The Edible Woman (5 page)

Joe returned carrying a tray. “I stuck her in the laundry basket,” he said. “She’s playing with the clothespins.”

Arthur had reached us and stood beside his mother’s chair, still frowning, and Clara said to him, “Why have you got that funny look, you little demon?” She reached down behind him and felt his diaper. “I should have known,” she sighed, “he was so quiet. Husband, your son has shat again. I don’t know where, it isn’t in his diaper.”

Joe handed round the drinks, then knelt and said to Arthur firmly but kindly, “Show Daddy where you put it.” Arthur gazed up at him, not sure whether to whimper or smile. Finally he stalked portentously to the side of the garden, where he squatted down near a clump of dusty red chrysanthemums and stared with concentration at a patch of ground.

“That’s a good boy,” Joe said, and went back into the house.

“He’s a real nature-child, he just loves to shit in the garden,” Clara said to us. “He thinks he’s a fertility-god. If we didn’t clean it up this place would be one big manure field. I don’t know what he’s going to do when it snows.” She closed her eyes. “We’ve been trying to toilet-train him, though according to some of the books it’s too
early, and we got him one of those plastic potties. He hasn’t the least idea what it’s for; he goes around wearing it on his head. I guess he thinks it’s a crash helmet.”

We watched, sipping our beer, as Joe crossed the garden and returned with a folded piece of newspaper. “After this one I’m going on the pill,” said Clara.

When Joe had finally finished cooking the dinner we went into the house and ate it, seated around the heavy table in the dining room. The baby had been fed and exiled to the carriage on the front porch, but Arthur sat in a high chair, where he evaded with spastic contortions of his body the spoonfuls of food Clara poked in the direction of his mouth. Dinner was wizened meat balls and noodles from a noodle mix, with lettuce. For dessert we had something I recognized.

“This is that new canned rice pudding; it saves a lot of time,” Clara said defensively. “It’s not too bad with cream, and Arthur loves it.”

“Yes,” I said. “Pretty soon they’ll be having Orange and Caramel too.”

“Oh?” Clara deftly intercepted a long drool of pudding and returned it to Arthur’s mouth.

Ainsley got out a cigarette and held it for Joe to light. “Tell me,” she said to him, “do you know this friend of theirs – Leonard Slank? They’re being so mysterious about him.”

Joe had been up and down all during the meal, taking off the plates and tending things in the kitchen. He looked dizzy. “Oh yes, I remember him,” he said, “though he’s really a friend of Clara’s.” He finished his pudding quickly and asked Clara whether she needed any help, but she didn’t hear him. Arthur had just thrown his bowl on the floor.

“But what do
you
think of him?” Ainsley asked, as though appealing to his superior intelligence.

Joe stared at the wall, thinking. He didn’t like giving negative judgments, I knew, but I also knew he wasn’t fond of Len. “He’s not ethical,” he said at last. Joe is an Instructor in Philosophy.

“Oh, that’s not quite fair,” I said. Len had never been unethical towards me.

Joe frowned at me. He doesn’t know Ainsley very well, and tends anyway to think of all unmarried girls as easily victimized and needing protection. He had several times volunteered fatherly advice to me, and now he emphasized his point. “He’s not someone to get … mixed up with,” he said sternly. Ainsley gave a short laugh and blew out smoke, unperturbed.

“That reminds me,” I said, “you’d better give me his phone number.”

After dinner we went to sit in the littered living room while Joe cleared the table. I offered to help, but Joe said that was all right, he would rather I talked to Clara. Clara had settled herself on the chesterfield in a nest of crumpled newspapers with her eyes closed; again I could think of little to say. I sat staring up at the centre of the ceiling where there was an elaborately-scrolled plaster decoration, once perhaps the setting for a chandelier, remembering Clara at high school: a tall fragile girl who was always getting exempted from Physical Education. She’d sit on the sidelines watching the rest of us in our blue-bloomered gymsuits as though anything so sweaty and ungainly was foreign enough to her to be a mildly amusing entertainment. In that classroom full of oily potato-chip-fattened adolescents she was everyone’s ideal of translucent perfume-advertisement femininity. At university she had been a little healthier, but had grown her blonde hair long, which made her look more medieval than ever: I had thought of her in connection with the ladies sitting in rose gardens on tapestries. Of course her mind wasn’t like that, but I’ve always been influenced by appearances.

