The Edible Woman

by Margaret Atwood

  "I think this is it," said Duncan.

  They went in. The night clerk yawned as he took down the key. "Sort of late buddy, isn't it?" he said. "That'll be four."

  "Better late," Duncan said, "than never." He took a handful of bills out of his pocket, scattering assorted change over the carpet. As he stooped to pick it up, the night clerk looked over at Marian with an undisguised though slightly jaded leer. She drooped her eyelids at him. After all, she thought grimly, if I'm dressed like one and acting like one, why on earth shouldn't he think I really am one?

  They ascended the sparsely carpeted stairs in silence.

  The room when they finally located it was the size of a large cupboard, furnished with an iron bedstead, a straight-backed chair, and a dresser whose varnish was peeling off. There was a miniature quarter-in-the-slot T. V. set bolted to the wall in one corner. On the dresser were a couple of folded threadbare towels in baby blue and pink. The narrow window opposite the bed had a blue neon sign hanging outside it; the sign flashed on and off, making an ominous buzzing noise. Behind the room door was another door that led to a cubbyhole of a bathroom.

  Duncan bolted the door behind them. "Well, what do we do now?" he said. "You must know."

  Marian removed her boots, then her shoes. Her toes tingled with the pain of thawing. She looked at the gaunt face peering at her from between an upturned coat collar and a mass of windy hair; the face was dead white, all but the nose, which was red from the cold. As she watched he produced a tattered grey piece of kleenex from some recess in his clothing and wiped it.

  God, she thought, what am I doing here? How did I get here anyway? What would Peter say? She walked across the room and stood in front of the window, looking out at nothing in particular.

  "Oh boy," said Duncan behind her, enthusiastically. She turned. He had discovered something new, a large ashtray that had been sitting on the dresser behind the towels. "It's genuine." The ashtray was in the form of a seashell, pink china with scalloped edges. "It says A Gift From Burk's Falls on it," he told her with glee. He turned it over to look on the bottom and some ashes fell out of it onto the floor. "Made In Japan," he announced.

  Marian felt a surge of desperation. Something had to be done. "Look," she said, "for heaven's sake put down that damned ashtray and take off your clothes and get into that bed!"

  Duncan hung his head like a rebuked child. "Oh, alright," he said.

  He shed his clothes with such velocity that it looked as though he had concealed zippers somewhere, or one long zipper so his clothes came off together like a single skin. He tossed them in a heap onto the chair and scuttled with alacrity into the bed and lay with the sheets pulled up around his chin, watching her with barely disguised and only slightly friendly curiosity.

  With tight-lipped determination she began to undress. It was somewhat difficult to wisp off her stockings in reckless abandon or even a reasonable facsimile of it with those two eyes goggling at her in such a frog-like manner from over the top of the sheet. She scrabbled with her fingers for the zipper at the back of her dress. She could not quite reach it.

  "Unzip me," she said tersely. He complied.

  She threw the dress over the back of the chair and struggled out of her girdle.

  "Hey!" he said. "A real one! I've seen them in the ads but I never got that far in real life, I've always wondered how they worked. Can I look at it?"

  She handed it over to him. He sat up in bed to examine it, stretching it all of its three ways and flexing the bones. "God, how medieval," he said. "How can you stand it? Do you have to wear one all the time?" He spoke of it as though it was some kind of unpleasant but necessary surgical appliance: a brace or a truss.

  "No," she said. She was standing in her slip, wondering what to do next. She refused, somewhat prudishly she supposed, to undress the rest of the way with the lights on; but he seemed to be having such a good time at the moment that she didn't want to interrupt. On the other hand the room was cold and she was beginning to shiver.

  She walked doggedly towards the bed, gritting her teeth. It was an assignment that was going to take a lot of perseverance. If she had had any sleeves on she would have rolled them up. "Move over," she said.

