The Edible Woman (24 page)

She examined the women’s bodies with interest, critically, as though she had never seen them before. And in a way she hadn’t, they had just been there like everything else, desks, telephones, chairs, in the space of the office: objects viewed as outline and surface only. But now she could see the roll of fat pushed up across Mrs. Gundridge’s back by the top of her corset, the ham-like bulge of thigh, the creases round the neck, the large porous cheeks; the blotch of varicose veins glimpsed at the back of one plump crossed leg, the way her jowls jellied when she chewed, her sweater a woolly teacosy over those rounded shoulders; and the others too, similar in structure but with varying proportions and textures of bumpy permanents and dune-like contours of breast and waist and hip; their fluidity sustained somewhere within by bones, without by a carapace of clothing and makeup. What peculiar creatures they were; and the continual flux between the outside and the inside, taking things in, giving them out, chewing, words, potato chips, burps, grease, hair,
babies, milk, excrement, cookies, vomit, coffee, tomato juice, blood, tea, sweat, liquor, tears, and garbage.…

For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be – or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick Sargasso Sea of femininity. She drew a deep breath, clenching her body and her mind back into her self like some tactile sea creature withdrawing its tentacles; she wanted something solid, clear: a man; she wanted Peter in the room so that she could put her hand out and hold on to him to keep from being sucked down. Lucy had a gold bangle on one arm. Marian focussed her eyes on it, concentrating on it as though she was drawing its hard gold circle around herself, a fixed barrier between herself and that liquid amorphous other.

She became aware of a silence in the room. The hen-yard gabble had ceased. She lifted her head: Mrs. Bogue was standing at the end of the room near the table, holding up her hand.

“Now that we’re all gathered together here in this unofficial way,” she said, smiling benignly, “I’d like to take this opportunity to make a very pleasant announcement. I’ve learned recently through the grapevine that one of our girls will soon be getting married. I’m sure we’ll all wish Marian MacAlpin the very best in her new life.”

There were preliminary squeals and chirps and burbles of excitement; then the whole mass rose up and descended upon her, deluging her with moist congratulations and chocolate-crumbed inquiries and little powdery initiatory kisses. Marian stood up, and was immediately pressed against the more-than-ample bosom of Mrs. Gundridge. She unstuck herself and backed against the wall; she was blushing, but more from anger than from modesty. Someone had let it slip; one of them had told on her; Millie, it must have been.

She said “Thank you” and “September” and “March,” the only three words necessary for the questions they were asking. “Wonderful!” and “Marvellous!” cried the chorus. The office virgins remained aloof, smiling wistfully. Mrs. Bogue also stood aside. She had, by the tone of her speech, and by the mere fact of this public announcement coming without warning or prior consultation, made it clear to Marian that she would be expecting her to leave her job whether she wanted to or not. Marian knew, from rumour and from the banishment of a typist just after she had begun to work at the office, that Mrs. Bogue preferred her girls to be either unmarried or seasoned veterans with their liability to unpredictable pregnancies well in the past. Newly-weds, she had been heard to say, were inclined to be unstable. Mrs. Grot from Accounting kept at the rim of the circle too, her smile tight-lipped and acid. I bet her festive mood is quite spoiled now, Marian thought; I’m lost to the Pension Plan forever.

To emerge from the building and walk along the street in the cold air was like throwing open the window of an overheated and stuffy room. The wind had subsided. It was already dark, but the jangling light from the store windows and the Christmas decorations overhead, festoons and stars, made the snow that was falling, softly now, glow like the spray from a gigantic and artificially lit waterfall. Underfoot, there was less snow than she had anticipated. It was wet, trodden to a brown slush by the pedestrians. The blizzard had not started until after Marian had left for work that morning, and she wasn’t wearing boots. Her shoes were soaked through by the time she had reached the subway station.

