The Edible Woman (3 page)

What, then, could I expect to turn into at Seymour Surveys? I couldn’t become one of the men upstairs; I couldn’t become a machine person or one of the questionnaire-marking ladies, as that would be a step down. I might conceivably turn into Mrs. Bogue or her assistant, but as far as I could see that would take a long time, and I wasn’t sure I would like it anyway.

I was just finishing the scouring-pad questionnaire, a rush job, when Mrs. Grot of Accounting came through the door. Her business was with Mrs. Bogue, but on her way out she stopped at my
desk. She’s a short tight woman with hair the colour of a metal refrigerator-tray.

“Well, Miss MacAlpin,” she grated, “you’ve been with us four months now, and that means you’re eligible for the Pension Plan.”

“Pension Plan?” I had been told about the Pension Plan when I joined the company but I had forgotten about it. “Isn’t it too soon for me to join the Pension Plan? I mean – don’t you think I’m too young?”

“Well, it’s just as well to start early, isn’t it,” Mrs. Grot said. Her eyes behind their rimless spectacles were glittering: she would relish the chance of making yet another deduction from my paycheque.

“I don’t think I’d like to join the Pension Plan,” I said. “Thank you anyway.”

“Yes, well, but it’s obligatory, you see,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice.

“Obligatory? You mean even if I don’t want it?”

“Yes, you see if nobody paid into it, nobody would be able to get anything out of it, would they? Now I’ve brought the necessary documents; all you have to do is sign here.”

I signed, but after Mrs. Grot had left I was suddenly quite depressed; it bothered me more than it should have. It wasn’t only the feeling of being subject to rules I had no interest in and no part in making: you get adjusted to that at school. It was a kind of superstitious panic about the fact that I had actually signed my name, had put my signature to a magic document which seemed to bind me to a future so far ahead I couldn’t think about it. Somewhere in front of me a self was waiting, pre-formed, a self who had worked during innumerable years for Seymour Surveys and was now receiving her reward. A pension. I foresaw a bleak room with a plug-in electric heater. Perhaps I would have a hearing aid, like one of my great-aunts who had never married. I would talk to myself; children would
throw snowballs at me. I told myself not to be silly, the world would probably blow up between now and then; I reminded myself I could walk out of there the next day and get a different job if I wanted to, but that didn’t help. I thought of my signature going into a file and the file going into a cabinet and the cabinet being shut away in a vault somewhere and locked.

I welcomed the coffee break at ten-thirty. I knew I ought to have skipped it and stayed to expiate my morning’s lateness, but I needed the distraction.

I go for coffee with the only three people in the department who are almost my own age. Sometimes Ainsley walks over from her office to join us, when she is tired of the other toothbrush-testers. Not that she’s especially fond of the three from my office, whom she calls collectively the office virgins. They aren’t really very much alike, except that they are all artificial blondes – Emmy, the typist, whisk-tinted and straggly; Lucy, who has a kind of public-relations job, platinum and elegantly coiffured, and Millie, Mrs. Bogue’s Australian assistant, brassy from the sun and cropped – and, as they have confessed at various times over coffee grounds and the gnawed crusts of toasted Danishes, all virgins – Millie from a solid girl-guide practicality (“I think in the long run it’s better to wait until you’re married, don’t you? Less bother.”), Lucy from social quailing (“What would people
say
?”), which seems to be rooted in a conviction that all bedrooms are wired for sound, with society gathered at the other end tuning its earphones; and Emmy, who is the office hypochondriac, from the belief that it would make her sick, which it probably would. They are all interested in travelling: Millie has lived in England, Lucy has been twice to New York, and Emmy wants to go to Florida. After they have travelled enough they would like to get married and settle down.

“Did you hear the laxative survey in Quebec has been cancelled?” Millie said when we were seated at our usual table at the wretched,
but closest, restaurant across the street. “Great big job it was going to be, too – a product test in their own home and thirty-two pages of questions.” Millie always gets the news first.

