The Edible Woman

by Margaret Atwood

  She took as much time as she could getting home; she did not wish to walk in on the middle of anything. The house, as far as she could tell from the outside, was in darkness, but when she stepped through the door and switched on the hall light, an intercepting form glided out from the dining room. It was the lady down below, still managing to look dignified even in pincurls and a purple Viyella-flannel dressing gown.

  "Miss MacAlpin," she said, her eyebrows severe, "I have been so upset. I'm sure I heard a - some man went upstairs earlier this evening with Miss Tewce, and I'm positive I haven't heard him come down yet. Of course, I don't mean to imply that - I know that you are both very nice girls, but still, the child ..."

  Marian looked at her watch. "Well, I don't know," she said doubtfully, "I don't think anything like that would happen. Perhaps you were mistaken. After all it's past one, and when she isn't out somewhere Ainsley usually goes to bed before that."

  "Well, that's what I thought, I mean I haven't heard any conversation from up there ... not that I mean to say ..."

  The mangy old eavesdropper, she's perfectly avid, Marian thought. "Then she must have gone to bed," she said cheerfully. "And whoever it was probably came downstairs very quietly so as not to disturb you. But I'll speak to her about it in the morning for you." She smiled with what she intended to be a reassuring efficiency, and escaped up the stairs.

  Ainsley is a whited sepulchre, she thought as she climbed, and I've just applied another coat of whitewash. But remember the mote in thy neighbour's eye and the beam in thine own, etcetera. How on earth are we going to convey him, whatever is left of him, down past that old vulture in the morning?

  On the kitchen table she found the scotch bottle, three-quarters empty. A tie with green and blue stripes was dangling victoriously on the closed door of her own room.

  That meant she'd have to clear some place that could be slept in, more or less, from the tangled crow's-nest of sheets, clothing, blankets and paperback books that was Ainsley's bed.

  "Oh rats!" she said to herself as she flung off her coat.

  15

  At four-thirty the next day Marian was walking along a hospital corridor searching for the right room. She had skipped her lunch hour, substituting a cheese-and-lettuce sandwich - a slice of plastic cheese between two pieces of solidified bubble-bath with several flaps of pallid greenery, brought in a cardboard carton by the restaurant take-out-order boy - for real food, so that she could leave the office an hour early, and had already spent half an hour buying the roses and getting to the hospital. Now she had only thirty minutes of visiting time in which to talk with Clara; she wondered whether they would be able to produce, between them, thirty minutes' worth of conversation.

  The doors of the rooms were standing open, and she had to pause in front of them and step almost into the rooms to read the numbers. From within each came the high-pitched bibblebobble of women talking together. At last she reached the right number, close to the end of the corridor.

  Clara was lying diaphanously on a high white hospital bed, its raised back propping her in a half-sitting position. She was wearing a flannelette hospital gown. Her body under the sheet looked to Marian unnaturally thin; her pale hair was falling loosely over her shoulders.

  "Well hi," she said. "Come down to see the old mum at last, eh?"

  Marian thrust her flowers forward in place of the guilty apologetic remark she should have made. Clara's fragile fingers unwrapped the cornucopia of green paper from around them. "They're lovely," she said. "I'll have to get that damn nurse to put them in some decent water. She's just as likely to stick them in the bedpan if you don't watch her."

  When selecting them, Marian had been uncertain whether to get deep-red ones, salmon pink, or white; she was a little sorry now that she had chosen the white. In some ways they went almost too well with Clara; in other ways not at all.

  "Draw the curtains a bit," Clara said in a low voice. There were three other women in the room and private conversation was obviously difficult.

  When Marian had pulled the heavy canvas curtains that were attached by rings to a curved metal rod suspended like a large oval halo above the bed and had sat down on the visitor's chair, she asked, "Well, how do you feel?"

