The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
"No!" Duncan shouted back at her. "We're escaping! Come on!"
Under her arm a seam split. She had a vision of the red dress disintegrating in mid-air, falling in little scraps behind her in the snow, like feathers. They were off the sidewalk now, slithering down the road towards a fence; there was a yellow and black chequered sign that said "Danger." She was afraid they would go splintering through the wooden fence and hurtle over an unseen edge, in slow motion almost, like movies of automobiles falling off cliffs, but at the last minute Duncan swerved around the end of the fence and they were on a narrow cinder path between high banks. The footbridge at the bottom of the hill came rapidly towards them; he stopped suddenly and she skidded, colliding.
Her lungs hurt: she was dizzy from too much air. They were leaning against a cement wall, one of the sides of the bridge. Marian put her arms on the top and rested. Level with her eyes there were tree-tops, a maze of branches, the ends already pale yellow, pale red, knotted with buds.
"We aren't there yet," Duncan said. He tugged at her arm. "We go down." He led her to the end of the bridge. At one side was an unofficial path: the imprints of feet, a muddy track. They climbed down gingerly, their feet sideways like children learning to go down stairs, step by step. Water was dripping on them from the icicles on the underside of the bridge.
When they had reached the bottom and were standing on level ground Marian asked, "Are we here yet?"
"Not yet," said Duncan. He began to walk away from the bridge. Marian hoped they were going to a place where they could sit down.
They were in one of the ravines that fissured the city, but which one she didn't know. She had gone for walks close to the one that was visible from their living-room window, but nothing she saw around her was familiar. The ravine was narrow here and deep, closed in by trees which looked as though they were pinning the covering of snow to the steep sides. Far above, towards the rim, some children were playing. Marian could see their bright jackets, red and blue, and hear their faint laughter.
They were going single file along a track in the crusted snow. Some other people had walked there, but not many. At intervals she noticed what she thought were the marks of horses' hooves. All she could see of Duncan was his slouched back and his feet lifting and setting down.
She wished he would turn around so she could see his face; his expressionless coat made her uneasy.
"We'll sit down in a minute," he said as if in answer.
She didn't see any place they might possibly sit. They were walking now through a field of tall weedstalks whose stiff dried branches scraped against them as they passed: goldenrod, teazles, burdocks, the skeletons of anonymous grey plants. The burdocks had clusters of brown burrs and the teazles their weathered-silver spiked heads but otherwise nothing interrupted the thin branching and re-branching monotony of the field. Beyond it on either side rose the walls of the ravine. Along the top now were houses, a line of them perched on the edge, careless of the erosion gullies that scarred the ravine-face at irregular intervals. The creek had disappeared into an underground culvert.
Marian looked behind her. The ravine had made a curve; she had walked around it without noticing; ahead of them was another bridge, a larger one. They kept walking.
"I like it down here in winter," Duncan's voice said after a while. "Before I've only been down here in summer. Everything grows, it's so thick with green leaves and stuff you can't see three feet in front of you, some of it's poison ivy. And it's populated. The old drunks come down here and sleep under the bridges and the kids play here too. There's a riding stable down here somewhere, I think what we're on is one of the bridle paths. I used to come down because it was cooler. But it's better covered with snow. It hides the junk. They're beginning to fill this place up with junk too, you know, beginning with the creek, I wonder why they like throwing things around all over the landscape ... old tires, tin cans...." The voice came from a mouth she couldn't see, as though from nowhere; it was foreshortened, blunted, as if it was being blotted up, absorbed by the snow.
The ravine had widened out around them and in this place there were fewer weeds. Duncan turned off the path, breaking the crusted snow; she followed him. They plodded up the side of a small hill.
"Here we are," Duncan said. He stopped and turned, and reached a hand to draw her up beside him.
Marian gasped and took an involuntary step back: they were standing on the very edge of a cliff. The ground ended abruptly beyond their feet. Below them was a huge roughly circular pit, with a spiral path or roadway cut round and around the sides, leading to the level snow-covered space at the bottom. Directly across from where they were standing, separated from them by perhaps a quarter of a mile of empty space, was a long shed-like black building. Everything seemed closed, deserted.
"What is it?" she asked.
"It's only the brickworks," Duncan said. "That's pure clay down there. They go down that road with steam shovels and dig it out."
"I didn't know there was anything like that in the ravines," she said. It seemed wrong to have this cavity in the city: the ravine itself was supposed to be as far down as you could go. It made her suspect the white pit bottom also; it didn't look solid, it looked possibly hollow, dangerous, a thin layer of ice, as though if you walked on it you might fall through.
"Oh, they have lots of good things. There's a prison down here somewhere, too."
Duncan sat down on the edge, dangling his legs nonchalantly, and took out a cigarette. After a moment she sat down beside him, although she didn't trust the earth. It was the kind of thing that caved in. They both gazed down into the gigantic hole scooped into the ground.
"I wonder what time it is," Marian said. She listened as she spoke: the open space had swallowed up her voice.
