heard the lilting sounds coming from the concealed loudspeakers she remembered an article she had read about cows who gave more milk when sweet music was played to them. But just because she knew what they were up to didn’t mean she was immune. These days, if she wasn’t careful, she found herself pushing the cart like a somnambulist, eyes fixed, swaying slightly, her hands twitching with the impulse to reach out and grab anything with a bright label. She had begun to defend herself with lists, which she printed in block letters before setting out, willing herself to buy nothing, however deceptively priced or subliminally packaged, except what was written there. When she was feeling unusually susceptible she would tick the things off the list with a pencil as an additional counter-charm.
But in some ways they would always be successful: they couldn’t miss. You had to buy something sometime. She knew enough about it from the office to realize that the choice between, for instance, two brands of soap or two cans of tomato juice was not what could be called a rational one. In the products, the things themselves, there was no real difference. How did you choose then? You could only abandon yourself to the soothing music and make a random snatch. You let the thing in you that was supposed to respond to the labels just respond, whatever it was; maybe it had something to do with the pituitary gland. Which detergent had the best power symbol? Which tomato juice can had the sexiest-looking tomato on it, and did she care? Something in her must care; after all, she did choose eventually, doing precisely what some planner in a broadloomed office had hoped and predicted she would do. She had caught herself lately watching herself with an abstracted curiosity, to see what she would do.
“Noodles,” she said. She glanced up from her list just in time to avoid collision with a plump lady in frazzled muskrat. “Oh no, they’ve put another brand on the market.” She knew the noodle business: several of her afternoons had been spent in stores in the Italian section, counting the endless varieties and brands of pasta. She glared at the noodles, stacks of them, identical in their cellopaks, then shut her eyes, shot out her hand and closed her fingers on a package. Any package.
“Lettuce, radishes, carrots, onions, tomatoes, parsley,” she read from her list. Those would be easy: at least you could tell by looking at them, though some things came in bags or rubber-banded bunches arranged with some good and some bad in each, and the tomatoes, hothouse-pink and tasteless at this time of year, were prepackaged in cardboard and cellophane boxes of four. She steered her cart towards the vegetable area, where a slickly finished rustic wooden sign hung on the wall: “The Market Garden.”
She picked listlessly through the vegetables. She used to be fond of a good salad but now she had to eat so many of them she was beginning to find them tiresome. She felt like a rabbit, crunching all the time on mounds of leafy greenery. How she longed to become again a carnivore, to gnaw on a good bone! Christmas dinner had been difficult. “Why Marian, you’re not eating!” her mother had fussed when she had left the turkey untouched on her plate. She had said she wasn’t hungry, and had eaten huge quantities of cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and mince pie when no one was looking. Her mother had set her strange loss of appetite down to overexcitement. She had thought of saying she had taken up a new religion that forbade her to eat meat, Yoga or Doukhobor or something, but it wouldn’t have been a good idea: they had been pathetically eager to have the wedding in the family church. Their reaction though, as far as she could estimate the reactions of people who were now so remote from her, was less elated glee than a quiet, rather smug satisfaction, as though their fears about the effects of her university education, never stated but always apparent, had been calmed at last. They had probably been worried she would turn into a high-school teacher or a maiden aunt or a dope addict or a female executive, or that she would undergo some shocking physical transformation, like developing muscles and a deep voice or growing moss. She could picture the anxious consultations over cups of tea. But now, their approving eyes said, she was turning out all right after all. They had not met Peter, but for them he seemed to be merely the necessary X-factor. They were curious though: they continued to urge her to bring him home for the weekend soon. As she had moved around the town during those two cold days, visiting relatives, answering questions, she could not convince herself she was actually back in it.
“Kleenex,” she said. She glanced with distaste at the different brands and colours offered – what difference did it make what you blew your nose on? – and at the fancy printed toilet paper – flowers and scrolls and polka dots. Pretty soon they would have it in gold, as though they wanted to pretend it was used for something quite different, like wrapping Christmas presents. There really wasn’t a single human unpleasantness left that they had not managed to turn to their uses. What on earth was wrong with plain white? At least it looked clean.
Her mother and her aunts of course had been interested in the wedding dress and the invitations and things like that. At the moment, listening to the electric violins and hesitating between two flavours of canned rice pudding – she had no reservations about eating that, it tasted so synthetic – she couldn’t remember what they had all decided.
She looked at her watch: she didn’t have much time. Luckily they were playing a tango. She wheeled rapidly towards the canned soup section, trying to shake the glaze out of her eyes. It was dangerous to stay in the supermarket too long. One of these days it would get her. She would be trapped past closing time, and they would find her in the morning propped against one of the shelves in an unbreakable coma, surrounded by all the pushcarts in the place heaped to overflowing with merchandise…
She steered towards the checkout counters. They were having another of their sales-promoting special programmes, some sort of contest that would send the winner on a three-day trip to Hawaii. There was a big poster over the front window, a semi-nude girl in a grass skirt and flowers, and beside it a small sign: PINEAPPLES, Three Cans 65?. The cashier behind the counter had a paper garland around her neck; her orange mouth was chewing gum. Marian watched the mouth, the hypnotic movements of the jaws, the bumpy flesh of the cheeks with their surface of dark-pink makeup, the scaling lips through which glinted several rodent-yellow teeth working as with a life of their own. The cash register totalled her groceries.
The orange mouth opened. “Five twenty-nine,” it said. “Just write your name and address on the receipt.”
“No thanks,” Marian said, “I don’t want to go.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders and turned away. “Excuse me, you forgot to give me my stamps,” Marian said.
That was another thing, she thought as she hoisted the grocery bag and went through the electric-eye door into the slushy grey twilight. For a while she had refused them: it was another hidden way for them to make money. But they still made the money anyway, more of it; so she had begun accepting them and hiding them in kitchen drawers. Now, however, Ainsley was saving for a baby carrier, so she made a point of getting them. It was the least she could do for Ainsley. The flowery cardboard Hawaiian smiled at her as she trudged off towards the subway station.
Flowers. They had all wanted to know what kind of flowers she was going to carry. Marian herself was in favour of lilies; Lucy had suggested a cascade of pink tea roses and baby’s breath. Ainsley had been scornful. “Well, I suppose you have to have a traditional wedding, since it’s Peter,” she had said. “But people are so hypocritical about flowers at weddings. Nobody wants to admit they’re really fertility symbols. What about a giant sunflower or a sheaf of wheat? Or a cascade of mushrooms and cactuses, that would be quite genital, don’t you think?” Peter didn’t want to be involved in such decisions. “I’ll leave all that sort of thing up to you,” he would say with fondness when questioned seriously.
Lately she had been seeing more and more of Peter, but less and less of Peter alone. Now that she had been ringed he took pride in displaying her. He said he wanted her to really get to know some of his friends, and he had been taking her around with him to cocktail parties with the more official ones and to dinners and evening get- togethers with the intimates. She had even been to lunch with some lawyers, during which she had sat the whole time silent and smiling. The friends collectively were all well dressed and on the verge of being successful, and they all had wives who were also well dressed and on the verge of being successful. They were all anxious; they were all polite to her. Marian found it difficult to connect these sleek men with the happy hunters and champion beer drinkers that lived in Peter’s memories of the past, but some of them were the same people. Ainsley referred to them as “the soap men,” because once when Peter had come to pick Marian up he brought with him a friend who worked for a soap company. Marian’s greatest apprehension about them was that she would get their names mixed up.
She wanted to be nice to them for Peter’s sake; however, she had been feeling somewhat bombarded with them, and she had decided it was time for Peter to start really getting to know some of
