Margaret Atwood - The Edible Woman

“I’m so glad you could all come,” Marian said. At that moment she was not at all glad. They were so excited. They were each expecting a version of Peter to walk miraculously through the door, drop to one knee and propose. What would they do when confronted with Fish and Trevor, not to mention Duncan? Moreover, what would Fish and Trevor, not to mention Duncan, do when confronted with them ? She pictured two trios of screams and a mass exodus, one set through the door and one through the window. What have I done now? she thought. But she had almost ceased to believe in the existence of the three graduate students; they were becoming more and more improbable as the evening and the scotch wore on. Maybe they would just never show up.

The soap-men and their wives were filtering in. Peter had put a record on the hi-fi and the room was noisier and more crowded. Every time there was a knock on the door the three office virgins swivelled their heads towards the entrance; and every time they saw another successful and glittering wife step into the room with her sleek husband, they turned back, a little more frantic, to their drinks and their interchange of strained comments. Emmy was fiddling with one of her rhinestone earrings. Millie picked at a loose sequin on her evening-bag.

Marian, smiling and efficient, led each wife to the bedroom. The pile of coats grew higher. Peter got everybody drinks and had a number of them himself. The peanuts and potato chips and other things were circulating from hand to hand, from hand to mouth. Already the group in the living room was beginning to divide itself into the standard territories, wives on the sofa side of the room, men on the hi-fi side, an invisible no-man’s-land between. The office virgins had got stuck on the wrong side: they listened unhappily to the wives. Marian felt another pang of remorse. But she couldn’t attend to them right now, she thought: she was passing the pickled mushrooms. She wondered what was keeping Ainsley.

The door opened again, and Clara and Joe walked into the room. Behind them was Leonard Slank. Marian’s nerves twitched, and one of the cocktail mushrooms fell from the plate she was carrying, bounced along the floor, and disappeared under the hi-fi set. She set down the plate. Peter was already greeting them, shaking Len’s hand effusively. His voice was getting louder with every drink. “How the hell are you, good to see you here, god I’ve been meaning to call you up,” he was saying. Len responded with a lurch and a glazed stare.

Marian clamped her hand firmly on Clara’s coatsleeve and hustled her into the bedroom. “What’s he doing here?” she asked, rather ungraciously.

Clara took off her coat. “I hope you don’t mind us bringing him, I didn’t think you would because after all you’re old friends, but really I thought we’d better, we didn’t want him going off somewhere alone. As you can see, he’s in piss-poor shape. He turned up just after the babysitter got there and he looked really awful, he’d obviously had a lot. He told us an incoherent story about some woman he’s been having trouble with, it sounded quite serious, and he said he was afraid to go back to the apartment, I don’t know why, what could anybody do to him? So, poor thing, we’re going to keep him up in that back room on the second floor. It’s Arthur’s room really, but I’m sure Len won’t mind sharing. We both feel so sorry for him, what he needs is some nice home-loving type who’ll take care of him, he doesn’t seem to be able to cope at all…”

“Did he say who she was?” Marian asked quickly.

“Why no,” Clara said, raising her eyebrows, “he doesn’t usually tell the names.”

“Let me get you a drink,” Marian said. She was feeling like another one herself. Of course Clara and Joe couldn’t have known who the woman was or they never would have brought Len with them. She was surprised he had even come; he must have known there was a good chance Ainsley would be at the party, but probably by this time he was too far gone to care. What worried her most was the effect his presence might have on Ainsley. It might upset her enough to make her do something unstable.

When they reached the living room, Marian saw that Leonard had been spotted at once by the office virgins as single and available. They had him backed against the wall in the neuter area now, two of them on the sides cutting off flank escape and the third, in front. He had one of his hands pressed against the wall for balance; the other held a glass stein full of beer. While they talked he shifted his gaze continually from face to face as though he didn’t want to remain looking for too long at any one of them. His own face, which was the flat whitish-grey colour of uncooked pie crust and oddly bloated, expressed a combination of sodden incredulity, boredom, and alarm. But they seemed to have pried a few words out of him, because Marian heard Lucy exclaim, “Television! How exciting!” while the others giggled tensely. Leonard swallowed a desperate mouthful of beer.

Marian was passing the ripe olives when she saw Joe coming towards her from the men’s territory. “Hi,” he said to her. “I’m very glad you asked us here tonight. Clara has so few chances to get out of the house.”

Both of them turned their eyes towards Clara, who was over at the sofa side of the room, talking with one of the soap-wives.

“I worry about her a lot, you know,” Joe continued. “I think it’s a lot harder for her than for most other women; I think it’s harder for any woman who’s been to university. She gets the idea she has a mind, her professors pay attention to what she has to say, they treat her like a thinking human being; when she gets married, her core gets invaded…”

“Her what?” Marian asked.

“Her core. The centre of her personality, the thing she’s built up; her image of herself, if you like.”

“Oh. Yes,” said Marian.

“Her feminine role and her core are really in opposition, her feminine role demands passivity from her…”

Marian had a fleeting vision of a large globular pastry, decorated with whipped cream and maraschino cherries, floating suspended in the air above Joe’s head.

“So she allows her core to get taken over by the husband. And when the kids come, she wakes up one morning and discovers she doesn’t have anything left inside, she’s hollow, she doesn’t know who she is any more; her core has been destroyed.” He shook his head gently and sipped at his drink. “I can see it happening with my own female students. But it would be futile to warn them.”

Marian turned to look at Clara where she stood talking, dressed in simple beige, her long hair a delicate pear-pale yellow. She wondered whether Joe had ever told Clara her core had been destroyed; she thought of apples and worms. As she watched, Clara made an emphatic gesture with one of her hands and a soap-wife stepped back looking shocked.

“Of course it doesn’t help to realize all that,” Joe was saying. “It happens, whether you realize it or not. Maybe women shouldn’t be allowed to go to university at all; then they wouldn’t always be feeling later on that they’ve missed out on the life of the mind. For instance when I suggest to Clara that she should go out and do something about it, like taking a night course, she just gives me a funny look.”

Marian looked up at Joe with an affection the precise flavour of which was blurred by the drinks she had had. She thought of him shuffling about the house in his undershirt, meditating on the life of the mind and doing the dishes and tearing the stamps raggedly off the envelopes; she wondered what he did with the stamps after that. She wanted to reach out and touch him, reassure him, tell him Clara’s core hadn’t really been destroyed and everything would be all right; she wanted to give him something. She thrust forward the plate she was holding. “Have an olive,” she said.