The Edible Woman

by Margaret Atwood

  "Clara," she said, "do you think I'm normal?" Clara had known her a long time; her opinion would be worth something.

  Clara considered. "Yes, I would say you're normal," she said, removing a button from Elaine's mouth. "I'd say you're almost abnormally normal, if you know what I mean. Why?"

  Marian was reassured. That was what she herself would have said. But if she was so normal, why had this thing chosen to attack her?

  "Something's been happening to me lately," she said. "I don't know what to do about it."

  "Oh, what's that? No, you little pig, that's mummy's."

  "I can't eat certain things; I get this awful feeling." She wondered whether Clara was paying as much attention as she ought to.

  "I know what you mean," said Clara, "I've always felt that way about liver."

  "But these are things I used to be able to eat. It isn't that I don't like the taste; it's the whole ..." It was difficult to explain.

  "I expect it's bridal nerves," Clara said; "I threw up every morning for a week before my wedding. So did Joe," she added. "You'll get over it. Did you want to know anything about ... sex?" she asked, with a delicacy Marian found ludicrous, coming from Clara.

  "No, not really thanks," she had said. Though she was sure Clara's explanation wasn't the right one she had felt better.

  The record had begun to play from the middle again. She opened her eyes; from where she was lying she could see a green plastic aircraft carrier floating in the circle of light from Peter's desk lamp. Peter had a new hobby, putting together model ships from model ship kits. He said he found it relaxing. She herself had helped with that one, reading the directions out loud and handing him the pieces.

  She turned her head on the pillow and smiled at Peter. He smiled back at her, his eyes shining in the semi-darkness.

  "Peter," she said, "am I normal?"

  He laughed and patted her on the rump. "I'd say from my limited experience that you're marvellously normal, darling." She sighed; she didn't mean it that way.

  "I could use another drink," Peter said; it was his way of asking her to get him one. The ashtray was removed from her back. She turned over and sat up, pulling the top sheet off the bed and wrapping it around her. "And while you're up, flip over the record, that's a good girl."

  Marian turned the record, feeling naked in the open expanse of the living room in spite of the sheet and the venetian blinds; then she went into the kitchen and measured out Peter's drink. She was hungry - she hadn't had much for dinner - so she unboxed the cake she had bought that afternoon on the way back from Clara's. The day before had been Valentine's Day and Peter had sent her a dozen roses. She had felt guilty, thinking she ought to have given him something but not knowing what. The cake wasn't a real gift, only a token. It was a heart with pink icing and probably stale, but it was the shape that mattered.

  She got out two of Peter's plates and two forks and two paper napkins, then she cut into the cake. She was surprised to find that it was pink in the inside too. She put a forkful into her mouth and chewed it slowly; it felt spongy and cellular against her tongue, like the bursting of thousands of tiny lungs. She shuddered and spat the cake out into her napkin and scraped her plate into the garbage; after that she wiped her mouth off with the edge of the sheet.

  She walked into the bedroom, carrying Peter's drink and the plate. "I've brought you some cake," she said. It would be a test, not of Peter but of herself. If he couldn't eat his either then she was normal.

  "Aren't you nice." He took the plate and the glass from her and set them on the floor.

  "Aren't you going to eat it?" For a moment she was hopeful.

  "Later," he said, "later." He was unwinding her from the sheet. "You're a bit chilly, darling; come here and be warmed up." His mouth tasted of scotch and cigarettes. He pulled her down on top of him, the sheet rustling whitely around them, his clean familiar soap-smell enfolding her; in her ears the light cocktail music went on and on.

  Later, Marian was resting on her stomach with an ashtray balanced in the hollow of her back; this time her eyes were open. She was watching Peter eat. "I really worked up an appetite," he had said, grinning at her. He didn't seem to notice anything odd about the cake: he hadn't even winced.

