The Edible Woman

wisps, and had manufactured two tusk-like spitcurls which projected forward, one on each cheekbone.

“Well,” she said dubiously, frowning at the mirror, “it’s a little – um – extreme for me.” She thought it made her look like a call girl.

“Ah, but you should wear it this way more often,” he said with Italianate enthusiasm, his rapturous expression nevertheless fading a shade. “You should try new things. You should be daring, eh?” He laughed roguishly at her, displaying an unnatural number of white even teeth and two gold ones; his breath was flavoured with peppermint mouthwash.

She considered asking him to comb out some of his special effects, but decided not to, partly because she was intimidated by his official surroundings and specialist implements and dentist-like certainty – he must know what was right, it was his business – but partly because she found herself shrugging mentally. After all, she had taken the leap, she had walked through that gilded chocolate-box door of her own free will and this was the consequence and she had better accept it. “Peter will probably like it. Anyway,” she reflected, “it will go with the dress.”

Still half etherized, she had plunged into one of the large department stores nearby, intending to take a short- cut through the basement to the subway station. She had gone quickly through the Household Wares section, past the counters that held frying pans and casserole dishes, and the display models of vacuum cleaners and automatic washers. They reminded her, uneasily, both of the surprise shower the girls at the office had given her the day before, her last day of work, which had involved the bestowing of tea towels and ladles and beribboned aprons and advice, and of the several anxious letters she had got recently from her mother, urging her to choose her patterns – china and crystal and silverware – because people were wanting to know what to get for wedding presents. She had taken trips to various stores for the purpose of making the selection, but had been so far quite unable to make up her mind. And she was leaving on the bus for home the next day. Well, she would do it later.

She rounded a counter lush with artificial plastic flowers and walked along what seemed to be a main aisle that led somewhere. In front of her a small frantic man was standing on a pedestal, demonstrating a new kind of grater with an apple-coring attachment. He was pattering and grating simultaneously, non-stop, holding up a handful of shredded carrot, then an apple with a neat round hole in its centre. A cluster of women with shopping bags watched silently, their heavy coats and overshoes drab in the basement light, their eyes shrewd and sceptical.

Marian stopped for a minute on the outer fringe of the group. The little man made a radish-rose with yet another attachment. Several of the women turned and glanced at her in an appraising way, summing her up. Anyone with a hairstyle like that, they must have been thinking, would be far too trivial to be seriously interested in graters. How long did it take to acquire that patina of lower-middle income domesticity, that weathered surface of slightly mangy fur, cloth worn thin at cuff-edges and around buttons, scuffed leather of handbags; the tight slant of the mouth, the gauging eyes; and above all that invisible colour that was like a smell, the under-painting of musty upholstery and worn linoleum that made them in this bargain basement authentic in a way that she was not? Somehow Peter’s future income cancelled the possibility of graters. They made her feel like a dilettante.

The little man started briskly to reduce a potato to a pulp. Marian lost her interest and continued her search for the yellow subway sign.

When she opened the front door she was met by a gabble of female voices. She took off her boots in the vestibule and put them on the newspapers that were there for that purpose. A number of other pairs had been deposited, many with thick soles and some with black fur tops. As she went past the parlour doorway she caught a glimpse of dresses and hats and necklaces. The lady down below was having a tea party; they must be the Imperial Daughters, or perhaps they were the Women Christian Temperates. The child, in maroon velvet with a lace collar, was passing cakes.

Marian climbed the stairs as noiselessly as she could. For some reason she had not yet spoken to the lady down below about giving up the apartment. She should have done it weeks ago. The delay might mean having to pay another month’s rent for insufficient notice. Maybe Ainsley would want to keep it on with another roommate; but she doubted it. In another few months that would be impossible.

When she had climbed the second flight of stairs she could hear Ainsley talking in the living room. The voice was harder, more insistent, angrier than she had ever heard it before: Ainsley did not usually lose her temper. Another voice was interrupting, answering. It was Leonard Slank’s.

“Oh no,” Marian thought. They seemed to be having an argument. She definitely did not want to get involved. She intended to slip quietly into her room and close the door, but Ainsley must have heard her coming up the stairs: her head appeared abruptly from the living room, followed by quantities of loose red hair and then by the rest of her body. She was dishevelled and had been crying.

“Marian!” she half-wailed, half-commanded. “You’ve got to come in here and talk to Len. You’ve got to make him listen to reason! I like your hair,” she added perfunctorily.

Marian trailed after her into the living room, feeling like a child’s wheeled wooden toy being pulled along by a string, but she didn’t know on what grounds, moral or otherwise, she could base a refusal. Len was standing in the middle of the room, looking even more disturbed than Ainsley.

Marian sat down on a chair, keeping her coat on as a shock-absorber. The other two both stared angrily and beseechingly at her in silence.

Then, “My God!” Len almost shouted. “After all that, now she wants me to marry her!”

“Well, what’s the matter with you anyway! You don’t want a homosexual son, do you?” Ainsley demanded.

“Goddamn it, I don’t want any son at all! I didn’t want it, you did it yourself, you should have it removed, there must be some kind of pill…”

“That’s not the point, don’t be ridiculous, the point is of course I’m going to have the baby; but it should have the best circumstances, and it’s your responsibility to provide it with a father. A father- image.” Ainsley was now trying a slightly more patient and cool-headed approach.

Len paced across the floor. “How much do they cost? I’ll buy you one. Anything. But I’m not going to marry you, dammit. Don’t give me that responsibility stuff either, I’m not responsible anyway. It was all your doing, you deliberately allowed me to get myself drunk, you seduced me, you practically dragged me into…”

“That isn’t quite how I remember it,” Ainsley said, “and I was in a condition to remember it a lot more clearly than you can. Anyway,” she continued with relentless logic, “you thought you were seducing me. And after all, that’s important too, isn’t it: your motives. Suppose you really had been seducing me and I’d got pregnant accidentally. What would you do then? You’d certainly be responsible then, wouldn’t you? So it is your responsibility.”

Len contorted his face, his smile an anaemic parody of cynical sarcasm. “You’re like all the rest of them, you’re a sophist,” he said in a quaveringly savage voice. “You’re twisting the truth. Let’s stick to the facts, shall we dear? I didn’t seduce you really, it was…”

“That doesn’t matter,” Ainsley said, her voice rising. “You thought you…”

“For God’s sake can’t you be realistic!” Leonard shrieked.

Marian had been sitting quietly, looking from one to the other, thinking how peculiarly they were acting; so out of control. Now she said, “Could we please be a little less noisy? The lady down below might hear.”

“Oh, SCREW the lady down below!” Len roared.

This novel idea was so blasphemous and at the same time so ludicrous that both Ainsley and Marian broke into horrified and delighted giggles. Len glared at them. This was the final outrage, the final feminine insolence – after putting him through all that, she was laughing at him! He snatched up his coat from the back of the chesterfield and strode towards the stairs.

“You and your goddamn fertility worship can go straight to hell!” he shouted, plunging downwards.

Ainsley, seeing the father-image escaping, remoulded her features into an imploring expression and ran after him. “Oh Len, come back and let’s talk it over seriously,” she pleaded. Marian followed them down the stairs, impelled less by a sense of being able to do anything concrete or helpful than by some obscure herd- or lemming- instinct. Everyone else was leaping over the cliff, she might as well go too.

Len’s descent was halted by the spinning wheel on the landing. He was temporarily snarled in it, and tugged and swore loudly. By the time he was able to start down the next flight of stairs Ainsley had caught up to him and was pulling at his sleeve, and all the ladies, as alert to the symptoms of wickedness as a spider to the vibrations of