The Edible Woman (23 page)

Marian blushed with embarrassment, but Ainsley gave a maternal coo of concern and hurried to the chesterfield. She sat down beside Len and put her arms around him, pulling him down so that he was resting half across her lap with his head against her shoulder. “There, there,” she soothed. Her hair fell down around their two faces like a veil, or, Marian thought, a web. She rocked her body gently. “There, there. It’s not going to be a little chicken anyway, it’s going to be a lovely nice baby. Nice baby.”

Marian walked out to the kitchen. She was coldly revolted: they were acting like a couple of infants. Ainsley was getting a layer of blubber on her soul already, she thought; aren’t hormones wonderful. Soon she would be fat all over. And Len had displayed something hidden, something she had never seen in him before. He had behaved like a white grub suddenly unearthed from its burrow and exposed to the light of day. A repulsive blinded writhing. It amazed her though that it had taken so little, really, to reduce him to that state. His shell had not been as thick and calloused as she had imagined. It was like that parlour trick they used to play with eggs: you put the egg endwise between your locked hands and squeezed it with all your might, and the egg wouldn’t break; it was so well balanced that you were exerting your force against yourself. But with only a slight shift, an angle, a re-adjustment of the pressure, the egg would crack, and skoosh, there you were with your shoes full of albumin.

Now Len’s delicate adjustment had been upset and he was being crushed. She wondered how he had ever managed to avoid the issue for so long, to persuade himself that his own much-vaunted sexual
activities could have nothing whatever to do with the manufacture of children. What would he have done then if the situation had been as he first imagined it, and he
had
got Ainsley pregnant by accident? Would he have been able to play guilt off against a blamelessness based on no-intent-to-injure, have let them cancel each other out and escaped unscathed? Ainsley couldn’t have foreseen his reaction. But it was her decision that was responsible for this crisis. What was she going to do with him now? What
should
she do?

Oh well, she thought, it’s their problem, let them solve it; I’m well out of it anyway. She went into her bedroom and closed the door.

The next morning, however, when she opened her soft-boiled egg and saw the yolk looking up at her with its one significant and accusing yellow eye, she found her mouth closing together like a frightened sea anemone. It’s living; it’s alive, the muscles in her throat said, and tightened. She pushed the dish away. Her conscious mind was used to the procedure by now. She sighed with resignation and crossed one more item off the list.

“T
here’s jelly, salmon, peanut butter and honey, and egg salad,” Mrs. Grot said, shoving the platter almost under Marian’s nose – not because she was being rude but because Marian was sitting on the chesterfield and Mrs. Grot was standing up, and the assemblage of vertebrae, inflexible corsetry, and desk-oriented musculature that provided Mrs. Grot with her vertical structure would not allow her to bend very far over.

Marian drew herself back into the soft chintz cushions. “Jelly, thanks,” she said, taking one.

It was the office Christmas party, which was being held in the ladies’ lunchroom where they could be, as Mrs. Gundridge had put it, “more comfy.” So far their comfiness, all-permeating as it was in these close quarters, had been tempered by a certain amount of suppressed resentment. Christmas fell on a Wednesday this year, which meant that they all had to come back to work on Friday, missing by a single day the chance of a gloriously long weekend. It was the knowledge of this fact however that had, Marian was sure, put the twinkle in Mrs. Grot’s spectacles and even infused her with gaiety
enough to sustain this unprecedentedly social sandwich-passing. It’s because she wants to take a good close look at our sufferings, Marian thought, watching the rigid figure as it progressed around the room.

The office party seemed to consist largely of the consumption of food and the discussion of ailments and bargains. The food had all been brought by the ladies themselves: each of them had agreed to provide a certain item. Even Marian had been pressured into promising some chocolate brownies, which she had actually bought at a bakery and switched to a different bag. She had not felt much like cooking lately. The food was heaped on the table that stood at one end of the lunchroom – much more food than they needed really, salads and sandwiches and fancy breads and desserts and cookies and cakes. But since everyone had brought something, everyone had to eat at least some of everything, or else the contributor would feel slighted. From time to time one or another of the ladies would shriek, “Oh Dorothy, I just
have
to try some of your Orange-Pineapple Delight!” or “Lena, your Luscious Fruit Sponge looks just scrummy!” and heave to her feet and trundle to the table to refill her paper plate.

