The Edible Woman (37 page)

“You’re not exactly the picture of health yourself,” she replied. His eyes were heavily circled and his hair looked like a raven’s nest. They got out of bed and she examined her own face briefly in the yellowed wavery glass of the bathroom mirror. Her skin was drawn and white and strangely dry. It was the truth: she did look awful.

She had not wanted to put those particular clothes back on but she had no choice. They dressed in silence, awkward in the narrow space of the room whose shabbiness was even more evident in the grey daylight, and furtively descended the stairs.

She looked at him now as he sat hunched over across the table from her, muffled again in his clothes. He had lit a cigarette and his eyes were watching the smoke. The eyes were closed to her, remote. The imprint left on her mind by the long famished body that had
seemed in the darkness to consist of nothing but sharp crags and angles, the memory of its painfully defined almost skeletal ribcage, a pattern of ridges like a washboard, was fading as rapidly as any other transient impression on a soft surface. Whatever decision she had made had been forgotten, if indeed she had ever decided anything. It could have been an illusion, like the blue light on their skins. Something had been accomplished in his life though, she thought with a sense of weary competence; that was a small comfort; but for her nothing was permanent or finished. Peter was there, he hadn’t vanished; he was as real as the crumbs on the table, and she would have to act accordingly. She would have to go back. She had missed the morning bus but she could get the afternoon one, after talking to Peter, explaining. Or rather avoiding explanation. There was no real reason to explain because explanations involved causes and effects and this event had been neither. It had come from nowhere and it led nowhere, it was outside the chain. Suddenly it occurred to her that she hadn’t begun to pack.

She looked down at the menu. “Bacon and Eggs, Any Style,” she read. “Our Plump Tender Sausages.” She thought of pigs and chickens. She shifted hastily to “Toast.” Something moved in her throat. She closed the menu.

“What do you want?” Duncan asked.

“Nothing, I can’t eat anything,” she said, “I can’t eat anything at all. Not even a glass of orange juice.” It had finally happened at last then. Her body had cut itself off. The food circle had dwindled to a point, a black dot, closing everything outside.… She looked at the grease spot on the cover of the menu, almost whimpering with self-pity.

“You sure? Oh well then,” said Duncan with a trace of alacrity, “that means I can spend it all on me.”

When the waitress came back he ordered ham and eggs, which he proceeded to consume voraciously, and without apology or
comment, before her very eyes. She watched him in misery. When he broke the eggs with his fork and their yellow centres ran viscously over the plate she turned her head away. She thought she was going to be sick.

“Well,” he said when he had paid the cheque and they were standing outside on the street, “thanks for everything. I’ve got to go home and get to work on my term paper.”

Marian thought of the cold fuel-oil and stale cigar smell there would be inside the bus. Then she thought of the dishes in the kitchen sink. The bus would get warm and stuffy as she travelled inside it along the highway, the tires making their high grinding whine. What was living, hidden and repulsive, down there among the plates and dirty glasses? She couldn’t go back.

“Duncan,” she said, “please don’t go.”

“Why? Is there more?”

“I can’t go back.”

He frowned down at her. “What do you expect me to do?” he asked. “You shouldn’t expect me to do anything. I want to go back to my shell. I’ve had enough so-called reality for now.”

“You don’t have to do anything, couldn’t you just …”

“No,” he said, “I don’t want to. You aren’t an escape any more, you’re too real. Something’s bothering you and you’d want to talk about it; I’d have to start worrying about you and all that, I haven’t time for it.”

She looked down at their four feet, standing in the trodden slush of the sidewalk. “I really can’t go back.”

He peered at her more closely. “Are you going to be sick?” he asked. “Don’t do that.”

She stood mutely before him. She could offer him no good reason for staying with her. There was no reason: what would it accomplish?

“Well,” he said, hesitating, “all right. But not for very long, okay?”

She nodded gratefully.

They walked north. “We can’t go to my place, you know,” he said. “They’d make a fuss.”

“I know.”

“Where do you want to go then?” he asked.

