The Edible Woman

by Margaret Atwood

  "I haven't got to that point yet. I don't know when I ever will or what will happen then. I try not to think about it. Right now I'm supposed to be writing an overdue term paper from the year before last. I write a sentence a day. On good days, that is." The machines clicked into their spin-dry cycle. He stared at them, morosely.

  "Well, what's your term paper on then?" I was intrigued; as much, I decided, by the changing contours of his face as by what he was saying. At any rate I didn't want him to stop talking.

  "You don't really want to know," he said. "Pre-Raphaelite pornography. I'm trying to do something with Beardsley, too."

  "Oh." We both considered in silence the possible hopelessness of this task. "Maybe," I suggested somewhat hesitantly, "you're in the wrong business. Maybe you might be happier doing something else."

  He snickered again, then coughed. "I should stop smoking," he said. "What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits.... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time."

  I had no answer. I looked at him and tried to picture him working at a place like Seymour Surveys; even upstairs with the intelligence men; but without success. He definitely wouldn't fit.

  "Are you from out of town?" I asked finally. The subject of graduate school seemed to have been exhausted.

  "Of course, we all are; nobody really comes from here, do they? That's why we've got that apartment, god knows we can't afford it but there aren't any graduate residences. Unless you count that new pseudo-British joint with the coat of arms and the monastery wall. But they'd never let me in and it would be just as bad as living with Trevor anyway. Trevor's from Montreal, the family is sort of Westmount and well off; but they had to go into trade after the war. They own a coconut-cookie factory but we aren't supposed to refer to it around the apartment; it's awkward though, these mounds of coconut cookies keep appearing and you have to eat them while pretending you don't know where they come from. I don't like coconut. Fish was from Vancouver, he keeps missing the sea. He goes down to the lakeshore and wades through the pollution and tries to turn himself on with seagulls and floating grapefruit peels, but it doesn't work. Both of them used to have accents but now you can't tell anything from listening to them; after you've been in that braingrinder for a while you don't sound as though you're from anywhere."

  "Where are you from?"

  "You've never heard of it," he said curtly.

  The machines clicked off. We both got wire laundry-carts and transferred our clothes to the dryers. Then we sat down in the chairs again. Now there wasn't anything to watch; just the humming and thumping of the dryers to listen to. He lit another cigarette.

  A seedy old man shuffled through the door, saw us, and shuffled out again. He was probably looking for a place to sleep.

  "The thing is," he said at last, "it's the inertia. You never feel you're getting anywhere; you get bogged down in things, waterlogged. Last week I set fire to the apartment, partly on purpose. I think I wanted to see what they would do. Maybe I wanted to see what I would do. Mostly though I just got interested in seeing a few flames and some smoke, for a change. But they just put it out, and then they ran around in frenzied figure-eights like a couple of armadillos, talking about how I was 'sick' and why did I do it, and maybe my inner tensions were getting too much for me and I'd better go see a shrink. That wouldn't do any good. I know about all of that and none of it does any good. Those types can't convince me any more, I know too much about it, I've been through that already, I'm immune. Setting fire to the apartment didn't change anything, except now I can't flex my nostrils without having Trevor squeal and leap a yard and Fischer look me up in his leftover freshman Psych. textbook. They think I'm mad." He dropped his cigarette stub on the floor and ground it underfoot. "I think they're mad," he added.

  "Maybe," I said cautiously, "you should move out."

  He smiled his crooked smile.

  "Where could I go? I couldn't afford it. I'm stuck. Besides, they sort of take care of me, you know." He hunched his shoulders further up around his neck.

  I looked at the side of his thin face, the high stark ridge of his cheekbone, the dark hollow of his eye, marvelling: all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle. But sitting there with the plug of a fresh cigarette stoppering his mouth he didn't appear to be sensing any danger of that kind.