  "Oh marvellous; really marvellous. I watched the whole thing, it's messy, all that blood and junk, but I've got to admit it's sort of fascinating. Especially when the little bugger sticks its head out, and you finally know after carrying the damn thing around all that time what it looks like; I get so excited waiting to see, it's like when you were little and you waited and waited and finally got to open your Christmas presents. Sometimes when I was pregnant I wished like hell we could just hatch them out of eggs, like the birds and so on; but there's really something to be said for this method." She picked up one of the white roses, and sniffed at it. "You really ought to try it sometime."

  Marian wondered how she could be so casual about it, as if she was recommending a handy trick for making fluffier pie crust or a new detergent. Of course it was something she had always planned to do, eventually; and Peter had begun to make remarks with paternal undertones. But in this room with these white-sheeted outstretched women the possibility was suddenly much too close. And then there was Ainsley. "Don't rush me," she said, smiling.

  "Of course it hurts like hell," Clara said smugly, "and they won't give you anything till quite far along, because of the baby; but that's the funny thing about pain. You can never remember it afterwards. I feel just marvellous now - I keep thinking I'll get post-puerperal depression, like a lot of women do, but I never seem to; I save that till I have to get up and go home. It's so nice to just lie here; I really feel marvellous." She hitched herself up a little against the pillows.

  Marian sat and smiled at her. She couldn't think of anything to say in reply. More and more, Clara's life seemed cut off from her, set apart, something she could only gaze at through a window. "What are you going to call her?" she asked, repressing a desire to shout, not quite sure whether Clara would be able to hear her through the glass.

  "We don't really know yet. We're sort of considering Vivian Lynn, after my grandmother and Joe's grandmother. Joe wanted to call her after me but I've never liked my own name much. It's really marvellous though to have a man who's just as pleased with a daughter as a son, so many men aren't, you know, though maybe Joe wouldn't be if he didn't have one son already."

  Marian stared at the wall above Clara's head, thinking that it was painted the same colour as the office. She almost expected to hear the sound of typewriters from beyond the curtains, but instead there were only the murmuring voices of the three other women and their visitors. When she came in she had noticed that one of them, the young one in the pink-lace bed jacket, had been sitting up working at a paint-by-numbers picture. Maybe she should have brought Clara something to do, instead of just flowers: it must be very tiresome lying around like that all day.

  "Would you like me to bring you anything to read?" she asked, thinking as she did so how much she was sounding like the kind of ladies'-club member who makes a part-time career out of visiting the sick.

  "Now that's a kind thought. But really I don't think I could concentrate enough, not for a while. I'll either be sleeping, or," she said in a lower voice, "listening to those other women. Maybe it's the hospital atmosphere, but all they ever talk about are their miscarriages and their diseases. It makes you feel very sickly after a while: you start wondering when it'll be your turn to get cancer of the breast or a ruptured tube, or miscarry quadruplets at half-weekly intervals; no kidding, that's what happened to Mrs. Moase, the big one over there in the far corner. And christ they're so calm about it, and they seem to think that each of their grisly little episodes is some kind of service medal: they haul them out and compare them and pile on the gory details, they're really proud of them. It's a positive gloating about pain. I even find myself producing a few of my own ailments, as though I have to compete. I wonder why women are so morbid?"

/>   "Oh, some men are morbid too, I guess," Marian said. Clara was talking a lot more, and a lot more quickly, than she usually did, and Marian found herself being surprised. During the later, more vegetable stage of Clara's pregnancy she had tended to forget that Clara had a mind at all or any perceptive faculties above the merely sentient and sponge-like, since she had spent most of her time being absorbed in, or absorbed by, her tuberous abdomen. To have her observing, commenting like this, was a slight shock. It might be some kind of reaction, but it certainly wasn't hysteria: she seemed thoroughly in control. Something to do with hormones maybe.

  "Well, Joe certainly isn't," Clara said happily. "If he weren't so un-morbid I don't know how I'd ever manage. He's so good about the children and the washing and everything, I don't feel at all uneasy about leaving everything up to him at a time like this. I know he manages just as well as I would if I were there, though we're having a bit of trouble with poor Arthur. He's beautifully toilet-trained now, he uses his plastic potty almost every time, but he's become a hoarder. He rolls the shit into little pellets and hides them places - like cupboards and bottom drawers. You have to watch him like a hawk. Once I found some in the refrigerator, and Joe tells me he just discovered a whole row of them hardening on the bathroom windowsill behind the curtain. He gets very upset when we throw them out. I can't imagine why he does it; maybe he'll grow up to be a banker."