  Duncan flung away the girdle and pulled himself back into the bedclothes like a turtle into its shell. "Oh no," he said, "I'm not letting you into this bed until you go in there and peel that junk off your face. Fornication may be all very well in its way, but if I'm going to come out looking like a piece of flowered wallpaper I reject it."

  She saw his point.

  When she returned, scraped more or less clean, she snapped off the light and slithered into bed beside him. There was a pause.

  "I guess now I'm supposed to crush you in my manly arms," Duncan said out of the darkness.

  She slid her hand beneath his cool back.

  He groped for her head, snuffling against her neck. "You smell funny," he said.

  Half an hour later Duncan said, "It's no use. I must be incorruptible. I'm going to have a cigarette." He got up, stumbled the few steps across the room in the dark, located his clothes and rummaged around in them till he had found the pack, and returned. She could see parts of his face now and the china seashell gleaming in the light of the burning cigarette. He was sitting propped against the iron scrollwork at the head of the bed.

  "I don't exactly know what's wrong," he said. "Partly I don't like not being able to see your face; but it would probably be worse if I could. But it's not just that, I feel like some kind of little stunted creature crawling over the surface of a huge mass of flesh. Not that you're fat," he added, "you aren't. There's just altogether too much flesh around here. It's suffocating." He threw back the covers on his side of the bed. "That's better," he said. He rested the arm with the cigarette across his face.

  Marian knelt beside him in the bed, holding the sheet around her like a shawl. She could barely trace the outlines of his long white body, flesh-white against bed-white, faintly luminous in the blue light from the street. Somebody in the next room flushed a toilet; the gurgling of the water in the pipes swirled through the air of the room and died away with a sound between a sigh and a hiss.

  She clenched her hands on the sheet. She was tense with impatience and with another emotion that she recognized as the cold energy of terror. At this moment to evoke something, some response, even though she could not predict the thing that might emerge from beneath that seemingly passive surface, the blank white formless thing lying insubstantial in the darkness before her, shifting as her eyes shifted trying to see, that appeared to have no temperature, no odour, no thickness and no sound, was the most important thing she could ever have done, could ever do, and she couldn't do it. The knowledge was an icy desolation worse than fear. No effort of will could be worth anything here. She could not will herself to reach out and touch him again. She could not will herself to move away.

  The glow of the cigarette vanished; there was the hard china click of the ashtray being set down on the floor. She could sense that he was smiling in the darkness, but with what expression, sarcasm, malevolence, or even kindness, she could not guess.

  "Lie down," he said.

  She sank back, still with the sheet clutched around her and her knees drawn up.

  He put his arm around her. "No," he said, "you have to unbend. Assuming the foetal position won't be any help at all, god knows I've tried it long enough." He stroked her with his hand, gently, straightening her out, almost as though he was ironing her.

  "It isn't something you can dispense, you know," he said. "You have to let me take my own time."

  He edged over, closer to her now. She could feel his breath against the side of her neck, sharp and cool, and then his face pressing against her, nudging into her flesh, cool; like the muzzle of an animal, curious, and only slightly friendly.

  29

  They were sitting in a grimy coffee shop around the corner from the hotel. Duncan was counting the rest of his money to see what
they could afford to have for breakfast. Marian had undone the buttons of her coat, but was holding it together at the neck. She didn't want any of the other people to see her red dress: it belonged too obviously to the evening before. She had put Ainsley's earrings in her pocket.

  Between them on the green arborite-surfaced table was an assortment of dirty plates and cups and crumbs and splashes and smears of grease, remnants of the courageous breakfasters who had pioneered earlier into the morning when the arborite surface was innocent as a wilderness, untouched by the knife and fork of man, and had left behind them the random clutter of rejected or abandoned articles typical of such light travellers. They knew they would never pass that way again. Marian looked at their waste-strewn trail with distaste, but she was trying to be casual about breakfast. She didn't want her stomach to make a scene. I'll just have coffee and toast, maybe with jelly; surely there will be no objections to that, she thought.

