The Edible Woman

by Margaret Atwood

  I said, solicitously, "Oh that's too bad. You were drinking quite a lot. Like a cup of coffee?"

  "Love one," he said, and came over and pecked me on the cheek, then collapsed on one of the kitchen chairs. "By the way, sorry I didn't phone first - I just felt like seeing you."

  "That's okay," I said. He did look hungover. He was carelessly dressed, but it's impossible for Peter to dress with genuine carelessness. This was an arranged carelessness; he was meticulously unshaven, and his socks matched the colour of the paint stains on his sports shirt. I turned on the coffee.

  "Well!" he said, just as Ainsley had but with a very different emphasis. He sounded as though he'd just bought a shiny new car. I gave him a tender chrome-plated smile; that is, I meant the smile to express tenderness, but my mouth felt stiff and bright and somehow expensive.

  I poured two cups of coffee, got out the milk and sat down in the other kitchen chair. He put one of his hands over mine.

  "You know," he said, "I didn't think I was intending - what happened last night - at all." I nodded: I hadn't thought I was, either.

  "I guess I've been running away from it."

  I had been, too.

  "But I guess you were right about Trigger. And maybe I was intending it, without knowing it. A man's got to settle down sometime, and I am twenty-six."

  I was seeing him in a new light: he was changing form in the kitchen, turning from a reckless young bachelor into a rescuer from chaos, a provider of stability. Somewhere in the vaults of Seymour Surveys an invisible hand was wiping away my signature.

  "And now things are settled I feel I'm going to be much happier. A fellow can't keep running around indefinitely. It'll be a lot better in the long run for my practice too, the clients like to know you've got a wife; people get suspicious of a single man after a certain age, they start thinking you're a queer or something." He paused, then continued, "And there's one thing about you, Marian, I know I can always depend on you. Most women are pretty scatterbrained but you're such a sensible girl. You may not have known this but I've always thought that's the first thing to look for when it comes to choosing a wife."

  I didn't feel very sensible. I lowered my eyes modestly and fixed them upon a toast crumb that had eluded me when I wiped the table. I wasn't sure what to say - "You're very sensible too" didn't seem appropriate.

  "I'm very happy too," I said. "Let's take our coffee into the living room."

  He followed me in; we set our cups on the round coffee table and sat down on the chesterfield.

  "I like this room," he said, glancing over it. "It's so homey." He put his arm around my shoulders, and we sat in what I hoped was a blissful silence. We were awkward with each other. We no longer had the assumptions, the tracks and paths of our former relationship to guide us. Until we'd established the new assumptions we wouldn't know quite what to do or say.

  Peter chuckled to himself.

  "What's funny?" I asked.

  "Oh, not much. When I went out to get the car I found three shrubs caught underneath it; so I just took a drive past that lawn. We made a neat little hole in their hedge." He was still pleased with himself about that.

  "You big silly idiot," I said fondly. I could feel the stirrings of the proprietary instinct. So this object, then, belonged to me. I leaned my head against his shoulder.

  "When do you want to get married?" he asked, almost gruffly.

  My first impulse was to answer, with the evasive flippancy I'd always used before when he'd asked me serious questions about myself, "What about Groundhog Day?" But instead I heard a soft flannelly voice I barely recognized, saying, "I'd rather have you decide that. I'd rather leave the big decisions up to you." I was astounded at myself. I'd never said anything remotely like that to him before. The funny thing was I really meant it.

  11

  Peter left early. He said he needed to get some more sleep and he advised me to do the same. However I wasn't at all tired. I was filled with a nervous energy which refused to dissipate itself in the restless forages I made through the apartment. This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.

