The Edible Woman (25 page)

“Kleenex,” she said. She glanced with distaste at the different brands and colours offered – what difference did it make what you blew your nose on? – and at the fancy printed toilet paper – flowers and scrolls and polka dots. Pretty soon they would have it in gold, as though they wanted to pretend it was used for something quite different, like wrapping Christmas presents. There really wasn’t a single human unpleasantness left that they had not managed to turn to their uses. What on earth was wrong with plain white? At least it looked clean.

Her mother and her aunts of course had been interested in the wedding dress and the invitations and things like that. At the moment, listening to the electric violins and hesitating between two flavours of canned rice pudding – she had no reservations about eating that, it tasted so synthetic – she couldn’t remember what they had all decided.

She looked at her watch: she didn’t have much time. Luckily they were playing a tango. She wheeled rapidly towards the canned soup section, trying to shake the glaze out of her eyes. It was dangerous to stay in the supermarket too long. One of these days it would get her. She would be trapped past closing time, and they would find her in the morning propped against one of the shelves in an unbreakable coma, surrounded by all the pushcarts in the place heaped to overflowing with merchandise.…

She steered towards the checkout counters. They were having another of their sales-promoting special programmes, some sort of contest that would send the winner on a three-day trip to Hawaii. There was a big poster over the front window, a semi-nude girl in a grass skirt and flowers, and beside it a small sign:
PINEAPPLES
, Three Cans 65¢. The cashier behind the counter had a paper garland around her neck; her orange mouth was chewing gum. Marian watched the mouth, the hypnotic movements of the jaws, the bumpy flesh of the cheeks with their surface of dark-pink makeup,
the scaling lips through which glinted several rodent-yellow teeth working as with a life of their own. The cash register totalled her groceries.

The orange mouth opened. “Five twenty-nine,” it said. “Just write your name and address on the receipt.”

“No thanks,” Marian said, “I don’t want to go.”

The girl shrugged her shoulders and turned away. “Excuse me, you forgot to give me my stamps,” Marian said.

That was another thing, she thought as she hoisted the grocery bag and went through the electric-eye door into the slushy grey twilight. For a while she had refused them: it was another hidden way for them to make money. But they still made the money anyway, more of it; so she had begun accepting them and hiding them in kitchen drawers. Now, however, Ainsley was saving for a baby carrier, so she made a point of getting them. It was the least she could do for Ainsley. The flowery cardboard Hawaiian smiled at her as she trudged off towards the subway station.

Flowers. They had all wanted to know what kind of flowers she was going to carry. Marian herself was in favour of lilies; Lucy had suggested a cascade of pink tea roses and baby’s breath. Ainsley had been scornful. “Well, I suppose you have to have a traditional wedding, since it’s Peter,” she had said. “But people are so hypocritical about flowers at weddings. Nobody wants to admit they’re really fertility symbols. What about a giant sunflower or a sheaf of wheat? Or a cascade of mushrooms and cactuses, that would be quite genital, don’t you think?” Peter didn’t want to be involved in such decisions. “I’ll leave all that sort of thing up to you,” he would say with fondness when questioned seriously.

Lately she had been seeing more and more of Peter, but less and less of Peter alone. Now that she had been ringed he took pride in displaying her. He said he wanted her to really get to know some of his friends, and he had been taking her around with him to cocktail
parties with the more official ones and to dinners and evening get-togethers with the intimates. She had even been to lunch with some lawyers, during which she had sat the whole time silent and smiling. The friends collectively were all well dressed and on the verge of being successful, and they all had wives who were also well dressed and on the verge of being successful. They were all anxious; they were all polite to her. Marian found it difficult to connect these sleek men with the happy hunters and champion beer drinkers that lived in Peter’s memories of the past, but some of them were the same people. Ainsley referred to them as “the soap men,” because once when Peter had come to pick Marian up he brought with him a friend who worked for a soap company. Marian’s greatest apprehension about them was that she would get their names mixed up.