  Thinking about it later, I'm surprised at my own detachment. My restlessness of the afternoon had vanished; I felt calm, serene as a stone moon, in control of the whole white space of the laundromat. I could have reached out effortlessly and put my arms around that huddled awkward body and consoled it, rocked it gently. Still, there was something most unchildlike about him, something that suggested rather an unnaturally old man, old far beyond consolation. I thought too, remembering his duplicity about the beer interview, that he was no doubt capable of making it all up. It may have been real enough; but then again, it may have been calculated to evoke just such a mothering reaction, so that he could smile cleverly at the gesture and retreat further into the sanctuary of his sweater, refusing to be reached or touched.

  He must have been equipped with a kind of science-fiction extra sense, a third eye or an antenna. Although his face was turned away so that he couldn't see mine, he said in a soft dry voice, "I can tell you're admiring my febrility. I know it's appealing, I practise at it; every woman loves an invalid. I bring out the Florence Nightingale in them. But be careful." He was looking at me now, cunningly, sideways. "You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal, you know."

  My calmness was shattered. I felt mice-feet of apprehension scurrying over my skin. What exactly was I being accused of? Was I exposed?

  I could think of nothing to say.

  The dryers whirred to a standstill. I got up. "Thanks for the soap," I said with formal politeness.

  He got up too. He seemed again quite indifferent to my presence. "That's all right," he said.

  We stood side by side without speaking, pulling the clothes out of the dryers and wadding them into our laundry bags. We shouldered our laundry and walked to the door together, I a little ahead. I paused for an instant at the entrance, but he made no move to open the door for me so I opened it myself.

  When we were outside the laundromat we turned, both at once so that we almost collided. We stood facing each other irresolutely for a minute; we both started to say something, and both stopped. Then, as though someone had pulled a switch, we dropped our laundry bags to the sidewalk and took a step forward. I found myself kissing him, or being kissed by him, I still don't know which. His mouth tasted like cigarettes. Apart from that taste, and an impression of thinness and dryness, as though the body I had my arms around and the face touching mine were really made of tissue paper or parchment stretched on a frame of wire coathangers, I can remember no sensation at all.

  We both stopped kissing at the same time, and stepped back. We looked at each other for another minute. Then we picked up our laundry bags, slung them over our shoulders, turned around, and marched away in opposite directions. The whole incident had been ridiculously like the jerky attractions and repulsions of those plastic dogs with magnets on the bottoms I remembered getting as prizes at birthday parties.

  I can't recall anything about the trip back to the apartment, except that on the bus I stared for a long time at an advertisement with a picture of a nurse in a white cap and dress. She had a wholesome, competent face and she was ho
lding a bottle and smiling. The caption said: GIVE THE GIFT OF LIFE.

  12

  So here I am.

  I'm sitting on my bed in my room with the door shut and the window open. It's Labour Day, a fine cool sunny day like yesterday. I found it strange not to have to go to the office this morning. The highways outside the city will be coagulating with traffic even this early, people already beginning to come back from their weekends at summer cottages, trying to beat the rush. At five o'clock everything will have slowed down to an ooze out there and the air will be filled with the shimmer of sun on miles of metal and the whining of idling motors and bored children. But here, as usual, it's quiet.

  Ainsley is in the kitchen. I've hardly seen her today. I can hear her walking about on the other side of the door, humming intermittently. I feel hesitant about opening the door. Our positions have shifted in some way I haven't yet assessed, and I know I would find it difficult to talk with her.

  Friday seems a long time ago, so much has happened since then, but now I've gone over it all in my mind I see that my actions were really more sensible than I thought at the time. It was my subconscious getting ahead of my conscious self, and the subconscious has its own logic. The way I went about doing things may have been a little inconsistent with my true personality, but are the results that inconsistent? The decision was a little sudden, but now I've had time to think about it I realize it is actually a very good step to take. Of course I'd always assumed through high school and college that I was going to marry someone eventually and have children, everyone does. Either two or four, three is a bad number and I don't approve of only children, they get spoiled too easily. I've never been silly about marriage the way Ainsley is. She's against it on principle, and life isn't run by principles but by adjustments. As Peter says, you can't continue to run around indefinitely; people who aren't married get funny in middle age, embittered or addled or something, I've seen enough of them around the office to realize that. But although I'm sure it was in the back of my mind I hadn't consciously expected it to happen so soon or quite the way it did. Of course I was more involved with Peter all along than I wanted to admit.

