The Edible Woman Read online

  INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR

  The Edible Woman

  "[The Edible Woman] is chock-full of startling images, superbly and classically crafted...."

  -Saturday Night

  "Few writers are able to combine wit and humour ... Margaret Atwood is a poet and novelist who seems to be able to do anything she wants."

  -Newsweek

  "A pleasure."

  -Kirkus Reviews

  "Funny, sharp, witty, clever."

  -The Times

  "Marked by a keen eye for evocative details which cohere into vivid incidents."

  -Canadian Forum

  "[Atwood is] a subtle and penetrating observer of relationships between men and women."

  -Sunday Times

  "Delightful - spare, precise, mordantly witty.... Exquisitely written."

  -Journal of Canadian Fiction

  "[Atwood] knows exactly what she is doing with every phrase."

  -Vancouver Sun

  BOOKS BY MARGARET ATWOOD

  FICTION

  The Edible Woman (1969)

  Surfacing (1972)

  Lady Oracle (1976)

  Dancing Girls (1977)

  Life Before Man (1979)

  Bodily Harm (1981)

  Murder in the Dark (1983)

  Bluebeard's Egg (1983)

  The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

  Cat's Eye (1988)

  Wilderness Tips (1991)

  Good Bones (1992)

  The Robber Bride (1993)

  Alias Grace (1996)

  The Blind Assassin (2000)

  Good Bones and Simple Murders (2001)

  Oryx and Crake (2003)

  The Penelopiad (2005)

  The Tent (2006)

  Moral Disorder (2006)

  The Year of the Flood (2009)

  FOR CHILDREN

  Up in the Tree (1978)

  Anna's Pet (with Joyce Barkhouse) (1980)

  For the Birds (1990)

  Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995)

  Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003)

  Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004)

  NON-FICTION

  Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)

  Days of the Rebels 1815-1840 (1977)

  Second Words (1982)

  Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1996)

  Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002)

  Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982-2004 (2004)

  Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008)

  POETRY

  Double Persephone (1961)

  The Circle Game (1966)

  The Animals in That Country (1968)

  The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)

  Procedures for Underground (1970)

  Power Politics (1971)

  You Are Happy (1974)

  Selected Poems (1976)

  Two-Headed Poems (1978)

  True Stories (1981)

  Interlunar (1984)

  Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986 (1986)

  Morning in the Burned House (1995)

  The Door (2007)

  Copyright (c) 1969 by O.W. Toad Ltd.

  First cloth edition published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 1969

  Emblem edition published in 1999

  This Emblem edition published in 2010

  Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  Emblem and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher - or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency - is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Atwood, Margaret, 1939-

  The edible woman / Margaret Atwood.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199495-6

  I. Title.

  PS8501.T86E3 2010 C813'.54 C2010-902599-7

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  This book was produced using 20% recycled materials.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  For J.

  The surface on which you work (preferably marble), the tools, the ingredients and your fingers should be chilled throughout the operation....

  (Recipe for Puff Pastry in I. S. Rombauer

  and M. R. Becker, The Joy of Cooking.)

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Two Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part Three Chapter 31

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  1

  I know I was all right on Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual. When I went out to the kitchen to get breakfast Ainsley was there, moping: she said she had been to a bad party the night before. She swore there had been nothing but dentistry students, which depressed her so much she had consoled herself by getting drunk.

  "You have no idea how soggy it is," she said, "having to go through twenty conversations about the insides of peoples' mouths. The most reaction I got out of them was when I described an abscess I once had. They positively drooled. And most men look at something besides your teeth, for god's sake."

  She had a hangover, which put me in a cheerful mood - it made me feel so healthy - and I poured her a glass of tomato juice and briskly fixed her an Alka-Seltzer, listening and making sympathetic noises while she complained.

  "As if I didn't get enough of that at work," she said. Ainsley has a job as a tester of defective electric toothbrushes for an electric toothbrush company: a temporary job. What she is waiting for is an opening in one of those little art galleries, even though they don't pay well: she wants to meet the artists. Last year, she told me, it was actors, but then she actually met some. "It's an absolute fixation. I expect they all carry those bent mirrors around in their coat pockets and peer into their own mouths every time they go to the john to make sure they're still cavity-free." She ran one hand reflectively through her hair, which is long and red, or rather auburn. "Could you imagine kissing one? He'd say 'Open wide' beforehand. They're so bloody one-track."

  "It must have been awful," I said, refilling he
r glass. "Couldn't you have changed the topic?"

  Ainsley raised her almost non-existent eyebrows, which hadn't been coloured in yet that morning. "Of course not," she said. "I pretended to be terribly interested. And naturally I didn't let on what my job was: those professional men get so huffy if you know anything about their subject. You know, like Peter."

