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

4

I walked down towards the subway station along the late-afternoon sidewalk through a thick golden haze of heat and dust. It was almost like moving underwater. From a distance I saw Ainsley shimmering beside a telephone pole, and when I had reached her she turned and we joined the lines of office workers who were tunnelling down the stairs into the cool underground caverns below. By quick manoeuvring we got seats, though on the opposite sides of the car, and I sat reading the advertisements as well as I could through the screen of lurching bodies. When we got off again and went out through the pastel corridors the air felt less humid.

Clara’s house was a few blocks further north. We walked in silence; I thought about mentioning the Pension Plan, but decided not to. Ainsley wouldn’t understand why I found it disturbing: she’d see no reason why I couldn’t leave my job and get another one, and why this wouldn’t be a final solution. Then I thought about Peter and what had happened to him; Ainsley, however, would only be amused if I told her. Finally I asked her if she was feeling better.

“Don’t be so concerned, Marian,” she said, “you make me feel like an invalid.”

I was hurt and didn’t answer.

We were going uphill at a slight angle. The city slopes upwards from the lake in a series of gentle undulations, though at any given point it seems flat. This accounted for the cooler air. It was quieter here too; I thought Clara was lucky, especially in her condition, to be living so far away from the heat and noise of downtown. Though she herself thought of it as a kind of exile: they had started out in an apartment near the university, but the need for space had forced them further north, although they had not yet reached the real suburbia of modern bungalows and station wagons. The street itself was old but not as attractive as our street: the houses were duplexes, long and narrow, with wooden porches and thin back gardens.

“Christ it’s hot,” Ainsley said as we turned up the walk that led to Clara’s house. The grass on the doormat-sized lawn had not been cut for some time. On the steps lay a neatly decapitated doll and inside the baby carriage was a large teddy bear with the stuffing coming out. I knocked, and after several minutes Joe appeared behind the screen door, harried and uncombed, doing up the buttons on his shirt.

“Hi Joe,” I said, “here we are. How’s Clara feeling?”

“Hi, come on through,” he said, stepping aside to let us past. “Clara’s out back.”

We walked the length of the house, which was arranged in the way such houses usually are – living room in front, then dining room with doors that can be slid shut, then kitchen – stepping over some of the scattered obstacles and around the others. We negotiated the stairs of the back porch, which were overgrown with empty bottles of all kinds, beer bottles, milk bottles, wine and scotch bottles, and baby bottles, and found Clara in the garden, sitting in a round wicker basket-chair with metal legs. She had her feet up on another chair and was holding her latest baby somewhere in the vicinity of what had once been her lap. Clara’s body is so thin that her pregnancies are always bulgingly obvious, and now in her seventh month she looked like a boa constrictor that has swallowed a watermelon. Her head, with its aureole of pale hair, was made to seem smaller and even more fragile by the contrast.

“Oh hi,” she said wearily as we came down the back steps. “Hello Ainsley, nice to see you again. Christ it’s hot.”

We agreed, and sat down on the grass near her, since there were no chairs. Ainsley and I took off our shoes; Clara was already barefoot. We found it difficult to talk: everyone’s attention was necessarily focussed on the baby, which was whimpering, and for some time it was the only person who said anything.

When she telephoned Clara had seemed to be calling me to some sort of rescue, but I felt now that there was nothing much I could do, and nothing she had even expected me to do. I was to be only a witness, or perhaps a kind of blotter, my mere physical presence absorbing a little of the boredom.

The baby had ceased to whine and was now gurgling. Ainsley was plucking bits of grass.

“Marian,” Clara said at last, “could you take Elaine for a while? She doesn’t like going on the ground and my arms are just about falling off.”

“I’ll take her,” said Ainsley unexpectedly.

Clara pried the baby away from her body and transferred it to Ainsley, saying “Come on, you little leech. I sometimes think she’s all covered with suckers, like an octopus.” She lay back in her chair and closed her eyes, looking like a strange vegetable growth, a bulbous tuber that had sent out four thin white roots and a tiny pale-yellow flower. A cicada was singing in a tree nearby, its monotonous vibration like a hot needle of sunlight between the ears.

Ainsley held the baby awkwardly, gazing with curiosity into its face. I thought how closely the two faces resembled each other. The baby stared back up with eyes as round and blue as Ainsley’s own; the pink mouth was drooling slightly.

Clara raised her head and opened her eyes. “Is there anything I can get you?” she asked, remembering she was the hostess.

“Oh no, we’re fine,” I said hastily, alarmed by the image of her struggling up out of the chair. “Is there anything I can get you?” I would have felt better doing something positive.

“Joe will come out soon,” she said as if explaining. “Well, talk to me. What’s new?”