Duncan didn't answer. He finished his cigarette in silence; then he stood up, walked a short way along the brink till he came to a flat area where there were no weeds, and lay down in the snow. He was so peaceful, stretched out there looking up at the sky, that Marian walked over to join him where he was lying.
"You'll get cold," he said, "but go ahead if you want to."
She lay down at arm's length from him. It did not seem right, here, to be too close. Above, the sky was a uniform light grey, made diffusely bright by a sun concealed somewhere behind it.
Duncan spoke into the silence. "So why can't you go back? I mean, you are getting married and so on. I thought you were the capable type."
"I am," she said unhappily. "I was. I don't know." She didn't want to discuss it.
"Some would say of course that it's all in your mind."
"I know that," she said, impatient: she wasn't a total idiot yet. "But how do I get it out?"
"It ought to be obvious," Duncan's voice said, "that I'm the last person to ask. They tell me I live in a world of fantasies. But at least mine are more or less my own, I choose them and I sort of like them, some of the time. But you don't seem too happy with yours."
"Maybe I should see a psychiatrist," she said gloomily.
"Oh no, don't do that. They'd only want to adjust you."
"But I want to be adjusted, that's just it. I don't see any point in being unstable." It occurred to her also that she didn't see any point in starving to death. What she really wanted, she realized, had been reduced to simple safety. She thought she had been heading towards it all these months but actually she hadn't been getting anywhere. And she hadn't accomplished anything. At the moment her only solid achievement seemed to be Duncan. That was something she could hang on to.
Suddenly she needed to make sure he was still there, hadn't vanished or sunk down beneath the white surface. She wanted verification.
"How was it for you last night?" she asked. He had not yet said anything about it.
"How was what? Oh. That." He was silent for several minutes. She listened intently, waiting for his voice as though for an oracle. But when he spoke at last he said, "I like this place. Especially now in winter, it's so close to abs
Marian was puzzled. What did this have to do with it?
"You want me to say it was stupendous, don't you?" he asked. "That it got me out of my shell. Hatched me into manhood. Solved all my problems."
"Well ..."
"Sure you do, and I could always tell you would. I like people participating in my fantasy life and I'm usually willing to participate in theirs, up to a point. It was fine; just as good as usual."
The implication sank in smoothly as a knife through butter. She wasn't the first then. The starched nurse-like image of herself she had tried to preserve as a last resort crumpled like wet newsprint; the rest of her couldn't even work up the energy to be angry. She had been so thoroughly taken in. She should have known. But after she had thought about it for a few minutes, gazing up at the blank sky, it didn't make that much difference. There was the possibility also that this revelation was just as fraudulent as so much else had been.
She sat up, brushing the snow from her sleeves. It was time for action. "All right, that was your joke," she said. She would let him wonder whether or not she believed him. "Now I've got to decide what I'm going to do."
He grinned at her. "Don't ask me, that's your problem. It does look as though you ought to do something: self-laceration in a vacuum eventually gets rather boring. But it's your own personal cul-de-sac, you invented it, you'll have to think of your own way out." He stood up.
Marian stood up too. She had been calm but now she could feel desperation returning in her, seeping through her flesh like the effects of a drug. "Duncan," she said, "could you maybe come back with me and talk to Peter? I don't think I can do it, I don't know what to say, he's not going to understand...."
"Oh no," he said, "you can't do that. I'm not part of that. It would be disastrous, don't you see? I mean for me." He wrapped his arms around his torso and held on to his own elbows.
"Please," she said. She knew he would refuse.
"No," he said, "it wouldn't be right." He turned and looked down at the two imprints their bodies had made in the snow. Then he stepped on them, first on his own and then on hers, smearing the snow with his foot. "Come here," he said, "I'll show you how to get back." He led her further along. They came to a road which rose and then dipped. Below was a giant expressway, sloping up, and in the distance another bridge, a familiar bridge with subway cars moving on it. Now she knew where she was.
"Aren't you coming with me even that far?" she asked.
"No. I'm going to stay here for a while. But you have to go now." The tone of his voice closed her out. He turned and started to walk away.
The cars rocketed past. She looked back once when she had trudged halfway up the hillside towards the bridge. She almost expected him to have evaporated into the white expanse of the ravine, but he was still there, a dark shape against the snow, crouched on the edge and gazing into the empty pit.
30
Marian had just got home and was struggling with her wrinkled dress, trying to get the zipper undone, when the phone rang. She knew who it would be.
"Hello?" she said.
Peter's voice was icy with anger. "Marian, where the hell have you been? I've been phoning everywhere." He sounded hungover.
"Oh," she said with airy casualness, "I've been somewhere else. Sort of out."
He lost control, "Why the hell did you leave the party? You really disrupted the evening for me. I was looking for you to get you in the group picture and you were gone, of course I couldn't make a big production of it with all those people there but after they'd gone home I looked all over for you, your friend Lucy and I got in the car and drove up and down the streets and we called your place half a dozen times, we were both so worried. Damn nice of her to take the trouble, it's nice to know there are some considerate women left around...."
I'll bet it is, Marian thought with a momentary twinge of jealousy, remembering Lucy's silver eyelids; but out loud she said, "Peter, please don't get upset. I just stepped outside for a breath of fresh air and something else came up, that's all. There is absolutely nothing to get upset about. There have been no catastrophes."
