The Edible Woman

by Margaret Atwood

  However the first time I had gone to his apartment had almost been the last. He had plied me with hi-fi music and brandy, thinking he was crafty and suave, and I had allowed myself to be manipulated into the bedroom. We had set our brandy snifters down on the desk, when Peter, being acrobatic, had knocked one of the glasses to the floor where it smashed.

  "Oh leave the damn thing," I said, perhaps undiplomatically; but Peter had turned on the light, gone for the broom and dustpan, and swept up all the bits of glass, picking the larger ones up carefully and accurately like a pigeon pecking crumbs. The mood had been shattered. We had said goodnight soon afterwards, rather snappishly, and I hadn't heard from him after that for over a week. Of course things were much better now.

  Peter stretched and yawned beside me, grinding my arm against the porcelain. I winced and withdrew it gently from beneath him.

  "How was it for you?" he asked casually, his mouth against my shoulder. He always asked me that.

  "Marvellous," I murmured; why couldn't he tell? One of these days I should say "Rotten," just to see what he would do; but I knew in advance he wouldn't believe me. I reached up and stroked his damp hair, scratching the back of his neck; he liked that, in moderation.

  Maybe he had intended the bathtub as an expression of his personality. I tried thinking of ways to make that fit. Asceticism? A modern version of hair shirts or sitting on spikes? Mortification of the flesh? But surely nothing about Peter suggested that; he liked his comforts, and besides it wasn't his flesh that was being mortified: he had been on top. Or maybe it had been a reckless young-man gesture, like jumping into the swimming pool with your clothes on, or putting things on your head at parties. But this image didn't suit Peter either. I was glad there were no more of his group of old friends left to be married: next time he might have tried cramming us into a clothes closet, or an exotic posture in the kitchen sink.

  Or maybe - and the thought was chilling - he had intended it as an expression of my personality. A new corridor of possibilities extended itself before me: did he really think of me as a lavatory fixture? What kind of a girl did he think I was?

  He was twining his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck. "I bet you'd look great in a kimono," he whispered. He bit my shoulder, and I recognized this as a signal for irresponsible gaiety: Peter doesn't usually bite.

  I bit his shoulder in return, then, making sure the shower lever was still up, I reached out my right foot - I have agile feet - and turned on the COLD tap.

  8

  By eight-thirty we were on our way to meet Len. Peter's mood, whatever it had been, had changed to one which I hadn't yet interpreted, so I didn't attempt conversation as we drove along. Peter kept his eyes on the road, turning corners too quickly and muttering under his breath at the other drivers. He hadn't fastened his seat belt.

  He had not been pleased at first when I told him about the arrangements I'd made with Len, even when I said, "I'm sure you'll like him."

  "Who is he?" he had asked suspiciously. If it wasn't Peter I would have suspected jealousy. Peter isn't the jealous type.

  "He's an old friend," I said, "from college. He's just got back from England; I think he's a T. V. producer or something." I knew Len wasn't that high on the scale, but Peter is impressed by people's jobs. Since I had intended Len as a distraction for Peter I wanted the evening to be pleasant.

  "Oh," said Peter, "one of those arts-crafts types. Probably queer." We were sitting at the kitchen table, eating frozen peas and smoked meat, the kind you boil for three minutes in the plastic packages. Peter had decided against going out for dinner.

  "Oh no," I said, eager to defend Len, "quite the opposite."

  Peter pushed his plate away. "Why can't you ever cook anything?" he said petulantly.

  I was hurt: I considered this unfair. I like to cook, but I had been deliberately refraining at Peter's for fear he would feel threatened. Besides, he had always liked smoked meat before, and it was perfectly nourishing. I was about to make a sharp comment, but repressed it. Peter after all was suffering. Instead I asked, "How was the wedding?"

  Peter groaned, leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and gazed inscrutably at the far wall. Then he got up and poured himself another gin-and-tonic. He tried pacing up and down in the kitchen, but it was too narrow, so he sat down again.

