The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
This time something worse had happened. In the West, whoever had been in charge of selecting from the local phone books the names of the women who were to be hit by the first wave (who had been in charge out there? Mrs. Lietch in Foam River? Mrs. Hatcher in Watrous? No one could remember, and Emmy said they seemed to have misplaced the file) had not been overly meticulous. Instead of the expected flood of responses, only a mere trickle of filled-in questionnaires had been coming through the mail. Millie and Lucy were scrutinizing these now at the desk opposite Marian's, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
"Well, some of them obviously went out to men," Millie snorted. "Here's one with 'Tee Hee' written on it, from a Mr. Leslie Andrewes."
"What I can't understand is the ones that come back from women with NO checked in all the boxes. What on earth do they use then?" said Lucy peevishly.
"Well this lady's over eighty."
"Here's one who says she's been pregnant for seven years straight."
"Oh no, poor thing," gasped Emmy, who was listening. "Why she'll ruin her health."
"I bet that dumb cluck Mrs. Lietch - or Mrs. Hatcher, whoever it was - sent them to Indian reservations again. I specifically told her not to. The lord knows what they use," sniffed Lucy.
"Moss," Millie said decisively. This wasn't the first time something had gone wrong in the West. She counted once more through the stack of questionnaires. "We're going to have to start it all over again and the client will be furious. All our quotas are thrown off and I hate to think what'll happen to our deadlines."
Marian looked at the clock. It was almost time for lunch. She drew a row of moons across her page: crescent moons, full moons, then crescent moons pointing the other way, then nothing: a black moon. For good measure she drew a star inside one of the crescents. She set her watch, the one Peter had given her for her birthday, though it was only two minutes off by the office clock, and wound it. She typed another question. She was aware of being hungry, and wondered whether her hunger had been produced by her knowledge of the time. She got out of her chair, spun it round a couple of times to raise the height, sat down again and typed another question; she was tired, tired, tired of being a manipulator of words. At last, unable to remain sitting in her chair at her desk in front of her typewriter a moment longer, she said "Let's go have lunch now."
"Well ..." Millie hesitated, and looked at the clock. She was still semi-held by the illusion that there was something she could do about the mess.
"Yes, let's," said Lucy, "this is driving me bats, I've just got to get out of here." She walked towards the coat rack, and Emmy followed her. When Millie saw the others putting on their coats she reluctantly abandoned the questionnaires.
On the street the wind was cold. They turned their collars up, holding the fronts of their coats together near the neck with gloved hands, threading two by two among the other lunchtime scurriers, their heels clicking and grating on the bare sidewalk: it had not yet snowed. They had further to walk than usual. Lucy had suggested that they go to a more expensive restaurant than the ones they normally frequented, and in the state of heightened metabolism created by the sanitary-napkin turmoil they had agreed.
"OOoo," Emmy wailed as they leaned into the gritty wind. "In this dry weather I just don't know what I'll do. My skin's just all drying up and flaking away." When it rained she got terrible pains in her feet and when it was sunny she got eye-strain, headaches and freckles and dizzy spells. When the weather was neutral, grey and lukewarm, she got hot flashes and coughs.
"Cold cream's the best," Millie said. "My gran had dry skin too and that's what she used."
"But I've heard it gives you pimples," Emmy said dubiously.
The restaurant was one with old-world English pretensions and stuffed leather chairs and Tudor beams. After a short wait they were led to a table by a black-silk hostess; they settled themselves and slipped off their coats. Marian noticed that Lucy was wearing a new dress, a stately dark-mauve laminated jersey with a chaste silver pin at the neckline. So that's why she wanted to come here today, Marian thought.
Lucy's long-lashed gaze was brushing over the other lunchers - stolid breadfaced businessmen most of them, gobbling their food and swilling a few drinks to get the interruption of lunch over with as soon and as numbly as possible so they could get back to the office and make some money and get that over with as soon as possible and get back through the rush-hour traffic to their homes and wives and dinners and to get those over with as soon as possible too. Lucy had mauve eyeshadow to match her dress, and lipstick with a pale mauve tinge. She was, as always, elegant. She had been lunching out expensively more and more in the last two months (though Marian wondered how she could afford it), trailing herself like a many-plumed fish lure with glass beads and three spinners and seventeen hooks through the likely-looking places, good restaurants and cocktail bars with their lush weed beds of potted philodendrons, where the right kind of men might be expected to be lurking, ravenous as pike, though more maritally inclined. But those men, the right kind, weren't biting, or had left for other depths, or were snapping at a different sort of bait - some inconspicuous brown-plastic minnow or tarnished simple brass spoon, or something with even more feathers and hooks than Lucy could manage. And in this restaurant, and similar ones, it was in vain that Lucy displayed her delicious dresses and confectionery eyes to the tubfuls of pudgy guppies who had no time for mauve.