She wanted to be nice to them for Peter’s sake; however, she had been feeling somewhat bombarded with them, and she had decided it was time for Peter to start really getting to know some of
her
friends. This was why she had asked Clara and Joe to dinner. She had been guilty of neglecting them anyway; though it was curious, she thought, how married people always assumed they were being neglected when you didn’t phone them, even when they themselves had been too dug under to even think of phoning you. Peter had been recalcitrant; he had seen the inside of Clara’s living room once.

As soon as she had issued the invitations she realized that the menu would be a major problem. She couldn’t feed them milk and peanut butter and vitamin pills, or a salad with cottage cheese, she couldn’t have fish because Peter didn’t like it, but she couldn’t serve meat either – because what would they all think when they saw her not eating any of it? She couldn’t possibly explain; if she didn’t understand it herself, how could she expect them to? In the past month the few forms that had been available to her had excluded themselves from her diet: hamburger after a funny story of Peter’s about a friend of his who had got some analysed just for a joke and
had discovered it contained ground-up mouse hairs; pork because Emmy during a coffee break had entertained them with an account of trichinosis and a lady she knew who got it – she mentioned the name with almost religious awe (“She ate it too pink in a restaurant, I’d never dare eat anything like that in a restaurant, just
think
, all those little things curled up in her muscles and they can’t ever get them out”); and mutton and lamb because Duncan had told her the etymology of the word “giddy”: it came, he said, from “gid,” which was a loss of equilibrium in sheep caused by large white worms in their brains. Even hot dogs had been ruled out; after all, her stomach reasoned, they could mash up any old thing and stick it in there. In restaurants she could always hedge by ordering a salad, but that would never do for guests, not for dinner. And she couldn’t serve them Vegetarian Baked Beans.

She had fallen back on a casserole, a mushroom-and-meatballs affair of her mother’s which would disguise things effectively. “I’ll turn off the lights and have candles,” she thought, “and get them drunk on sherry first so they won’t notice.” She could dish herself a very small helping, eat the mushrooms, and roll the meatballs under one of the lettuce leaves from the accompanying salad. It wasn’t an elegant solution but it was the best she could do.

Now, hurriedly slicing up the radishes for the salad, she was grateful for several things: that she had made the casserole the night before so all she had to do was stick it in the oven; that Clara and Joe were coming late, after they had put the children to bed; and that she could still eat salad. She was becoming more and more irritated by her body’s decision to reject certain foods. She had tried to reason with it, had accused it of having frivolous whims, had coaxed it and tempted it, but it was adamant; and if she used force it rebelled. One incident like that in a restaurant had been enough. Peter had been terribly nice about it, of course; he’d driven her straight home and helped her up the stairs as though she was an invalid and insisted she
must have the stomach flu; but also he had been embarrassed and (understandably) annoyed. From then on she had resolved to humour it. She had done everything it wanted, and had even bought it some vitamin pills to keep its proteins and minerals balanced. There was no sense in getting malnutrition. “The thing to do,” she had told herself, “is to keep calm.” At times when she had meditated on the question she had concluded that the stand it had taken was an ethical one: it simply refused to eat anything that had once been, or (like oysters on the half-shell) might still be living. But she faced each day with the forlorn hope that her body might change its mind.

She rubbed the wooden bowl with a half-clove of garlic and threw in the onion rings and the sliced radishes and the tomatoes, and tore up the lettuce. At the last minute she thought of adding a grated carrot to give it more colour. She took one from the refrigerator, located the peeler finally in the bread-box, and began to peel off the skin, holding the carrot by its leafy top.

She was watching her own hands and the peeler and the curl of crisp orange skin. She became aware of the carrot. It’s a root, she thought, it grows in the ground and sends up leaves. Then they come along and dig it up, maybe it even makes a sound, a scream too low for us to hear, but it doesn’t die right away, it keeps on living, right now it’s still alive.…

She thought she felt it twist in her hands. She dropped it on the table. “Oh no,” she said, almost crying. “Not this too!”