  "Do you think it has anything to do with the new baby?" Marian said. "Jealousy perhaps?"

  "Oh, probably," Clara said, smiling serenely. She was twirling one of the white roses between her fingers. "But here I am running on about myself," she said, turning herself on the bed so she was facing more directly towards Marian. "I haven't really had a chance to talk to you about your engagement. We both think it's wonderful, of course, although we don't really know Peter."

  Marian said, "We must all get together sometime, after you're home and have got yourself organized again. I'm sure you'll like him."

  "Well he looks awfully nice. Of course you never really know someone till you've been married to them for a while and discover some of their scruffier habits. I remember how upset I was when I realized for the first time that after all Joe wasn't Jesus Christ. I don't know what it was, probably some silly thing like finding out he's crazy about Audrey Hepburn. Or that he's a secret philatelist."

  "A what?" asked Marian. She didn't know what it was but it sounded perverted.

  "Stamp collecting. Not a real one of course, he tears them off the mail. Anyway it takes adjustment. Now," she said, "I just think he's one of the minor saints."

  Marian didn't know what to say. She found Clara's attitude towards Joe both complacent and embarrassing: it was sentimental, like the love stories in the back numbers of women's magazines. Also she felt Clara was trying to give her some kind of oblique advice, and this was even more embarrassing. Poor Clara, she was the last person whose advice would be worth anything. Look at the mess she had blundered into: three children at her age. Peter and she were going into it with far fewer illusions. If Clara had slept with Joe before marriage she would have been much better able to cope afterwards.

  "I think Joe's a wonderful husband," she said generously.

  Clara gave a snort of laughter, then winced. "Oh. Screw. It hurts in the most ungodly places. No you don't; you think we're both shiftless and disorganized and you'd go bats if you lived in all that chaos; you can't understand how we've survived without hating each other." Her voice was perfectly good-natured.

  Marian started to protest, thinking it was unfair of Clara to force the conversation out into the open like that; but a nurse popped her head through the doorway long enough to announce that the visiting time was up.

  "If you want to see the baby," Clara said as Marian was leaving, "you can probably get someone to tell you where they've stowed it. You can see them through a plate-glass window somewhere; they all look alike, but they'll point out mine if you ask. If I were you I wouldn't bother though, they aren't very interesting at this stage. They look like red shrivelled prunes."

  "Maybe I'll wait then," said Marian.

  It struck her as she went out the door that there had been something in Clara's manner, especially in the slightly worried twist of her eyebrows once or twice, that had expressed concern; but concern about what, exactly, she didn't know and couldn't stop to puzzle over. She had the sense of having escaped, as if from a culvert or cave. She was glad she wasn't Clara.

  Now there was the rest of the day to unravel. She would eat quickly at the nearest restaurant she could find and by the time she was finished the traffic would have cleared somewhat, and she could rush home and grab some laundry. What on earth did she have that was fit to take? Perhaps a couple of blouses. She wondered whether a pleated skirt would do, that would keep him busy and she had one that needed pressing, but on second thought it was the wrong sort of thing, and surely too complicated anyway.

  The hours before her were going to be, she felt, as convoluted as that hour in the afternoon during which Peter had called to arrange dinner and they had discussed at length - too great a length, she was afraid - where they were going to eat; and then after all that she had had to call him back and say, "I'm terribly sorry darling, but something really unavoidable has come up; can we put it off? Tomorrow maybe?" He had been peevish, but he couldn't say much about it because he had just finished doing the same thing to her the day before.

  There had been a difference, of course, in what had come up. In her case it had been another telephone call.

  The voice at the other end had said, "This is Duncan."

  "Who?"

  "The guy at the laundromat."