She hadn’t thought about that. Everything was impossible. She put her hands over her ears. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice rising towards hysteria, “I don’t know, I might as well go back.…”

“Oh come now,” he said genially, “no histrionics. We’ll go for a walk.” He pulled her hands away from her ears. “All right,” she said, letting herself be humoured.

As they walked Duncan swung their linked hands back and forth. His mood seemed to have changed from its breakfast sullenness to a certain vacant contentment. They were going uphill, away from the lake; the sidewalks were crowded with furred Saturday ladies trudging inexorably as icebreakers through the slush, brows furrowed with purpose, eyes glinting, shopping bags hung at either side to give them ballast. Marian and Duncan dodged past and around them, breaking hands when an especially threatening one bore down upon them. In the streets the cars fumed and splattered by. Pieces of soot fell from the grey air, heavy and moist as snowflakes.

“I need some clean air,” Duncan said when they had walked wordlessly for twenty minutes or so. “This is like being in a fishbowl full of dying pollywogs. Can you face a short subway ride?”

Marian nodded. The further away, she thought, the better.

They went down the nearest pastel-tiled chute, and after an interval smelling of damp wool and mothballs let themselves be carried up by the escalator and out again into daylight.

“Now we take the streetcar,” Duncan said. He seemed to know where he was going, for which Marian could only be thankful. He was leading her. He was in control.

On the streetcar they had to stand. Marian held on to one of the metal poles and stooped so she could see out the window. Over the
top of a tea-cosy-shaped green and orange wool hat with large gold sequins sewed to it an unfamiliar landscape jolted past: stores first, then houses, then a bridge, then more houses. She had no idea what part of the city they were in.

Duncan reached over her head and pulled the cord. The streetcar ground to a halt and they squeezed their way towards the back and jumped down.

“Now we walk,” said Duncan. He turned down a side street. The houses were smaller and a little newer than the ones in Marian’s district, but they were still dark and tall, many with square pillared wooden porches, the paint grey or dingy white. The snow on the lawns was fresher here. They passed an old man shovelling a walk, the scrape of the shovel sounding strangely loud in the silent air. There was an abnormal number of cats. Marian thought of how the street would smell in the spring when the snow melted: earth, bulbs coming up, damp wood, last year’s leaves rotting, the winter’s accumulations of the cats who had thought they were being so clean and furtive as they scratched holes for themselves in the snow. Old people coming out of the grey doors with shovels, creaking over the lawns, burying things. Spring cleaning: a sense of purpose.

They crossed a street and began to go down a steep hill. All at once Duncan started to run, dragging Marian behind him as if she was a toboggan.

“Stop!” she called, alarmed at the loudness of her own voice. “I can’t run!” She felt the curtains in all the windows swaying perilously as they went past, as though each house contained a dour watcher.

“No!” Duncan shouted back at her. “We’re escaping! Come on!”

Under her arm a seam split. She had a vision of the red dress disintegrating in mid-air, falling in little scraps behind her in the snow, like feathers. They were off the sidewalk now, slithering down the road towards a fence; there was a yellow and black chequered sign
that said “Danger.” She was afraid they would go splintering through the wooden fence and hurtle over an unseen edge, in slow motion almost, like movies of automobiles falling off cliffs, but at the last minute Duncan swerved around the end of the fence and they were on a narrow cinder path between high banks. The footbridge at the bottom of the hill came rapidly towards them; he stopped suddenly and she skidded, colliding.

Her lungs hurt: she was dizzy from too much air. They were leaning against a cement wall, one of the sides of the bridge. Marian put her arms on the top and rested. Level with her eyes there were tree-tops, a maze of branches, the ends already pale yellow, pale red, knotted with buds.

“We aren’t there yet,” Duncan said. He tugged at her arm. “We go down.” He led her to the end of the bridge. At one side was an unofficial path: the imprints of feet, a muddy track. They climbed down gingerly, their feet sideways like children learning to go down stairs, step by step. Water was dripping on them from the icicles on the underside of the bridge.

When they had reached the bottom and were standing on level ground Marian asked, “Are we here yet?”

