Margaret Atwood - The Edible Woman

Peter relaxed; anyone interested in news reports, he was probably thinking, couldn’t be queer.

I felt a hand touch my shoulder, and looked around. A young girl I’d never seen before was standing there. I opened my mouth to ask her what she wanted, when Peter said, “Oh. It’s Ainsley. You didn’t tell me she was coming along.” I looked again: it was Ainsley.

“Gosh, Marian,” she said in a breathless semi-whisper, “you didn’t tell me this was a bar . I sure hope they don’t ask me for my birth certificate.”

Len and Peter had risen. I introduced Ainsley to Len, much against my better judgement, and she sat down in the fourth chair. Peter’s face had a puzzled expression. He had met Ainsley before and hadn’t liked her, suspecting her of holding what he called “wishy-washy radical” views because she had favoured him with a theoretical speech about liberating the Id. Politically Peter is conservative. She had offended him too by calling one of his opinions “conventional,” and he had retaliated by calling one of hers “uncivilized.” Right now, I guessed, he could tell she was up to something but was unwilling to rock her boat until he knew what it was. He required evidence.

The waiter appeared and Len asked Ainsley what she would have. She hesitated, then said timidly, “Oh, could I have just a – just a glass of ginger ale?”

Len beamed at her. “I knew you had a new roommate, Marian,” he said, “but you didn’t tell me she was so young!”

“I’m sort of keeping an eye on her,” I said sourly, “for the folks back home.” I was furious with Ainsley. She had put me in a very awkward position. I could either give the game away by revealing she had been to college and was in fact several months older than me, or I could keep silent and participate in what amounted to a fraud. I knew perfectly well why she had come: Len was a potential candidate, and she had chosen to inspect him this way because she had sensed she’d have difficulty forcing me to introduce them otherwise.

The waiter returned with her ginger ale. I was amazed that he hadn’t asked for her birth certificate, but upon reflection I decided that any experienced waiter would assume that no girl who seemed so young would dare to walk into a bar dressed like that and order ginger ale unless she was in reality safely over-age. It’s the adolescents who overdress that they suspect, and Ainsley was not overdressed. She had dug out from somewhere a cotton summer creation I’d never seen before, a pink and light-blue gingham check on white with a ruffle around the neck. Her hair was tied behind her head with a pink bow and on one of her wrists she had a tinkly silver charm bracelet. Her makeup was understated, her eyes carefully but not noticeably shadowed to make them twice as large and round and blue, and she had sacrificed her long oval fingernails, biting them nearly to the quick so that they had a jagged schoolgirlish quality. I could see she was determined.

Len was talking to her, asking her questions, trying to draw her out. She sipped at her ginger ale, giving short, shy answers. She was evidently afraid of saying too much, aware of Peter as a threat. When Len asked her what she did, however, she could give a truthful answer. “I work at an electric toothbrush company,” she said, and blushed a warm and genuine-looking pink. I almost choked.

“Excuse me,” I said, “I’m just going out on the patio for a breath of air.” Actually I wanted to decide what I should do – surely it was unethical of me to let Len be deceived – and Ainsley must have sensed this, for she gave me a quick warning look as I got up.

Outside, I leaned my arms against the top of the wall, which came almost to my collarbone, and gazed out over the city. A moving line of lights ran straight in front of me till it hit and broke against and flowed around a blob of darkness, the park; and another line went at right angles, disappearing on both sides into the distance. What could I do? Was it any of my business? I knew that if I interfered I would be breaking an unspoken code, and that Ainsley was sure to get back at me some way through Peter. She was clever at such things.

Far off on the eastern horizon I saw a flicker of lightning. We were going to have a storm. “Good,” I said out loud, “it’ll clear the air.” If I wasn’t going to take deliberate steps, I’d have to be sure of my self-control so I wouldn’t say something by accident. I paced the terrace a couple of times till I felt I was ready to go back in, noting with a faint surprise that I was wobbling slightly.

The waiter must have been around again: there was a fresh gin-and-tonic in my place. Peter was deep in a conversation with Len and scarcely acknowledged my return. Ainsley sat silent, her eyes lowered, jiggling her ice cube around in her ginger-ale glass. I studied her latest version of herself, thinking that it was like one of the large plump dolls in the stores at Christmas-time, with washable rubber-smooth skin and glassy eyes and gleaming artificial hair. Pink and white.

I attuned myself to Peter’s voice; it sounded as though it was coming from a distance. He was telling Len a story, which seemed to be about hunting. I knew Peter used to go hunting, especially with his group of old friends, but he had never told me much about it. He had said once that they never killed anything but crows, groundhogs and other small vermin.

“So I let her off and Wham. One shot, right through the heart. The rest of them got away. I picked it up and Trigger said, ‘You know how to gut them, you just slit her down the belly and give her a good hard shake and all the guts’ll fall out.’ So I whipped out my knife, good knife, German steel, and slit the belly and took her by the hind legs and gave her one hell of a crack, like a whip you see, and the next thing you know there was blood and guts all over the place. All over me, what a mess, rabbit guts dangling from the trees, god the trees were red for yards…”

He paused to laugh. Len bared his teeth. The quality of Peter’s voice had changed; it was a voice I didn’t recognize. The sign saying TEMPERANCE flashed in my mind: I couldn’t let my perceptions about Peter be distorted by the effects of alcohol, I warned myself.

“God it was funny. Lucky thing Trigger and me had the old cameras along, we got some good shots of the whole mess. I’ve been meaning to ask you, in your business you must know quite a bit about cameras…” and they were off on a discussion of Japanese lenses.

Peter’s voice seemed to be getting louder and faster – the stream of words was impossible to follow, and my mind withdrew, concentrating instead on the picture of the scene in the forest. I saw it as though it was a slide projected on a screen in a dark room, the colours luminous, green, brown, blue for the sky, red. Peter stood with his back to me in a plaid shirt, his rifle slung on his shoulder. A group of friends, those friends whom I had never met, were gathered around him, their faces clearly visible in the sunlight that fell in shafts down through the anonymous trees, splashed with blood, the mouths wrenched with laughter. I couldn’t see the rabbit.

I leaned forward, my arms on the black tabletop. I wanted Peter to turn and talk to me, I wanted to hear his normal voice, but he wouldn’t; I studied the reflections of the other three as they lay and moved beneath the polished black surface as in a pool of water; they were all chin and no eyes, except for Ainsley’s eyes, their gaze resting gently on her glass. After a while I noticed with mild curiosity that a large drop of something wet had materialized on the table near my hand. I poked it with my finger and smudged it around a little before I realized with horror that it was a tear. I must be crying then! Something inside me started to dash about in dithering mazes of panic, as though I had swallowed a tadpole. I was going to break down and make a scene, and I couldn’t.