  "Oh. Yes." Now she recognized the voice, though it sounded more nervous than usual.

  "I'm sorry I startled you in the movie, but I knew you were dying to know what I was eating."

  "Yes, I was actually," she said, glancing at the clock and then at the open door of Mrs. Bogue's cubicle. She had already spent far too much time on the phone that afternoon.

  "They were pumpkin seeds. I'm trying to stop smoking, you know, and I find them very helpful. There's a lot of oral satisfaction in cracking them open. I get them at the pet store, they're supposed to be for birds, really."

  "Yes," she said, to fill up the pause that followed.

  "It was a crummy movie."

  Marian wondered whether the switchboard girl downstairs was listening in on the conversation, as she had been known to do, and if so, what she was thinking about it; she must have realized by now that it was not a business call. "Mr.... Duncan," she said in her most official voice, "I'm sort of at the office, and we aren't supposed to take much time for outside calls; I mean from friends and so on."

  "Oh," he said. He sounded discouraged, but he made no attempt to clarify the situation.

  She pictured him at the other end of the line, morose, hollow-eyed, waiting for the sound of her voice. She had no idea why he had called. Perhaps he needed her, needed to talk to her. "But I would like to talk to you," she said encouragingly. "Some more convenient time?"

  "Well," he said, "as a matter of fact I sort of need you; right now. I mean I need - what I need is some ironing. I've just got to iron something and I've already ironed everything in the house, even the dishtowels, and I sort of wondered whether maybe I could come over to your house and maybe iron some of your things."

  Mrs. Bogue's eve was now definitely upon her. "Why, of course," she said crisply. Then she suddenly decided that it would be, for some as yet unexamined reason, disastrous if this man were to encounter either Peter or Ainsley. Besides, who could tell what variety of turmoil had broken loose after she had tiptoed out of the house that morning, leaving Len still caught in the toils of vice behind the door ornamented with his own tie? She hadn't heard from Ainsley all day, which might be either a good or an evil omen. And even if Len had managed to escape safely, the wrath of the lady down below, foiled of its proper object, might very well descend on the head of t
he harmless ironer as a representative of the whole male species. "Maybe I'd better bring some things to your house," she said.

  "Actually I'd prefer that. It means I can use my own iron; I'm used to it. It makes me uncomfortable to iron with other people's irons. But please hurry, I really do need it. Desperately."

  "Yes, as soon as I can after work," she said, trying both to reassure him and to sound, for the benefit of the office, as though she was making a dentist appointment. "About seven." She realized as soon as she had hung up that this would mean postponing dinner with Peter yet again; but then she could see him any night. The other thing was an emergency.

  By the time she had got matters straightened out with Peter she had felt as though she had been trying to unsnarl herself from all the telephone lines in the city. They were prehensile, they were like snakes, they had a way of coiling back on you and getting you all wrapped up.

  A nurse was coming towards her, pushing a rubber-wheeled wagon loaded with trays of food. Although her mind was occupied with other things, Marian's eyes registered the white shape and found it out of place. She stopped and looked around. Wherever else she was going it was not towards the main exit. She had been so involved in the threads of her own plans and reflections that she must have got off the elevator on the wrong floor. She was in a corridor exactly similar to the one she had just come from, except that all the room-doors were closed. She looked for a number: 273. Well, that was simple: she had got off a floor too soon.

  She turned and walked back, trying to remember where the elevator was supposed to be; she seemed to recall having gone around several corners. The nurse had disappeared. Coming towards her now from the far end of the hallway was a figure, a man wearing a green smock, with a white mask over the lower part of his face. She was aware for the first time of the hospital smell, antiseptic, severe.

  It must be one of the doctors. She could see now that he had a thin black thing, a stethoscope, around his neck. As he came nearer she looked at him more closely. In spite of the mask there was something familiar about him; it bothered her that she could not tell what it was. But he passed her, staring straight ahead, his eyes expressionless, and opened one of the doors to the right and went in. When he turned she could see that he had a bald spot on the back of his head.