The Edible Woman

crew, were to have descended on the unwary front porches of the housewives with cardboard trays on strings around their necks, like cigarette girls (privately, to Lucy, Marian had suggested bleaching them all and dressing them up in feathers and net stockings), carrying small paper cups of real canned tomato juice and small paper cups of instant-tomato-juice powder and small pitchers of water. The housewife was to take a sip of the real juice, watch the interviewer mix the Instant right before her astounded eyes, and then try the result, impressed, possibly, by its quickness and ease: “One Stir and You’re Sure!” said the tentative advertisement sketches. If they’d done it in October it might have worked.

Unfortunately the snow that had been withholding itself during five uniformly overclouded grey days had chosen that morning at ten o’clock to begin to fall, not in soft drifting flakes or even intermittent flurries, but in a regular driving blizzard. Mrs. Bogue had tried to get the higher-ups to postpone the test, but in vain. “We’re working with humans, not with machines,” she had said on the phone, her voice loud enough so that they could hear it through the closed door of her cubicle. “It’s utterly impossible out there!” But there was a deadline to be met. The thing had already been postponed for so long that it could be kept back no longer, and furthermore a delay of one day at this point would mean an actual delay of three because of the major inconvenience of Christmas. So Mrs. Bogue’s flock had been driven, bleating faintly, out into the storm.

For the rest of the morning the office had resembled the base of a mercy mission in a disaster area. Phone calls flooded in from the hapless interviewers. Their cars, antifreeze- and snow tire-less, balked and stalled, stranded themselves in blowing drifts, and slammed their doors on hands and their trunk lids on heads. The paper cups were far too light to withstand the force of the gale, and whirled away over the lanes and hedges, emptying their blood- red contents on the snow, on the interviewers, and, if the interviewers had actually made it as far as a front door, on the housewife herself. One interviewer had her whole tray ripped from her neck and lifted into the air like a kite; another had tried to shelter hers inside her coat, only to have it tipped and spewn against her body by the wind. From eleven o’clock on, the interviewers themselves had come straggling in, wild haired and smeared with red, to resign or explain or have their faith in themselves as scientific and efficient measurers of public opinion restored, depending on temperament; and Mrs. Bogue had had to cope in addition with the howls of rage from the broadloomed Olympics above who refused to recognize the existence of any storm not of their own making. The traces of the fray were still evident on her face as she moved among the eating women. When she was pretending to be flustered and upset, she was really serene; but now, attempting serenity, she reminded Marian of a club lady in a flowered hat making a gracious speech of thanks, who has just felt a small many-legged creature scamper up her leg.

Marian gave up half-listening to several conversations at once and let the sound of voices filling the room wash across her ears in a blur of meaningless syllables. She finished her jelly sandwich and went for a piece of cake. The loaded table made her feel gluttonous: all that abundance, all those meringues and icings and glazes, those coagulations of fats and sweets, that proliferation of rich glossy food. When she returned with a piece of sponge cake Lucy, who had been talking with Emmy, had turned and was now talking with Millie, so that after she had taken her place again Marian found herself in the middle of their conversation.

“Well naturally they just didn’t know what to do about it,” Lucy was saying. “You just don’t ask someone would they please take a bath. I mean it’s not very polite.”

“And London’s so dirty too,” Millie said sympathetically. “You see the men in the evenings, the collars of their white shirts are black, just black. It’s all the soot.”

“Yes well, and this went on and it got worse and worse, it was getting so bad they were ashamed to even ask their friends in…”

“Who’s this?” Marian asked.

“Oh this girl who was living with some friends of mine in England and she just stopped washing. Nothing else was wrong with her, she just didn’t wash, even her hair even, or change her clothes or anything, for the longest time, and they didn’t want to say anything because she seemed perfectly normal in every other way, but obviously underneath it she must have been really sick.”

Emmy’s narrow peaked face swung round at the word “sick,” and the story was repeated to her.

“So what happened, then?” Millie asked, licking chocolate icing from her fingers.

“Well,” said Lucy, nibbling daintily at a morsel of shortcake, “it got pretty horrible. I mean, she was wearing the same clothes, you can imagine. And I guess it must have been three or four months.”

There was a murmur of “Oh no’s,” and she said, “Well, at least two. And they were just about to ask her for god’s sake either take a bath or move out. I mean, wouldn’t you? But one day she came home and just took off those clothes and burnt them, and had a bath and everything, and she’s been perfectly normal ever since. Just like that.”

“Well that is queer!” Emmy said in a disappointed voice. She had been expecting a severe illness, or perhaps even an operation.

“Of course they’re all a lot dirtier Over There, you know,” Millie said in a woman-of-the-world tone.

“But she was from Over Here!” Lucy exclaimed. “I mean she’d been brought up the right way, she was from a good family and all; it wasn’t as if they didn’t have a bathroom, they were always perfectly clean!”

“Maybe it was one of those things we sort of all go through,” said Millie philosophically. “Maybe she was just immature, and being away from home like that and all…”

“I think she was sick,” Lucy said. She was picking the raisins out of a piece of Christmas cake, preparatory to eating it.

Marian’s mind grasped at the word “immature,” turning it over like a curious pebble found on a beach. It suggested an unripe ear of corn, and other things of a vegetable or fruitlike nature. You were green and then you ripened: became mature. Dresses for the mature figure. In other words, fat.

She looked around the room at all the women there, at the mouths opening and shutting, to talk or to eat. Here, sitting like any other group of women at an afternoon feast, they no longer had the varnish of officialdom that separated them, during regular office hours, from the vast anonymous ocean of housewives whose minds they were employed to explore. They could have been wearing housecoats and curlers. As it was, they all wore dresses for the mature figure. They were ripe, some rapidly becoming overripe, some already beginning to shrivel; she thought of them as attached by stems at the tops of their heads to an invisible vine, hanging there in various stages of growth and decay… in that case, thin elegant Lucy, sitting beside her, was merely at an earlier stage, a springtime green bump or nodule forming beneath the careful golden calyx of her hair…

She examined the women’s bodies with interest, critically, as though she had never seen them before. And in a way she hadn’t, they had just been there like everything else, desks, telephones, chairs, in the space of the office: objects viewed as outline and surface only. But now she could see the roll of fat pushed up across Mrs. Gundridge’s back by the top of her corset, the ham-like bulge of thigh, the creases round the neck, the large porous cheeks; the blotch of varicose veins glimpsed at the back of one plump crossed leg, the way her jowls jellied when she chewed, her sweater a woolly teacosy over those rounded shoulders; and the others too, similar in structure but with varying proportions and textures of bumpy permanents and dune-like contours of breast and waist and hip; their fluidity sustained somewhere within by bones, without by a carapace of clothing and makeup. What peculiar creatures they were; and the continual flux between the outside and the inside, taking things in, giving them out, chewing, words, potato chips, burps, grease, hair, babies, milk, excrement, cookies, vomit, coffee, tomato juice, blood, tea, sweat, liquor, tears, and garbage…

For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be – or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick Sargasso Sea of femininity. She drew a deep breath, clenching her body and her mind back into her self like some tactile sea creature withdrawing its tentacles; she wanted something solid, clear: a man; she wanted Peter in the room so that she could put her hand out and hold on to him to keep from being sucked down. Lucy had a gold bangle on one arm. Marian focussed her eyes on it, concentrating on it as though she was drawing its hard gold circle around herself, a fixed barrier between herself and that liquid amorphous other.

She became aware of a silence in the room. The hen-yard gabble had ceased. She lifted her head: Mrs. Bogue was standing at the end of the room near the table, holding up her hand.