The waitress came. Millie ordered steak-and-kidney pie, a good substantial lunch. Emmy chose a salad with cottage cheese, to go with her three kinds of pills, the pink, the white, and the orange, which were lined up on the table beside her water glass. Lucy fussed and fretted and changed her mind several times and finally asked for an omelette. Marian was surprised at herself. She had been dying to go for lunch, she had been starving, and now she wasn't even hungry. She had a cheese sandwich.
"How's Peter?" Lucy asked after she had fiddled with her omelette and accused it of being leathery. She took an interest in Peter. He had got into the habit of phoning Marian at the office to tell her what he had done that day and what he was going to do that evening, and when Marian wasn't there he left messages with Lucy, who shared Marian's phone. Lucy thought him most polite, and found his voice intriguing.
Marian was watching Millie as she stowed away her steak-and-kidney pie, methodically, like putting things in a trunk. "There," she'd say, or ought to, when it was finished: "all stored neatly away." And her mouth would close like a lid.
"Just fine," Marian said. She and Peter had decided she shouldn't tell them at the office quite yet. She had been holding out therefore, day after day, but now the question caught her desire to announce off-guard, and she couldn't resist. They might as well know there's hope in the world yet, she rationalized. "I have something to tell you all," she said, "but it isn't to go any further just now." She waited until the three pairs of eyes had transferred their attention from the plates to her, then said, "We're engaged."
She smiled glowingly at them, watching the expression in their eyes change from expectation to dismay. Lucy dropped her fork and gasped, "No!" adding, "how wonderful!" Millie said, "Oh. Jolly good." Emmy hurriedly took another pill.
Then there were flurried questions, which Marian dealt with calmly, doling out the information like candies to small children: one at a time, and not too much: it might make them sick. The triumphant elation she had assumed would follow the announcement, for her at least, was only momentary. As soon as the surprise effect had worn off, the conversation became as remote and impersonal, on both sides, as the razor-blade questionnaires: enquiries about the wedding, the future apartment, the possible china and glassware, what would be bought and worn.
Lucy asked finally, "I always thought he was the confirmed bachelor type, that's what you said. How on earth did you ever catch him?"
Marian looked away from the suddenly pathetic too-eager faces poised to snatch at her answer, down at the knives and forks on the plates. "I honestly don'
Peter phoned almost as soon as they got back to the office. Lucy handed the phone to Marian with a whispered "It's the man!", a little awed by the presence of an actual prospective groom at the other end of the line. Marian felt through the air the tensing of three pairs of ear-muscles, the swivelling of three blonde heads, as she spoke into the phone.
Peter's voice was terse. "Hi honey how are you? Listen, I really can't make it tonight. A case came up suddenly, something big, and I've just got to do some work on it."
He sounded as though he was accusing her of trying to interfere with his work, and she resented this. She hadn't even been expecting to see him in mid-week like that until he'd called the day before and asked her to have dinner; since then she'd been looking forward to it. She said rather sharply, "That's all right, darling. But it would be nice if we could get these things straight before the last minute."
"I told you it came up suddenly," he said with irritation.
"Well you needn't bite my head off."
"I wasn't," he said, exasperated. "You know I'd much rather see you, of course, only you've got to understand...." The rest of the conversation was a tangle of retractions and conciliations. Well, we have to learn to compromise, Marian thought, and we might as well begin working at it now. She concluded, "Tomorrow then?"
"Look darling," he said, "I really don't know. It'll really all depend, you know how these things are, I'll let you know, okay?"
When Marian had said good-bye sweetly for the benefit of her audience and had put down the phone she felt exhausted. She must watch how she spoke to Peter, she would have to handle him more carefully, there was evidently a good deal of pressure on him at his office.... "I wonder if I'm getting anaemia?" she said to herself as she turned back to the typewriter.