  I finished the dishes, sorted the knives and forks and spoons into their compartments in the kitchen drawer, though I knew they wouldn't stay put for long, scanned the magazines in the living room for the seventh time, my attention snagging briefly but with new significance on such titles as "ADOPTION: YES OR NO?," "YOU'RE IN LOVE - IS IT REAL?A TWENTY-QUESTION quiz," and "HONEYMOON TENSIONS," and fiddled with the controls of the toaster, which had been burning things. When the telephone rang I jumped for it eagerly: it was a wrong number. I suppose I could have talked with Ainsley, who was still in her bedroom; but somehow I didn't think it would be much help. I wanted to do something that could be finished, accomplished, though I didn't know what. Finally I resolved to spend the evening at the laundromat.

  We do not, of course, use the lady down below's laundry facilities. If she has any. She never allows anything as plebeian as washing to desecrate the well-kept expanse of her back lawn. Maybe it's that she and the child just never get their clothes dirty; perhaps they have an invisible plastic coating. Neither of us has been in her cellar or even heard her acknowledge the existence of one. It's possible that washing is, in her hierarchy of the proprieties, one of those things that everyone knows about but nobody who is at all respectable discusses.

  So when the mounds of unwearable clothes become intolerable and the drawersful of wearable ones are all but empty, we go to the laundromat. Or, usually, I go alone: I can't hold out as long as Ainsley can. Sunday evening is a better time to go than any of the rest of the weekend. There are fewer elderly gentlemen tying up and de-aphidizing their rose bushes, and fewer elderly ladies, flowery-hatted and white-gloved, driving or being driven up to the houses of other elderly ladies for tea. The nearest laundromat is a subway stop away, and Saturdays are bad because of the shoppers on the bus, again elderly ladies hatted and gloved, though not as immaculately; and Saturday evenings bring out the young moviegoers. I prefer Sunday evenings; they are emptier. I don't like being stared at, and my laundry bag is too obviously a laundry bag.

  That evening I looked forward to the trip. I was anxious to get out of the apartment. I warmed up and ate a frozen dinner, then changed to my laundromat clothes - denims, sweatshirt, and a pair of plaid running shoes I'd picked up once on impulse and never wore anywhere else - and checked my purse for quarters. I was stuffing the pertinent garments into my laundry bag when Ainsley wandered in. She'd been closeted in her bedroom most of the day, engaging in heaven-knows-what black-magic practices: brewing up an aphrodisiac, no doubt, or making wax dolls of Leonard and transfixing them with hatpins at the appropriate points. Now some intuition had alerted her.

  "Hi, going to the laundromat?" she said with careful nonchalance.

  "No," I said, "I've chopped Peter up into little bits. I'm camouflaging him as laundry and taking him down to bury him in the ravine."

  She must have thought this remark in bad taste. She did not smile. "Look, would you mind very much throwing in a few of my things while you're there? Just essentials."

  "Fine," I said, resigned. "Bring them along." This is standard procedure. It's one of the reasons Ainsley never has to go to the laundromat.

  She disappeared, and came back in a few minutes with both arms around a huge heap of multicoloured lingerie.

  "Ainsley. Just essentials."

  "They're all essentials," she said sulkily; but when I insisted I couldn't get it all into the bag she divided the pile in half.

  "Thanks a lot, that's a real lifesaver," she said. "See you later."

  I trailed the sack behind me down the stairs, picked it up, slung it over my shoulder and staggered out the door, intercepting a frigid look in passing from the lady down below as she glided out from behind one of the velvet curtains that hung at the entrance to the parlour. She meant, I
knew, to convey her disapproval of this flagrant exhibition of soilage. We are all, I silently quoted at her, utterly unclean.

