Margaret Atwood - The Edible Woman

“Oh,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster, and not intending to justify myself by explaining the high – well, higher – status of my real job, “we all have to eat. Besides, what else can you do with a B.A. these days?”

When I was outside I looked at the questionnaire. The notes I had made of his answers were almost indecipherable in the glare of the sunlight; all I could see on the page was a blur of grey scribbling.

Technically I was still one and a half interviews short, but I had enough for the necessary report and the questionnaire changes. Besides, I wanted to have a bath and change before going to Peter’s and the interviewing had taken longer than I expected.

I got back to the apartment and threw the questionnaires on the bed. Then I looked around for Ainsley, but she was out. I gathered together my washcloth, soap, toothbrush and toothpaste, put on my dressing gown, and went downstairs. Our apartment has no bathroom of its own, which helps to account for the low rent. Perhaps the house was built before they had them, or perhaps it was felt that servants didn’t need bathrooms; at any rate, we have to use the second-floor bathroom, which makes life difficult at times. Ainsley is always leaving rings, which the lady down below regards as a violation of her shrine. She leaves deodorants and cleansers and brushes and sponges in conspicuous places, which has no effect on Ainsley but makes me feel uneasy. Sometimes I go downstairs after Ainsley has taken a bath and clean out the tub.

I had wanted to soak for a while, but I had barely scrubbed away the afternoon’s film of dust and bus fumes when the lady down below began making rustling and throat-clearing noises outside the door. This is her way of suggesting that she wants to get in: she never knocks and asks. I clambered upstairs again, dressed, had a cup of tea, and set out for Peter’s. The ancestors watched me with their fading daguerrotyped eyes as I went down the stairs, their mouths bleak above their stiff collars.

Usually we went out for dinner, but when we didn’t the pattern was that I would walk over to Peter’s and get something to cook at a store on the way – one of those small grubby stores you sometimes find in the older residential districts. Of course he could have picked me up at the house in his Volkswagen, but he is made irritable by errands; also I don’t like to give the lady down below too much food for speculation. I didn’t know whether we were going out for dinner or not – Peter had said nothing about it – so I dropped in at the store just to be on the safe side. He would probably have a hangover from the celebration of the night before and wouldn’t feel like a full-scale dinner.

Peter’s apartment building is just far enough away to make getting there by transportation system more bother than it’s worth. It’s south of our district and east of the university, in a rundown area, nearly a slum, that is scheduled to be transformed over the next few years by high-rise apartments. Several have been completed but Peter’s is still under construction. Peter is the only person who lives there; he does so temporarily, at only a third of the price they’ll charge when the building is finished. He was able to make this deal through a connection he acquired during a piece of contract manipulating. Peter’s in his articling year as a lawyer and doesn’t have extravagant amounts of money yet – for instance he couldn’t have afforded the apartment at its list price – but his is a small firm and he’s rising in it like a balloon.

All summer whenever I went to the apartment I had to thread my way through piles of concrete blocks near the entrance to the lobby, around shapes covered with dusty tarpaulins on the floor inside, and sometimes over troughs for plaster and ladders and stacks of pipes on the stairway going up; the elevators aren’t in working order yet. Occasionally I would be stopped by workmen who didn’t know about Peter and who would insist that I couldn’t go in because nobody lived there. We would then have arguments about the existence or non-existence of Mr. Wollander, and once I’d had to take some of them up to the seventh floor with me and produce Peter in the flesh. I knew there wouldn’t be any men working as late as five on Saturday though; and they probably had the whole long weekend off anyway. Generally they seem to go about things in a leisurely manner, which suits Peter. There’s been a strike or a layoff too which has held things up. Peter hopes it will go on: the longer they take, the longer his rent will be low.

Structurally the building was complete, except for the finishing touches. They had all the windows in and had scrawled them with white soap hieroglyphics to keep people from walking through them. The glass doors had been installed several weeks before, and Peter had got an extra set of keys made for me: a necessity rather than just a convenience, since the buzzer-system for letting people in had not yet been connected. Inside, the shiny surfaces – tiled floors, painted walls, mirrors, light fixtures – which would later give the building its expensive gloss, its beetle-hard internal shell, had not yet begun to secrete themselves. The rough grey underskin of subflooring and unplastered wall-surface was still showing, and raw wires dangled like loose nerves from most of the sockets. I went up the stairs carefully, avoiding the dirty bannister, thinking how much I had come to associate weekends with this new-building smell of sawn boards and cement dust. On the floors I passed, the doorways of the future apartments gaped emptily, their doors as yet unhung. It was a long climb up; as I reached Peter’s floor I was breathing hard. I would be glad when the elevators were running.

Peter’s apartment, of course, has been largely finished; he’d never live in a place without proper floors and electricity, no matter how low the rent. His connection uses it as a model of what the rest of the apartments will be like, and shows it to the occasional prospective tenant, always phoning Peter before he arrives. It doesn’t inconvenience Peter much: he’s out a lot and doesn’t mind people looking through his place.

I opened the door, went in, and took the groceries to the refrigerator in the kitchenette. I could tell by the sound of running water that Peter was taking a shower: he often is. I strolled into the living room and looked out of the window. The apartment isn’t far enough up for a good view of the lake or the city – you can only see a mosaic of dingy little streets and narrow backyards, and you aren’t low enough to see clearly what the people are doing in them. Peter hasn’t put much in the living room yet. He’s got a Danish Modern sofa and a chair to match and a hi-fi set, but nothing else. He says he’d rather wait and get good things than clutter the place up with cheap things he doesn’t like. I suppose he is right, but still it will help when he gets more: his two pieces of furniture are made to look very spindly and isolated by the large empty space that surrounds them.

I get restless when I’m waiting for anyone, I tend to pace. I wandered into the bedroom and looked out the window there, though it’s much the same view. Peter has the bedroom nearly done, he’s told me, though for some tastes it might be slightly sparse. He has a good-sized sheepskin on the floor and a plain, solid bed, also good sized, second-hand but in perfect condition, which is always neatly made. Then an austere square desk, dark wood, and one of those leather-cushioned office swivel-chairs that he picked up second-hand too; he says it’s very comfortable for working. The desk has a reading lamp on it, a blotter, an assortment of pens and pencils, and Peter’s graduation portrait in a stand-up frame. On the wall above there’s a small bookcase – his law books on the bottom shelf, his hoard of paperback detective novels on the top shelf, and miscellaneous books and magazines in between. To one side of the bookcase is a pegboard with hooks that holds Peter’s collection of weapons: two rifles, a pistol, and several wicked-looking knives. I’ve been told all the names, but I can never remember them. I’ve never seen Peter use any of them, though of course in the city he wouldn’t have many opportunities. Apparently he used to go hunting a lot with his oldest friends. Peter’s cameras hang there too, their glass eyes covered by leather cases. There’s a full-length mirror on the outside of the cupboard door, and inside the cupboard are all of Peter’s clothes.