She married Joe Bates in May at the end of our second year, and at first I thought it was an ideal match. Joe was then a graduate student, almost seven years older than she was, a tall shaggy man with a slight stoop and a protective attitude towards Clara. Their worship of each other before the wedding was sometimes ridiculously idealistic; one kept expecting Joe to spread his overcoat on mud puddles or drop to his knees to kiss Clara’s rubber boots. The babies had been unplanned: Clara greeted her first pregnancy with astonishment that such a thing could happen to her, and her second with dismay; now, during her third, she had subsided into a grim but inert fatalism. Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.

I looked at her, feeling a wave of embarrassed pity sweep over me; what could I do? Perhaps I could offer to come over some day and clean up the house. Clara simply had no practicality, she wasn’t able to control the more mundane aspects of life, like money or getting to lectures on time. When we lived in residence together she used to become hopelessly entangled in her room at intervals, unable to find matching shoes or enough clean clothes to wear, and I would have to dig her out of the junk pile she had allowed to accumulate around her. Her messiness wasn’t actively creative like Ainsley’s, who could devastate a room in five minutes if she was feeling chaotic; it was passive. She simply stood helpless while the tide of dirt rose round her, unable to stop it or evade it. The babies were like that too; her own body seemed somehow beyond her, going its own way without reference to any directions of hers. I studied the pattern of bright flowers on the maternity smock she was wearing; the stylized petals and tendrils moved with her breathing, as though they were coming alive.

We left early, after Arthur had been carried off to bed screaming after what Joe called “an accident” behind the living-room door.

“It was no accident,” Clara remarked, opening her eyes. “He just loves peeing behind doors. I wonder what it is. He’s going to be secretive when he grows up, an undercover agent or a diplomat or something. The furtive little bastard.”

Joe saw us to the door, a pile of dirty laundry in his arms. “You must come and see us again soon,” he said, “Clara has so few people she can really talk to.”

W
e walked down towards the subway in the semi-dusk, through the sound of crickets and muffled television sets (in some of the houses we could see them flickering blue through the open windows) and a smell of warm tar. My skin felt stifled, as though I was enclosed in a layer of moist dough. I was afraid Ainsley hadn’t enjoyed herself: her silence was negative.

“Dinner wasn’t bad,” I said, wanting to be loyal to Clara, who was after all an older friend than Ainsley; “Joe’s turning into quite a good cook.”

“How can she stand it?” Ainsley said with more vehemence than usual. “She just lies there and that man does all the work! She lets herself be treated like a
thing
!”

“Well, she is seven months pregnant,” I said. “And she’s never been well.”

“
She’s
not well!” Ainsley said indignantly. “She’s flourishing; it’s him that’s not well. He’s aged even since I’ve known him and that’s less than four months. She’s draining all his energy.”

“What do you suggest?” I said. I was annoyed with Ainsley: she couldn’t see Clara’s position.

“Well, she should
do
something; if only a token gesture. She never finished her degree, did she? Wouldn’t this be a perfect time for her to work on it? Lots of pregnant women finish their degrees.”

I remembered poor Clara’s resolutions after the first baby: she had thought of it as only a temporary absence. After the second she had wailed, “I don’t know what we’re doing wrong! I always try to be so careful.” She had always been against the pill – she thought it might change her personality – but gradually she had become less adamant. She had read a French novel (in translation) and a book about archaeological expeditions in Peru and had talked about night school. Lately she had taken to making bitter remarks about being “just a housewife.” “But Ainsley,” I said, “you’re always saying that a degree is no real indication of anything.”

“Of course the degree in itself isn’t,” Ainsley said, “it’s what it stands for. She should get organized.”

When we were back at the apartment I thought of Len, and decided it wasn’t too late to call him. He was in, and after we’d exchanged greetings I told him I would love to see him.

“Great,” he said, “when and where? Make it some place cool. I didn’t remember it was so bloody hot in the summers over here.”