  Once I had settled myself on the bus I propped the laundry bag beside me on the seat, hoping it looked from a distance enough like a small child to fend off the righteous indignation of those who might object to working on the Lord's Day. I was remembering a previous incident, a black-silk-swathed old lady with a mauve hat who had clutched at me one Sunday as I was getting off the bus. She was disturbed not only because I was breaking the fourth commandment, but also because of the impious way I had dressed in order to do it: Jesus, she implied, would never forgive my plaid running shoes. Then I concentrated on one of the posters above the windows, a colourful one of a young woman with three pairs of legs skipping about in her girdle. I must admit to being, against my will, slightly scandalized by those advertisements. They are so public. I wondered for the first few blocks what sort of person would have enough response to that advertisement to go and buy the object in question, and whether there had ever been a survey done on it. The female form, I thought, is supposed to appeal to men, not to women, and men don't usually buy girdles. Though perhaps the lithe young woman was a self-image; perhaps the purchasers thought they were getting their own youth and slenderness back in the package. For the next few blocks I thought about the dictum I'd read somewhere that no well-dressed woman is ever without her girdle. I considered the possibilities suggested by the word "ever." Then for the rest of the journey I thought about middle-aged spread: when would I get it? - maybe I already had it. You have to be careful about things like that, I reflected; they have a way of creeping up on you before you know it.

  The laundromat was just along the street from the entrance to the subway station. When I was actually standing in front of one of the large machines I discovered I had forgotten the soap.

  "Oh fiddlesticks!" I said out loud.

  The person stuffing clothes into the machine next to mine turned towards me.

  He looked at me without expression. "You can have some of mine," he said, handing me the box.

  "Thank you. I wish they'd put in a vending machine, you'd think they'd have the sense to." Then I recognized him: it was the young man from the beer interview. I stood there holding the box. How had he known I'd forgotten my soap? I hadn't said it out loud.

  He was scrutinizing me more closely. "Oh," he said, "now I know who you are. I didn't place you at first. Without that official shell you look sort of - exposed." He bent over his machine again.

  Exposed. Was that good or bad? I checked quickly to make sure no seams were split or zippers undone; then I began to cram the clothes hastily into the machines, putting darks in one and lights in the other. I didn't want him to be finished before I was so that he would be able to watch me, but he was done in time to observe several of Ainsley's lacy frivolities being flung through the door.

  "Those yours?" he asked with interest.

  "No," I said, flushing.

  "Didn't think so. They didn't look like you."

  Had that been a compliment or an insult? Judging by his uninflected voice it had been merely a comment; and as a comment it was accurate enough, I thought wryly.

  I shut the two thick glass doors and put the quarters in the slots, paused till the familiar sloshing sound informed me that all was well, then went over to the line of chairs provided by the management and sat down in one of them. I'd have to wait it out, I realized; there was nothing else to do in that area on Sundays. I could have gone to a movie, but I didn't have enough money with me. I'd even forgotten to bring a paperback to read. What could I have been thinking of when I left the apartment? I don't usually forget things.

  He sat down next to me. "The only thing about laundromats," he said, "is that you're always finding other people's pubic hairs in the washers. Not that I mind particularly. I'm not picky about germs or anything. It's just rather gross. Have some chocolate?"

  I glanced around to see if anyone had heard, but we were alone in the laundromat. "No thanks," I said.

  "I don't like it much either but I'm trying to quit smoking." He peeled the chocolate bar and slowly devoured it. We both stared at the long line of gleaming white machines, and especially at those three glass windows, like portholes or aquaria, where our clothes were going round and around, different shapes and colours appearing, mingling, disappearing, appearing again out of a fog of suds. He finished his chocolate bar, licked his fingers, smoothed and folded the silver wrapper neatly and put it in one of his pockets, and took out a cigarette.

  "I sort of like watching them," he said; "I watch laundromat washers the way other people watch television, it's soothing because you always know what to expect and you don't have to think about it. Except I can vary my programmes a little; if I get tired of watching the same stuff I can always put in a pair of green socks or something colourful like that." He was talking in a monotone, sitting hunched forward, his elbows on his knees, his head drawn down into the neck of his dark sweater like a turtle's into its shell. "I come here quite a lot; sometimes I just have to get out of that apartment. It's all right as long as I have something to iron; I like flattening things out, getting rid of the wrinkles, it gives me something to do with my hands, but when I run out of things to iron, well, I have to come here. To get some more."