Marian gathered that it had not always been like this. For some of the older girls, there was a memory, fast fading to legend, of a time when the office party had been a company-wide event; that was when the company had been much smaller. In those far-off days, Mrs. Bogue said mistily, the men from upstairs had come down, and they even had drinks. But the office had expanded, finally things reached a stage at which nobody knew everybody any longer, and the parties started to get out of hand. Small ink-stained girls from Mimeo were pursued by wandering executives, there were untimely revelations of smouldering lusts and concealed resentments, and elderly ladies had a papercupful too much and hysterics. Now, in the interests of all-over office morale, each department had its own office party; and Mrs. Gundridge had volunteered earlier that afternoon that it was a
lot comfier this way anyhow, just all us girls here together, a comment which had produced glutinous murmurs of assent.

Marian was sitting wedged between two of the office virgins; the third was perched on the arm of the chesterfield. In situations like this, the three of them huddled together for self-protection: they had no children whose cutenesses could be compared, no homes whose furnishings were of much importance, and no husbands, details of whose eccentricities and nasty habits could be exchanged. Their concerns were other, though Emmy occasionally contributed an anecdote about one of her illnesses to the general conversation. Marian was aware that her own status among them was doubtful – they knew that she was on the fringe of matrimony and therefore regarded her as no longer genuinely single, no longer able to empathize with their problems – but in spite of their slight coolness towards her she still preferred being with them to joining any of the other groups. There was little movement in the room. Apart from the platter-passers, most of the ladies remained seated, in various clusters and semicircles, re-clumping themselves every now and then by an exchange of chairs. Mrs. Bogue alone circulated, bestowing a sociable smile here, a mark of attention or a cookie there. It was her duty.

She was working at it the more assiduously because of the cataclysm that had taken place earlier in the day. The giant city-wide instant-tomato-juice taste test, in the offing since October but constantly delayed for further refinements, had been due to go out that morning. A record number of interviewers, almost the whole available crew, were to have descended on the unwary front porches of the housewives with cardboard trays on strings around their necks, like cigarette girls (privately, to Lucy, Marian had suggested bleaching them all and dressing them up in feathers and net stockings), carrying small paper cups of real canned tomato juice and small paper cups of instant-tomato-juice powder and small pitchers of water. The housewife was to take a sip of the real juice, watch the interviewer
mix the Instant right before her astounded eyes, and then try the result, impressed, possibly, by its quickness and ease: “One Stir and You’re Sure!” said the tentative advertisement sketches. If they’d done it in October it might have worked.

Unfortunately the snow that had been withholding itself during five uniformly overclouded grey days had chosen that morning at ten o’clock to begin to fall, not in soft drifting flakes or even intermittent flurries, but in a regular driving blizzard. Mrs. Bogue had tried to get the higher-ups to postpone the test, but in vain. “We’re working with humans, not with machines,” she had said on the phone, her voice loud enough so that they could hear it through the closed door of her cubicle. “It’s utterly impossible out there!” But there was a deadline to be met. The thing had already been postponed for so long that it could be kept back no longer, and furthermore a delay of one day at this point would mean an actual delay of three because of the major inconvenience of Christmas. So Mrs. Bogue’s flock had been driven, bleating faintly, out into the storm.

For the rest of the morning the office had resembled the base of a mercy mission in a disaster area. Phone calls flooded in from the hapless interviewers. Their cars, antifreeze- and snow tire-less, balked and stalled, stranded themselves in blowing drifts, and slammed their doors on hands and their trunk lids on heads. The paper cups were far too light to withstand the force of the gale, and whirled away over the lanes and hedges, emptying their blood-red contents on the snow, on the interviewers, and, if the interviewers had actually made it as far as a front door, on the housewife herself. One interviewer had her whole tray ripped from her neck and lifted into the air like a kite; another had tried to shelter hers inside her coat, only to have it tipped and spewn against her body by the wind. From eleven o’clock on, the interviewers themselves had come straggling in, wild haired and smeared with red, to resign or explain or have their faith in themselves as scientific and efficient measurers
of public opinion restored, depending on temperament; and Mrs. Bogue had had to cope in addition with the howls of rage from the broadloomed Olympics above who refused to recognize the existence of any storm not of their own making. The traces of the fray were still evident on her face as she moved among the eating women. When she was pretending to be flustered and upset, she was really serene; but now, attempting serenity, she reminded Marian of a club lady in a flowered hat making a gracious speech of thanks, who has just felt a small many-legged creature scamper up her leg.