But in spite of her wet feet she got off the subway a stop before the right one. After that tea party she could not confront the apartment yet. Ainsley would come in and take up her infernal knitting; and there was the Christmas tree, a plastic table model in silver and
azure. There were still the presents to be wrapped, lying on her bed; and her suitcase to be packed: early the next morning she had to leave on the bus for a two-day visit with her parents and their town and their relatives. When she thought of them at all, they no longer seemed to belong to her. The town and the people waited for her on some horizon, somewhere, unchanging, monolithic and grey, like the weathered stone ruins of an extinct civilization. She had bought all of the presents last weekend, shoving her way through the crowds that clamoured and shouted at the store counters, but she no longer felt like giving anybody anything. She felt even less like receiving, having to thank them all for things she didn’t need and would never use; and it was no use telling herself, as she had been told all her life, that it was the spirit of the giver and not the value of the gift that counted. That was worse: all the paper tags with Love on them. The kind of love they were given with was also by now something she didn’t need and would never use. It was archaic, sadly ornate, kept for some obscure nostalgic reason, like the photograph of a dead person.

She had been walking west but with little sense of direction along a street walled with stores and with elegant mannequins posturing in their bright glass cages. Now she had passed the final store and was walking in a darker space. As she approached the corner, she realized she had been heading toward the Park. She crossed the street and turned south, following the stream of cars. The Museum was on her left, its frieze of stone figures thrown into relief by the garish orange floodlights they seemed to be using more and more for night-lighting.

Peter had been a problem. She hadn’t known what she ought to buy him. Clothes were out of the question, she had decided: he would always want to choose his own. What else was there? Something for the apartment, some household object, would be like
making a gift to herself. She had finally settled on a handsome expensive technical book about cameras. She knew nothing about the subject but she had taken the word of the salesman, hoping that the book was one he didn’t already have. She was glad he had hobbies: he would be less likely to get heart failure after retiring.

She was passing under the arching branches of the trees that grew within these nearby fences and seclusions of the university. The sidewalk was less trampled here, and the snow was deeper, above her ankles in some places. Her feet were aching with the cold. Just as she was beginning to wonder why she kept on walking, she had crossed the street again and was standing in the Park.

It was a huge dimly white island in the darkness of the night. The cars flowed around it, counter-clockwise; on the further side lay the buildings of the university, those places she thought she had known so well only half a year ago but which now radiated a faint hostility towards her through the cold air, a hostility she recognized as coming from herself: in some obscure way she was jealous of them. She would have liked them to have vanished when she left, but they had remained standing, kept going on, as indifferent to her absence as they had actually been, she supposed, to her presence.

She walked further into the Park through the soft ankle-deep snow. Here and there it was criss-crossed by random trails of footprints, already silting over, but mostly it was smooth, untouched, the trunks of the bare trees coming straight up out of the snow as though it was seven feet deep and the trees had been stuck there like candles in the icing of a cake. Black candles.

She was near the round concrete pool that had a fountain in the summers but would be empty of water now, gradually filling instead with snow. She stopped to listen to the distant sounds of the city, which seemed to be moving in a circle around her; she felt quite safe. “You have to watch it,” she said to herself, “you don’t want to end up not taking baths.” In the lunchroom she had felt for a
moment dangerously close to some edge; now she found her own reactions rather silly. An office party was merely an office party. There were certain things that had to be got through between now and then, that was all: details, people, necessary events. After that it would be all right. She was almost ready to go back and wrap the presents; she was even hungry enough now to devour half a cow, dotted lines and all. But she wanted to stand for only one more minute with the snow sifting down here in this island, this calm open eye of silence.…

“Hello,” a voice said.

Marian was hardly startled. She turned: there was a figure seated on the far end of a bench in the darker shadow of some evergreen trees. She walked towards it.

It was Duncan, sitting hunched over, a cigarette glowing between his fingers. He must have been there for some time. The snow had settled on his hair and on the shoulders of his coat. His hand, when she took off her glove to touch it, was cold and wet.

She sat down beside him on the snow-covered bench. He flicked away his cigarette and turned towards her, and she undid the buttons of his overcoat and huddled herself inside it, in a space that smelled of damp cloth and stale cigarettes. He closed his arms around her back.

He was wearing a shaggy sweater. She stroked it with one of her hands as though it was a furry skin. Beneath it she could feel his spare body, the gaunt shape of a starved animal in time of famine. He nuzzled his wet face under her scarf and hair and coat collar, against her neck.

They sat without moving. The city, the time outside the white circle of the Park, had almost vanished. Marian felt her flesh gradually numbing; her feet had even ceased to ache. She pressed herself deeper into the furry surface; outside, the snow was falling. She could not begin the effort of getting up.…

“You took a long time,” he said quietly at last. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Her body was beginning to shiver. “I have to go now,” she said.