“Then you shouldn’t have come back,” I said, hinting that I knew why he had and giving him an opening.

“It was safer,” he said with a touch of smugness. “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.” He had acquired a slight English accent. “By the way, Clara tells me you’ve got a new roommate.”

“She isn’t your type,” I said. Ainsley had gone into the living room and was sitting on the chesterfield with her back to me.

“Oh, you mean too old, like you, eh?” My being too old was one of his jokes.

I laughed. “Let’s say tomorrow night,” I said. It had suddenly struck me that Len would be a perfect distraction for Peter. “About eight-thirty at the Park Plaza. I’ll bring a friend along to meet you.”

“Aha,” said Len, “this fellow Clara told me about. Not serious, are you?”

“Oh no, not at all,” I said to reassure him.

When I had hung up Ainsley said, “Was that Len Slank you were talking to?”

I said yes.

“What does he look like?” she asked casually.

I couldn’t refuse to tell her. “Oh, sort of ordinary. I don’t think you’d find him attractive. He has blond curly hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Why?”

“I just wondered.” She got up and went into the kitchen. “Want a drink?” she called.

“No thanks,” I said, “but you could bring me a glass of water.” I moved into the living room and went to the window seat where there was a breeze.

She came back in with a scotch on the rocks for herself and handed me my glass of water. Then she sat down on the floor. “Marian,” she said, “I have something I need to tell you.”

Her voice was so serious that I was immediately worried. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m going to have a baby,” she said quietly.

I took a quick drink of water. I couldn’t imagine Ainsley making a miscalculation like that. “I don’t believe you.”

She laughed. “Oh, I don’t mean I’m already pregnant. I mean I’m going to get pregnant.”

I was relieved, but puzzled. “You mean you’re going to get married?” I asked, thinking of Trigger’s misfortune. I tried to guess which of them Ainsley could be interested in, without success; ever since I’d known her she had been decidedly anti-marriage.

“I knew you’d say that,” she said with amused contempt. “No, I’m not going to get married. That’s what’s wrong with most children, they have too many parents. You can’t say the sort of household Clara and Joe are running is an ideal situation for a child. Think of how confused their mother-image and their father-image will be; they’re riddled with complexes already. And it’s mostly because of the father.”

“But Joe is marvellous!” I cried. “He does just about everything for her! Where would Clara be without him?”

“Precisely,” said Ainsley. “She would have to cope by herself. And she would cope, and their total upbringing would be much more consistent. The thing that ruins families these days is the husbands. Have you noticed she isn’t even breast-feeding the baby?”

“But it’s got teeth,” I protested. “Most people wean them when they get teeth.”

“Nonsense,” Ainsley said darkly, “I bet Joe put her up to it. In South America they breast-feed them much longer than that. North American men hate watching the basic mother-child unit functioning naturally, it makes them feel not needed. This way Joe can give it the bottle just as easily. Any woman left to her own devices would automatically breast-feed as long as possible: I’m certainly going to.”

It seemed to me that the discussion had got off the track: we were talking theory about a practical matter. I tried a personal attack: “Ainsley, you don’t know anything at all about babies. You don’t even like them much, I’ve heard you say they’re too dirty and noisy.”

“Not liking other people’s babies,” said Ainsley, “isn’t the same as not liking your own.”

I couldn’t deny this. I was baffled: I didn’t even know how to justify my own opposition to her plan. The worst of it was that she would probably do it. She can go about getting what she wants with a great deal of efficiency, though in my opinion some of the things
she wants – and this was a case in point – are unreasonable. I decided to take a down-to-earth approach.

“All right,” I said. “Granted. But why do you want a baby, Ainsley? What are you going to
do
with it?”

She gave me a disgusted look. “Every woman should have at least one baby.” She sounded like a voice on the radio saying that every woman should have at least one electric hair dryer. “It’s even more important than sex. It fulfills your deepest femininity.” Ainsley is fond of paperback books by anthropologists about primitive cultures: there are several of them bogged down among the clothes on her floor. At her college they make you take courses in it.

“But why now?” I said, searching my mind for objections. “What about the job at the art gallery? And meeting the artists?” I held them out to her like a carrot to a donkey.