“Nothing much,” I said. I sat trying to think of things that would entertain her, but anything I could mention, the office or places I had been or the furnishings of the apartment, would only remind Clara of her own inertia, her lack of room and time, her days made claustrophobic with small necessary details.

“Are you still going out with that nice boy? The good-looking one. What’s-his-name. I remember he came by once to get you.”

“You mean Peter?”

“Yes she is,” said Ainsley, with a hint of disapproval. “He’s monopolized her.” She was sitting cross-legged, and now she put the baby down in her lap so she could light a cigarette.

“That sounds hopeful,” Clara said gloomily. “By the way, guess who’s back in town? Len Slank. He called up the other day.”

“Oh really? When did he get in?” I was annoyed that he hadn’t called me too.

“About a week ago, he said. He said he’d tried to phone you but couldn’t get hold of your number.”

“He might have tried Information,” I said drily. “But I’d love to see him. How did he seem? How long is he staying?”

“Who is he?” Ainsley asked.

“Oh, no one you’d be interested in,” I said quickly. I couldn’t think of two people who would be worse for each other. “He’s just an old friend of ours from college.”

“He went to England and got into television,” said Clara. “I’m not just sure what he does. A nice type though, but he’s horrible with women, sort of a seducer of young girls. He says anything over seventeen is too old.”

“Oh, one of those,” Ainsley said. “They’re such a bore.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the grass.

“You know, I got the feeling that’s why he’s back,” Clara said, with something like vivacity. “Some kind of a mess with a girl; like the one that made him go over in the first place.”

“Ah,” I said, not surprised.

Ainsley gave a little cry and deposited the baby on the lawn. “It’s wet on my dress,” she said accusingly.

“Well, they do, you know,” said Clara. The baby began to howl, and I picked her up gingerly and handed her over to Clara. I was prepared to be helpful, but only up to a point.

Clara joggled the baby. “Well, you goddamned fire hydrant,” she said soothingly. “You spouted on mummy’s friend, didn’t you? It’ll wash out, Ainsley. But we didn’t want to put rubber pants on you in all this heat, did we, you stinking little geyser? Never believe what they tell you about maternal instinct,” she added grimly to us. “I don’t see how anyone can love their children till they start to be human beings.”

Joe appeared on the back porch, a dishtowel tucked apron-like into the belt of his trousers. “Anybody for a beer before dinner?”

Ainsley and I said Yes eagerly, and Clara said, “A little vermouth for me, darling. I can’t drink anything else these days, it upsets my bloody stomach. Joe, can you just take Elaine in and change her?”

Joe came down the steps and picked up the baby. “By the way,” he said, “you haven’t seen Arthur around anywhere, have you?”

“Oh god, now where has the little bugger got to now?” Clara asked as Joe disappeared into the house; it seemed a rhetorical question. “I think he’s found out how to open the back gate. The little bastard. Arthur! Come here, darling,” she called languidly.

Down at the end of the narrow garden the line of washing that hung almost brushing the ground was parted by two small grubby hands, and Clara’s firstborn emerged. Like the baby he was naked except for a pair of diapers. He hesitated, peering at us dubiously.

“Come here love, and let mummy see what you’ve been up to,” Clara said. “Take your hands off the clean sheets,” she added without conviction.

Arthur picked his way over the grass towards us, lifting his bare feet high with every step. The grass must have been ticklish. His diaper was loose, suspended as though by willpower alone below the bulge of his stomach with its protruding navel. His face was puckered in a serious frown.

Joe returned carrying a tray. “I stuck her in the laundry basket,” he said. “She’s playing with the clothespins.”

Arthur had reached us and stood beside his mother’s chair, still frowning, and Clara said to him, “Why have you got that funny look, you little demon?” She reached down behind him and felt his diaper. “I should have known,” she sighed, “he was so quiet. Husband, your son has shat again. I don’t know where, it isn’t in his diaper.”

Joe handed round the drinks, then knelt and said to Arthur firmly but kindly, “Show Daddy where you put it.” Arthur gazed up at him, not sure whether to whimper or smile. Finally he stalked portentously to the side of the garden, where he squatted down near a clump of dusty red chrysanthemums and stared with concentration at a patch of ground.

“That’s a good boy,” Joe said, and went back into the house.

“He’s a real nature-child, he just loves to shit in the garden,” Clara said to us. “He thinks he’s a fertility-god. If we didn’t clean it up this place would be one big manure field. I don’t know what he’s going to do when it snows.” She closed her eyes. “We’ve been trying to toilet-train him, though according to some of the books it’s too early, and we got him one of those plastic potties. He hasn’t the least idea what it’s for; he goes around wearing it on his head. I guess he thinks it’s a crash helmet.”

We watched, sipping our beer, as Joe crossed the garden and returned with a folded piece of newspaper. “After this one I’m going on the pill,” said Clara.

