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Authors: Margaret Atwood

The Edible Woman

BOOK: The Edible Woman
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INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
The Edible Woman

“[
The Edible Woman
] is chock-full of startling images, superbly and classically crafted.…”


Saturday Night

“Few writers are able to combine wit and humour … Margaret Atwood is a poet and novelist who seems to be able to do anything she wants.”


Newsweek

“A pleasure.”


Kirkus Reviews

“Funny, sharp, witty, clever.”


The Times

“Marked by a keen eye for evocative details which cohere into vivid incidents.”


Canadian Forum

“[Atwood is] a subtle and penetrating observer of relationships between men and women.”


Sunday Times

“Delightful – spare, precise, mordantly witty.… Exquisitely written.”


Journal of Canadian Fiction

“[Atwood] knows exactly what she is doing with every phrase.”


Vancouver Sun

BOOKS BY MARGARET ATWOOD

FICTION
The Edible Woman
(1969)
Surfacing
(1972)
Lady Oracle
(1976)
Dancing Girls
(1977)
Life Before Man
(1979)
Bodily Harm
(1981)
Murder in the Dark
(1983)
Bluebeard’s Egg
(1983)
The Handmaid’s Tale
(1985)
Cat’s Eye
(1988)
Wilderness Tips
(1991)
Good Bones
(1992)
The Robber Bride
(1993)
Alias Grace
(1996)
The Blind Assassin
(2000)
Good Bones and Simple Murders
(2001)
Oryx and Crake
(2003)
The Penelopiad
(2005)
The Tent
(2006)
Moral Disorder
(2006)
The Year of the Flood
(2009)

FOR CHILDREN
Up in the Tree
(1978)
Anna’s Pet
(with Joyce Barkhouse) (1980)
For the Birds
(1990)
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut
(1995)
Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes
(2003)
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda
(2004)

NON-FICTION
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
(1972)
Days of the Rebels 1815–1840
(1977)
Second Words
(1982)
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature
(1996)
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
(2002)
Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982–2004
(2004)
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
(2008)

POETRY
Double Persephone
(1961)
The Circle Game
(1966)
The Animals in That Country
(1968)
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
(1970)
Procedures for Underground
(1970)
Power Politics
(1971)
You Are Happy
(1974)
Selected Poems
(1976)
Two-Headed Poems
(1978)
True Stories
(1981)
Interlunar
(1984)
Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976–1986
(1986)
Morning in the Burned House
(1995)
The Door
(2007)

Copyright © 1969 by O.W. Toad Ltd.
First cloth edition published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 1969
Emblem edition published in 1999
This Emblem edition published in 2010

Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Emblem and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Atwood, Margaret, 1939–
The edible woman / Margaret Atwood.

eISBN: 978-1-55199-495-6
I. Title.
PS8501.T86E3 2010    C813′.54     C2010-902599-7

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

This book was produced using 20% recycled materials.

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com

v3.1

For J.

The surface on which you work (preferably marble), the tools, the ingredients and your fingers should be chilled throughout the operation.…

(Recipe for Puff Pastry in I. S. Rombauer
and M. R. Becker
, The Joy of Cooking.)

Contents
PART ONE
1

I
know I was all right on Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual. When I went out to the kitchen to get breakfast Ainsley was there, moping: she said she had been to a bad party the night before. She swore there had been nothing but dentistry students, which depressed her so much she had consoled herself by getting drunk.

“You have no idea how soggy it is,” she said, “having to go through twenty conversations about the insides of peoples’ mouths. The most reaction I got out of them was when I described an abscess I once had. They positively drooled. And most men look at something besides your
teeth
, for god’s sake.”

She had a hangover, which put me in a cheerful mood – it made me feel so healthy – and I poured her a glass of tomato juice and briskly fixed her an Alka-Seltzer, listening and making sympathetic noises while she complained.