After she had finished the razor-blade questionnaire and had begun to work on a different one, the instructions for a product test of a new dehydrated dog food, the phone rang again. It was Joe Bates. She had been half-expecting the call. She greeted Joe with false enthusiasm: she knew she had been shirking her responsibilities lately, avoiding the Bates' dinner-invitations even though Clara had been wanting to see her. The pregnancy had gone first one week, then two weeks longer than it was supposed to, and Clara had sounded over the phone as though she herself was being dragged slowly down into the gigantic pumpkin-like growth that was enveloping her body. "I can hardly stand up," she had groaned. But Marian had not been able to face another evening of contemplating Clara's belly and speculating with her on the mysterious behaviour of its contents. She had responded the last time only with cheerful but notably uncheering remarks intended to lighten the atmosphere, such as "Maybe it's got three heads," and "Maybe it isn't a baby at all but a kind of parasitic growth, like galls on trees, or elephantiasis of the navel, or a huge bunion...." After that evening she had rationalized that she would do Clara more harm by going to see her than by staying away. In a spurt of solicitude catalysed by guilt, though, she had made Joe promise as she was leaving to let her know as soon as anything happened, even offering heroically to babysit for the others if absolutely necessary; and now his voice was saying, "Well thank god it's all over. It's another girl, ten pounds seven ounces, and she only went into the hospital at two last night. We were afraid she was going to have it in the taxi."
"Well that's marvellous," Marian exclaimed, and added various inquiries and congratulations. She got the visiting hours and the room number from Joe and wrote them down on her telephonemessages pad. "Tell her I'll come down and see her tomorrow," she said. She was thinking that now Clara was deflating toward her normal size again she would be able to talk with her more freely: she would no longer feel as though she was addressing a swollen mass of flesh with a tiny pinhead, a shape that had made her think of a queen ant, bulging with the burden of an entire society, a semi-person - or sometimes, she thought, several people, a cluster of hidden personalities that she didn't know at all. She decided on impulse to buy her some roses: a welcoming-back gift for the real Clara, once more in uncontended possession of her own frail body.
She settled the phone in its black cradle and leaned back in her chair. The second-hand on the clock was sweeping around, accompanied by the ticking of typewriters and the click-clack of high-heeled shoes on the hard floor. She could feel time eddying and curling almost visibly around her feet, rising around her, lifting her body in the office chair and bearing her, slowly and circuitously but with the inevitability of water moving downhill, towards the distant, not-so-distant-any-more day they had agreed on - in late March? - that would end this phase and begin another. Somewhere else, arrangements were being gradually made; the relatives were beginning to organize their forces and energies, it was all being taken care of, there was nothing for her to do. She was floating, letting the current hold her up, trusting to it to take her where she was going. Now there was this day to get through: a landmark to be passed on the shore, a tree not much different from any of the others that could be distinguished from the rest only by being here rather than further back or further on, with no other purpose than to measure the distance travelled. She wanted to get it behind her. To help the propelling second hand she typed out the rest of the dog-food questionnaire.
Towards the end of the afternoon Mrs. Bogue sauntered out of her cubicle. The upwardly arranged lines on her brow expressed consternation, but her eyes were level as ever.
"Oh dear," she said to the office at large - it was part of her human-relations policy to let them in on minor managerial crises - "What a day. Not only that disturbance in the West, but there's been some trouble with that horrible Underwear Man again."
"Not that filthy man!" Lucy said, wrinkling her opalescently powdered nose in disgust.
"Yes," said Mrs. Bogue, "it's so upsetting." She wrung her hands together in feminine despair. She was evidently not at all upset. "He seems to have shifted his field of operations to the suburbs, to Etobicoke as a matter of fact. I've had two ladies from Etobicoke on the phone this afternoon complaining. Of course he's probably some nice ordinary man, perfectly harmless, but it's so nasty for the company's image."
"What does he do?" asked Marian. She had never heard about the Underwear Man before.
"Oh," said Lucy, "he's one of those dirty men who phone women and say filthy things to them. He was doing it last year too."
"The trouble is," Mrs. Bogue lamented, still clasping her hands in front of her, "he tells them he's from our company. Apparently he has a very convincing voice. Very official. He says he's doing a survey on underwear, and I guess the first questions he asks must sound genuine. Brands and types and sizes and things. Then he gets more and more personal until the ladies get annoyed and hang up. Of course then they phone the company to complain, and sometimes they've accused us of all sorts of indecent things before I can explain that he's not one of our interviewers and our company would never ask questions like that. I wish they'd catch him and ask him to stop, he's such a nuisance, but of course he's almost impossible to trace."
"I wonder why he does it?" Marian speculated.
"Oh, he's probably one of those sex fiends," Lucy said with a delicate mauve shiver.
Mrs. Bogue puckered her brow again and shook her head. "But they all say he sounds so nice. So normal and even intelligent. Not at all like those awful people who call you up and breathe at you."
"Maybe it all proves that some sex fiends are very nice normal people," Marian said to Lucy when Mrs. Bogue had gone back to her cubicle.
As she put on her coat and drifted out of the office and down the hall and let herself be floated down in the decompression chamber of the elevator, she was still thinking about the Underwear Man. She pictured his intelligent face, his polite, attentive manner, something like that of an insurance salesman, or an