The Edible Woman

by Margaret Atwood

  Some shoes appeared. I watched them carefully from under the door of my cell. They were, I decided, Ainsley's shoes.

  "Marian!" she called. "Are you all right?"

  "Yes," I said. I wiped my eyes and came out.

  "Well," I said, trying to sound controlled, "getting your sights set?"

  "We'll see," she said coolly. "I have to find out more about him first. Of course you won't say anything."

  "I suppose not," I said, "though it doesn't seem ethical. It's like bird-liming, or spearing fish by lantern or something."

  "I'm not going to do anything to him," she protested. "It won't hurt." She took off her pink bow and combed her hair. "But what's wrong? I saw you start to cry at the table."

  "Nothing," I said. "You know I can't drink very much. It's probably the humidity." By now I was perfectly under control.

  We walked back to our chairs. Peter was talking at full speed to Len about the different methods of taking self-portraits: with reflecting images in mirrors, self-timers that let you press the shutter-release and then run to position and pose, and long cable-releases with triggers and air-type releases with bulbs. Len was contributing some information about the correct focussing of the image, but several minutes after I had sat down he gave me a quick peculiar look, as though he was disappointed with me. Then he switched back to the conversation.

  What had he meant? I glanced from one to the other. Peter smiled at me in the middle of one of his sentences, fondly but from a distance, and then I thought I knew. He was treating me as a stage prop; silent but solid, a two-dimensional outline. He wasn't ignoring me, as perhaps I had felt (did that account for the ridiculous flight?) - he was depending on me! And Len had looked at me that way because he thought I was being self-effacing on purpose, and that if so the relationship was more serious than I had said it was. Len never wished matrimony on anyone, especially anyone he liked. But he didn't know the situation; he had misinterpreted.

  Suddenly the panic swept back over me. I gripped the edge of the table. The square elegant room with its looped curtains and muted carpet and crystal chandeliers was concealing things; the murmuring air was filled with a soft menace. "Hang on," I told myself. "Don't move." I eyed the doors and windows, calculating distances. I had to get out.

  The lights flicked off and on and one of the waiters called "Time, gentlemen." There was a pushing back of chairs.

  We descended in the elevator. Len said as we stepped off, "The evening's young, why don't you all come over to my place for another drink? You can take a look at my teleconverter," and Peter said "Great. Love to."

  We went out through the glass doors. I took Peter's arm and we walked on ahead. Ainsley had cut Len out from the herd and was allowing him to keep her safely behind.

  On the street the air was cooler; there was a slight breeze. I let go of Peter's arm and began to run.

  9

  I was running along the sidewalk. After the first minute I was surprised to find my feet moving, wondering how they had begun, but I didn't stop.

  The rest of them were so astonished they didn't do anything at all for a moment. Then Peter yelled, "Marian! Where the hell do you think you're going?"

  I could hear the fury in his voice: this was the unforgivable sin, because it was public. I didn't answer, but I looked back over my shoulder as I ran. Both Peter and Len had started to run after me. Then they both stopped and I heard Peter call, "I'll go get the car and head her off, you try to keep her out of the main drag," and he turned around and sprinted off in the other direction. This disturbed me - I must have been expecting Peter to chase me, but instead it was Len who was galloping heavily along behind me. I turned my head to the front just in time to avoid collision with an old man who was shambling out of a restaurant, then glanced back again. Ainsley had hesitated, not knowing which of them to follow, but now she was bouncing off in the direction Peter had taken. I saw her wobble in a flounce of pink and white around the corner.

  I was out of breath already, but I had a good head start on them. I could afford to slow down. Each lamp post as I passed it became a distance marker on my course: it seemed an achievement, an accomplishment of some kind to put them one by one behind me. Since it was bar-closing time there were quite a few people on the street. I grinned at them and waved at some as I went by, almost laughing at the surprise on their faces. I was filled with the exhilaration of speed; it was like a game of tag. "Hey! Marian! Stop!" Len called behind me at intervals.

