room and was sitting on the chesterfield with her back to me.

  "Oh, you mean too old, like you, eh?" My being too old was one of his jokes.

  I laughed. "Let's say tomorrow night," I said. It had suddenly struck me that Len would be a perfect distraction for Peter. "About eight-thirty at the Park Plaza. I'll bring a friend along to meet you."

  "Aha," said Len, "this fellow Clara told me about. Not serious, are you?"

  "Oh no, not at all," I said to reassure him.
>
  When I had hung up Ainsley said, "Was that Len Slank you were talking to?"

  I said yes.

  "What does he look like?" she asked casually.

  I couldn't refuse to tell her. "Oh, sort of ordinary. I don't think you'd find him attractive. He has blond curly hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Why?"

  "I just wondered." She got up and went into the kitchen. "Want a drink?" she called.

  "No thanks," I said, "but you could bring me a glass of water." I moved into the living room and went to the window seat where there was a breeze.

  She came back in with a scotch on the rocks for herself and handed me my glass of water. Then she sat down on the floor. "Marian," she said, "I have something I need to tell you."

  Her voice was so serious that I was immediately worried. "What's wrong?"

  "I'm going to have a baby," she said quietly.

  I took a quick drink of water. I couldn't imagine Ainsley making a miscalculation like that. "I don't believe you."

  She laughed. "Oh, I don't mean I'm already pregnant. I mean I'm going to get pregnant."

  I was relieved, but puzzled. "You mean you're going to get married?" I asked, thinking of Trigger's misfortune. I tried to guess which of them Ainsley could be interested in, without success; ever since I'd known her she had been decidedly anti-marriage.

  "I knew you'd say that," she said with amused contempt. "No, I'm not going to get married. That's what's wrong with most children, they have too many parents. You can't say the sort of household Clara and Joe are running is an ideal situation for a child. Think of how confused their mother-image and their father-image will be; they're riddled with complexes already. And it's mostly because of the father."

  "But Joe is marvellous!" I cried. "He does just about everything for her! Where would Clara be without him?"

  "Precisely," said Ainsley. "She would have to cope by herself. And she would cope, and their total upbringing would be much more consistent. The thing that ruins families these days is the husbands. Have you noticed she isn't even breast-feeding the baby?"

  "But it's got teeth," I protested. "Most people wean them when they get teeth."

  "Nonsense," Ainsley said darkly, "I bet Joe put her up to it. In South America they breast-feed them much longer than that. North American men hate watching the basic mother-child unit functioning naturally, it makes them feel not needed. This way Joe can give it the bottle just as easily. Any woman left to her own devices would automatically breast-feed as long as possible: I'm certainly going to."

  It seemed to me that the discussion had got off the track: we were talking theory about a practical matter. I tried a personal attack: "Ainsley, you don't know anything at all about babies. You don't even like them much, I've heard you say they're too dirty and noisy."

  "Not liking other people's babies," said Ainsley, "isn't the same as not liking your own."

  I couldn't deny this. I was baffled: I didn't even know how to justify my own opposition to her plan. The worst of it was that she would probably do it. She can go about getting what she wants with a great deal of efficiency, though in my opinion some of the things she wants - and this was a case in point - are unreasonable. I decided to take a down-to-earth approach.

  "All right," I said. "Granted. But why do you want a baby, Ainsley? What are you going to do with it?"

  She gave me a disgusted look. "Every woman should have at least one baby." She sounded like a voice on the radio saying that every woman should have at least one electric hair dryer. "It's even more important than sex. It fulfills your deepest femininity." Ainsley is fond of paperback books by anthropologists about primitive cultures: there are several of them bogged down among the clothes on her floor. At her college they make you take courses in it.

  "But why now?" I said, searching my mind for objections. "What about the job at the art gallery? And meeting the artists?" I held them out to her like a carrot to a donkey.

  Ainsley widened her eyes at me. "What has having a baby got to do with getting a job at an art gallery? You're always thinking in terms of either/or. The thing is wholeness. As for why now, well, I've been considering this for some time. Don't you feel you need a sense of purpose? And wouldn't you rather have your children while you're young? While you can enjoy them. Besides, they've proved they're likely to be healthier if you have them between twenty and thirty."

  "And you're going to keep it," I said. I looked around the living room, calculating already how much time, energy and money it would take to pack and move the furniture. I had contributed most of the solider items: the heavy round coffee table donated from a relative's attic back home, the walnut drop-leaf we used for company, also a donation, the stuffed easy chair and the chesterfield I had picked up at the Salvation Army and re-covered. The outsize poster of Theda Bara and the bright paper flowers were Ainsley's; so were the ashtrays and the inflatable plastic cushions with geometric designs. Peter said our living-room lacked unity. I had never thought of it as a permanent arrangement, but now it was threatened it took on a desirable stability for me. The tables planted their legs more firmly on the floor; it was inconceivable that the round coffee table could ever be manipulated down those narrow stairs, that the poster of Theda Bara could be rolled up, revealing the crack in the plaster, that the plastic cushions could allow themselves to be deflated and stowed away in a trunk. I wondered whether the lady down below would consider Ainsley's pregnancy a breach of contract and take legal action.

