Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [10]
Dear Sir, The cereal was fine but I found this in with the raisins. Yours Truly, (Mrs.) Ramona Baldwin.
A squashed housefly was scotch-taped to the bottom of the letter.
“It was that raisin-cereal study,” Lucy said faintly. She was playing on my sympathies.
“Oh, all right,” I said; “have you got her address?”
I made several trial drafts:
Dear Mrs. Baldwin; We are extremely sorry about the object in your cereal but these little mistakes will happen. Dear Mrs. Baldwin; We are so sorry to have inconvenienced you; we assure you however that the entire contents of the package was absolutely sterile. Dear Mrs. Baldwin; We are grateful to you for calling this matter to our attention as we always like to know about any errors we may have made.
The main thing, I knew, was to avoid calling the housefly by its actual name.
The phone rang again; this time it was an unexpected voice.
“Clara!” I exclaimed, conscious of having neglected her. “How are you?”
“Shitty, thanks,” Clara said. “But I wonder if you can come to dinner. I’d really like to see an outside face.”
“I’d love to,” I said, my enthusiasm half genuine: it would be better than a T. V. dinner. “About what time?”
“Oh, you know,” Clara said. “Whenever you come. We aren’t what you’d call punctual around here.” She sounded bitter.
Now I was committed I was thinking rapidly of what this would involve: I was being invited as an entertainer and confidante, someone who would listen to a recital of Clara’s problems, and I didn’t feel like it. “Do you think I could bring Ainsley too?” I said. “That is, if she isn’t doing anything.” I told myself it would be good for Ainsley to have a wholesome dinner – she had only had a coffee at the coffee break – but secretly I wanted her along to take off a bit of the pressure. She and Clara could talk about child psychology.
“Sure, why not?” Clara said. “The more the merrier, that’s our motto.”
I called Ainsley at work, carefully asking her whether she was doing anything for dinner and listening to her accounts of the two invitations she had received and turned down – one from the toothbrush murder trial witness, the other from the dentistry student of the night before. To the latter she had been quite rude: she was never going out with him again. She claimed he had told her there would be artists at the party.
“So you aren’t doing anything then,” I said, establishing the fact.
“Well, no,” said Ainsley, “unless something comes along.”
“Then why don’t you come with me to Clara’s for dinner?” I was expecting a protest, but she accepted calmly. I arranged to meet her at the subway station.
I left the desk at five and headed for the cool pink Ladies’ Room. I wanted a few minutes of isolation to prepare myself for coping before I set out for Clara’s. But Emmy, Lucy and Millie were all there, combing their yellow hair and retouching their makeup. Their six eyes glittered in the mirrors.
“Going out tonight, Marian?” Lucy asked, too casually. She shared my telephone line and naturally knew about Peter.
“Yes,” I said, without volunteering information. Their wistful curiosity made me nervous.
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