“Well I must say that’s a good thing,” Emmy sniffed. “I don’t see how they could ask anybody thirty-two pages about
that
.” She went back to peeling the nail polish off her thumbnail. Emmy always looks as though she is coming unravelled. Stray threads trail from her hems, her lipstick sloughs off in dry scales, she sheds wispy blonde hairs and flakes of scalp on her shoulders and back; everywhere she goes she leaves a trail of assorted shreds.

I saw Ainsley come in and waved to her. She squeezed into the booth, saying “Hi” all round, then pinned up a strand of hair that had come down. The office virgins responded, but without marked enthusiasm.

“They’ve done it before,” Millie said. She’s been at the company longer than any of us. “And it works. They figure anybody you could take past page three would be a sort of laxative addict, if you see what I mean, and they’d go right on through.”

“Done what before?” said Ainsley.

“What do you want to bet she doesn’t wipe the table?” Lucy said, loudly enough so the waitress would overhear. She carries on a running battle with the waitress, who wears Woolworth earrings and a sullen scowl and is blatantly not an office virgin.

“The laxative study in Quebec,” I said privately to Ainsley.

The waitress arrived, wiped the table savagely, and took our orders. Lucy made an issue of the toasted Danish – she definitely wanted one without raisins this time. “Last time she brought me one
with
raisins,” she informed us, “and I told her I just couldn’t stand them. I’ve never been able to stand raisins. Ugh.”

“Why only Quebec?” Ainsley said, breathing smoke out through her nostrils. “Is there some psychological reason?” Ainsley majored in psychology at college.

“Gosh, I don’t know,” said Millie, “I guess people are just more constipated there. Don’t they eat a lot of potatoes?”

“Would potatoes make you
that
constipated?” asked Emmy, leaning forward across the table. She pushed several straws of hair back from her forehead and a cloud of tiny motes detached themselves from her and settled gently down through the air.

“It can’t be only the potatoes,” Ainsley pronounced. “It must be their collective guilt complex. Or maybe the strain of the language problem; they must be horribly repressed.”

The others looked at her with hostility: I could tell they thought she was showing off. “It’s awfully hot out today,” said Millie, “the office is like a furnace.”

“Anything happening at your office?” I asked Ainsley, to break the tension.

Ainsley ground out her cigarette. “Oh yes, we’ve had quite a bit of excitement,” she said. “Some woman tried to bump off her husband by short-circuiting his electric toothbrush, and one of our boys has to be at the trial as a witness; testify that the thing couldn’t possibly short-circuit under normal circumstances. He wants me to go along as a sort of special assistant, but he’s such a bore. I can tell he’d be rotten in bed.”

I suspected Ainsley of making this story up, but her eyes were at their bluest and roundest. The office virgins squirmed. Ainsley has an offhand way of alluding to the various men in her life that makes them uncomfortable.

Luckily our orders arrived. “That bitch brought me one
with
raisins again,” Lucy wailed, and began picking them out with her long perfectly shaped iridescent fingernails and piling them at the side of her plate.

As we were walking back to the office I complained to Millie about the Pension Plan. “I didn’t realize it was obligatory,” I said. “I
don’t see why I should have to pay into their Pension Plan and have all those old crones like Mrs. Grot retire and feed off my salary.”

“Oh yes, it bothered me too at first,” Millie said without interest. “You’ll get over it. Gosh, I hope they’ve fixed the air conditioning.”

I
had returned from lunch and was licking and stamping envelopes for the coast-to-coast instant-pudding-sauce study, behind schedule because someone in mimeo had run one of the question sheets backwards, when Mrs. Bogue came out of her cubicle.

“Marian,” she said with a sigh of resignation, “I’m afraid Mrs. Dodge in Kamloops will have to be removed. She’s pregnant.” Mrs. Bogue frowned slightly: she regards pregnancy as an act of disloyalty to the company.