When they had finally gone, even Peter, who had kissed her on the cheek and said jokingly, “Darling, we’re never going to be like
that
,” Marian went out to the kitchen and scraped the plates into the garbage pail and stacked them in the sink. The dinner had not been a good idea. Clara and Joe hadn’t been able to get a babysitter so they had brought the children, lugging them up the stairs and putting them to bed, two in Marian’s room and one in Ainsley’s. The
children had wept and excreted, and the fact that the bathroom was down a flight of stairs didn’t help. Clara carted them out to the living room to reassure them and change them; she had no qualms. Conversation had ceased. Marian hovered about, handing diaper pins and pretending to be helpful, but secretly wondering whether it would be bad taste to go down and get one of the many odour-killing devices from the lady down below’s bathroom. Joe bustled about, whistling and bringing fresh supplies; Clara made apologetic remarks in Peter’s direction. “Small children are like this, it’s only shit. Perfectly natural, we all do it. Only,” she said, joggling the youngest on her knee, “some of us have a sense of timing. Don’t we, you little turd?”

Peter had pointedly opened a window; the room became ice cold. Marian served the sherry, despairingly. Peter was not getting the right impression, but she didn’t know what could be done. She found herself wishing that Clara had a few more inhibitions. Clara didn’t deny that her children stank, but neither did she take any pains to conceal it. She admitted it, she almost affirmed it; it was as though she wanted it to be appreciated.

When the children had been swathed and pacified and arranged, two on the chesterfield and one in its carrier on the floor, they sat down to dinner. Now, Marian hoped, they will all have a conversation. She was concentrating on how to conceal her meatballs and didn’t want the position of referee: she just couldn’t think up any bright topical remarks. “Clara tells me you’re a philatelist,” she had ventured, but for some reason Joe didn’t hear her; at least he didn’t answer. Peter gave her a quick inquisitive look. She sat fidgeting with a piece of roll, feeling as though she had made an indecent joke and nobody had laughed.

Peter and Joe had started talking about the international situation, but Peter had tactfully changed the subject when it became obvious they would disagree. He said he had once had to take a philosophy
course at university and had never been able to understand Plato; perhaps Joe could explain? Joe said he thought not, as he himself specialized in Kant, and asked Peter a technical question about inheritance taxes. He and Clara, he added, belonged to a co-operative burial society.

“I didn’t know that,” Marian said in an undertone to Clara as she dished herself a second helping of noodles. She felt as though her plate was exposed, all eyes fixed upon it, the hidden meatballs showing up from beneath the lettuce leaves like bones in an X-ray; she wished she had used one candle instead of two.

“Oh yes,” said Clara briskly, “Joe doesn’t believe in embalming.”

Marian was afraid Peter might find this a little too radical. The trouble was, she sighed inwardly, that Joe was idealistic and Peter was pragmatic. You could tell by their ties: Peter’s was paisley and dark green, elegant, functional; while Joe’s was – well, it wasn’t exactly a tie any more; it was the abstract idea of a tie. They themselves must have realized the difference: she caught them separately eyeing each others’ ties, each probably thinking he would never wear a tie like that.

She began putting the glasses into the sink. It bothered her that things hadn’t gone well; it made her feel responsible, like being It in a game of tag at recess. “Oh well,” she remembered, “he got on with Len.” It didn’t really matter anyway: Clara and Joe were from her past, and Peter shouldn’t be expected to adjust to her past; it was the future that mattered. She shivered slightly; the house was still chilly from when Peter had opened the window. She would smell maroon velvet and furniture polish, behind her there would be rustlings and coughings, then she would turn and there would be a crowd of watching faces, they would move forward and step through a doorway and there would be a flurry of white, the bits of paper blowing against their faces and settling on their hair and shoulders like snow.

She took a vitamin pill and opened the refrigerator door to get herself a glass of milk. Either she or Ainsley should really do something about the refrigerator. In the past couple of weeks their interdependent cleaning cycle had begun to break down. She had tidied up the living room for this evening, but she knew she was going to leave the dishes unwashed in the sink, which meant Ainsley would leave hers, and they would go on like that until they had used up all the dishes. Then they would start washing the top plate when they needed one and the others would sit there undisturbed. And the refrigerator: not only did it need defrosting, but its shelves were getting cluttered up with odds and ends, scraps of food in little jars, things in tinfoil and brown-paper bags.… Soon it would begin to smell. She hoped that whatever was going on in there wouldn’t spread too quickly to the rest of the house, at least not down the stairs. Maybe she would be married before it became epidemic.