  And there's no reason why our marriage should turn out like Clara's. Those two aren't practical enough, they have no sense at all of how to manage, how to run a well-organized marriage. So much of it is a matter of elementary mechanical detail, such as furniture and meals and keeping things in order. But Peter and I should be able to set up a very reasonable arrangement. Though of course we still have a lot of the details to work out. Peter is an ideal choice when you come to think of it. He's attractive and he's bound to be successful, and also he's neat, which is a major point when you're going to be living with someone.

  I can imagine the expressions on their faces at the office when they hear. But I can't tell them yet, I'll have to keep my job there for a while longer. Till Peter is finished articling we'll need the money. We'll probably have to live in an apartment at first, but later we can have a real house, a permanent place; it will be worth the trouble to keep clean.

  Meanwhile I should be doing something constructive instead of sitting around like this. First I should revise the beer questionnaire and make out a report on my findings so I can type it up first thing tomorrow and get it out of the way.

  Then perhaps I'll wash my hair. And my room needs a general clean-up. I should go through the dresser drawers and throw out whatever has accumulated in them, and there are some dresses hanging in the closet I don't wear enough to keep. I'll give them to the Salvation Army. Also a lot of costume jewellery, the kind you get from relatives at Christmas: imitation gold pins in the shapes of poodle dogs and bunches of flowers with pieces of cut glass for petals and eyes. There's a cardboard box full of books, textbooks mostly, and letters from home I know I'll never look at again, and a couple of ancient dolls I've kept for sentimental reasons. The older doll has a cloth body stuffed with sawdust (I know that because I once performed an operation on it with a pair of nail scissors) and hands, feet and head made of a hard woody material. The fingers and toes have been almost chewed off; the hair is black and short, a few frizzy wisps attached to a piece of netting which is coming unglued from the skull. The face is almost eroded but still has its open mouth with the red felt tongue inside and two china teeth, its chief fascination as I remember. It's dressed in a strip of old sheet. I used to leave food in front of it overnight and was always disappointed when it wasn't gone in the morning. The other doll is newer and has long washable hair and a rubbery skin. I asked for her one Christmas because you could give her baths. Neither of them is very attractive any longer; I might as well throw them out with the rest of the junk.

  I still can't quite fit in the man at the laundromat or account for my own behaviour. Maybe it was a kind of lapse, a blank in the ego, like amnesia. But there's little chance of my ever running into him again - I don't even know his name - and anyway he has nothing at all to do with Peter.

  After I finish cleaning my room I should write a letter home. They will all be pleased, this is surely what they've been waiting for. They'll want us to come down for the weekend as soon as possible. I've never met Peter's parents either.

  In a minute I'll get off the bed and walk through the pool of sunshine on the floor. I can't let my whole afternoon dribble away, relaxing though it is to sit in this quiet room gazing up at the empty ceiling with my back against the cool wall, dangling my feet over the edge of the bed. It's almost like being on a rubber raft, drifting, looking up into a clear sky.

  I must get organized. I have a lot to do.

