through high school and college that I was going to marry someone eventually and have children, everyone does. Either two or four, three is a bad number and I don’t approve of only children, they get spoiled too easily. I’ve never been silly about marriage the way Ainsley is. She’s against it on principle, and life isn’t run by principles but by adjustments. As Peter says, you can’t continue to run around indefinitely; people who aren’t married get funny in middle age, embittered or addled or something, I’ve seen enough of them around the office to realize that. But although I’m sure it was in the back of my mind I hadn’t consciously expected it to happen so soon or quite the way it did. Of course I was more involved with Peter all along than I wanted to admit.
And there’s no reason why our marriage should turn out like Clara’s. Those two aren’t practical enough, they have no sense at all of how to manage, how to run a well-organized marriage. So much of it is a matter of elementary mechanical detail, such as furniture and meals and keeping things in order. But Peter and I should be able to set up a very reasonable arrangement. Though of course we still have a lot of the details to work out. Peter is an ideal choice when you come to think of it. He’s attractive and he’s bound to be successful, and also he’s neat, which is a major point when you’re going to be living with someone.
I can imagine the expressions on their faces at the office when they hear. But I can’t tell them yet, I’ll have to keep my job there for a while longer. Till Peter is finished articling we’ll need the money. We’ll probably have to live in an apartment at first, but later we can have a real house, a permanent place; it will be worth the trouble to keep clean.
Meanwhile I should be doing something constructive instead of sitting around like this. First I should revise the beer questionnaire and make out a report on my findings so I can type it up first thing tomorrow and get it out of the way.
Then perhaps I’ll wash my hair. And my room needs a general clean-up. I should go through the dresser drawers and throw out whatever has accumulated in them, and there are some dresses hanging in the closet I don’t wear enough to keep. I’ll give them to the Salvation Army. Also a lot of costume jewellery, the kind you get from relatives at Christmas: imitation gold pins in the shapes of poodle dogs and bunches of flowers with pieces of cut glass for petals and eyes. There’s a cardboard box full of books, textbooks mostly, and letters from home I know I’ll never look at again, and a couple of ancient dolls I’ve kept for sentimental reasons. The older doll has a cloth body stuffed with sawdust (I know that because I once performed an operation on it with a pair of nail scissors) and hands, feet and head made of a hard woody material. The fingers and toes have been almost chewed off; the hair is black and short, a few frizzy wisps attached to a piece of netting which is coming unglued from the skull. The face is almost eroded but still has its open mouth with the red felt tongue inside and two china teeth, its chief fascination as I remember. It’s dressed in a strip of old sheet. I used to leave food in front of it overnight and was always disappointed when it wasn’t gone in the morning. The other doll is newer and has long washable hair and a rubbery skin. I asked for her one Christmas because you could give her baths. Neither of them is very attractive any longer; I might as well throw them out with the rest of the junk.
I still can’t quite fit in the man at the laundromat or account for my own behaviour. Maybe it was a kind of lapse, a blank in the ego, like amnesia. But there’s little chance of my ever running into him again – I don’t even know his name – and anyway he has nothing at all to do with Peter.
After I finish cleaning my room I should write a letter home. They will all be pleased, this is surely what they’ve been waiting for. They’ll want us to come down for the weekend as soon as possible. I’ve never met Peter’s parents either.
In a minute I’ll get off the bed and walk through the pool of sunshine on the floor. I can’t let my whole afternoon dribble away, relaxing though it is to sit in this quiet room gazing up at the empty ceiling with my back against the cool wall, dangling my feet over the edge of the bed. It’s almost like being on a rubber raft, drifting, looking up into a clear sky.
I must get organized. I have a lot to do.
PART TWO
13
Marian was sitting listlessly at her desk. She was doodling on the pad for telephone messages. She drew an arrow with many intricate feathers, then a cross-hatch of intersecting lines. She was supposed to be working on a questionnaire, something about stainless-steel razor blades; she had got as far as the question that directed the interviewer to ask the victim for the used razor blade currently in his razor and offer him a new one in exchange. This had stalled her. She was thinking now that it must be an elaborate plot: the president of the razor-blade company had possessed a miraculous razor blade which had been in his family for generations and which not only renewed its sharpness every time it was used but also granted the shaver anything he wished for after every thirteenth shave… the president, however, had not guarded his treasure carefully enough. One day he had forgotten to replace it in its velvet-lined case and had left it lying around in the bathroom, and one of the maids, trying to be useful, had… (the story was unclear at this point, but it was very complicated. The razor blade had somehow managed to make its way into a store, a second-hand store where it had been bought by an unsuspecting customer and…). The president had that very day needed some money in a hurry. He had shaved frantically every three hours to make up the number 13, scraping his face raw; what was his surprise and dismay when… So he had found out what had happened, commanded the offending maid to be tossed into a pit full of used razor blades, and had covered the city with a dragnet of middle-aged female private detectives posing as Seymour Surveys interviewers, their eagle-eyes trained to ferret out everyone, male or female, with the least trace of a beard, crying “New Razor Blades For Old,” in a desperate attempt to recover the priceless lost…
Marian sighed, drew a small spider in one corner of the maze of lines, and turned to her typewriter. She typed the section intact from the rough questionnaire – “We would like to examine the condition of your razor blade. Would you give me the razor blade that is
Around her the office was in a turmoil. It was always either in a turmoil or in a dead flat calm, and on the whole she preferred the turmoils. She could get away with doing less, everyone else was in such a state, skittering about and screeching, that they didn’t have time to lounge around and peer over her shoulder and wonder what was taking her so long or what exactly she was doing anyway. She used to feel a sense of participation in the turmoils themselves; once or twice she had even allowed herself to become frenzied in sympathy, and had been surprised at how much fun it was; but ever since she had become engaged and had known she wasn’t going to be there forever (they’d talked about it, Peter said of course she could keep working after the wedding if she wanted to, for a while at least, though she didn’t need to financially – he considered it unfair to marry, he said, if you couldn’t afford to support your wife, but she had decided against it), she had been able to lean back and view them all with detachment. In fact, she found that she couldn’t become involved even when she wanted to. They had taken lately to complimenting her on her calmness in emergencies. “Well, thank goodness for Marian,” they’d say, as they soothed themselves with cups of tea and patted their overwrought foreheads with pieces of kleenex, breathing hard. “
At the moment they were running around, she thought, like a herd of armadillos at the zoo. Armadillos recalled briefly to her mind the man in the laundromat, who had never reappeared, though she had been to the laundromat several times since and had always half-expected to see him there. But that wasn’t surprising, he was obviously unstable; he had probably vanished down some drain or other a long time ago…
She watched Emmy as she darted to the filing cabinet and rummaged feverishly among the files. This time it was the coast-to-coast sanitary-napkin survey: something had gone embarrassingly wrong in the West. It was supposed to have been what they called a “three-wave” survey: the first wave surging out through the mails, locating and bringing back on its returning crest a shoal of eligible and willing answerers, and the second and third waves following up with interviews of greater depth, done in person. And, Marian hoped, behind closed doors. The