  Ainsley was getting sulky. "Of course I'm going to keep it. What's the good of going through all that trouble if you don't keep it?"

  "So what it boils down to," I said, finishing my water, "is that you've decided to have an illegitimate child in cold blood and bring it up yourself."

  "Oh, it's such a bore to explain. Why use that horrible bourgeois word? Birth is legitimate, isn't it? You're a prude, Marian, and that's what's wrong with this whole society."

  "Okay, I'm a prude," I said, secretly hurt: I thought I was being more understanding than most. "But since the society is the way it is, aren't you being selfish? Won't the child suffer? How are you going to support it and deal with other people's prejudices and so on?"

  "How is the society ever going to change," said Ainsley with the dignity of a crusader, "if some individuals in it don't lead the way? I will simply tell the truth. I know I'll have trouble here and there, but some people will be quite tolerant about it, I'm sure, even here. I mean, it won't be as though I've gotten pregnant by accident or anything."

  We sat in silence for several minutes. The main point seemed to have been established. "All right," I said finally, "I see you've thought of everything. But what about a father for it? I know it's a small technical detail, but you will need one of those, you know, if only for a short time. You can't just send out a bud."

  "Well," she said, taking me seriously, "actually I have been thinking about it. He'll have to have a decent heredity and be fairly good-looking; and it will help if I can get someone co-operative who will understand and not make a fuss about marrying me."

  She reminded me more than I liked of a farmer discussing cattle-breeding. "Anyone in mind? What about that dentistry student?"

  "Good god no," she said, "he has a receding chin."

  "Or the electric toothbrush murder-witness man?"

  She puckered her brow. "I don't think he's very bright. I'd prefer an artist of course, but that's too risky genetically; by this time they must all have chromosome breaks from l.s.d. I suppose I could unearth Freddy from last year, he wouldn't mind in the least, though he's too fat and he has an awfully stubbly five o'clock shadow. I wouldn't want a fat child."

  "Nor one with heavy stubble either," I said, trying to be helpful.

  Ainsley looked at me with annoyance. "You're being sarcastic," she said. "But if only people would give more thought to the characteristics they pass on to their children maybe they wouldn't rush blindly into things. We know the human race is degenerating and it's all becaus
e people pass on their weak genes without thinking about it, and medical science means they aren't naturally selected out the way they used to be."

  I was beginning to feel fuzzy in the brain. I knew Ainsley was wrong, but she sounded so rational. I thought I'd better go to bed before she had convinced me against my better judgment.

  In my room, I sat on the bed with my back against the wall, thinking. At first I tried to concentrate on ways to stop her, but then I became resigned. Her mind was made up, and though I could hope this was just a whim she would get over, was it any of my business? I would simply have to adjust to the situation. Perhaps when we had to move I should get another roommate; but would it be right to leave Ainsley on her own? I didn't want to behave irresponsibly.

  I got into bed, feeling unsettled.

  6

  The alarm clock startled me out of a dream in which I had looked down and seen my feet beginning to dissolve, like melting jelly, and had put on a pair of rubber boots just in time only to find that the ends of my fingers were turning transparent. I had started towards the mirror to see what was happening to my face, but at that point I woke up. I don't usually remember my dreams.

  Ainsley was still asleep, so I boiled my egg and drank my tomato juice and coffee alone. Then I dressed in an outfit suitable for interviewing, an official-looking skirt, a blouse with sleeves, and a pair of low-heeled walking shoes. I intended to get an early start, but I couldn't be too early or the men, who would want to sleep in on the holiday, wouldn't be up yet. I got out my map of the city and studied it, mentally crossing off the areas I knew had been selected for the actual survey. I had some toast and a second cup of coffee, and traced out several possible routes for myself.

  What I needed was seven or eight men with a certain minimum average beer consumption per week, who would be willing to answer the questions. Locating them might be more difficult than usual, because of the long weekend. I knew from experience that men were usually more unwilling than women to play the questionnaire game. The streets near the apartment were out: word might get back to the lady down below that I had been asking the neighbours how much beer they drank. Also, I suspected that it was a scotch area rather than a beer one, with a sprinkling of teetotalling widows. The rooming-house district further west was out, too: I had tried it once for a potato-chip taste test and found the landladies very hostile. They seemed to think I was a government agent in disguise, trying to raise their tax by discovering they had more lodgers than they claimed. I considered the fraternity houses near the university, but remembered the study demanded answerers over the age limit.