  24

  All at once it was the day of Peter's final party. Marian had spent the afternoon at the hairdresser's: Peter had suggested that she might have something done with her hair. He had also hinted that perhaps she should buy a dress that was, as he put it, "not quite so mousy" as any she already owned, and she had duly bought one. It was short, red, and sequinned. She didn't think it was really her, but the saleslady did. "It's you, dear," she had said, her voice positive.

  It had needed an alteration so she had picked it up when she came from the hairdresser's and was carrying it now in its pink and silver cardboard box as she walked towards the house across the slippery road, balancing her head on her neck as though she was a juggler with a fragile golden bubble. Even outside in the cold late-afternoon air she could smell the sweetly artificial perfume of the hairspray he had used to glue each strand in place. Though she'd asked him not to put on too much; but they never did what you wanted them to. They treated your head like a cake: something to be carefully iced and ornamented.

  She usually did her hair herself, so she had got the name of the establishment from Lucy, thinking she would know about such places; but perhaps that had been a mistake. Lucy had a face and shape that almost demanded the artificial: nail polish and makeup and elaborate arrangements of hair blended into her, became part of her. Surely she would look peeled or amputated without them; whereas Marian had always thought that on her own body these things looked extra, stuck to her surface like patches or posters.

  As soon as she had walked into the large pink room - everything had been pink and mauve, it was amazing how such frivolously feminine decorations could look at the same time so functional - she had felt as passive as though she was being admitted to a hospital to have an operation. She had checked her appointment with a mauve-haired young woman who despite her false eyelashes and iridescent talons was disturbingly nurse-like and efficient; then she had been delivered over to the waiting staff.

  The shampoo girl wore a pink smock and had sweaty armpits and strong professional hands. Marian had closed her eyes, leaning back against the operating table, while her scalp was soaped and scraped and rinsed. She thought it would be a good idea if they would give anaesthetics to the patients, just put them to sleep while all these necessary physical details were taken care of; she didn't enjoy feeling like a slab of flesh, an object.

  Then they had strapped her into the chair - not really strapped in, but she couldn't get up and go running out into the winter street with wet hair and a surgical cloth around her neck - and the doctor had set to work. A young man in a white smock who smelled of cologne and had deft spindly fingers and shoes with pointed toes. She had sat motionless, handing him the clamps, fascinated by the draped figure prisoned in the filigreed gold oval of the mirror and by the rack of gleaming instruments and bottled medicines on the counter in front of her. She couldn't see what he was doing behind her back. Her whole body felt curiously paralysed.

  When at last all the clamps and rollers and clips and pins were in place, and her head resembled a mutant hedgehog with a covering of rounded hairy appendages instead of spikes, she was led away and installed under a dryer and switched on. She looked sideways down the assembly line of women seated in identical mauve chairs under identical whirring mushroom-shaped machines. All that was visible was a row of strange creatures with legs of various shapes and hands that held magazines and heads that were metal domes. Inert; totally inert. Was this what she was being pushed towards, this compound of the simply vegetable and the simply mechanical? An electric mushroom.

  She resigned herself to the necessity of endurance, and picked up a movie-star magazine from the stack at her elbow. A blonde woman with enormous breasts spoke to her from the back cover: "G
irls! Be Successful! If you want to really Go Places, Develop Your Bust...."

  After one of the nurses had pronounced her dry she was returned to the doctor's chair to have the stitches taken out; she found it rather incongruous that they weren't wheeling her back on a table. She passed along the gently frying line of those who were not yet done, and soon her head was being unwound and brushed and combed; then the doctor was smiling and holding a hand mirror at an angle so that she could see the back of her head. She looked. He had built her usually straight hair up into a peculiar shape embellished with many intricate stiff curved wisps, and had manufactured two tusk-like spitcurls which projected forward, one on each cheekbone.

  "Well," she said dubiously, frowning at the mirror, "it's a little - um - extreme for me." She thought it made her look like a call girl.

  "Ah, but you should wear it this way more often," he said with Italianate enthusiasm, his rapturous expression nevertheless fading a shade. "You should try new things. You should be daring, eh?" He laughed roguishly at her, displaying an unnatural number of white even teeth and two gold ones; his breath was flavoured with peppermint mouthwash.