  "God," he said, "poor Trigger. He looked terrible. How could he let himself be taken in like that?" He continued in a disjointed monologue in which Trigger was made to sound like the last of the Mohicans, noble and free, the last of the dinosaurs, destroyed by fate and lesser species, and the last of the dodos, too dumb to get away. Then he attacked the bride, accusing her of being predatory and malicious and of sucking poor Trigger into the domestic void (making me picture her as a vacuum-cleaner), and finally ground to a halt with several funereal predictions about his own solitary future. By solitary he meant without other single men.

  I swallowed the last of my frozen peas. I had heard this speech twice before, or something like it, and I knew there was nothing I could say. If I agreed with him it would only intensify his depression, and if I disagreed he would suspect me of siding with the bride. The first time I had been cheerful and maxim-like, and had attempted consolation. "Well, it's done now," I had said, "and maybe it'll turn out to be a good thing in the end. After all, it isn't as though she's robbing the cradle. Isn't he twenty-six?"

  "I'm twenty-six," Peter had said moodily.

  So this time I said nothing, remarking to myself that it was a good thing Peter had got this speech over with early in the evening. I got up and dished him out some ice-cream, which he took as a sympathetic gesture, putting his arm round my waist and giving me a gloomy hug.

  "God, Marian," he said, "I don't know what I'd do if you didn't understand. Most women wouldn't, but you're so sensible."

  I leaned against him, stroking his hair while he ate his ice-cream.

  We left the car in one of the usual places, on a side street behind the Park Plaza. As we started to walk along I put my hand through Peter's arm and he smiled down at me abstractedly. I smiled back at him - I was glad he was out of the teeth-gritting mood he had been in while driving - and he brought his other hand over and placed it on top of mine. I was going to bring my other hand up and place it on top of his, but I thought if I did then mine would be on top and he'd have to take his arm out from underneath so he'd have another hand to put on top of the heap, like those games at recess. I squeezed his arm affectionately instead.

  We reached the Park Plaza and Peter opened the plate-glass door for me as he always does. Peter is scrupulous about things like that; he opens car doors too. Sometimes I expect him to click his heels.

  While we waited for the elevator I watched our double image in the floor-to-ceiling mirror by the elevator doors. Peter was wearing one of his more subdued costumes, a brownish-green summer suit whose cut emphasized the functional spareness of his body. All his accessories matched.

  "I wonder if Len's up there yet," I said to him, keeping an eye on myself and talking to him in the mirror. I was thinking I was just about the right height for him.

  The elevator came and Peter said "Roof, please," to the white-gloved elevator girl, and we moved smoothly upwards. The Park Plaza is a hotel really, but they have a bar at the top, one of Peter's favourite places for a quiet drink, which was why I had suggested it to Len. Being up that high gives you a sense of the vertical which is rare in the city. The room itself is well lit, not dark as a drain like many others, and it's clean. No one ever seems to get offensively drunk there, and you can hear yourself talk: there's no band or singer. The chairs are comfortable, the decor is reminiscent of the eighteenth century, and the bartenders all know Peter. Ainsley told me once that she had been there when someone threatened to commit suicide by jumping off the wall of the patio outside, but it may have been one of her stories.

  We walked in; there weren't many people, so I immediately spotted Len, sitting at one of the black
-topped tables. We went over and I introduced Peter to him; they shook hands, Peter abruptly, Len affably. The waiter appeared promptly at our table and Peter ordered two more gin-and-tonics.

  "Marian, it's good to see you!" Len said, leaning across the corner of the table to kiss my cheek; a habit, I reflected, he must have picked up in England, as he never used to do it. He had put on a little weight.

  "And how was England?" I asked him. I wanted him to talk and entertain Peter, who was looking grumpy.

