The Edible Woman

She remained sitting on the bed, gnawing idly on the end of one of her fringed dressing-gown ties, closed in a sodden formless unhappiness that seemed now to have been clogging her mind for a long time, how long she could not remember. With its weight pressing around her it was most improbable that she would ever manage to get up off the bed. I wonder what time it is? she said to herself. I’ve got to get ready.

The two dolls which she had never thrown out after all were staring blankly back at her from the top of the dresser. As she looked at them their faces blurred, then re-formed, faintly malevolent. She was irritated with them for sitting there inertly on either side of the mirror, just watching her, not offering any practical suggestions. But now that she examined their faces more closely she could see that it was only the dark one, the one with the peeling paint, that was definitely watching her. Perhaps the blonde one didn’t even see her, the round blue eyes in its rubbery face were gazing straight through her.

She substituted one of her fingers for the dressing-gown tie, biting at the side of her nail. Or perhaps it was a game, an agreement they had made. She saw herself in the mirror between them for an instant as though she was inside them, inside both of them at once, looking out: herself, a vague damp form in a rumpled dressing gown, not quite focussed, the blonde eyes noting the arrangement of her hair, her bitten fingernails, the dark one looking deeper, at something she could not quite see, the two overlapping images drawing further and further away from each other; the centre, whatever it was in the glass, the thing that held them together, would soon be quite empty. By the strength of their separate visions they were trying to pull her apart.

She couldn’t stay there any longer. She pushed herself off the bed and into the hallway, where she found herself crouching over the telephone and dialing a number. There was ringing, then a click. She held her breath.

“Hullo?” said a sullen voice.

“Duncan?” she said tentatively. “It’s me.”

“Oh.” There was a pause.

“Duncan, could you come to a party tonight? At Peter’s place? I know it’s late to ask you, but…”

“Well, we’re supposed to be going to a brain-picking graduate English party,” he said. “The whole family.”

“Well, maybe you could come on later. And you could even bring them with you.”

“Well, I don’t know…”

“Please, Duncan, I don’t really know anybody there, I need you to come,” she said with an intensity which was unfamiliar to her.

“No you don’t,” he said. “But maybe we’ll come though. This other thing sounds pretty dull, all they ever do is talk about their Orals, and it would be sort of a kick to see what you’re getting married to.”

“Oh thank you,” she said gratefully, and gave him directions.

When she had put down the phone she felt a lot better. So that was the answer, then: to make sure there were people at the party who really knew her. That would keep everything in the right perspective, she would be able to cope… She dialled another number.

She spent half an hour on the phone; by that time she had rounded up a sufficient number of people. Clara and Joe were coming if they could get a babysitter, that made five counting the other three; and the three office virgins. After their initial hesitations, caused she supposed by the lateness of the invitation, she had hooked the three firmly by saying that she hadn’t asked them before because she thought it was going to be mostly married people, but that several unescorted bachelors were coming, and could they do her the favour of coming along too? Things got so dull for single men at couple-parties, she had added. That made eight altogether. As an afterthought she had asked Ainsley – it would be good for her to get out – and she accepted, surprisingly: it wasn’t her kind of party.

Although she considered it in passing, Marian did not think it would be a wise move to ask Leonard Slank.

Now she was all right she could begin to dress. She oozed herself into the new girdle she had got to go with the dress, noting that she hadn’t really lost much weight: she had been eating a lot of noodles. She hadn’t intended to buy one at all, but the saleslady who was selling her the dress and who was thoroughly corseted herself said that she ought to, and produced an appropriate model with satin panelling and a bow of ribbon at the front. “Of course you’re very thin dear, you don’t really need one, but still that is a close-fitting dress and you wouldn’t want it to be obvious that you haven’t got one on, would you?” She had lifted her pencilled brows. At that time it had seemed like a moral issue. “No, of course not,” Marian had said hastily, “I’ll take it.”

When she had slithered into her red dress, she found she couldn’t reach behind far enough to do up the zipper. She knocked on Ainsley’s door. “Do up my zipper, please?” she asked.

Ainsley was in her slip. She had begun to put on her makeup, but thus far only one of her eyes had acquired its outline of black and her eyebrows hadn’t appeared at all, which made her face look unbalanced. After she had done up Marian’s zipper and the little hook at the top, she stood back and examined her critically. “That’s a good dress,” she said, “but what are you going to wear with it?”

“With it?”

“Yes, it’s very dramatic; you need some good heavy earrings or something to set it off. Have you got any?”

“I don’t know,” said Marian. She went into her own room and brought back the drawer that held the trinkets accumulated from her relatives. They were all variations of clustered imitation pearls and pastel arrangements of seashells and metal-and-glass flowers and cute animals.

Ainsley pawed through them. “No,” she said, with the decisiveness of someone who really knew. “These won’t do. I’ve got a pair that’ll work, though.” After a search which involved much rustling in drawers and overturning of things on the bureau, she produced a couple of chunky dangly gold objects, which she screwed to Marian’s ears. “That’s better,” she said. “Now smile.”

Marian smiled, weakly.

Ainsley shook her head. “Your hair’s okay,” she said, “but really you’d better let me do your face for you. You’ll never manage it by yourself. You’d just do it in your usual skimpy way and come out looking like a kid playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes.”

She wadded Marian into her chair, which was lumpy with garments in progressive stages of dirtiness, and tucked a towel around her neck. “I’ll do your nails first so they can be drying,” she said, adding while she began to file them, “looks like you’ve been biting them.” When the nails had been painted a shimmering off-white and Marian was holding her hands carefully in the air, she went to work on Marian’s face, using mixtures and instruments from the jumble of beauty aids that covered her dressing table.

During the rest of the procedure, while strange things were being done to her skin, then to each eye and each eyebrow, Marian sat passively, marvelling at the professional efficiency with which Ainsley was manipulating her features. It reminded her of the mothers backstage at public-school plays, making up their precocious daughters. She had only a fleeting thought about germs.

Finally Ainsley took a lipstick brush and painted the mouth with several coats of glossy finish. “There,” she said, holding a hand-mirror so that Marian could see herself. “That’s better. But be careful till the eyelash glue is dry.”

Marian stared into the Egyptian-lidded and outlined and thickly-fringed eyes of a person she had never seen before. She was afraid even to blink, for fear that this applied face would crack and flake with the strain. “Thank you,” she said doubtfully.

“Now smile,” said Ainsley.

Marian smiled.

Ainsley frowned. “Not like that,” she said. “You’ve got to throw yourself into it more. Sort of droop your eyelids.”

Marian was embarrassed: she didn’t know how. She was experimenting, looking in the mirror, trying to find out which particular set of muscles would produce the desired effect, and had just succeeded in getting an approximate droop that still however had a suggestion of squint in it, when they heard footsteps ascending the stairs; and a moment later the lady down below stood in the doorway, breathing heavily.

Marian removed the towel from her neck and stood up. Now that she had got her eyelids drooped she could not immediately get them undrooped again, back to their usual capable and level width. It was going to be impossible in this red dress and this face to behave with the ordinary matter-of-fact politeness that the situation was going to require.