  She considered asking him to comb out some of his special effects, but decided not to, partly because she was intimidated by his official surroundings and specialist implements and dentist-like certainty - he must know what was right, it was his business - but partly because she found herself shrugging mentally. After all, she had taken the leap, she had walked through that gilded chocolate-box door of her own free will and this was the consequence and she had better accept it. "Peter will probably like it. Anyway," she reflected, "it will go with the dress."

  Still half etherized, she had plunged into one of the large department stores nearby, intending to take a short-cut through the basement to the subway station. She had gone quickly through the Household Wares section, past the counters that held frying pans and casserole dishes, and the display models of vacuum cleaners and automatic washers. They reminded her, uneasily, both of the surprise shower the girls at the office had given her the day before, her last day of work, which had involved the bestowing of tea towels and ladles and beribboned aprons and advice, and of the several anxious letters she had got recently from her mother, urging her to choose her patterns - china and crystal and silverware - because people were wanting to know what to get for wedding presents. She had taken trips to various stores for the purpose of making the selection, but had been so far quite unable to make up her mind. And she was leaving on the bus for home the next day. Well, she would do it later.

  She rounded a counter lush with artificial plastic flowers and walked along what seemed to be a main aisle that led somewhere. In front of her a small frantic man was standing on a pedestal, demonstrating a new kind of grater with an apple-coring attachment. He was pattering and grating simultaneously, non-stop, holding up a handful of shredded carrot, then an apple with a neat round hole in its centre. A cluster of women with shopping bags watched silently, their heavy coats and overshoes drab in the basement light, their eyes shrewd and sceptical.

  Marian stopped for a minute on the outer fringe of the group. The little man made a radish-rose with yet another attachment. Several of the women turned and glanced at her in an appraising way, summing her up. Anyone with a hairstyle like that, they must have been thinking, would be far too trivial to be seriously interested in graters. How long did it take to acquire that patina of lower-middle income domesticity, that weathered surface of slightly mangy fur, cloth worn thin at cuff-edges and around buttons, scuffed leather of handbags; the tight slant of the mouth, the gauging eyes; and above all that invisible colour that was like a smell, the under-painting of musty upholstery and worn linoleum that made them in this bargain basement authentic in a way that she was not? Somehow Peter's future income cancelled the possibility of graters. They made her feel like a dilettante.

  The little man started briskly to reduce a potato to a pulp. Marian lost her interest and continued her search for the yellow subway sign.

  When she opened the front door she was met by a gabble of female voices. She took off her boots in the vestibule and put them on the newspapers that were there for that purpose. A number of other pairs had been deposited, many with thick soles and some with black fur tops. As she went past the parlour doorway she caught a glimpse of dresses and hats and necklaces. The lady down below was having a tea party; they must be the Imperial Daughters, or perhaps they were the Women Christian Temperates. The child, in maroon velvet with a lace collar, was passing cakes.

  Marian climbed the stairs as noiselessly as she could. For some reason she had not yet spoken to the lady down below about giving up the apartment. She should have done it weeks ago. The delay might mean having to pay another month's rent for insufficient notice. Maybe Ainsley would want to keep it on with another roommate; but she doubted it. In another few months that would be impossible.

  When she had climbed the second flight of stairs she could hear Ainsley talking in the living room. The voice was harder, more insistent, angrier than she had ever heard it before: Ainsley did not usually lose her temper. Another voice was interrupting, answering. It was Leonard Slank's.

  "Oh no," Marian thought. They seemed to be having an argument. She definitely did not want to get involved. She intended to slip quietly into her room and close the door, but Ainsley must have heard her coming up the stairs: her head appeared abruptly from the living room, followed by quantities of loose red hair and then by the rest of her body. She was dishevelled and had been crying.

  "Marian!" she half-wailed, half-commanded. "You've got to come in here and talk to Len. You've got to make him listen to reason! I like your hair," she added perfunctorily.