  Ainsley tends to make jabs at Peter, especially when she isn't feeling well. I was magnanimous and didn't respond. "You'd better eat something before you go to work," I said, "it's better when you've got something on your stomach."

  "Oh god," said Ainsley, "I can't face it. Another day of machines and mouths. I haven't had an interesting one since last month, when that lady sent back her toothbrush because the bristles were falling off. We found out she'd been using Ajax."

  I got so caught up in being efficient for Ainsley's benefit while complimenting myself on my moral superiority to her that I didn't realize how late it was until she reminded me. At the electric toothbrush company they don't care what time you breeze in, but my company thinks of itself as punctual. I had to skip the egg and wash down a glass of milk and a bowl of cold cereal which I knew would leave me hungry long before lunchtime. I chewed through a piece of bread while Ainsley watched me in nauseated silence and grabbed up my purse, leaving Ainsley to close the apartment door behind me.

  We live on the top floor of a large house in one of the older and more genteel districts, in what I suppose used to be the servants' quarters. This means there are two flights of stairs between us and the front door, the higher flight narrow and slippery, the lower one wide and carpeted but with stair rods that come loose. In the high heels expected by the office I have to go down sideways, clutching the bannister. That morning I made it safely past the line of pioneer brass warming-pans strung on the wall of our stairway, avoided catching myself on the many-pronged spinning wheel on the second-floor landing, and sidestepped quickly down past the ragged regimental flag behind glass and the row of oval-framed ancestors that guard the first stairway. I was relieved to see there was no one in the downstairs hall. On level ground I strode towards the door, swerving to avoid the rubber plant on one side and the hall table with the ecru doily and the round brass tray on the other. Behind the velvet curtain to the right I could hear the child performing her morning penance at the piano. I thought I was safe.

  But before I reached the door it swung silently inward upon its hinges, and I knew I was trapped. It was the lady down below. She was wearing a pair of spotless gardening gloves and carrying a trowel. I wondered who she'd been burying in the garden.

  "Good morning, Miss MacAlpin," she said.

  "Good morning." I nodded and smiled. I can never remember her name, and neither can Ainsley; I suppose we have what they call a mental block about it. I looked past her towards the street, but she didn't move out of the doorway.

  "I was out last night," she said. "At a meeting." She has an indirect way of going about things. I shifted from one foot to the other and smiled again, hoping she would realize I was in a hurry. "The child tells me there was another fire."

  "Well, it wasn't exactly a fire," I said. The child had taken this mention of her name as an excuse to stop practising, and was standing now in the velvet doorway of the parlour, staring at me. She is a hulking creature of fifteen or so who is being sent to an exclusive private girls' school, and she has to wear a green tunic with knee-socks to match. I'm sure she's really quite normal, but there's something cretinous about the hair-ribbon perched up on top of her gigantic body.

  The lady down below took off one of her gloves and patted her chignon. "Ah," she said sweetly. "The child says there was a lot of smoke."

  "Everything was under control," I said, not smiling this time. "It was just the pork chops."

  "Oh, I see," she said. "Well, I do wish you would tell Miss Tewce to try not to make quite so much smoke in future. I'm afraid it upsets the child." She holds Ainsley alone responsible for the smoke, and seems to think she sends it out of her nostrils like a dragon. But she never stops Ainsley in the hall to talk about it: only me. I suspect she's decided Ainsley isn't respectable, whereas I am. It's probably the way we dress: Ainsley says I choose clothes as though they're a camouflage or a protective colouration, though I can't see anything wrong with that. She herself goes in for neon pink.

  Of course I missed the bus: as I crossed the lawn I could see it disappearing across the bridge in a cloud of air pollution. While I was standing under the tree - our street has many trees, all of them enormous - waiting for the next bus, Ainsley came out of the house and joined me. She's a quick-change artist; I could never put myself together in such a short time. She was looking a lot healthier - possibly the effects of makeup, though you can never tell with Ainsley - and she had her red hair piled up on top of her head, as she always does when she goes to work. The rest of the time she wears it down in straggles. She had on her orange and pink sleeveless dress, which I judged was too tight across the hips. The day was going to be hot and humid; already I could feel a private atmosphere condensing around me like a plastic bag. Maybe I should have worn a sleeveless dress too.

  "She got me in the hall," I said. "About the smoke."

  "The old bitch," said Ainsley. "Why can't she mind her own business?" Ainsley doesn't come from a small town as I do, so she's not as used to people being snoopy; on the other hand she's not as afraid of it either. She has no idea about the consequences.