“That’s too bad,” I said. The huge wall map of the country, sprinkled with red thumbtacks like measles, is directly above my desk, which means that the subtraction and addition of interviewers seems to have become part of my job. I climbed up on the desk, located Kamloops, and took out the thumbtack with the paper flag marked
DODGE
.

“While you’re up there,” Mrs. Bogue said, “could you just take off Mrs. Ellis in Blind River? I hope it’s only temporary, she’s always done good work, but she writes that some lady chased her out of the house with a meat cleaver and she fell on the steps and broke her
leg. Oh, and add this new one – a Mrs. Gauthier in Charlottetown. I certainly hope she’s better than the last one there; Charlottetown is always so difficult.”

When I had climbed down she smiled at me pleasantly, which put me on guard. Mrs. Bogue has a friendly, almost cosy manner that equips her perfectly for dealing with the interviewers, and she is at her most genial when she wants something. “Marian,” she said, “we have a little problem. We’re running a beer study next week – you know which one, it’s the telephone-thing one – and they’ve decided upstairs that we need to do a pre-test this weekend. They’re worried about the questionnaire. Now, we could get Mrs. Pilcher, she’s a dependable interviewer, but it
is
the long weekend and we don’t like to ask her. You’re going to be in town, aren’t you?”

“Does it have to be this weekend?” I asked, somewhat pointlessly.

“Well, we absolutely have to have the results Tuesday. You only need to get seven or eight men.”

My lateness that morning had given her leverage. “Fine,” I said, “I’ll do them tomorrow.”

“You’ll get overtime, of course,” Mrs. Bogue said as she walked away, leaving me wondering whether that had been a snide remark. Her voice is always so bland it’s hard to tell.

I finished licking the envelopes, then got the beer questionnaires from Millie and went through the questions, looking for trouble-spots. The initial selection questions were standard enough. After that, the questions were designed to test listener response to a radio jingle, part of the advertising campaign for a new brand of beer one of the large companies was about to launch on the market. At a certain point the interviewer had to ask the respondent to pick up the telephone and dial a given number, whereupon the jingle would play itself to him over the phone. Then there were a number of questions asking the man how he liked the commercial, whether he thought it might influence his buying habits, and so on.

I dialled the phone number. Since the survey wasn’t actually being conducted till the next week, someone might have forgotten to hook up the record, and I didn’t want to make an idiot of myself.

After a preliminary ringing, buzzing and clicking a deep bass voice, accompanied by what sounded like an electric guitar, sang:

Then a speaking voice, almost as deep as the singer’s, intoned persuasively to background music,

The singer resumed:

and after a climax of sound the record clicked off. It was in satisfactory working order.

I remembered the sketches I’d seen of the visual presentation, scheduled to appear in magazines and on posters: the label was to have a pair of antlers with a gun and a fishing rod crossed beneath them. The singing commercial was a reinforcement of this theme; I
didn’t think it was very original but I admired the subtlety of “just plain old-fashioned relaxing.” That was so the average beer-drinker, the slope-shouldered pot-bellied kind, would be able to feel a mystical identity with the plaid-jacketed sportsman shown in the pictures with his foot on a deer or scooping a trout into his net.

I had got to the last page when the telephone rang. It was Peter. I could tell from the sound of his voice that something was wrong.

“Listen, Marian, I can’t make it for dinner tonight.”

“Oh?” I said, wanting further explanation. I was disappointed, I had been looking forward to dinner with Peter to cheer me up. Also I was hungry again. I had been eating in bits and pieces all day and I had been counting on something nourishing and substantial. This meant another of the
T. V
. dinners Ainsley and I kept for emergencies. “Has something happened?”

“I know you’ll understand. Trigger” – his voice choked – “Trigger’s getting married.”

“Oh,” I said. I thought of saying “That’s too bad,” but it didn’t seem adequate. There was no use in sympathizing as though for a minor mishap when it was really a national disaster. “Would you like me to come with you?” I asked, offering support.

“God no,” he said, “that would be even worse. I’ll see you tomorrow. Okay?”