  Marian trailed after her into the living room, feeling like a child's wheeled wooden toy being pulled along by a string, but she didn't know on what grounds, moral or otherwise, she could base a refusal. Len was standing in the middle of the room, looking even more disturbed than Ainsley.

  Marian sat down on a chair, keeping her coat on as a shock-absorber. The other two both stared angrily and beseechingly at her in silence.

  Then, "My God!" Len almost shouted. "After all that, now she wants me to marry her!"

  "Well, what's the matter with you anyway! You don't want a homosexual son, do you?" Ainsley demanded.

  "Goddamn it, I don't want any son at all! I didn't want it, you did it yourself, you should have it removed, there must be some kind of pill...."

  "That's not the point, don't be ridiculous, the point is of course I'm going to have the baby; but it should have the best circumstances, and it's your responsibility to provide it with a father. A father-image." Ainsley was now trying a slightly more patient and cool-headed approach.

  Len paced across the floor. "How much do they cost? I'll buy you one. Anything. But I'm not going to marry you, dammit. Don't give me that responsibility stuff either, I'm not responsible anyway. It was all your doing, you deliberately allowed me to get myself drunk, you seduced me, you practically dragged me into ..."

  "That isn't quite how I remember it," Ainsley said, "and I was in a condition to remember it a lot more clearly than you can. Anyway," she continued with relentless logic, "you thought you were seducing me. And after all, that's important too, isn't it: your motives. Suppose you really had been seducing me and I'd got pregnant accidentally. What would you do then? You'd certainly be responsible then, wouldn't you? So it is your responsibility."

  Len contorted his face, his smile an anaemic parody of cynical sarcasm. "You're like all the rest of them, you're a sophist," he said in a quaveringly savage voice. "You're twisting the truth. Let's stick to the facts, shall we dear? I didn't seduce you really, it was ..."

  "That doesn't matter," Ainsley said, her voice rising. "You thought you ..."

  "For God's sake can't you be realistic!" Leonard shrieked.

  Marian had been sitting quietly, looking from one to the other, thinking how peculiarly they were acting; so
out of control. Now she said, "Could we please be a little less noisy? The lady down below might hear."

  "Oh, SCREW the lady down below!" Len roared.

  This novel idea was so blasphemous and at the same time so ludicrous that both Ainsley and Marian broke into horrified and delighted giggles. Len glared at them. This was the final outrage, the final feminine insolence - after putting him through all that, she was laughing at him! He snatched up his coat from the back of the chesterfield and strode towards the stairs.

  "You and your goddamn fertility worship can go straight to hell!" he shouted, plunging downwards.

  Ainsley, seeing the father-image escaping, remoulded her features into an imploring expression and ran after him. "Oh Len, come back and let's talk it over seriously," she pleaded. Marian followed them down the stairs, impelled less by a sense of being able to do anything concrete or helpful than by some obscure herd-or lemming-instinct. Everyone else was leaping over the cliff, she might as well go too.

  Len's descent was halted by the spinning wheel on the landing. He was temporarily snarled in it, and tugged and swore loudly. By the time he was able to start down the next flight of stairs Ainsley had caught up to him and was pulling at his sleeve, and all the ladies, as alert to the symptoms of wickedness as a spider to the vibrations of its web, had come fluttering out of the parlour and were gathered at the foot of the stairs, gazing up with a certain gloating alarm. The child was among them, still holding a plate of cakes, her mouth slackly open, her eyes wide. The lady down below in black silk and pearls was being dignified in the background.

  Len looked over his shoulder, then down the stairs. Retreat was impossible. He was surrounded by the enemy; there was no choice but to go bravely forward.

  Not only that, he had an audience. His eyes rolled in his head like those of a frenzied spaniel. "All you clawed scaly bloody predatory whoring fucking bitches can go straight to hell! All of you! Underneath you're all the same!" he shouted, with, Marian thought, rather good enunciation.