  "She's not that old," I said, glancing over at the curtained windows of the house; though I knew she couldn't hear us. "Besides, it wasn't her who noticed the smoke, it was the child. She was at a meeting."

  "Probably the W.C.T.U.," Ainsley said. "Or the I.O.D.E. I'll bet she wasn't at a meeting at all; she was hiding behind that damn velvet curtain, wanting us to think she was at a meeting so we'd really do something. What she wants is an orgy."

  "Now Ainsley," I said, "you're being paranoid." Ainsley is convinced that the lady down below comes upstairs when we aren't there and looks round our apartment and is silently horrified, and even suspects her of ruminating over our mail, though not of going so far as to open it. It's a fact that she sometimes answers the front door for our visitors before they ring the bell. She must think she's within her rights to take precautions: when we first considered renting the apartment she made it clear to us, by discreet allusions to previous tenants, that whatever happened the child's innocence must not be corrupted, and that two young ladies were surely more to be depended upon than two young men.

  "I'm doing my best," she had said, sighing and shaking her head. She had intimated that her husband, whose portrait in oils hung above the piano, had not left as much money as he should have. "Of course you realize your apartment has no private entrance?" She had been stressing the drawbacks rather than the advantages, almost as though she didn't want us to rent. I said we did realize it; Ainsley said nothing. We had agreed I would do the talking and Ainsley would sit and look innocent, something she can do very well when she wants to - she has a pink-and-white blunt baby's face, a bump for a nose, and large blue eyes she can make as round as ping-pong balls. On this occasion I had even got her to wear gloves.

  The lady down below shook her head again. "If it weren't for the child," she said, "I would sell the house. But I want the child to grow up in a good district."

  I said I understood, and she said that of course the district wasn't as good as it used to be: some of the larger houses were too expensive to keep up and the owners had been forced to sell them to immigrants (the corners of her mouth turned gently down) who had divided them up into rooming houses. "But that hasn't reached our street yet," she said. "And I tell the child exactly which streets she can walk on and which she can't." I said I thought that was wise. She had seemed much easier to deal with before we had signed the lease. And the rent was so low, and the house was so close to the bus stop. For this city it was a real find.

  "Besides," I added to Ainsley, "they have a right to be worr
ied about the smoke. What if the house was on fire? And she's never mentioned the other things."

  "What other things? We've never done any other things."

  "Well ..." I said. I suspected the lady down below had taken note of all the bottle-shaped objects we had carried upstairs, though I tried my best to disguise them as groceries. It was true she had never specifically forbidden us to do anything - that would be too crude a violation of her law of nuance - but this only makes me feel I am actually forbidden to do everything.

  "On still nights," said Ainsley as the bus drew up, "I can hear her burrowing through the woodwork."

  We didn't talk on the bus; I don't like talking on buses, I would rather look at the advertisements. Besides, Ainsley and I don't have much in common except the lady down below. I've only known her since just before we moved in: she was a friend of a friend, looking for a room mate at the same time I was, which is the way these things are usually done. Maybe I should have tried a computer; though on the whole it's worked out fairly well. We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women. Our apartment is never exactly clean, but we keep it from gathering more than a fine plum-bloom of dust by an unspoken agreement: if I do the breakfast dishes, Ainsley does the supper ones; if I sweep the living-room floor, Ainsley wipes the kitchen table. It's a see-saw arrangement and we both know that if one beat is missed the whole thing will collapse. Of course we each have our own bedroom and what goes on in there is strictly the owner's concern. For instance Ainsley's floor is covered by a treacherous muskeg of used clothes with ashtrays scattered here and there on it like stepping-stones, but though I consider it a fire hazard I never speak to her about it. By such mutual refrainings - I assume they are mutual since there must be things I do that she doesn't like - we manage to preserve a reasonably frictionless equilibrium.

  We reached the subway station, where I bought a package of peanuts. I was beginning to feel hungry already. I offered some to Ainsley, but she refused, so I ate them all on the way downtown.

  We got off at the second-last stop south and walked a block together; our office buildings are in the same district.

  "By the way," said Ainsley as I was turning off at my street, "have you got three dollars? We're out of scotch." I rummaged in my purse and handed over, not without a sense of injustice: we split the cost but rarely the contents. At the age of ten I wrote a temperance essay for a United Church Sunday-school competition, illustrating it with pictures of car crashes, diagrams of diseased livers, and charts showing the effects of alcohol upon the circulatory system; I expect that's why I can never take a second drink without a mental image of a warning sign printed in coloured crayons and connected with the taste of tepid communion grape juice. This puts me at a disadvantage with Peter; he likes me to try and keep up with him.