The Edible Woman

“Now that’s a kind thought. But really I don’t think I could concentrate enough, not for a while. I’ll either be sleeping, or,” she said in a lower voice, “listening to those other women. Maybe it’s the hospital atmosphere, but all they ever talk about are their miscarriages and their diseases. It makes you feel very sickly after a while: you start wondering when it’ll be your turn to get cancer of the breast or a ruptured tube, or miscarry quadruplets at half-weekly intervals; no kidding, that’s what happened to Mrs. Moase, the big one over there in the far corner. And christ they’re so calm about it, and they seem to think that each of their grisly little episodes is some kind of service medal: they haul them out and compare them and pile on the gory details, they’re really proud of them. It’s a positive gloating about pain. I even find myself producing a few of my own ailments, as though I have to compete. I wonder why women are so morbid?”

“Oh, some men are morbid too, I guess,” Marian said. Clara was talking a lot more, and a lot more quickly, than she usually did, and Marian found herself being surprised. During the later, more vegetable stage of Clara’s pregnancy she had tended to forget that Clara had a mind at all or any perceptive faculties above the merely sentient and sponge-like, since she had spent most of her time being absorbed in, or absorbed by, her tuberous abdomen. To have her observing, commenting like this, was a slight shock. It might be some kind of reaction, but it certainly wasn’t hysteria: she seemed thoroughly in control. Something to do with hormones maybe.

“Well, Joe certainly isn’t,” Clara said happily. “If he weren’t so un-morbid I don’t know how I’d ever manage. He’s so good about the children and the washing and everything, I don’t feel at all uneasy about leaving everything up to him at a time like this. I know he manages just as well as I would if I were there, though we’re having a bit of trouble with poor Arthur. He’s beautifully toilet-trained now, he uses his plastic potty almost every time, but he’s become a hoarder. He rolls the shit into little pellets and hides them places – like cupboards and bottom drawers. You have to watch him like a hawk. Once I found some in the refrigerator, and Joe tells me he just discovered a whole row of them hardening on the bathroom windowsill behind the curtain. He gets very upset when we throw them out. I can’t imagine why he does it; maybe he’ll grow up to be a banker.”

“Do you think it has anything to do with the new baby?” Marian said. “Jealousy perhaps?”

“Oh, probably,” Clara said, smiling serenely. She was twirling one of the white roses between her fingers. “But here I am running on about myself,” she said, turning herself on the bed so she was facing more directly towards Marian. “I haven’t really had a chance to talk to you about your engagement. We both think it’s wonderful, of course, although we don’t really know Peter.”

Marian said, “We must all get together sometime, after you’re home and have got yourself organized again. I’m sure you’ll like him.”

“Well he looks awfully nice. Of course you never really know someone till you’ve been married to them for a while and discover some of their scruffier habits. I remember how upset I was when I realized for the first time that after all Joe wasn’t Jesus Christ. I don’t know what it was, probably some silly thing like finding out he’s crazy about Audrey Hepburn. Or that he’s a secret philatelist.”

“A what?” asked Marian. She didn’t know what it was but it sounded perverted.

“Stamp collecting. Not a real one of course, he tears them off the mail. Anyway it takes adjustment. Now,” she said, “I just think he’s one of the minor saints.”

Marian didn’t know what to say. She found Clara’s attitude towards Joe both complacent and embarrassing: it was sentimental, like the love stories in the back numbers of women’s magazines. Also she felt Clara was trying to give her some kind of oblique advice, and this was even more embarrassing. Poor Clara, she was the last person whose advice would be worth anything. Look at the mess she had blundered into: three children at her age. Peter and she were going into it with far fewer illusions. If Clara had slept with Joe before marriage she would have been much better able to cope afterwards.

“I think Joe’s a wonderful husband,” she said generously.

Clara gave a snort of laughter, then winced. “Oh. Screw. It hurts in the most ungodly places. No you don’t; you think we’re both shiftless and disorganized and you’d go bats if you lived in all that chaos; you can’t understand how we’ve survived without hating each other.” Her voice was perfectly good-natured.