"What do you mean, upset!" he said. "You shouldn't go wandering around the streets at night, you might get raped, if you're going to do these things and god knows it isn't the first time why the hell can't you think of other people once in a while? You could at least have told me where you were, your parents called me long distance, they're frantic because you weren't on the bus and what was I supposed to tell them?"
Oh yes, she thought; she had forgotten about that. "Well, I'm perfectly all right," she said.
"But where were you? When we'd discovered you'd left and I started quietly asking people if they'd seen you I must say I got a pretty funny story from that prince-charming friend of yours, Trevor or whatever the hell his name is. Who's this guy he was telling me about anyway?"
"Please, Peter," she said, "I just hate talking about things like this over the phone." She had a sudden desire to tell him the whole story, but what good would that do since nothing had been proved or accomplished? Instead she said, "What time is it?"
"Two-thirty," he said, his voice surprised into neutrality by this appeal to simple fact.
"Well, why don't you come over a bit later? Maybe about five-thirty. For tea. And then we can talk it all over." She made her voice sweet, conciliatory. She was conscious of her own craftiness. Though she hadn't made any decisions she could feel she was about to make one and she needed time.
"Well, all right," he said peevishly, "but it better be good." They hung up together.
Marian went into the bedroom and took off her clothes; then she went downstairs and took a quick bath. The lower regions were silent; the lady down below was probably brooding in her dark den or praying for the swift destruction of Ainsley by heavenly thunderbolts. In a spirit approaching gay rebellion Marian neglected to erase her bathtub ring.
What she needed was something that avoided words, she didn't want to get tangled up in a discussion. Some way she could know what was real: a test, simple and direct as litmus paper. She finished dressing - a plain grey wool would be appropriate - and put on her coat, then located her everyday purse and counted the money. She went out to the kitchen and sat down at the table to make herself a list, but threw down the pencil after she had written several words. She knew what she needed to get.
In the supermarket she went methodically up and down the aisles, relentlessly out-manoeuvring the muskrat-furred ladies, edging the Saturday children to the curb, picking the things off the shelves. Her image was taking shape. Eggs. Flour. Lemons for the flavour. Sugar, icing sugar, vanilla, salt, food colouring. She wanted everything new, she didn't want to use anything that was already in the house. Chocolate - no, cocoa, that would be better. A glass tube full of round silver decorations. Three nesting plastic bowls, teaspoons, aluminium cake decorator and a cake tin. Lucky, she thought, they sell almost everything in supermarkets these days. She started back towards the apartment, carrying her paper bag.
Sponge or angel-food? she wondered. She decided on sponge. It was more fitting.
She turned on the oven. That was one part of the kitchen that had not been over-run by the creeping skin-disease-covering of dirt, mostly because they hadn't been using it much recently. She tied on an apron and rinsed the new bowls and the other new utensils under the tap, but did not disturb any of the dirty dishes. Later for them. Right now she didn't have time. She dried the things and began to crack and separate the eggs, hardly thinking, concentrating all her attention on the movements of her hands, and then when she was beating and sifting and folding, on the relative times and the textures. Sponge cake needed a light hand. She poured the batter into the tin and drew a fork sideways through it to break the large air bubbl
While the cake was in the oven baking she re-washed the bowls and mixed the icing. An ordinary butter icing, that would be the best. Then she divided the icing into three parts in the three bowls. The largest portion she left white, the next one she tinted a bright pink, almost red, with the red food colouring she had bought, and the last one she made dark brown by stirring cocoa into it.
What am I going to put her on? she thought when she had finished. I'll have to wash a dish. She unearthed a long platter from the very bottom of the stack of plates in the sink and scoured it thoroughly under the tap. It took quite a lot of detergent to get the scum off.
She tested the cake; it was done. She took it out of the oven and turned it upside down to cool.
She was glad Ainsley wasn't home: she didn't want any interference with what she was going to do. In fact it didn't look as though Ainsley had been home at all. There was no sign of her green dress. In her room a suitcase was lying open on the bed where she must have left it the night before. Some of the surface flotsam was eddying into it, as though drawn by a vortex. Marian wondered in passing how Ainsley was ever going to cram the random contents of the room into anything as limited and rectilineal as a set of suitcases.
While the cake was cooling she went into the bedroom and tidied her hair, pulling it back and pinning it to get rid of the remains of the hairdresser's convolutions. She felt lighthearted, almost dizzy: it must be the lack of sleep and the lack of food. She grinned into the mirror, showing her teeth.
The cake wasn't cooling quickly enough. She refused to put it into the refrigerator though. It would pick up the smells. She took it out of the tin and set it on the clean platter, opened the kitchen window, and stuck it out on the snowy sill. She knew what happened to cakes that were iced warm - everything melted.
She wondered what time it was. Her watch was still on the top of the dresser where she had left it the day before but it had run down. She didn't want to turn on Ainsley's transistor, that would be too distracting. She was getting jittery already. There used to be a number you could phone ... but anyway she would have to hurry.