Against her neck she felt a convulsive movement of the muscles beneath his face.

M
arian was walking slowly down the aisle, keeping pace with the gentle music that swelled and rippled around her. “Beans,” she said. She found the kind marked “Vegetarian” and tossed two cans into her wire cart.

The music swung into a tinkly waltz; she proceeded down the aisle, trying to concentrate on her list. She resented the music because she knew why it was there: it was supposed to lull you into a euphoric trance, lower your sales resistance to the point at which all things are desirable. Every time she walked into the supermarket and heard the lilting sounds coming from the concealed loudspeakers she remembered an article she had read about cows who gave more milk when sweet music was played to them. But just because she knew what they were up to didn’t mean she was immune. These days, if she wasn’t careful, she found herself pushing the cart like a somnambulist, eyes fixed, swaying slightly, her hands twitching with the impulse to reach out and grab anything with a bright label. She had begun to defend herself with lists, which she printed in block letters before setting out, willing herself to buy nothing, however
deceptively priced or subliminally packaged, except what was written there. When she was feeling unusually susceptible she would tick the things off the list with a pencil as an additional counter-charm.

But in some ways they would always be successful: they couldn’t miss. You had to buy something sometime. She knew enough about it from the office to realize that the choice between, for instance, two brands of soap or two cans of tomato juice was not what could be called a rational one. In the products, the things themselves, there was no real difference. How did you choose then? You could only abandon yourself to the soothing music and make a random snatch. You let the thing in you that was supposed to respond to the labels just respond, whatever it was; maybe it had something to do with the pituitary gland. Which detergent had the best power symbol? Which tomato juice can had the sexiest-looking tomato on it, and did she care? Something in her must care; after all, she did choose eventually, doing precisely what some planner in a broadloomed office had hoped and predicted she would do. She had caught herself lately watching herself with an abstracted curiosity, to see what she would do.

“Noodles,” she said. She glanced up from her list just in time to avoid collision with a plump lady in frazzled muskrat. “Oh no, they’ve put another brand on the market.” She knew the noodle business: several of her afternoons had been spent in stores in the Italian section, counting the endless varieties and brands of pasta. She glared at the noodles, stacks of them, identical in their cellopaks, then shut her eyes, shot out her hand and closed her fingers on a package. Any package.

“Lettuce, radishes, carrots, onions, tomatoes, parsley,” she read from her list. Those would be easy: at least you could tell by looking at them, though some things came in bags or rubber-banded bunches arranged with some good and some bad in each, and the tomatoes, hothouse-pink and tasteless at this time of year, were
prepackaged in cardboard and cellophane boxes of four. She steered her cart towards the vegetable area, where a slickly finished rustic wooden sign hung on the wall: “The Market Garden.”

She picked listlessly through the vegetables. She used to be fond of a good salad but now she had to eat so many of them she was beginning to find them tiresome. She felt like a rabbit, crunching all the time on mounds of leafy greenery. How she longed to become again a carnivore, to gnaw on a good bone! Christmas dinner had been difficult. “Why Marian, you’re not eating!” her mother had fussed when she had left the turkey untouched on her plate. She had said she wasn’t hungry, and had eaten huge quantities of cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and mince pie when no one was looking. Her mother had set her strange loss of appetite down to overexcitement. She had thought of saying she had taken up a new religion that forbade her to eat meat, Yoga or Doukhobor or something, but it wouldn’t have been a good idea: they had been pathetically eager to have the wedding in the family church. Their reaction though, as far as she could estimate the reactions of people who were now so remote from her, was less elated glee than a quiet, rather smug satisfaction, as though their fears about the effects of her university education, never stated but always apparent, had been calmed at last. They had probably been worried she would turn into a high-school teacher or a maiden aunt or a dope addict or a female executive, or that she would undergo some shocking physical transformation, like developing muscles and a deep voice or growing moss. She could picture the anxious consultations over cups of tea. But now, their approving eyes said, she was turning out all right after all. They had not met Peter, but for them he seemed to be merely the necessary X-factor. They were curious though: they continued to urge her to bring him home for the weekend soon. As she had moved around the town during those two cold days, visiting relatives, answering questions, she could not convince herself she was actually back in it.