  A waitress with harassed hair appeared and began to clear the table. She flapped a dog-eared menu down in front of each of them. Marian opened hers and looked at the column headed "Breakfast Suggestions."

  Last night everything had seemed resolved, even the imagined face of Peter with its hunting eyes absorbed into some white revelation. It had been simple clarity rather than joy, but it had been submerged in sleep; and waking to the sound of water sighing in the pipes and loud corridor voices, she could not remember what it was. She had lain quietly, trying to concentrate on it, on what it might possibly have been, gazing at the ceiling, which was blotched with distracting watermarks; but it was no use. Then Duncan's head had emerged from beneath the pillow where he had placed it during the night for safe-keeping. He stared at her for a moment as though he didn't have the least idea who she was or what he was doing in that room. Then "Let's get out of here," he said. She had leaned over and kissed him on the mouth, but after she had drawn back he had merely licked his lips, and as though reminded by the action said "I'm hungry. Let's go for breakfast. You look awful," he had added.

  "You're not exactly the picture of health yourself," she replied. His eyes were heavily circled and his hair looked like a raven's nest. They got out of bed and she examined her own face briefly in the yellowed wavery glass of the bathroom mirror. Her skin was drawn and white and strangely dry. It was the truth: she did look awful.

  She had not wanted to put those particular clothes back on but she had no choice. They dressed in silence, awkward in the narrow space of the room whose shabbiness was even more evident in the grey daylight, and furtively descended the stairs.

  She looked at him now as he sat hunched over across the table from her, muffled again in his clothes. He had lit a cigarette and his eyes were watching the smoke. The eyes were closed to her, remote. The imprint left on her mind by the long famished body that had seemed in the darkness to consist of nothing but sharp crags and angles, the memory of its painfully defined almost skeletal ribcage, a pattern of ridges like a washboard, was fading as rapidly as any other transient impression on a soft surface. Whatever decision she had made had been forgotten, if indeed she had ever decided anything. It could have been an illusion, like the blue light on their skins. Something had been accomplished in his life though, she thought with a sense of weary competence; that was a small comfort; but for her nothing was permanent or finished. Peter was there, he hadn't vanished; he was as real as the crumbs on the table, and she would have to act accordingly. She would have to go back. She had missed the morning bus but she could get the afternoon one, after talking to Peter, explaining. Or rather avoiding explanation. There was no real reason to explain because explanations involved causes and effects and this event had been neither. It had come from nowhere and it led nowhere, it was outside the chain. Suddenly it occurred to her that she hadn't begun to pack.

  She looked down at the menu. "Bacon and Eggs, Any Style," she read. "Our Plump Tender Sausages." She thought of pigs and chickens. She shifted hastily to "Toast." Something moved in her throat. She closed the menu.

  "What do you want?" Duncan asked.

  "Nothing, I can't eat anything," she said, "I can't eat anything at all. Not even a glass of orange juice." It had finally happened at last then. Her body had cut itself off. The food circle had dwindled to a point, a black dot, closing everything outside.... She looked at the grease spot on the cover of the menu, almost whimpering with self-pity.

  "You sure? Oh well then," said Duncan with a trace of alacrity, "that means I can spend it all on me."

  When the waitress came back he ordered ham and eggs, which he proceeded to consume voraciously, and without apology or comment, before her very eyes. She watched him in misery. When he broke the eggs with his fork and their yellow centres ran viscously over the plate she turned her head away. She thought she was going to be sick.

  "Well," he said when he had paid the cheque and they were standing outside on the street, "thanks for everything. I've got to go home and get to work on my term paper."

  Marian thought of the cold fuel-oil and stale cigar smell there would be inside the bus. Then she thought of the dishes in the kitchen sink. The bus would get warm and stuffy as she travelled inside it along the highway, the tires making their high grinding whine. What was living, hidden and repulsive, down there among the plates and dirty glasses? She couldn't go back.

