Margaret Atwood - The Edible Woman

I took the bus, got off at the subway station, paused to note down my fare as “Transportation” on my expenses time-sheet, and crossed the street. Then I went down a slope into the flat treeless park spread out opposite the station. There was a baseball diamond in one corner, but nobody was playing on it. The rest of the park was plain grass, which had turned yellow; it crackled underfoot. This day was going to be like the one before, windless and oppressive. The sky was cloudless but not clear: the air hung heavily, like invisible steam, so that the colours and outlines of objects in the distance were blurred.

At the far side of the park was a sloping asphalt ramp, which I climbed. It led to a residential street lined with small, rather shabby houses set close together, the two-storey shoe-box kind with wooden trim round the windows and eaves. Some of the houses had freshly painted trimmings, which merely accentuated the weather-beaten surfaces of the shingled fronts. The district was the sort that had been going downhill for some decades but had been pushed uphill again in the past few years. Several refugees from the suburbs had bought these city houses and completely refinished them, painting them a sophisticated white and adding flagstone walks and evergreens in cement planters and coachlamps by the doors. The redone houses looked flippant beside the others, as though they had chosen to turn their backs with an irresponsible light-heartedness upon the problems of time and shabbiness and puritan weather. I resolved to avoid the transformed houses when I began to interview. I wouldn’t find the right sort of people there: they would be the martini set.

There is something intimidating about a row of closed doors if you know you have to go up and knock on them and ask what amounts to a favour. I straightened my dress and my shoulders and assumed what I hoped was an official but friendly expression, and walked as far as the next block practising it before I had worked up resolution enough to begin. At the end of the block I could see what looked like a fairly new apartment building. I made it my goal: it would be cool inside, and might supply me with any missing interviews.

I rang the first doorbell. Someone scrutinized me briefly through the white semi-transparent curtains of the front window; then the door was opened by a sharp-featured woman in a print apron with a bib. Her face had not a vestige of makeup on it, not even lipstick, and she was wearing those black shoes with laces and thick heels that make me think of the word “orthopaedic” and that I associate with the bargain-basements of department stores.

“Good morning, I represent Seymour Surveys,” I said, smiling falsely. “We’re doing a little survey and I wonder if your husband would be kind enough to answer a few questions for me?”

“You selling anything?” she asked, glancing at my papers and pencil.

“Oh, no! We have nothing to do with selling. We’re a market research company, we merely ask questions. It helps improve the products,” I added lamely. I didn’t think I was going to find what I was looking for.

“What’s it about?” she asked, the corners of her mouth tightening with suspicion.

“Well, actually it’s about beer,” I said in a tinsel-bright voice, trying to make the word sound as skim-milk-like as possible.

Her face changed expression. She was going to refuse, I thought. But she hesitated, then stepped aside and said in a voice that reminded me of cold oatmeal porridge, “Come in.”

I stood in the spotless tiled hallway, inhaling the smell of furniture polish and bleach, while she disappeared through a door farther on, closing it behind her. There was a murmured conversation; then the door opened again and a tall man with grey hair and a severe frown came through it, followed by the woman. The man wore a black coat even though the day was so warm.

“Now young lady,” he said to me, “I’m not going to chastise you personally because I can see you are a nice girl and only the innocent means to this abominable end. But you will be so kind as to give these tracts to your employers. Who can tell but that their hearts may yet be softened? The propagation of drink and of drunkenness to excess is an iniquity, a sin against the Lord.”

I took the pamphlets he handed me, but felt enough loyalty to Seymour Surveys to say, “Our company doesn’t have anything to do with selling the beer, you know.”

“It is the same thing,” he said sternly, “it is all the same thing, ‘Those who are not with me are against me, saith the Lord.’ Do not try to whiten the sepulchres of those traffickers in human misery and degradation.” He was about to turn away, but said to me as an afterthought, “You might read those yourself, young lady. Of course you never pollute your lips with alcohol, but no soul is utterly pure and proof against temptation. Perhaps the seed will not fall by the wayside, nor yet on stony ground.”

I said a faint “Thank you,” and the man extended the edges of his mouth in a smile. His wife, who had been watching the small sermon with frugal satisfaction, stepped forward and opened the door for me, and I went out, resisting the reflex urge to shake both of them by the hand as though I was coming out of church.

It was a bad beginning. I looked at the tracts as I walked to the next house. “TEMPERANCE,” commanded one. The other was titled, more stirringly, “DRINK AND THE DEVIL.” He must be a minister, I thought, though certainly not Anglican, and probably not even United. One of those obscure sects.

No one was at home in the next house, and at the one after that the door was opened by a chocolate-smeared urchin who informed me that her daddy was still in bed. At the next one though I soon knew that I had come at last to a good place for head-hunting. The main door was standing open, and the man I could see coming towards me several moments after I had rung was of medium height but very thickly built, almost fat. When he opened the screen door I could see that he had only his socks on his feet, no shoes; he was wearing an undershirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts. His face was brick-red.

I explained my errand and showed him the card with the average-beer-consumption-per-week scale on it. Each average is numbered, and the scale runs from 0 to 10. The company does it that way because some men are shy about naming their consumption in so many words. This man picked No. 9, the second from the top. Hardly anybody chooses No. 10: everyone likes to think there’s a chance that somebody else drinks more than he does.

When we had got that far the man said, “Come on into the living room and sit down. You must be tired walking around in all that heat. My wife’s just gone to do the shopping,” he added irrelevantly.

I sat down in one of the easy chairs and he turned down the sound on the T. V. set. I saw a bottle of one of Moose Beer’s competitors standing on the floor by his chair, half empty. He sat down opposite me, smiling and mopping his forehead with his handkerchief, and answered the preliminary questions with the air of an expert delivering a professional verdict. After he had listened to the telephone commercial he scratched the hair on his chest thoughtfully and gave the sort of enthusiastic response for which a whole seminary of admen had no doubt been offering daily prayers. When we finished and I had written down the name and address, which the company needs so it won’t re-interview the same people, got up, and began to thank him, I saw him lurching out of his chair towards me with a beery leer. “Now what’s a nice little girl like you doing walking around asking men all about their beer?” he said moistly. “You ought to be at home with some big strong man to take care of you.”

I pressed the two Temperance pamphlets into his damp outstretched hand and fled.