  "All right, I guess; crowded, though. Every time you turn around you bump into somebody from here. It's getting so you might as well not go there at all, the place is so cluttered up with bloody tourists. I was sorry, though," he said, turning to Peter, "that I had to leave; I had a good job going for me and some other good things too. But you've got to watch these women when they start pursuing you. They're always after you to marry them. You've got to hit and run. Get them before they get you and then get out." He smiled, showing his brilliantly polished white teeth.

  Peter brightened perceptibly. "Marian tells me you're in television," he said.

  "Yes," Len said, examining the squarish nails of his disproportionately large hands; "I haven't got anything at the moment but I ought to be able to pick up something here. They need people with my experience. News reports. I'd like to see a good commentary programme in this country, I mean a really good one, though god knows how much red tape you have to go through to get anything done around here."

  Peter relaxed; anyone interested in news reports, he was probably thinking, couldn't be queer.

  I felt a hand touch my shoulder, and looked around. A young girl I'd never seen before was standing there. I opened my mouth to ask her what she wanted, when Peter said, "Oh. It's Ainsley. You didn't tell me she was coming along." I looked again: it was Ainsley.

  "Gosh, Marian," she said in a breathless semi-whisper, "you didn't tell me this was a bar. I sure hope they don't ask me for my birth certificate."

  Len and Peter had risen. I introduced Ainsley to Len, much against my better judgement, and she sat down in the fourth chair. Peter's face had a puzzled expression. He had met Ainsley before and hadn't liked her, suspecting her of holding what he called "wishy-washy radical" views because she had favoured him with a theoretical speech about liberating the Id. Politically Peter is conservative. She had offended him too by calling one of his opinions "conventional," and he had retaliated by calling one of hers "uncivilized." Right now, I guessed, he could tell she was up to something but was unwilling to rock her boat until he knew what it was. He required evidence.

  The waiter appeared and Len asked Ainsley what she would have. She hesitated, then said timidly, "Oh, could I have just a - just a glass of ginger ale?"

  Len beamed at her. "I knew you had a new roommate, Marian," he said, "but you didn't tell me she was so young!"

  "I'm sort of keeping an eye on her," I said sourly, "for the folks back home." I was furious with Ainsley. She had put me in a very awkward position. I could either give the game away by revealing she had been to college and was in fact several months older than me, or I could keep silent and participate in what amounted to a fraud. I knew perfectly well why she had come: Len was a potential candidate, and she had chosen to inspect him this way because she had sensed she'd have difficulty forcing me to introduce them otherwise.

  The waiter returned with her ginger ale. I was amazed that he hadn't asked for her birth certificate, but upon reflection I decided that any experienced waiter would assume that no girl who seemed so young would dare to walk into a bar dressed like that and order ginger ale unless she was in reality safely over-age. It's the adolescents who overdress that they suspect, and Ainsley was not overdressed. She had dug out from somewhere a cotton summer creation I'd never seen before, a pink and light-blue gingham check on white with a ruffle around the neck. Her hair was tied behind her head with a pink bow and on one of her wrists she had a tinkly silver charm bracelet. Her makeup was understated, her eyes carefully but not noticeably shadowed to make them twice as large and round and blue, and she had sacrificed her long oval fingernails, biting them nearly to the quick so that they had a jagged schoolgirlish quality. I could see she was determined.

  Len was talking to her, asking her questions, trying to draw her out. She sipped at her ginger ale, giving short, shy answers. She was evidently afraid of saying too much, aware of Peter as a threat. When Len asked her what she did, however, she could give a truthful answer. "I work at an electric toothbrush company," she said, and blushed a warm and genuine-looking pink. I almost choked.

  "Excuse me," I said, "I'm just going out on the patio for a breath of air." Actually I wanted to decide what I should do - surely it was unethical of me to let Len be deceived - and Ainsley must have sensed this, for she gave me a quick warning look as I got up.

  Outside, I leaned my arms against the top of the wall, which came almost to my collarbone, and gazed out over the city. A moving line of lights ran straight in front of me till it hit and broke against and flowed around a blob of darkness, the park; and another line went at right angles, disappearing on both sides into the distance. What could I do? Was it any of my business? I knew that if I interfered I would be breaking an unspoken code, and that Ainsley was sure to get back at me some way through Peter. She was clever at such things.