  "Duncan," she said, "please don't go."

  "Why? Is there more?"

  "I can't go back."

  He frowned down at her. "What do you expect me to do?" he asked. "You shouldn't expect me to do anything. I want to go back to my shell. I've had enough so-called reality for now."

  "You don't have to do anything, couldn't you just ..."

  "No," he said, "I don't want to. You aren't an escape any more, you're too real. Something's bothering you and you'd want to talk about it; I'd have to start worrying about you and all that, I haven't time for it."

  She looked down at their four feet, standing in the trodden slush of the sidewalk. "I really can't go back."

  He peered at her more closely. "Are you going to be sick?" he asked. "Don't do that."

  She stood mutely before him. She could offer him no good reason for staying with her. There was no reason: what would it accomplish?

  "Well," he said, hesitating, "all right. But not for very long, okay?"

  She nodded gratefully.

  They walked north. "We can't go to my place, you know," he said. "They'd make a fuss."

  "I know."

  "Where do you want to go then?" he asked.

  She hadn't thought about that. Everything was impossible. She put her hands over her ears. "I don't know," she said, her voice rising towards hysteria, "I don't know, I might as well go back...."

  "Oh come now," he said genially, "no histrionics. We'll go for a walk." He pulled her hands away from her ears. "All right," she said, letting herself be humoured.

  As they walked Duncan swung their linked hands back and forth. His mood seemed to have changed from its breakfast sullenness to a certain vacant contentment. They were going uphill, away from the lake; the sidewalks were crowded with furred Saturday ladies trudging inexorably as icebreakers through the slush, brows furrowed with purpose, eyes glinting, shopping bags hung at either side to give them ballast. Marian and Duncan dodged past and around them, breaking hands when an especially threatening one bore down upon them. In the streets the cars fumed and splattered by. Pieces of soot fell from the grey air, heavy and moist as snowflakes.

  "I need some clean air," Duncan said when they had walked wordlessly for twenty minutes or so. "This is like being in a fishbowl full of dying pollywogs. Can you face a short subway ride?"

  Marian nodded. The further away, she thought, the better.

  They went down the nearest pastel-tiled chute, and after an interval smelling of damp wool and mothballs let themselves be carried up by the escalator and out again into daylight.

  "Now we take the streetcar," Duncan said. He seemed to know where he was going, f
or which Marian could only be thankful. He was leading her. He was in control.

  On the streetcar they had to stand. Marian held on to one of the metal poles and stooped so she could see out the window. Over the top of a tea-cosy-shaped green and orange wool hat with large gold sequins sewed to it an unfamiliar landscape jolted past: stores first, then houses, then a bridge, then more houses. She had no idea what part of the city they were in.

  Duncan reached over her head and pulled the cord. The streetcar ground to a halt and they squeezed their way towards the back and jumped down.

  "Now we walk," said Duncan. He turned down a side street. The houses were smaller and a little newer than the ones in Marian's district, but they were still dark and tall, many with square pillared wooden porches, the paint grey or dingy white. The snow on the lawns was fresher here. They passed an old man shovelling a walk, the scrape of the shovel sounding strangely loud in the silent air. There was an abnormal number of cats. Marian thought of how the street would smell in the spring when the snow melted: earth, bulbs coming up, damp wood, last year's leaves rotting, the winter's accumulations of the cats who had thought they were being so clean and furtive as they scratched holes for themselves in the snow. Old people coming out of the grey doors with shovels, creaking over the lawns, burying things. Spring cleaning: a sense of purpose.

  They crossed a street and began to go down a steep hill. All at once Duncan started to run, dragging Marian behind him as if she was a toboggan.

  "Stop!" she called, alarmed at the loudness of her own voice. "I can't run!" She felt the curtains in all the windows swaying perilously as they went past, as though each house contained a dour watcher.