The Edible Woman (15 page)

Then perhaps I’ll wash my hair. And my room needs a general clean-up. I should go through the dresser drawers and throw out whatever has accumulated in them, and there are some dresses hanging in the closet I don’t wear enough to keep. I’ll give them to the Salvation Army. Also a lot of costume jewellery, the kind you get from relatives at Christmas: imitation gold pins in the shapes of poodle dogs and bunches of flowers with pieces of cut glass for petals and eyes. There’s a cardboard box full of books, textbooks mostly, and letters from home I know I’ll never look at again, and a couple of ancient dolls I’ve kept for sentimental reasons. The older doll has a cloth body stuffed with sawdust (I know that because I once performed an operation on it with a pair of nail scissors) and hands, feet and head made of a hard woody material. The fingers and toes have been almost chewed off; the hair is black and short, a few frizzy wisps attached to a piece of netting which is coming unglued from the skull. The face is almost eroded but still has its open mouth with the red felt tongue inside and two china teeth, its chief fascination as I remember. It’s dressed in a strip of old sheet. I used to leave food in front of it overnight and was always disappointed when it wasn’t gone in the morning. The other doll is newer and has long washable hair and a rubbery skin. I asked for her one Christmas because you could give her baths. Neither of them is very attractive any longer; I might as well throw them out with the rest of the junk.

I still can’t quite fit in the man at the laundromat or account for my own behaviour. Maybe it was a kind of lapse, a blank in the ego,
like amnesia. But there’s little chance of my ever running into him again – I don’t even know his name – and anyway he has nothing at all to do with Peter.

After I finish cleaning my room I should write a letter home. They will all be pleased, this is surely what they’ve been waiting for. They’ll want us to come down for the weekend as soon as possible. I’ve never met Peter’s parents either.

In a minute I’ll get off the bed and walk through the pool of sunshine on the floor. I can’t let my whole afternoon dribble away, relaxing though it is to sit in this quiet room gazing up at the empty ceiling with my back against the cool wall, dangling my feet over the edge of the bed. It’s almost like being on a rubber raft, drifting, looking up into a clear sky.

I must get organized. I have a lot to do.

M
arian was sitting listlessly at her desk. She was doodling on the pad for telephone messages. She drew an arrow with many intricate feathers, then a cross-hatch of intersecting lines. She was supposed to be working on a questionnaire, something about stainless-steel razor blades; she had got as far as the question that directed the interviewer to ask the victim for the used razor blade currently in his razor and offer him a new one in exchange. This had stalled her. She was thinking now that it must be an elaborate plot: the president of the razor-blade company had possessed a miraculous razor blade which had been in his family for generations and which not only renewed its sharpness every time it was used but also granted the shaver anything he wished for after every thirteenth shave … the president, however, had not guarded his treasure carefully enough. One day he had forgotten to replace it in its velvet-lined case and had left it lying around in the bathroom, and one of the maids, trying to be useful, had … (the story was unclear at this point, but it was very complicated. The razor blade had somehow managed to make its way into a store, a second-hand store where it had been
bought by an unsuspecting customer and …). The president had that very day needed some money in a hurry. He had shaved frantically every three hours to make up the number 13, scraping his face raw; what was his surprise and dismay when.… So he had found out what had happened, commanded the offending maid to be tossed into a pit full of used razor blades, and had covered the city with a dragnet of middle-aged female private detectives posing as Seymour Surveys interviewers, their eagle-eyes trained to ferret out everyone, male or female, with the least trace of a beard, crying “New Razor Blades For Old,” in a desperate attempt to recover the priceless lost …

Marian sighed, drew a small spider in one corner of the maze of lines, and turned to her typewriter. She typed the section intact from the rough questionnaire – “We would like to examine the condition of your razor blade. Would you give me the razor blade that is
now
in your razor? Here is a new one in return for it,” – adding a “please” before the “give.” There was no way of rewording the question that would make it sound less eccentric, but at least it could be made more polite.

Around her the office was in a turmoil. It was always either in a turmoil or in a dead flat calm, and on the whole she preferred the turmoils. She could get away with doing less, everyone else was in such a state, skittering about and screeching, that they didn’t have time to lounge around and peer over her shoulder and wonder what was taking her so long or what exactly she was doing anyway. She used to feel a sense of participation in the turmoils themselves; once or twice she had even allowed herself to become frenzied in sympathy, and had been surprised at how much fun it was; but ever since she had become engaged and had known she wasn’t going to be there forever (they’d talked about it, Peter said of course she could keep working after the wedding if she wanted to, for a while at least, though she didn’t need to financially – he considered it unfair to marry, he said, if you couldn’t afford to support your wife, but she
had decided against it), she had been able to lean back and view them all with detachment. In fact, she found that she couldn’t become involved even when she wanted to. They had taken lately to complimenting her on her calmness in emergencies. “Well, thank goodness for Marian,” they’d say, as they soothed themselves with cups of tea and patted their overwrought foreheads with pieces of kleenex, breathing hard. “
She
never lets herself get out of control. Do you, dear?”

At the moment they were running around, she thought, like a herd of armadillos at the zoo. Armadillos recalled briefly to her mind the man in the laundromat, who had never reappeared, though she had been to the laundromat several times since and had always half-expected to see him there. But that wasn’t surprising, he was obviously unstable; he had probably vanished down some drain or other a long time ago.…

She watched Emmy as she darted to the filing cabinet and rummaged feverishly among the files. This time it was the coast-to-coast sanitary-napkin survey: something had gone embarrassingly wrong in the West. It was supposed to have been what they called a “three-wave” survey: the first wave surging out through the mails, locating and bringing back on its returning crest a shoal of eligible and willing answerers, and the second and third waves following up with interviews of greater depth, done in person. And, Marian hoped, behind closed doors. The whole business, especially some of the questions that were to be asked, had rather shocked her sense of fitness, though Lucy had pointed out over a coffee break that it was most proper these days, after all it was a respectable product, you could buy it in the supermarket and it had full-page advertisements in some of the best magazines, and wasn’t it nice they were getting it out in the open and not being so Victorian and repressed about it. Millie had said of course that was the enlightened view but these surveys were always a pain, not only did you have trouble with
people at the doors but you couldn’t get the interviewers to do them anyway, lots of them were quite old fashioned, especially the ones in small towns, some of them even resigned if you asked them to do it (that was the worst of using housewives, they didn’t really
need
the money, they were always getting bored with it or fed up or pregnant and resigning and then you had to get new ones and train them up from scratch), the best thing was to send them out a form letter telling them how they must all do their best to better the lot of Womankind – an attempt to appeal, Marian reflected, to the embryonic noble nurse that is supposed to be curled, efficient and self-sacrificing, in the heart of every true woman.

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.