The Edible Woman

whole business, especially some of the questions that were to be asked, had rather shocked her sense of fitness, though Lucy had pointed out over a coffee break that it was most proper these days, after all it was a respectable product, you could buy it in the supermarket and it had full-page advertisements in some of the best magazines, and wasn’t it nice they were getting it out in the open and not being so Victorian and repressed about it. Millie had said of course that was the enlightened view but these surveys were always a pain, not only did you have trouble with people at the doors but you couldn’t get the interviewers to do them anyway, lots of them were quite old fashioned, especially the ones in small towns, some of them even resigned if you asked them to do it (that was the worst of using housewives, they didn’t really need the money, they were always getting bored with it or fed up or pregnant and resigning and then you had to get new ones and train them up from scratch), the best thing was to send them out a form letter telling them how they must all do their best to better the lot of Womankind – an attempt to appeal, Marian reflected, to the embryonic noble nurse that is supposed to be curled, efficient and self-sacrificing, in the heart of every true woman.

This time something worse had happened. In the West, whoever had been in charge of selecting from the local phone books the names of the women who were to be hit by the first wave (who had been in charge out there? Mrs. Lietch in Foam River? Mrs. Hatcher in Watrous? No one could remember, and Emmy said they seemed to have misplaced the file) had not been overly meticulous. Instead of the expected flood of responses, only a mere trickle of filled-in questionnaires had been coming through the mail. Millie and Lucy were scrutinizing these now at the desk opposite Marian’s, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

“Well, some of them obviously went out to men,” Millie snorted. “Here’s one with ‘Tee Hee’ written on it, from a Mr. Leslie Andrewes.”

“What I can’t understand is the ones that come back from women with NO checked in all the boxes. What on earth do they use then?” said Lucy peevishly.

“Well this lady’s over eighty.”

“Here’s one who says she’s been pregnant for seven years straight.”

“Oh no, poor thing,” gasped Emmy, who was listening. “Why she’ll ruin her health.”

“I bet that dumb cluck Mrs. Lietch – or Mrs. Hatcher, whoever it was – sent them to Indian reservations again. I specifically told her not to. The lord knows what they use,” sniffed Lucy.

“Moss,” Millie said decisively. This wasn’t the first time something had gone wrong in the West. She counted once more through the stack of questionnaires. “We’re going to have to start it all over again and the client will be furious. All our quotas are thrown off and I hate to think what’ll happen to our deadlines.”

Marian looked at the clock. It was almost time for lunch. She drew a row of moons across her page: crescent moons, full moons, then crescent moons pointing the other way, then nothing: a black moon. For good measure she drew a star inside one of the crescents. She set her watch, the one Peter had given her for her birthday, though it was only two minutes off by the office clock, and wound it. She typed another question. She was aware of being hungry, and wondered whether her hunger had been produced by her knowledge of the time. She got out of her chair, spun it round a couple of times to raise the height, sat down again and typed another question; she was tired, tired, tired of being a manipulator of words. At last, unable to remain sitting in her chair at her desk in front of her typewriter a moment longer, she said “Let’s go have lunch now.”

“Well…” Millie hesitated, and looked at the clock. She was still semi-held by the illusion that there was something she could do about the mess.

“Yes, let’s,” said Lucy, “this is driving me bats, I’ve just got to get out of here.” She walked towards the coat rack, and Emmy followed her. When Millie saw the others putting on their coats she reluctantly abandoned the questionnaires.

On the street the wind was cold. They turned their collars up, holding the fronts of their coats together near the neck with gloved hands, threading two by two among the other lunchtime scurriers, their heels clicking and grating on the bare sidewalk: it had not yet snowed. They had further to walk than usual. Lucy had suggested that they go to a more expensive restaurant than the ones they normally frequented, and in the state of heightened metabolism created by the sanitary-napkin turmoil they had agreed.