  PART TWO

  13

  Marian was sitting listlessly at her desk. She was doodling on the pad for telephone messages. She drew an arrow with many intricate feathers, then a cross-hatch of intersecting lines. She was supposed to be working on a questionnaire, something about stainless-steel razor blades; she had got as far as the question that directed the interviewer to ask the victim for the used razor blade currently in his razor and offer him a new one in exchange. This had stalled her. She was thinking now that it must be an elaborate plot: the president of the razor-blade company had possessed a miraculous razor blade which had been in his family for generations and which not only renewed its sharpness every time it was used but also granted the shaver anything he wished for after every thirteenth shave ... the president, however, had not guarded his treasure carefully enough. One day he had forgotten to replace it in its velvet-lined case and had left it lying around in the bathroom, and one of the maids, trying to be useful, had ... (the story was unclear at this point, but it was very complicated. The razor blade had somehow managed to make its way into a store, a second-hand store where it had been bought by an unsuspecting customer and ...). The president had that very day needed some money in a hurry. He had shaved frantically every three hours to make up the number 13, scraping his face raw; what was his surprise and dismay when.... So he had found out what had happened, commanded the offending maid to be tossed into a pit full of used razor blades, and had covered the city with a dragnet of middle-aged female private detectives posing as Seymour Surveys interviewers, their eagle-eyes trained to ferret out everyone, male or female, with the least trace of a beard, crying "New Razor Blades For Old," in a desperate attempt to recover the priceless lost ...

  Marian sighed, drew a small spider in one corner of the maze of lines, and turned to her typewriter. She typed the section intact from the rough questionnaire - "We would like to examine the condition of your razor blade. Would you give me the razor blade that is now in your razor? Here is a new one in return for it," - adding a "please" before the "give." There was no way of rewording the question that would make it sound less eccentric, but at least it could be made more polite.

  Around her the office was in a turmoil. It was always either in a turmoil or in a dead flat calm, and on the whole she preferred the turmoils. She could get away with doing less, everyone else was in such a state, skittering about and screechin
g, that they didn't have time to lounge around and peer over her shoulder and wonder what was taking her so long or what exactly she was doing anyway. She used to feel a sense of participation in the turmoils themselves; once or twice she had even allowed herself to become frenzied in sympathy, and had been surprised at how much fun it was; but ever since she had become engaged and had known she wasn't going to be there forever (they'd talked about it, Peter said of course she could keep working after the wedding if she wanted to, for a while at least, though she didn't need to financially - he considered it unfair to marry, he said, if you couldn't afford to support your wife, but she had decided against it), she had been able to lean back and view them all with detachment. In fact, she found that she couldn't become involved even when she wanted to. They had taken lately to complimenting her on her calmness in emergencies. "Well, thank goodness for Marian," they'd say, as they soothed themselves with cups of tea and patted their overwrought foreheads with pieces of kleenex, breathing hard. "She never lets herself get out of control. Do you, dear?"

  At the moment they were running around, she thought, like a herd of armadillos at the zoo. Armadillos recalled briefly to her mind the man in the laundromat, who had never reappeared, though she had been to the laundromat several times since and had always half-expected to see him there. But that wasn't surprising, he was obviously unstable; he had probably vanished down some drain or other a long time ago....

  She watched Emmy as she darted to the filing cabinet and rummaged feverishly among the files. This time it was the coast-to-coast sanitary-napkin survey: something had gone embarrassingly wrong in the West. It was supposed to have been what they called a "three-wave" survey: the first wave surging out through the mails, locating and bringing back on its returning crest a shoal of eligible and willing answerers, and the second and third waves following up with interviews of greater depth, done in person. And, Marian hoped, behind closed doors. The whole business, especially some of the questions that were to be asked, had rather shocked her sense of fitness, though Lucy had pointed out over a coffee break that it was most proper these days, after all it was a respectable product, you could buy it in the supermarket and it had full-page advertisements in some of the best magazines, and wasn't it nice they were getting it out in the open and not being so Victorian and repressed about it. Millie had said of course that was the enlightened view but these surveys were always a pain, not only did you have trouble with people at the doors but you couldn't get the interviewers to do them anyway, lots of them were quite old fashioned, especially the ones in small towns, some of them even resigned if you asked them to do it (that was the worst of using housewives, they didn't really need the money, they were always getting bored with it or fed up or pregnant and resigning and then you had to get new ones and train them up from scratch), the best thing was to send them out a form letter telling them how they must all do their best to better the lot of Womankind - an attempt to appeal, Marian reflected, to the embryonic noble nurse that is supposed to be curled, efficient and self-sacrificing, in the heart of every true woman.