When Joe had finally finished cooking the dinner we went into the house and ate it, seated around the heavy table in the dining room. The baby had been fed and exiled to the carriage on the front porch, but Arthur sat in a high chair, where he evaded with spastic contortions of his body the spoonfuls of food Clara poked in the direction of his mouth. Dinner was wizened meat balls and noodles from a noodle mix, with lettuce. For dessert we had something I recognized.

“This is that new canned rice pudding; it saves a lot of time,” Clara said defensively. “It’s not too bad with cream, and Arthur loves it.”

“Yes,” I said. “Pretty soon they’ll be having Orange and Caramel too.”

“Oh?” Clara deftly intercepted a long drool of pudding and returned it to Arthur’s mouth.

Ainsley got out a cigarette and held it for Joe to light. “Tell me,” she said to him, “do you know this friend of theirs – Leonard Slank? They’re being so mysterious about him.”

Joe had been up and down all during the meal, taking off the plates and tending things in the kitchen. He looked dizzy. “Oh yes, I remember him,” he said, “though he’s really a friend of Clara’s.” He finished his pudding quickly and asked Clara whether she needed any help, but she didn’t hear him. Arthur had just thrown his bowl on the floor.

“But what do you think of him?” Ainsley asked, as though appealing to his superior intelligence.

Joe stared at the wall, thinking. He didn’t like giving negative judgments, I knew, but I also knew he wasn’t fond of Len. “He’s not ethical,” he said at last. Joe is an Instructor in Philosophy.

“Oh, that’s not quite fair,” I said. Len had never been unethical towards me.

Joe frowned at me. He doesn’t know Ainsley very well, and tends anyway to think of all unmarried girls as easily victimized and needing protection. He had several times volunteered fatherly advice to me, and now he emphasized his point. “He’s not someone to get… mixed up with,” he said sternly. Ainsley gave a short laugh and blew out smoke, unperturbed.

“That reminds me,” I said, “you’d better give me his phone number.”

After dinner we went to sit in the littered living room while Joe cleared the table. I offered to help, but Joe said that was all right, he would rather I talked to Clara. Clara had settled herself on the chesterfield in a nest of crumpled newspapers with her eyes closed; again I could think of little to say. I sat staring up at the centre of the ceiling where there was an elaborately-scrolled plaster decoration, once perhaps the setting for a chandelier, remembering Clara at high school: a tall fragile girl who was always getting exempted from Physical Education. She’d sit on the sidelines watching the rest of us in our blue-bloomered gymsuits as though anything so sweaty and ungainly was foreign enough to her to be a mildly amusing entertainment. In that classroom full of oily potato-chip-fattened adolescents she was everyone’s ideal of translucent perfume-advertisement femininity. At university she had been a little healthier, but had grown her blonde hair long, which made her look more medieval than ever: I had thought of her in connection with the ladies sitting in rose gardens on tapestries. Of course her mind wasn’t like that, but I’ve always been influenced by appearances.

She married Joe Bates in May at the end of our second year, and at first I thought it was an ideal match. Joe was then a graduate student, almost seven years older than she was, a tall shaggy man with a slight stoop and a protective attitude towards Clara. Their worship of each other before the wedding was sometimes ridiculously idealistic; one kept expecting Joe to spread his overcoat on mud puddles or drop to his knees to kiss Clara’s rubber boots. The babies had been unplanned: Clara greeted her first pregnancy with astonishment that such a thing could happen to her, and her second with dismay; now, during her third, she had subsided into a grim but inert fatalism. Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.

I looked at her, feeling a wave of embarrassed pity sweep over me; what could I do? Perhaps I could offer to come over some day and clean up the house. Clara simply had no practicality, she wasn’t able to control the more mundane aspects of life, like money or getting to lectures on time. When we lived in residence together she used to become hopelessly entangled in her room at intervals, unable to find matching shoes or enough clean clothes to wear, and I would have to dig her out of the junk pile she had allowed to accumulate around her. Her messiness wasn’t actively creative like Ainsley’s, who could devastate a room in five minutes if she was feeling chaotic; it was passive. She simply stood helpless while the tide of dirt rose round her, unable to stop it or evade it. The babies were like that too; her own body seemed somehow beyond her, going its own way without reference to any directions of hers. I studied the pattern of bright flowers on the maternity smock she was wearing; the stylized petals and tendrils moved with her breathing, as though they were coming alive.

We left early, after Arthur had been carried off to bed screaming after what Joe called “an accident” behind the living-room door.

“It was no accident,” Clara remarked, opening her eyes. “He just loves peeing behind doors. I wonder what it is. He’s going to be secretive when he grows up, an undercover agent or a diplomat or something. The furtive little bastard.”

Joe saw us to the door, a pile of dirty laundry in his arms. “You must come and see us again soon,” he said, “Clara has so few people she can really talk to.”