  Then Peter's car turned the corner in front of me on to the main street. He must have driven around the block. That's all right, I thought, he's got to go across to the other lane, he won't be able to reach me.

  The car was on the far side of the road, coming towards me; but there was a gap in the line of traffic, and it spurted forward and swivelled into a reckless U-turn. It was parallel to me now, slowing down. I could see Ainsley's round expressionless face peering at me through the back window like a moon.

  All at once it was no longer a game. The blunt tank-shape was threatening. It was threatening that Peter had not given chase on foot but had enclosed himself in the armour of the car; though of course that was the logical thing to do. In a minute the car would stop, the door would swing open ... where was there to go?

  By this time I had passed the stores and restaurants and had come to a stretch of large old houses set well back from the street, most of which, I knew, were no longer lived in but had been converted into dentists' offices and dress-making establishments. There was an open wrought-iron gateway. I plunged through it and ran up the gravel drive.

  It must have been some sort of private club. The front door of the house had an awning over it, and the windows were lit up. As I hesitated, hearing Len's footsteps pounding nearer along the sidewalk, the front door started to open.

  I couldn't be caught there; I knew it was private property. I leapt the small hedge by the side of the driveway and skittered diagonally across the lawn into the shadows. I visualized Len pelting up the driveway and colliding with the outraged forces of society, which I pictured as a group of middle-aged ladies in evening dress, and was momentarily conscience-stricken. He was my friend. But he had taken sides against me and would have to pay the price.

  In the darkness at the side of the house I paused to consider. Behind me was Len; on one side was the house, and on the other two sides I could see something that was more solid than the darkness, blocking my way. It was the brick wall attached to the iron gate at the front; it seemed to go all the way around the house. I would have to climb it.

  I pushed my way through a mass of prickly shrubberies. The wall was only shoulder high; I took off my shoes and threw them over, then scrambled up, using branches and the uneven bricking of the wall as toe-holds. Something ripped. The blood was throbbing in my ears.

  I closed my eyes, knelt for a moment on the top of the wall, swaying dizzily, and dropped backwards.

  I felt myself caught, set down and shaken. It was Peter, who must have stalked me and waited there on the side street, knowing I would come over the wall. "What the hell got into you?" he said, his voice stern. His face in the light of the streetlamps was partly angry, partly alarmed. "Are you all right?"

  I leaned against him and put my hand up to touch his neck. The relief of being stopped and held, of hearing Peter's normal voice again and knowing he was real, was so great I started to laugh helplessly.

  "I'm fine," I said, "of course I'm all right. I don't know what got into me."

  "Put on your shoes then," Peter said, holding them out to me. He was annoyed but he wasn't going to make a fuss.

  Len heaved himself over the wall and landed on the earth with a thunk. He was breathing heavily. "Got her? Good. Let's get out of here before those people get the police after us."

  The car was right there. Peter opened the front door for me and I slid in; Len got into the back seat with Ainsley. All he said to me was, "Didn't think you were the hysterical type." Ainsley said nothin
g. We pulled away from the curb and rounded the corner, Len giving directions. I would rather have gone home, but I didn't want to cause Peter any more trouble that night. I sat up straight and folded my hands in my lap.

  We parked beside Len's apartment building, which as far as I could tell at night was of the collapsing brown-brick ramshackle variety, with fire escapes down the outside. There was no elevator, just creaky stairs with dark wooden railings. We ascended in decorous couples.

  The apartment itself was tiny, only one main room with a bathroom opening to one side and a kitchen to the other. It was somewhat disarranged, with suitcases on the floor and books and clothes strewn about: Len evidently hadn't finished moving into it yet. The bed was immediately to the left of the door, doubling as a chesterfield, and I kicked off my shoes and subsided onto it. My muscles had caught up with me and were beginning to ache with fatigue.

  Len poured the three of us generous shots of cognac, rummaged in the kitchen and managed to find some Coke for Ainsley, and put on a record. Then he and Peter began to fiddle with a couple of cameras, screwing various lenses onto them and peering through them and exchanging information about exposure times. I felt deflated. I was filled with penitence, but there was no outlet for it. If I could be alone with Peter it would be different, I thought: he could forgive me.