“OOoo,” Emmy wailed as they leaned into the gritty wind. “In this dry weather I just don’t know what I’ll do. My skin’s just all drying up and flaking away.” When it rained she got terrible pains in her feet and when it was sunny she got eye-strain, headaches and freckles and dizzy spells. When the weather was neutral, grey and lukewarm, she got hot flashes and coughs.

“Cold cream’s the best,” Millie said. “My gran had dry skin too and that’s what she used.”

“But I’ve heard it gives you pimples,” Emmy said dubiously.

The restaurant was one with old-world English pretensions and stuffed leather chairs and Tudor beams. After a short wait they were led to a table by a black-silk hostess; they settled themselves and slipped off their coats. Marian noticed that Lucy was wearing a new dress, a stately dark-mauve laminated jersey with a chaste silver pin at the neckline. So that’s why she wanted to come here today, Marian thought.

Lucy’s long-lashed gaze was brushing over the other lunchers – stolid breadfaced businessmen most of them, gobbling their food and swilling a few drinks to get the interruption of lunch over with as soon and as numbly as possible so they could get back to the office and make some money and get that over with as soon as possible and get back through the rush-hour traffic to their homes and wives and dinners and to get those over with as soon as possible too. Lucy had mauve eyeshadow to match her dress, and lipstick with a pale mauve tinge. She was, as always, elegant. She had been lunching out expensively more and more in the last two months (though Marian wondered how she could afford it), trailing herself like a many-plumed fish lure with glass beads and three spinners and seventeen hooks through the likely-looking places, good restaurants and cocktail bars with their lush weed beds of potted philodendrons, where the right kind of men might be expected to be lurking, ravenous as pike, though more maritally inclined. But those men, the right kind, weren’t biting, or had left for other depths, or were snapping at a different sort of bait – some inconspicuous brown-plastic minnow or tarnished simple brass spoon, or something with even more feathers and hooks than Lucy could manage. And in this restaurant, and similar ones, it was in vain that Lucy displayed her delicious dresses and confectionery eyes to the tubfuls of pudgy guppies who had no time for mauve.

The waitress came. Millie ordered steak-and-kidney pie, a good substantial lunch. Emmy chose a salad with cottage cheese, to go with her three kinds of pills, the pink, the white, and the orange, which were lined up on the table beside her water glass. Lucy fussed and fretted and changed her mind several times and finally asked for an omelette. Marian was surprised at herself. She had been dying to go for lunch, she had been starving, and now she wasn’t even hungry. She had a cheese sandwich.

“How’s Peter?” Lucy asked after she had fiddled with her omelette and accused it of being leathery. She took an interest in Peter. He had got into the habit of phoning Marian at the office to tell her what he had done that day and what he was going to do that evening, and when Marian wasn’t there he left messages with Lucy, who shared Marian’s phone. Lucy thought him most polite, and found his voice intriguing.

Marian was watching Millie as she stowed away her steak-and-kidney pie, methodically, like putting things in a trunk. “There,” she’d say, or ought to, when it was finished: “all stored neatly away.” And her mouth would close like a lid.

“Just fine,” Marian said. She and Peter had decided she shouldn’t tell them at the office quite yet. She had been holding out therefore, day after day, but now the question caught her desire to announce off-guard, and she couldn’t resist. They might as well know there’s hope in the world yet, she rationalized. “I have something to tell you all,” she said, “but it isn’t to go any further just now.” She waited until the three pairs of eyes had transferred their attention from the plates to her, then said, “We’re engaged.”

She smiled glowingly at them, watching the expression in their eyes change from expectation to dismay. Lucy dropped her fork and gasped, “No!” adding, “how wonderful!” Millie said, “Oh. Jolly good.” Emmy hurriedly took another pill.

Then there were flurried questions, which Marian dealt with calmly, doling out the information like candies to small children: one at a time, and not too much: it might make them sick. The triumphant elation she had assumed would follow the announcement, for her at least, was only momentary. As soon as the surprise effect had worn off, the conversation became as remote and impersonal, on both sides, as the razor-blade questionnaires: enquiries