Margaret Atwood - The Edible Woman

She wadded Marian into her chair, which was lumpy with garments in progressive stages of dirtiness, and tucked a towel around her neck. “I’ll do your nails first so they can be drying,” she said, adding while she began to file them, “looks like you’ve been biting them.” When the nails had been painted a shimmering off-white and Marian was holding her hands carefully in the air, she went to work on Marian’s face, using mixtures and instruments from the jumble of beauty aids that covered her dressing table.

During the rest of the procedure, while strange things were being done to her skin, then to each eye and each eyebrow, Marian sat passively, marvelling at the professional efficiency with which Ainsley was manipulating her features. It reminded her of the mothers backstage at public-school plays, making up their precocious daughters. She had only a fleeting thought about germs.

Finally Ainsley took a lipstick brush and painted the mouth with several coats of glossy finish. “There,” she said, holding a hand-mirror so that Marian could see herself. “That’s better. But be careful till the eyelash glue is dry.”

Marian stared into the Egyptian-lidded and outlined and thickly-fringed eyes of a person she had never seen before. She was afraid even to blink, for fear that this applied face would crack and flake with the strain. “Thank you,” she said doubtfully.

“Now smile,” said Ainsley.

Marian smiled.

Ainsley frowned. “Not like that ,” she said. “You’ve got to throw yourself into it more. Sort of droop your eyelids.”

Marian was embarrassed: she didn’t know how. She was experimenting, looking in the mirror, trying to find out which particular set of muscles would produce the desired effect, and had just succeeded in getting an approximate droop that still however had a suggestion of squint in it, when they heard footsteps ascending the stairs; and a moment later the lady down below stood in the doorway, breathing heavily.

Marian removed the towel from her neck and stood up. Now that she had got her eyelids drooped she could not immediately get them undrooped again, back to their usual capable and level width. It was going to be impossible in this red dress and this face to behave with the ordinary matter-of-fact politeness that the situation was going to require.

The lady down below gasped a little when she saw Marian’s new ensemble – bare arms and barish dress and well-covered face – but her real target was Ainsley, who stood bare-footed in her slip with one eye black-ringed and her auburn hair tendrilling over her shoulders.

“Miss Tewce,” the lady down below began. She was still wearing her tea dress and her pearls: she was going to attempt dignity. “I have waited until I am perfectly calm to speak to you. I don’t want any unpleasantness, I’ve always tried to avoid scenes and unpleasantness, but now I’m afraid you’ll have to go.” She was not at all calm: her voice was trembling. Marian noticed that she was clenching a lace handkerchief in one hand. “The drinking was bad enough, I know all those bottles were yours, I’m sure Miss MacAlpin never drank, not more than one should” – her eyes flicked again over Marian’s dress; her faith was somewhat shaken, but she let the comment pass – “though at least you were fairly discreet about all the liquor you were carrying into this house; and I couldn’t say anything about the untidiness and disorder, I’m a tolerant person and what a person does in their own living quarters has always been entirely their own business as far as I’m concerned. And I turned the other way when that young man as I’m perfectly aware, don’t try to lie to me, was here overnight, I even went out the next morning to avoid unpleasantness. At least the child didn’t know. But to make it so public” – she was shrilling now, in a vibrant accusing voice – “dragging your disreputable, drunken friends out into the open, where people can see them… and it’s such a bad example for the child…”

Ainsley glared at her; the black-rimmed eye flashed. “So,” she said in an equally accusing voice, tossing back her hair and planting her bare feet further apart on the floor, “I’ve always suspected you of being a hypocrite and now I know. You’re a bourgeois fraud, you have no real convictions at all, you’re just worried about what the neighbours will say. Your precious reputation. Well, I consider that kind of thing immoral. I’d like you to know that I’m going to have a child too, and I certainly wouldn’t choose to bring him up in this house – you’d teach him dishonesty. You’d be a bad example, and let me tell you that you’re by far the most anti-Creative-Life-Force person I’ve ever met. I will be most pleased to move and the sooner the better; I don’t want you exerting any negative pre-natal influences.”

The lady down below had turned quite pale. “Oh,” she said faintly, clutching at her pearls. “A baby! Oh, oh, oh!” She turned, emitting small cries of outrage and dismay, and tottered away down the stairs.

“I guess you’ll have to move,” said Marian. She felt safely remote from this fresh complication. She was leaving for home the next day anyway; and now that the lady down below had finally forced a confrontation she couldn’t imagine why she had ever been even slightly afraid of her. She had been so easily deflated.

“Yes, of course,” Ainsley said calmly, and sat down and began to outline her other eye.

Downstairs the doorbell rang.

“That must be Peter,” Marian said, “already.” She had no idea it was so late. “I’m supposed to go over with him and help get things ready – I wish we could give you a ride, but I don’t think we’ll be able to wait.”

“That’s okay,” said Ainsley, drawing a long gracefully curved artistic eyebrow on her forehead in the place where hers ought to have been. “I’ll come on later. I’ve got some things to do anyway. If it’s too cold for the baby I can always take a taxi, it isn’t that far.”

Marian went into the kitchen, where she had left her coat. I really should have eaten something, she said to herself, it’s bad to drink on an empty stomach. She could hear Peter coming up the stairs. She took another vitamin pill. They were brown, oval shaped, with pointed ends: like hard-cased brown seeds. I wonder what they grind up to put into these things, she thought as she swallowed.

Peter unlocked the glass door with his key and fixed the latch so that the door would remain open for the guests. Then they stepped into the lobby and walked together across the wide tiled floor towards the staircase. The elevator was not yet in working order, though Peter said it would be by the end of next week. The service elevator was running but the workmen kept it locked.

The apartment building was almost finished. Each time Marian had come there she had been able to notice a minor alteration. Gradually the clutter of raw materials, pipes and rough boards and cement blocks, had disappeared, transmuted by an invisible process of digestion and assimilation into the shining skins that enclosed the space through which they were moving. The walls and the line of square supporting pillars had been painted a deep orange-pink; the lighting had been installed, and was blazing now at its full cold strength, since Peter had turned all the lobby switches on for his party. The floor-length mirrors on the pillars were new since the last time she had been there; they made the lobby seem larger, much longer than it really was. But the carpets, the furniture (imitation-leather sofas, she predicted) and the inevitable broad-leaved philodendrons twining around pieces of driftwood had not yet arrived. They would be the final rich layer, and would add a touch of softness, however synthetic, to this corridor of hard light and brittle surfaces.