Margaret Atwood - The Edible Woman

I had begun to peck languidly at my damp typewriter when Mrs. Withers, the dietician, marched in through the back door, drew up, and scanned the room. She wore her usual Betty Grable hairdo and open-toed pumps, and her shoulders had an aura of shoulder pads even in a sleeveless dress. “Ah, Marian,” she said, “you’re just in time. I need another pre-test taster for the canned rice pudding study, and none of the ladies seem very hungry this morning.”

She wheeled and headed briskly for the kitchen. There is something unwiltable about dieticians. I unstuck myself from my chair, feeling like a volunteer singled out from the ranks; but I reminded myself that my stomach could use the extra breakfast.

In the tiny immaculate kitchen she explained her problem while spooning equal portions of canned rice pudding into three glass bowls. “You work on questionnaires, Marian, maybe you can help us. We can’t decide whether to have them taste all three flavours at the same meal, or each flavour separately at subsequent meals. Or perhaps we could have them taste in pairs – say, Vanilla and Orange at one meal, and Vanilla and Caramel at another. Of course we want to get as unbiased a sampling as possible, and so much depends on what else has been served – the colours of the vegetables for instance, and the tablecloth.”

I sampled the Vanilla.

“How would you rate the colour on that?” she asked anxiously, pencil poised. “Natural, Somewhat Artificial, or Definitely Unnatural?”

“Have you thought about putting raisins in it?” I said, turning to the Caramel. I didn’t wish to offend her.

“Raisins are too risky,” she said. “Many don’t like them.”

I set down the Caramel and tried the Orange. “Are you going to have them serve it hot?” I asked. “Or maybe with cream?”

“Well, it’s intended primarily for the time-saver market,” she said. “They naturally would want to serve it cold. They can add cream if they like, later, I mean we’ve nothing really against it though it’s not nutritionally necessary, it’s fortified with vitamins already, but right now we want a pure taste test.”

“I think subsequent meals would be best,” I said.

“If we could only do it in the middle of the afternoon. But we need a family reaction…” She tapped her pencil thoughtfully on the edge of the stainless-steel sink.

“Yes, well,” I said, “I’d better be getting back.” Deciding for them what they wanted to know wasn’t part of my job.

Sometimes I wonder just which things are part of my job, especially when I find myself calling up garage mechanics to ask them about their pistons and gaskets or handing out pretzels to suspicious old ladies on street corners. I know what Seymour Surveys hired me as – I’m supposed to spend my time revising the questionnaires, turning the convoluted and overly-subtle prose of the psychologists who write them into simple questions which can be understood by the people who ask them as well as the people who answer them. A question like “In what percentile would you place the visual impact value?” is not useful. When I got the job after graduation I considered myself lucky – it was better than many – but after four months its limits are still vaguely defined.

At times I’m certain I’m being groomed for something higher up, but as I have only hazy notions of the organizational structure of Seymour Surveys I can’t imagine what. The company is layered like an ice-cream sandwich, with three floors: the upper crust, the lower crust, and our department, the gooey layer in the middle. On the floor above are the executives and the psychologists – referred to as the men upstairs, since they are all men – who arrange things with the clients; I’ve caught glimpses of their offices, which have carpets and expensive furniture and silk-screen reprints of Group of Seven paintings on the walls. Below us are the machines – mimeo machines, I.B.M. machines for counting and sorting and tabulating the information; I’ve been down there too, into that factory-like clatter where the operatives seem frayed and overworked and have ink on their fingers. Our department is the link between the two: we are supposed to take care of the human element, the interviewers themselves. As market research is a sort of cottage industry, like a hand-knit sock company, these are all housewives working in their spare time and paid by the piece. They don’t make much, but they like to get out of the house. Those who answer the questions don’t get paid at all; I often wonder why they do it. Perhaps it’s the come-on blurb in which they’re told they can help to improve the products they use right in their own homes, something like a scientist. Or maybe they like to have someone to talk to. But I suppose most people are flattered by having their opinions asked.

Because our department deals primarily with housewives, everyone in it, except the unfortunate office-boy, is female. We are spread out in a large institutional-green room with an opaque glassed cubicle at one end for Mrs. Bogue, the head of the department, and a number of wooden tables at the other end for the motherly-looking women who sit deciphering the interviewers’ handwriting and making crosses and checkmarks on the completed questionnaires with coloured crayons, looking with their scissors and glue and stacks of paper like a superannuated kindergarten class. The rest of us in the department sit at miscellaneous desks in the space between. We have a comfortable chintz-curtained lunchroom for those who bring paper bags, and a tea and coffee machine, though some of the ladies have their own teapots; we also have a pink washroom with a sign over the mirrors asking us not to leave our hairs or tea leaves in the sink.

What, then, could I expect to turn into at Seymour Surveys? I couldn’t become one of the men upstairs; I couldn’t become a machine person or one of the questionnaire-marking ladies, as that would be a step down. I might conceivably turn into Mrs. Bogue or her assistant, but as far as I could see that would take a long time, and I wasn’t sure I would like it anyway.

I was just finishing the scouring-pad questionnaire, a rush job, when Mrs. Grot of Accounting came through the door. Her business was with Mrs. Bogue, but on her way out she stopped at my desk. She’s a short tight woman with hair the colour of a metal refrigerator-tray.

“Well, Miss MacAlpin,” she grated, “you’ve been with us four months now, and that means you’re eligible for the Pension Plan.”

“Pension Plan?” I had been told about the Pension Plan when I joined the company but I had forgotten about it. “Isn’t it too soon for me to join the Pension Plan? I mean – don’t you think I’m too young?”

“Well, it’s just as well to start early, isn’t it,” Mrs. Grot said. Her eyes behind their rimless spectacles were glittering: she would relish the chance of making yet another deduction from my paycheque.

“I don’t think I’d like to join the Pension Plan,” I said. “Thank you anyway.”

“Yes, well, but it’s obligatory, you see,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice.

“Obligatory? You mean even if I don’t want it?”

“Yes, you see if nobody paid into it, nobody would be able to get anything out of it, would they? Now I’ve brought the necessary documents; all you have to do is sign here.”

I signed, but after Mrs. Grot had left I was suddenly quite depressed; it bothered me more than it should have. It wasn’t only the feeling of being subject to rules I had no interest in and no part in making: you get adjusted to that at school. It was a kind of superstitious panic about the fact that I had actually signed my name, had put my signature to a magic document which seemed to bind me to a future so far ahead I couldn’t think about it. Somewhere in front of me a self was waiting, pre-formed, a self who had worked during innumerable years for Seymour Surveys and was now receiving her reward. A pension. I foresaw a bleak room with a plug-in electric heater. Perhaps I would have a hearing aid, like one of my great-aunts who had never married. I would talk to myself; children would throw snowballs at me. I told myself not to be silly, the world would probably blow up between now and then; I reminded myself I could walk out of there the next day and get a different job if I wanted to, but that didn’t help. I thought of my signature going into a file and the file going into a cabinet and the cabinet being shut away in a vault somewhere and locked.