  Far off on the eastern horizon I saw a flicker of lightning. We were going to have a storm. "Good," I said out loud, "it'll clear the air." If I wasn't going to take deliberate steps, I'd have to be sure of my self-control so I wouldn't say something by accident. I paced the terrace a couple of times till I felt I was ready to go back in, noting with a faint surprise that I was wobbling slightly.

  The waiter must have been around again: there was a fresh gin-and-tonic in my place. Peter was deep in a conversation with Len and scarcely acknowledged my return. Ainsley sat silent, her eyes lowered, jiggling her ice cube around in her ginger-ale glass. I studied her latest version of herself, thinking that it was like one of the large plump dolls in the stores at Christmas-time, with washable rubber-smooth skin and glassy eyes and gleaming artificial hair. Pink and white.

  I attuned myself to Peter's voice; it sounded as though it was coming from a distance. He was telling Len a story, which seemed to be about hunting. I knew Peter used to go hunting, especially with his group of old friends, but he had never told me much about it. He had said once that they never killed anything but crows, groundhogs and other small vermin.

  "So I let her off and Wham. One shot, right through the heart. The rest of them got away. I picked it up and Trigger said, 'You know how to gut them, you just slit her down the belly and give her a good hard shake and all the guts'll fall out.' So I whipped out my knife, good knife, German steel, and slit the belly and took her by the hind legs and gave her one hell of a crack, like a whip you see, and the next thing you know there was blood and guts all over the place. All over me, what a mess, rabbit guts dangling from the trees, god the trees were red for yards...."

  He paused to laugh. Len bared his teeth. The quality of Peter's voice had changed; it was a voice I didn't recognize. The sign saying TEMPERANCE flashed in my mind: I couldn't let my perceptions about Peter be distorted by the effects of alcohol, I warned myself.

  "God it was funny. Lucky thing Trigger and me had the old cameras along, we got some good shots of the whole mess. I've been meaning to ask you, in your business you must know quite a bit about cameras ..." and they were off on a discussion of Japanese lenses.

  Peter's voice seemed to be getting louder and faster - the stream of words was impossible to follow, and my mind withdrew, concentrating instead on the picture of the scene in the forest. I saw it as though it was a slide projected on a screen in a dark room, the colours luminous, green, brown, blue for the sky, red. Peter stood with his back to me in a plaid shirt, his rifle slung on his shoulder. A group of friends, those friends whom I had never met, were gathered around him, their faces clearly visible in the
sunlight that fell in shafts down through the anonymous trees, splashed with blood, the mouths wrenched with laughter. I couldn't see the rabbit.

  I leaned forward, my arms on the black tabletop. I wanted Peter to turn and talk to me, I wanted to hear his normal voice, but he wouldn't; I studied the reflections of the other three as they lay and moved beneath the polished black surface as in a pool of water; they were all chin and no eyes, except for Ainsley's eyes, their gaze resting gently on her glass. After a while I noticed with mild curiosity that a large drop of something wet had materialized on the table near my hand. I poked it with my finger and smudged it around a little before I realized with horror that it was a tear. I must be crying then! Something inside me started to dash about in dithering mazes of panic, as though I had swallowed a tadpole. I was going to break down and make a scene, and I couldn't.

  I slid out of my chair, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, walked across the room avoiding the other tables with great care, and went out to the Ladies' Powder Room. Checking first to make sure no one else was in there - I couldn't have witnesses - I locked myself into one of the plushy-pink cubicles and wept for several minutes. I couldn't understand what was happening, why I was doing this; I had never done anything like it before and it seemed to me absurd. "Get a grip on yourself," I whispered. "Don't make a fool of yourself." The roll of toilet paper crouched in there with me, helpless and white and furry, waiting passively for the end. I tore some of it off and blew my nose.