Margaret Atwood - The Edible Woman

I welcomed the coffee break at ten-thirty. I knew I ought to have skipped it and stayed to expiate my morning’s lateness, but I needed the distraction.

I go for coffee with the only three people in the department who are almost my own age. Sometimes Ainsley walks over from her office to join us, when she is tired of the other toothbrush-testers. Not that she’s especially fond of the three from my office, whom she calls collectively the office virgins. They aren’t really very much alike, except that they are all artificial blondes – Emmy, the typist, whisk-tinted and straggly; Lucy, who has a kind of public-relations job, platinum and elegantly coiffured, and Millie, Mrs. Bogue’s Australian assistant, brassy from the sun and cropped – and, as they have confessed at various times over coffee grounds and the gnawed crusts of toasted Danishes, all virgins – Millie from a solid girl-guide practicality (“I think in the long run it’s better to wait until you’re married, don’t you? Less bother.”), Lucy from social quailing (“What would people say ?”), which seems to be rooted in a conviction that all bedrooms are wired for sound, with society gathered at the other end tuning its earphones; and Emmy, who is the office hypochondriac, from the belief that it would make her sick, which it probably would. They are all interested in travelling: Millie has lived in England, Lucy has been twice to New York, and Emmy wants to go to Florida. After they have travelled enough they would like to get married and settle down.

“Did you hear the laxative survey in Quebec has been cancelled?” Millie said when we were seated at our usual table at the wretched, but closest, restaurant across the street. “Great big job it was going to be, too – a product test in their own home and thirty-two pages of questions.” Millie always gets the news first.

“Well I must say that’s a good thing,” Emmy sniffed. “I don’t see how they could ask anybody thirty-two pages about that .” She went back to peeling the nail polish off her thumbnail. Emmy always looks as though she is coming unravelled. Stray threads trail from her hems, her lipstick sloughs off in dry scales, she sheds wispy blonde hairs and flakes of scalp on her shoulders and back; everywhere she goes she leaves a trail of assorted shreds.

I saw Ainsley come in and waved to her. She squeezed into the booth, saying “Hi” all round, then pinned up a strand of hair that had come down. The office virgins responded, but without marked enthusiasm.

“They’ve done it before,” Millie said. She’s been at the company longer than any of us. “And it works. They figure anybody you could take past page three would be a sort of laxative addict, if you see what I mean, and they’d go right on through.”

“Done what before?” said Ainsley.

“What do you want to bet she doesn’t wipe the table?” Lucy said, loudly enough so the waitress would overhear. She carries on a running battle with the waitress, who wears Woolworth earrings and a sullen scowl and is blatantly not an office virgin.

“The laxative study in Quebec,” I said privately to Ainsley.

The waitress arrived, wiped the table savagely, and took our orders. Lucy made an issue of the toasted Danish – she definitely wanted one without raisins this time. “Last time she brought me one with raisins,” she informed us, “and I told her I just couldn’t stand them. I’ve never been able to stand raisins. Ugh.”

“Why only Quebec?” Ainsley said, breathing smoke out through her nostrils. “Is there some psychological reason?” Ainsley majored in psychology at college.

“Gosh, I don’t know,” said Millie, “I guess people are just more constipated there. Don’t they eat a lot of potatoes?”

“Would potatoes make you that constipated?” asked Emmy, leaning forward across the table. She pushed several straws of hair back from her forehead and a cloud of tiny motes detached themselves from her and settled gently down through the air.

“It can’t be only the potatoes,” Ainsley pronounced. “It must be their collective guilt complex. Or maybe the strain of the language problem; they must be horribly repressed.”

The others looked at her with hostility: I could tell they thought she was showing off. “It’s awfully hot out today,” said Millie, “the office is like a furnace.”

“Anything happening at your office?” I asked Ainsley, to break the tension.

Ainsley ground out her cigarette. “Oh yes, we’ve had quite a bit of excitement,” she said. “Some woman tried to bump off her husband by short-circuiting his electric toothbrush, and one of our boys has to be at the trial as a witness; testify that the thing couldn’t possibly short-circuit under normal circumstances. He wants me to go along as a sort of special assistant, but he’s such a bore. I can tell he’d be rotten in bed.”

I suspected Ainsley of making this story up, but her eyes were at their bluest and roundest. The office virgins squirmed. Ainsley has an offhand way of alluding to the various men in her life that makes them uncomfortable.

Luckily our orders arrived. “That bitch brought me one with raisins again,” Lucy wailed, and began picking them out with her long perfectly shaped iridescent fingernails and piling them at the side of her plate.

As we were walking back to the office I complained to Millie about the Pension Plan. “I didn’t realize it was obligatory,” I said. “I don’t see why I should have to pay into their Pension Plan and have all those old crones like Mrs. Grot retire and feed off my salary.”

“Oh yes, it bothered me too at first,” Millie said without interest. “You’ll get over it. Gosh, I hope they’ve fixed the air conditioning.”

I had returned from lunch and was licking and stamping envelopes for the coast-to-coast instant-pudding-sauce study, behind schedule because someone in mimeo had run one of the question sheets backwards, when Mrs. Bogue came out of her cubicle.

“Marian,” she said with a sigh of resignation, “I’m afraid Mrs. Dodge in Kamloops will have to be removed. She’s pregnant.” Mrs. Bogue frowned slightly: she regards pregnancy as an act of disloyalty to the company.

“That’s too bad,” I said. The huge wall map of the country, sprinkled with red thumbtacks like measles, is directly above my desk, which means that the subtraction and addition of interviewers seems to have become part of my job. I climbed up on the desk, located Kamloops, and took out the thumbtack with the paper flag marked DODGE.

“While you’re up there,” Mrs. Bogue said, “could you just take off Mrs. Ellis in Blind River? I hope it’s only temporary, she’s always done good work, but she writes that some lady chased her out of the house with a meat cleaver and she fell on the steps and broke her leg. Oh, and add this new one – a Mrs. Gauthier in Charlottetown. I certainly hope she’s better than the last one there; Charlottetown is always so difficult.”

When I had climbed down she smiled at me pleasantly, which put me on guard. Mrs. Bogue has a friendly, almost cosy manner that equips her perfectly for dealing with the interviewers, and she is at her most genial when she wants something. “Marian,” she said, “we have a little problem. We’re running a beer study next week – you know which one, it’s the telephone-thing one – and they’ve decided upstairs that we need to do a pre-test this weekend. They’re worried about the questionnaire. Now, we could get Mrs. Pilcher, she’s a dependable interviewer, but it is the long weekend and we don’t like to ask her. You’re going to be in town, aren’t you?”

“Does it have to be this weekend?” I asked, somewhat pointlessly.