"The Edible Woman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Atwood Margaret)

12

So here I am.

I’m sitting on my bed in my room with the door shut and the window open. It’s Labour Day, a fine cool sunny day like yesterday. I found it strange not to have to go to the office this morning. The highways outside the city will be coagulating with traffic even this early, people already beginning to come back from their weekends at summer cottages, trying to beat the rush. At five o’clock everything will have slowed down to an ooze out there and the air will be filled with the shimmer of sun on miles of metal and the whining of idling motors and bored children. But here, as usual, it’s quiet.

Ainsley is in the kitchen. I’ve hardly seen her today. I can hear her walking about on the other side of the door, humming intermittently. I feel hesitant about opening the door. Our positions have shifted in some way I haven’t yet assessed, and I know I would find it difficult to talk with her.

Friday seems a long time ago, so much has happened since then, but now I’ve gone over it all in my mind I see that my actions were really more sensible than I thought at the time. It was my subconscious getting ahead of my conscious self, and the subconscious has its own logic. The way I went about doing things may have been a little inconsistent with my true personality, but are the results that inconsistent? The decision was a little sudden, but now I’ve had time to think about it I realize it is actually a very good step to take. Of course I’d always assumed through high school and college that I was going to marry someone eventually and have children, everyone does. Either two or four, three is a bad number and I don’t approve of only children, they get spoiled too easily. I’ve never been silly about marriage the way Ainsley is. She’s against it on principle, and life isn’t run by principles but by adjustments. As Peter says, you can’t continue to run around indefinitely; people who aren’t married get funny in middle age, embittered or addled or something, I’ve seen enough of them around the office to realize that. But although I’m sure it was in the back of my mind I hadn’t consciously expected it to happen so soon or quite the way it did. Of course I was more involved with Peter all along than I wanted to admit.

And there’s no reason why our marriage should turn out like Clara’s. Those two aren’t practical enough, they have no sense at all of how to manage, how to run a well-organized marriage. So much of it is a matter of elementary mechanical detail, such as furniture and meals and keeping things in order. But Peter and I should be able to set up a very reasonable arrangement. Though of course we still have a lot of the details to work out. Peter is an ideal choice when you come to think of it. He’s attractive and he’s bound to be successful, and also he’s neat, which is a major point when you’re going to be living with someone.

I can imagine the expressions on their faces at the office when they hear. But I can’t tell them yet, I’ll have to keep my job there for a while longer. Till Peter is finished articling we’ll need the money. We’ll probably have to live in an apartment at first, but later we can have a real house, a permanent place; it will be worth the trouble to keep clean.

Meanwhile I should be doing something constructive instead of sitting around like this. First I should revise the beer questionnaire and make out a report on my findings so I can type it up first thing tomorrow and get it out of the way.

Then perhaps I’ll wash my hair. And my room needs a general clean-up. I should go through the dresser drawers and throw out whatever has accumulated in them, and there are some dresses hanging in the closet I don’t wear enough to keep. I’ll give them to the Salvation Army. Also a lot of costume jewellery, the kind you get from relatives at Christmas: imitation gold pins in the shapes of poodle dogs and bunches of flowers with pieces of cut glass for petals and eyes. There’s a cardboard box full of books, textbooks mostly, and letters from home I know I’ll never look at again, and a couple of ancient dolls I’ve kept for sentimental reasons. The older doll has a cloth body stuffed with sawdust (I know that because I once performed an operation on it with a pair of nail scissors) and hands, feet and head made of a hard woody material. The fingers and toes have been almost chewed off; the hair is black and short, a few frizzy wisps attached to a piece of netting which is coming unglued from the skull. The face is almost eroded but still has its open mouth with the red felt tongue inside and two china teeth, its chief fascination as I remember. It’s dressed in a strip of old sheet. I used to leave food in front of it overnight and was always disappointed when it wasn’t gone in the morning. The other doll is newer and has long washable hair and a rubbery skin. I asked for her one Christmas because you could give her baths. Neither of them is very attractive any longer; I might as well throw them out with the rest of the junk.

I still can’t quite fit in the man at the laundromat or account for my own behaviour. Maybe it was a kind of lapse, a blank in the ego, like amnesia. But there’s little chance of my ever running into him again – I don’t even know his name – and anyway he has nothing at all to do with Peter.

After I finish cleaning my room I should write a letter home. They will all be pleased, this is surely what they’ve been waiting for. They’ll want us to come down for the weekend as soon as possible. I’ve never met Peter’s parents either.

In a minute I’ll get off the bed and walk through the pool of sunshine on the floor. I can’t let my whole afternoon dribble away, relaxing though it is to sit in this quiet room gazing up at the empty ceiling with my back against the cool wall, dangling my feet over the edge of the bed. It’s almost like being on a rubber raft, drifting, looking up into a clear sky.

I must get organized. I have a lot to do.