Marian gave up half-listening to several conversations at once and let the sound of voices filling the room wash across her ears in a blur of meaningless syllables. She finished her jelly sandwich and went for a piece of cake. The loaded table made her feel gluttonous: all that abundance, all those meringues and icings and glazes, those coagulations of fats and sweets, that proliferation of rich glossy food. When she returned with a piece of sponge cake Lucy, who had been talking with Emmy, had turned and was now talking with Millie, so that after she had taken her place again Marian found herself in the middle of their conversation.

“Well naturally they just didn’t know what to do about it,” Lucy was saying. “You just don’t ask someone would they please take a bath. I mean it’s not very polite.”

“And London’s so dirty too,” Millie said sympathetically. “You see the men in the evenings, the collars of their white shirts are black, just black. It’s all the soot.”

“Yes well, and this went on and it got worse and worse, it was getting so bad they were ashamed to even ask their friends in.…”

“Who’s this?” Marian asked.

“Oh this
girl
who was living with some friends of mine in England and she just stopped
washing
. Nothing else was wrong with her, she just didn’t wash, even her
hair
even, or change her clothes or
anything, for the longest time, and they didn’t want to say anything because she seemed perfectly
normal
in every other way, but obviously underneath it she must have been really
sick
.”

Emmy’s narrow peaked face swung round at the word “sick,” and the story was repeated to her.

“So what happened, then?” Millie asked, licking chocolate icing from her fingers.

“Well,” said Lucy, nibbling daintily at a morsel of shortcake, “it got pretty horrible. I mean, she was wearing the same
clothes
, you can imagine. And I guess it must have been three or four months.”

There was a murmur of “Oh no’s,” and she said, “Well, at least two. And they were just about to ask her for god’s sake either take a bath or move out. I mean, wouldn’t you? But one day she came home and just took off those clothes and burnt them, and had a bath and everything, and she’s been perfectly normal ever since. Just like that.”

“Well that
is
queer!” Emmy said in a disappointed voice. She had been expecting a severe illness, or perhaps even an operation.

“Of course they’re all a lot dirtier Over There, you know,” Millie said in a woman-of-the-world tone.

“But
she
was from Over Here!” Lucy exclaimed. “I mean she’d been brought up the right way, she was from a good family and all; it wasn’t as if they didn’t have a
bath
room,
they
were always perfectly clean!”

“Maybe it was one of those things we sort of all go through,” said Millie philosophically. “Maybe she was just immature, and being away from home like that and all.…”

“I think she was
sick
,” Lucy said. She was picking the raisins out of a piece of Christmas cake, preparatory to eating it.

Marian’s mind grasped at the word “immature,” turning it over like a curious pebble found on a beach. It suggested an unripe ear of corn, and other things of a vegetable or fruitlike nature. You were
green and then you ripened: became mature. Dresses for the mature figure. In other words, fat.

She looked around the room at all the women there, at the mouths opening and shutting, to talk or to eat. Here, sitting like any other group of women at an afternoon feast, they no longer had the varnish of officialdom that separated them, during regular office hours, from the vast anonymous ocean of housewives whose minds they were employed to explore. They could have been wearing housecoats and curlers. As it was, they all wore dresses for the mature figure. They were ripe, some rapidly becoming overripe, some already beginning to shrivel; she thought of them as attached by stems at the tops of their heads to an invisible vine, hanging there in various stages of growth and decay … in that case, thin elegant Lucy, sitting beside her, was merely at an earlier stage, a springtime green bump or nodule forming beneath the careful golden calyx of her hair.…