“As if I didn’t get enough of that at work,” she said. Ainsley has a job as a tester of defective electric toothbrushes for an electric
toothbrush company: a temporary job. What she is waiting for is an opening in one of those little art galleries, even though they don’t pay well: she wants to meet the artists. Last year, she told me, it was actors, but then she actually met some. “It’s an absolute fixation. I expect they all carry those bent mirrors around in their coat pockets and peer into their own mouths every time they go to the john to make sure they’re still cavity-free.” She ran one hand reflectively through her hair, which is long and red, or rather auburn. “Could you imagine kissing one? He’d say ‘Open wide’ beforehand. They’re so bloody one-track.”

“It must have been awful,” I said, refilling her glass. “Couldn’t you have changed the topic?”

Ainsley raised her almost non-existent eyebrows, which hadn’t been coloured in yet that morning. “Of course not,” she said. “I pretended to be terribly interested. And naturally I didn’t let on what my job was: those professional men get so huffy if you know anything about their subject. You know, like Peter.”

Ainsley tends to make jabs at Peter, especially when she isn’t feeling well. I was magnanimous and didn’t respond. “You’d better eat something before you go to work,” I said, “it’s better when you’ve got something on your stomach.”

“Oh god,” said Ainsley, “I can’t face it. Another day of machines and mouths. I haven’t had an interesting one since last month, when that lady sent back her toothbrush because the bristles were falling off. We found out she’d been using Ajax.”

I got so caught up in being efficient for Ainsley’s benefit while complimenting myself on my moral superiority to her that I didn’t realize how late it was until she reminded me. At the electric toothbrush company they don’t care what time you breeze in, but my company thinks of itself as punctual. I had to skip the egg and wash down a glass of milk and a bowl of cold cereal which I knew would leave me hungry long before lunchtime. I chewed through a piece of
bread while Ainsley watched me in nauseated silence and grabbed up my purse, leaving Ainsley to close the apartment door behind me.

We live on the top floor of a large house in one of the older and more genteel districts, in what I suppose used to be the servants’ quarters. This means there are two flights of stairs between us and the front door, the higher flight narrow and slippery, the lower one wide and carpeted but with stair rods that come loose. In the high heels expected by the office I have to go down sideways, clutching the bannister. That morning I made it safely past the line of pioneer brass warming-pans strung on the wall of our stairway, avoided catching myself on the many-pronged spinning wheel on the second-floor landing, and sidestepped quickly down past the ragged regimental flag behind glass and the row of oval-framed ancestors that guard the first stairway. I was relieved to see there was no one in the downstairs hall. On level ground I strode towards the door, swerving to avoid the rubber plant on one side and the hall table with the écru doily and the round brass tray on the other. Behind the velvet curtain to the right I could hear the child performing her morning penance at the piano. I thought I was safe.

But before I reached the door it swung silently inward upon its hinges, and I knew I was trapped. It was the lady down below. She was wearing a pair of spotless gardening gloves and carrying a trowel. I wondered who she’d been burying in the garden.

“Good morning, Miss MacAlpin,” she said.

“Good morning.” I nodded and smiled. I can never remember her name, and neither can Ainsley; I suppose we have what they call a mental block about it. I looked past her towards the street, but she didn’t move out of the doorway.

“I was out last night,” she said. “At a meeting.” She has an indirect way of going about things. I shifted from one foot to the other and smiled again, hoping she would realize I was in a hurry. “The child tells me there was another fire.”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly a fire,” I said. The child had taken this mention of her name as an excuse to stop practising, and was standing now in the velvet doorway of the parlour, staring at me. She is a hulking creature of fifteen or so who is being sent to an exclusive private girls’ school, and she has to wear a green tunic with knee-socks to match. I’m sure she’s really quite normal, but there’s something cretinous about the hair-ribbon perched up on top of her gigantic body.

The lady down below took off one of her gloves and patted her chignon. “Ah,” she said sweetly. “The child says there was a lot of smoke.”

“Everything was under control,” I said, not smiling this time. “It was just the pork chops.”

BOOK: The Edible Woman
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