  He wasn't even looking at me. He might have been talking to himself. I leaned forward too, so I could see his face. In the blue-tinged fluorescent lighting of the laundromat, a light that seems to allow no tones and no shadows, his skin was even more unearthly. "I have to get out, it's that apartment. In the summer it's like a hot, dark oven, and when it's that hot you don't even want to turn on the iron. There isn't enough space anyway but the heat makes it shrink, the others get too close. I can feel them even in my own room with the door closed; I can tell what they're doing. Fish barricades himself into that chair and hardly moves, even when he's writing, and then he tears it all up and says it's no good and sits there for days staring at the pieces of paper on the floor; once he got down on his hands and knees and tried to put them together again with scotch-tape, and failed of course, and threw a real scene and accused both of us of trying to use his ideas to publish first and stealing some of the pieces. And Trevor, when he isn't away at summer school or heating the apartment up cooking twelve-course dinners, I'd just as soon eat canned salmon, practises his fifteenth-century Italian calligraphy, scrollwork and flourishes, and goes on and on about the quattrocento. He has an amazing memory for detail. I guess it's interesting but somehow it isn't the answer, at least not for me, and I don't think it really is for him either. The thing is, they repeat themselves and repeat themselves but they never get anywhere, they never seem to finish anything. Of course I'm no better, I'm just the same, I'm stuck on that wretched term paper. Once I went to the zoo and there was a cage with a frenzied armadillo in it going around in figure-eights, just around and around in the same path. I can still remember the funny metallic sound its feet made on the bottom of the cage. They say all caged animals get that way when they're caged, it's a form of psychosis, and even if you set the animals free after they go like that they'll just run around in the same pattern. You read and read the material and after you've read the twentieth article you can't make any sense out of it anymore, and then you start thinking about the number of books that are published in any given year, in any given month, in any given week, and that's just too much. Words," he said, looking in my direction finally but with his eyes strangely unfocussed, as though he was really looking at a point several inches beneath my skin, "are beginning to lose their meanings."

  The machines were switching into one of their rinsing cycles, whirling the clothes around faster and faster; then there was more running water, and more churning and sloshing. He lit another cigarette.

  "I gather you're all students, then," I said.

  "Of course," he said mournfully, "couldn't you tell? We're all graduate students. In English. All of us. I thought everyo
ne in the whole city was; we're so totally inbred that we never see anyone else. It was quite strange when you walked in the other day and turned out not to be."

  "I always thought that would be sort of exciting." I didn't really, I was trying to be responsive, but I was conscious as soon as I'd closed my mouth of the schoolgirl gushiness of the remark.

  "Exciting." He snickered briefly. "I used to think that. It looks exciting when you're an eager brilliant undergraduate. They all say, Go on to graduate studies, and they give you a bit of money; and so you do, and you think, Now I'm going to find out the real truth. But you don't find out, exactly, and things get pickier and pickier and more and more stale, and it all collapses in a welter of commas and shredded footnotes, and after a while it's like anything else: you've got stuck in it and you can't get out, and you wonder how you got there in the first place. If this were the States I could excuse myself by saying I'm avoiding the draft, but, as it is, there's no good reason. And besides that, everything's being done, it's been done already, fished out, and you yourself wallowing around in the dregs at the bottom of the barrel, one of those ninth-year graduate students, poor bastards, scrabbling through manuscripts for new material or slaving away on the definitive edition of Ruskin's dinner invitations and theatre stubs or trying to squeeze the last pimple of significance out of some fraudulent literary nonentity they dug up somewhere. Poor old Fischer is writing his thesis now, he wanted to do it on Womb Symbols in D. H. Lawrence but they all told him that had been done. So now he's got some impossible theory that gets more and more incoherent as he goes along." He stopped.

  "Oh, what is it?" I said, to joggle him out of silence.

  "I don't really know. He won't even talk about it any more except when he's loaded, and then no one can understand him. That's why he keeps tearing it up - he reads it over and he can't understand any of it himself."

  "And what are you doing yours on?" I couldn't quite imagine.