  Ainsley was no help. I saw she was going to keep up her little-girls-should-be-seen-and-not-heard act, as the safest course to follow. She had settled into a round wicker basket-chair, like the one in Clara's back yard except that this one had a quilted corduroy cover in egg-yolk yellow. I'd experienced those covers before. They're kept on by elastic, and they have a habit of slipping off the edges of the chair if you wiggle around too much and closing up around you. Ainsley sat quite still though, holding her Coca-Cola glass in her lap and contemplating her own reflection on the brown surface inside it. She registered neither pleasure nor boredom; her inert patience was that of a pitcher-plant in a swamp with its hollow bulbous leaves half-filled with water, waiting for some insect to be attracted, drowned, and digested.

  I was leaning back against the wall, sipping at my cognac, the noise of voices and music slapping against me like waves. I suppose the pressure of my body had pushed the bed out a little; at any rate, without thinking much about anything I turned my head away from the room and looked down. I began to find something very attractive about the dark cool space between the bed and the wall.

  It would be quiet down there, I thought; and less humid. I set my glass down on the telephone table beside the bed and glanced quickly around the room. They were all engrossed: no one would notice.

  A minute later I was wedged sideways between the bed and the wall, out of sight but not at all comfortable. This will never do, I thought; I'll have to go right underneath. It will be like a tent. It didn't occur to me to scramble back up. I eased the bed out from the wall as noiselessly as I could, using my whole body as a lever, lifted the fringed border of the bedspread, and slid myself in like a letter through a slot. It was a tight fit: the slats were unusually low for a bed, and I was forced to lie absolutely flat against the floor. I inched the bed back flush with the wall.

  It was quite cramped. Also, there were large rolls and clusters of dust strewn thickly over the floor like chunks of mouldy bread (I thought indignantly, What a pig Len is! Doesn't sweep under his bed, then re-considered: he hadn't been living there long and some of the dust may have been left over from whoever lived there before). But the semi-darkness, tinted orange by the filter of the bedspread that curtained me on all four sides, and the coolness and the solitude were pleasant. The raucous music and staccato laughter and the droning voices reached me muffled by the mattress. In spite of the narrowness and dust I was glad I didn't have to sit up there in the reverberating hot glare of the room. Though I was only two or three feet lower than the rest of them, I was thinking of the room as "up there." I myself was underground, I had dug myself a private burrow. I felt smug.

  One male voice, Peter's I think, said loudly, "Hey, where's Marian?" and the other one answered, "Oh, probably in the can." I smiled to myself. It was satisfying to be the only one who knew where I really was.

  The position, however, was becoming more and more of a strain. The muscles in my neck were hurting; I wanted to stretch; I was going to sneeze. I began to wish they would hurry up and realize I had disappeared, so they could search for me. I could no longer recall what good reasons had led me to cram myself under Len's bed in the first place. It was ridiculous: I would be all covered with fluff when I came out.

  But having taken the step I refused to turn back. There would be no dignity at all in crawling out from under the bedspread, trailing dust, like a weevil coming out of a flour barrel. It would be admitting I had done the wrong thing. There I was, and there I would stay until forcibly removed.

  My resentment at Peter for letting me remain crushed under the bed while he moved up there in the open, in the free air, jabbering away about exposure times, started me thinking about the past four months. All summer we had been moving in a certain direction, though it hadn't felt like movement: we had deluded ourselves into thinking we were static. Ainsley had warned me that Peter was monopolizing me; she saw no reason why I shouldn't, as she termed it, "branch out." This was all very well for her but I couldn't get over the subjective feeling that more than one at a time was unethical. However it had left me in a sort of vacuum. Peter and I had avoided talking about the future because we knew it didn't matter: we weren't really involved. Now, though, something in me had decided we were involved: surely that was the explanation for the powder-room collapse and the flight. I was evading reality. Now, this very moment, I would have to face it. I would have to decide what I wanted to do.