Marian started to protest, thinking it was unfair of Clara to force the conversation out into the open like that; but a nurse popped her head through the doorway long enough to announce that the visiting time was up.

“If you want to see the baby,” Clara said as Marian was leaving, “you can probably get someone to tell you where they’ve stowed it. You can see them through a plate-glass window somewhere; they all look alike, but they’ll point out mine if you ask. If I were you I wouldn’t bother though, they aren’t very interesting at this stage. They look like red shrivelled prunes.”

“Maybe I’ll wait then,” said Marian.

It struck her as she went out the door that there had been something in Clara’s manner, especially in the slightly worried twist of her eyebrows once or twice, that had expressed concern; but concern about what, exactly, she didn’t know and couldn’t stop to puzzle over. She had the sense of having escaped, as if from a culvert or cave. She was glad she wasn’t Clara.

Now there was the rest of the day to unravel. She would eat quickly at the nearest restaurant she could find and by the time she was finished the traffic would have cleared somewhat, and she could rush home and grab some laundry. What on earth did she have that was fit to take? Perhaps a couple of blouses. She wondered whether a pleated skirt would do, that would keep him busy and she had one that needed pressing, but on second thought it was the wrong sort of thing, and surely too complicated anyway.

The hours before her were going to be, she felt, as convoluted as that hour in the afternoon during which Peter had called to arrange dinner and they had discussed at length – too great a length, she was afraid – where they were going to eat; and then after all that she had had to call him back and say, “I’m terribly sorry darling, but something really unavoidable has come up; can we put it off? Tomorrow maybe?” He had been peevish, but he couldn’t say much about it because he had just finished doing the same thing to her the day before.

There had been a difference, of course, in what had come up. In her case it had been another telephone call.

The voice at the other end had said, “This is Duncan.”

“Who?”

“The guy at the laundromat.”

“Oh. Yes.” Now she recognized the voice, though it sounded more nervous than usual.

“I’m sorry I startled you in the movie, but I knew you were dying to know what I was eating.”

“Yes, I was actually,” she said, glancing at the clock and then at the open door of Mrs. Bogue’s cubicle. She had already spent far too much time on the phone that afternoon.

“They were pumpkin seeds. I’m trying to stop smoking, you know, and I find them very helpful. There’s a lot of oral satisfaction in cracking them open. I get them at the pet store, they’re supposed to be for birds, really.”

“Yes,” she said, to fill up the pause that followed.

“It was a crummy movie.”

Marian wondered whether the switchboard girl downstairs was listening in on the conversation, as she had been known to do, and if so, what she was thinking about it; she must have realized by now that it was not a business call. “Mr… Duncan,” she said in her most official voice, “I’m sort of at the office, and we aren’t supposed to take much time for outside calls; I mean from friends and so on.”

“Oh,” he said. He sounded discouraged, but he made no attempt to clarify the situation.

She pictured him at the other end of the line, morose, hollow-eyed, waiting for the sound of her voice. She had no idea why he had called. Perhaps he needed her, needed to talk to her. “But I would like to talk to you,” she said encouragingly. “Some more convenient time?”

“Well,” he said, “as a matter of fact I sort of need you; right now. I mean I need – what I need is some ironing. I’ve just got to iron something and I’ve already ironed everything in the house, even the dishtowels, and I sort of wondered whether maybe I could come over to your house and maybe iron some of your things.”

Mrs. Bogue’s eve was now definitely upon her. “Why, of course,” she said crisply. Then she suddenly decided that it would be, for some as yet unexamined reason, disastrous if this man were to encounter either Peter or Ainsley. Besides, who could tell what variety of turmoil had broken loose after she had tiptoed out of the house that morning, leaving Len still caught in the toils of vice behind the door ornamented with his own tie? She hadn’t heard from Ainsley all day, which might be either a good or an evil omen. And even if Len had managed to escape safely, the wrath of the lady down below, foiled of its proper object, might very well descend on the head of the harmless