Margaret Atwood - The Edible Woman

“You maniac!” I wailed, when I had ricocheted off the glove-compartment and realized I wasn’t dead. “You’ll get us all killed!” I must have been thinking of myself as plural.

Peter rolled down the window and stuck his head out. Then he began to laugh. “I’ve trimmed their hedge a bit for them,” he said. He stepped on the gas. The wheels spun for an instant, churning up the mud of the lawn and leaving (as I later saw) two deep gouges, and with a grinding of gears we moved up over the edge of the lawn and back onto the road.

I was trembling now from a combination of fright, cold, and fury. “First you drag me into your car,” I chittered, “and brow-beat me because of your own feelings of guilt, and then you try to kill me!”

Peter was still laughing. His head was soaking wet, even from that brief exposure to the rain, and the hair was plastered down on his head, the water trickling from it over his face. “They’re going to see an alteration in their landscape gardening when they get up in the morning,” he chuckled. He seemed to find wilfully ruining other people’s property immensely funny.

“You seem to find wilfully ruining other people’s property immensely funny,” I said, with sarcasm.

“Oh, don’t be such a killjoy,” he replied pleasantly. His satisfaction with what he considered a forceful display of muscle was obvious. It irritated me that he should appropriate as his own the credit due to the back wheels of his car.

“Peter, why can’t you be serious ? You’re just an overgrown adolescent.”

This he chose to disregard.

The car stopped jerkily. “Here we are,” he said.

I took hold of the door handle, intending, I think, to make a final unanswerable remark and dash for the house; but he put his hand on my arm. “Better wait until it lets up a bit.”

He turned the ignition key and the heartbeats of the windshield-wipers stopped. We sat silently, listening to the storm. It must have been right overhead; the lightning was dazzling and continuous, and each probing jagged fork was followed almost at once by a rending crash, like the trees of a whole forest splitting and falling. In the intervals of darkness we heard the rain pounding against the car; water was coming through in a fine spray around the edges of the closed windows.

“It’s a good thing I didn’t let you walk home,” Peter said in the tone of a man who has made a firm and proper decision. I could only agree.

During a long flickering moment of light I turned and saw him watching me, his face strangely shadowed, his eyes gleaming like an animal’s in the beam from a car headlight. His stare was intent, faintly ominous. Then he leaned towards me and said, “You’ve got some fluff. Hold still.” His hands fumbled against my head: he was awkwardly but with gentleness untangling a piece of dust that was caught in my hair.

I suddenly felt limp as a damp kleenex. I leaned my forehead against his and closed my eyes. His skin was cold and wet and his breath smelled of cognac.

“Open your eyes,” he said. I did: we still had our foreheads pressed together, and I found myself at the next bright instant gazing into a multitude of eyes.

“You’ve got eight eyes,” I said softly. We both laughed and he pulled me against him and kissed me. I put my arms around his back.

We rested quietly like that for some time in the centre of the storm. I was conscious only that I was very tired and that my body would not stop shivering. “I don’t know what I was doing tonight,” I murmured. He stroked my hair, forgiving, understanding, a little patronizing.

“Marian.” I could feel his neck swallow. I couldn’t tell now whether it was his body or my own that was shuddering; he tightened his arms around me. “How do you think we’d get on as… how do you think we’d be, married?”

I drew back from him.

A tremendous electric blue flash, very near, illuminated the inside of the car. As we stared at each other in that brief light I could see myself, small and oval, mirrored in his eyes.

When I woke up on Sunday morning – it was closer to Sunday afternoon – my mind was at first as empty as though someone had scooped out the inside of my skull like a cantaloupe and left me only the rind to think with. I looked around the room, scarcely recognizing it as a place I had ever been before. My clothes were scattered over the floor and draped and crumpled on the chairback like fragments left over from the explosion of some life-sized female scarecrow, and the inside of my mouth felt like a piece of cotton-wool stuffing. I got up and wavered out to the kitchen.

Clear sunshine and fresh air were shimmering in through the open kitchen window. Ainsley was up before me. She was leaning forward, concentrating on something that was spread out in front of her, her legs drawn up and tucked under her on the chair, her hair cascading over her shoulders. From the back she looked like a mermaid perched on a rock: a mermaid in a grubby green terry-cloth robe. Around her on a tabletop pebbled with crumbs lay the remnants of her breakfast – a limp starfish of a banana peel, some bits of shell, and brown crusts of toast beached here and there, random as driftwood.

I went to the refrigerator and got out the tomato juice. “Hi,” I said to Ainsley’s back. I was wondering whether I could face an egg.

She turned around. “Well,” she said.

“Did you get home okay?” I asked. “That was quite a storm.” I poured myself a large glassful of tomato juice and drank it blood-thirstily.

“Of course,” she said. “I made him call a taxi. I got home just before the storm broke and had a cigarette and a double scotch and went straight to bed; god, I was absolutely exhausted. Just sitting still like that takes a lot out of you, and then after you’d gone I didn’t know how I was going to get away. It was like escaping from a giant squid, but I did it, mostly by acting dumb and scared. That’s very necessary at this stage, you know.”

I looked into the saucepan that was sitting, still hot, on one of the burners. “You through with the egg water?” I switched the stove on.

“Well, what about you? I was quite worried, I thought maybe you were really drunk or something; if you don’t mind my saying so you were behaving like a real idiot.”

“We got engaged,” I said, a little reluctantly. I knew she would disapprove. I manoeuvred the egg into the saucepan; it cracked immediately. It was straight out of the refrigerator and too cold.

Ainsley lifted her barely nubile eyebrows; she didn’t seem surprised. “Well, if I were you I’d get married in the States, it’ll be so much easier to get a divorce when you need one. I mean, you don’t really know him, do you? But at least,” she continued more cheerfully, “Peter will soon be making enough money so you can live separately when you have a baby, even if you don’t get a divorce. But I hope you aren’t getting married right away. I don’t think you know what you’re doing.”

“Subconsciously,” I said, “I probably wanted to marry Peter all along.” That silenced her. It was like invoking a deity.

I inspected my egg, which was sending out a white semi-congealed feeler like an exploring oyster. It’s probably done, I thought, and fished it out. I turned on the coffee and cleared a space for myself on the oilcloth. Now I could see what Ainsley was busy with. She had taken the calendar down from the kitchen wall – it had a picture of a little girl in an old-fashioned dress sitting on a swing with a basket of cherries and a white puppy – I get one every year from a third cousin who runs a service station back home – and was making cryptic marks on it with a pencil.