  Someone sat down heavily on the bed, mashing me against the floor. I gave a dusty squawk.

  "What-the-hell!" whoever it was exclaimed, and stood up. "Someone's under the bed."

  I could hear them conferring in low tones, and then Peter called, much louder than necessary, "Marian, are you under the bed?"

  "Yes," I answered in a neutral voice. I had decided to be noncommittal about the whole thing.

  "Well, you'd better come out now," he said carefully. "I think it's time for us to go home."

  They were treating me like a sulking child who has locked itself in a cupboard and has to be coaxed. I was amused, and indignant. I considered saying, "I don't want to," but decided that it might be the last straw for Peter, and Len was quite capable of saying, "Aw, let her stay under there all night, Christ I don't mind. That's the way to handle them. Whatever's eating her, that'll cool her off." So instead I said, "I can't! I'm stuck!"

  I tried to move: I was stuck.

  Up above, they had another policy meeting. "We're going to lift up the bed," Peter called, "and then you come out, got that?" I heard them giving orders to each other. It was going to be a major feat of engineering skill. There was a scuffling of shoes as they took their positions and got purchase. Then Peter said "Hike!" and the bed rose into the air, and I scuttled out backwards like a crayfish when its rock has been upset.

  Peter stood me up. Every inch of my dress was furred and tufted with dust. They both started to brush me off, laughing.

  "What the hell were you doing under there?" Peter asked. I could tell by the way they were picking off the larger pieces of dust, slowly and making an effort to concentrate, that they'd put away a lot of brandy while I was below ground.

  "It was quieter," I said sullenly.

  "You should have told me you were stuck!" he said with magnanimous gallantry. "Then I would have got you out. You look a sight." He was superior and amused.

  "Oh," I said, "I didn't want to interrupt you." I had realized by this time what my prevailing emotion was: it was rage.

  The hot needle of anger in my voice must have penetrated the cuticle of Peter's euphoria. He stepped back a pace; his eyes seemed to measure me coldly. He took me by the upper arm as though he was arrestin
g me for jaywalking, and turned to Len. "I really think we'd better be pushing along now," he said. "It's been awfully pleasant. I hope we can get together again sometime soon. I'd really like to see what you think of my tripod." Across the room Ainsley disengaged herself from the corduroy chair-cover and stood up.

  I wrenched my arm away from Peter's hand. I said frigidly, "I'm not going back with you. I'll walk home," and bolted out the door.

  "Do whatever the hell you like," Peter said; but he began to stride after me, abandoning Ainsley to her fate. As I pelted down the narrow stairs I could hear Len saying, "Why don't we have another drink, Ainsley? I'll see that you get home safely; better let the two love-birds settle their own affairs," and Ainsley protesting with alarm, "Oh, I don't think I should...."

  Once I was outside I felt considerably better. I had broken out; from what, or into what, I didn't know. Though I wasn't at all certain why I had been acting this way, I had at least acted. Some kind of decision had been made, something had been finished. After that violence, that overt and suddenly to me embarrassing display, there could be no reconciliation; though now that I was moving away I felt no irritation at all towards Peter. It crossed my mind, absurdly, that it had been such a peaceful relationship: until that day we had never fought. There had been nothing to fight about.

  I looked behind me: Peter was nowhere in sight. I walked along the deserted streets, past the rows of old apartment buildings, towards the nearest main street where I could get a bus. At this hour though (what hour was it?) I'd have to wait a long time. The thought made me uneasy: the wind was now stronger and colder and the lightning seemed to be moving closer by the minute. In the distance the thunder was beginning. I was wearing only a flimsy summer dress. I wondered whether I had enough money to take a taxi, stopped to count it, and found I hadn't.

  I had been walking north for about ten minutes, past the closed icily lighted stores, when I saw Peter's car draw up to the curb about a hundred yards ahead of me. He got out and stood on the empty sidewalk, waiting. I walked on steadily, neither slackening my pace nor changing direction. Surely there was no longer any reason to run. I was no longer involved.