“Not yet,” said Duncan. He began to walk away from the bridge. Marian hoped they were going to a place where they could sit down.

They were in one of the ravines that fissured the city, but which one she didn’t know. She had gone for walks close to the one that was visible from their living-room window, but nothing she saw around her was familiar. The ravine was narrow here and deep, closed in by trees which looked as though they were pinning the covering of snow to the steep sides. Far above, towards the rim, some children were playing. Marian could see their bright jackets, red and blue, and hear their faint laughter.

They were going single file along a track in the crusted snow.
Some other people had walked there, but not many. At intervals she noticed what she thought were the marks of horses’ hooves. All she could see of Duncan was his slouched back and his feet lifting and setting down.

She wished he would turn around so she could see his face; his expressionless coat made her uneasy.

“We’ll sit down in a minute,” he said as if in answer.

She didn’t see any place they might possibly sit. They were walking now through a field of tall weedstalks whose stiff dried branches scraped against them as they passed: goldenrod, teazles, burdocks, the skeletons of anonymous grey plants. The burdocks had clusters of brown burrs and the teazles their weathered-silver spiked heads but otherwise nothing interrupted the thin branching and re-branching monotony of the field. Beyond it on either side rose the walls of the ravine. Along the top now were houses, a line of them perched on the edge, careless of the erosion gullies that scarred the ravine-face at irregular intervals. The creek had disappeared into an underground culvert.

Marian looked behind her. The ravine had made a curve; she had walked around it without noticing; ahead of them was another bridge, a larger one. They kept walking.

“I like it down here in winter,” Duncan’s voice said after a while. “Before I’ve only been down here in summer. Everything grows, it’s so thick with green leaves and stuff you can’t see three feet in front of you, some of it’s poison ivy. And it’s populated. The old drunks come down here and sleep under the bridges and the kids play here too. There’s a riding stable down here somewhere, I think what we’re on is one of the bridle paths. I used to come down because it was cooler. But it’s better covered with snow. It hides the junk. They’re beginning to fill this place up with junk too, you know, beginning with the creek, I wonder why they like throwing things
around all over the landscape … old tires, tin cans.…” The voice came from a mouth she couldn’t see, as though from nowhere; it was foreshortened, blunted, as if it was being blotted up, absorbed by the snow.

The ravine had widened out around them and in this place there were fewer weeds. Duncan turned off the path, breaking the crusted snow; she followed him. They plodded up the side of a small hill.

“Here we are,” Duncan said. He stopped and turned, and reached a hand to draw her up beside him.

Marian gasped and took an involuntary step back: they were standing on the very edge of a cliff. The ground ended abruptly beyond their feet. Below them was a huge roughly circular pit, with a spiral path or roadway cut round and around the sides, leading to the level snow-covered space at the bottom. Directly across from where they were standing, separated from them by perhaps a quarter of a mile of empty space, was a long shed-like black building. Everything seemed closed, deserted.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s only the brickworks,” Duncan said. “That’s pure clay down there. They go down that road with steam shovels and dig it out.”

“I didn’t know there was anything like that in the ravines,” she said. It seemed wrong to have this cavity in the city: the ravine itself was supposed to be as far down as you could go. It made her suspect the white pit bottom also; it didn’t look solid, it looked possibly hollow, dangerous, a thin layer of ice, as though if you walked on it you might fall through.

“Oh, they have lots of good things. There’s a prison down here somewhere, too.”

Duncan sat down on the edge, dangling his legs nonchalantly, and took out a cigarette. After a moment she sat down beside him, although she didn’t trust the earth. It was the kind of thing that
caved in. They both gazed down into the gigantic hole scooped into the ground.

“I wonder what time it is,” Marian said. She listened as she spoke: the open space had swallowed up her voice.

Duncan didn’t answer. He finished his cigarette in silence; then he stood up, walked a short way along the brink till he came to a flat area where there were no weeds, and lay down in the snow. He was so peaceful, stretched out there looking up at the sky, that Marian walked over to join him where he was lying.

“You’ll get cold,” he said, “but go ahead if you want to.”