Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [101]
“Don’t you have a birth certificate?”
“I did once, but I lost it.” He turned his head and kissed her on the nose. “I suppose we could go to the kind of hotel where you don’t have to be married.”
“You mean … you’d want me to pose as a – some kind of prostitute?”
“Well? Why not?”
“No,” she said, a little indignantly. “I couldn’t do that.”
“I probably couldn’t either,” he said in a gloomy voice. “And motels are out, I can’t drive. Well I guess that’s that.” He lit another cigarette. “Oh well, it’s true anyway: doubtless you would be corrupting me. But then again,” he said with mild bitterness, “maybe I’m incorruptible.”
Marian was looking out over the baseball park. The night was clear and crisp, and the stars in the black sky burnt coldly. It had snowed earlier, fine powdery snow, and the park was a white blank space, untracked. Suddenly she wanted to go down and run and jump in it, making footmarks and mazes and irregular paths. But she knew that in a minute she would be walking sedately as ever across it towards the station.
She stood up, brushing the snow from her coat. “Coming any further?” she asked.
Duncan stood up too and put his hands into his pockets. His face was shadowed in places and yellowed by the light from the feeble street lamp. “Nope,” he said. “See you, maybe.” He turned away, his retreating figure blurring almost noiselessly into the blue darkness.
When she had reached the bright pastel oblong of the subway station, Marian took out her change purse and retrieved her engagement ring from among the pennies, nickels and dimes.
23
Marian was resting on her stomach, eyes closed, an ashtray balanced in the hollow of her bare back where Peter had set it. He was lying beside her, having a cigarette and finishing his double scotch. In the living room the hi-fi set was playing cocktail music.
Although she was keeping her forehead purposefully unwrinkled, she was worrying. That morning her body had finally put its foot down on canned rice pudding, after accepting it with scarcely a tremor for weeks. It had been such a comfort knowing she could rely on it: it provided bulk, and as Mrs. Withers the dietician had said, it was fortified. But all at once as she had poured the cream over it her eyes had seen it as a collection of small cocoons. Cocoons with miniature living creatures inside.
Ever since this thing had started she had been trying to pretend there was nothing really wrong with her, it was a superficial ailment, like a rash: it would go away. But now she had to face up to it; she had wondered whether she ought to talk to someone about it. She had already told Duncan, but that was no good; he seemed to find it normal, and what was essentially bothering her was the thought that she might not be normal. This was why she was afraid to tell Peter: he might think she was some kind of freak, or neurotic. Naturally he would have second thoughts about getting married; he might say they should postpone the wedding until she got over it. She would say that, too, if it was him. What she would do after they were married and she couldn’t conceal it from him any longer, she couldn’t imagine. Perhaps they could have separate meals.
She was drinking her coffee and staring at her uneaten rice pudding when Ainsley came in, wearing her dingy green robe. These days she no longer hummed and knitted; instead she had been reading a lot of books, trying, she said, to nip the problem in the bud.
She assembled her ironized yeast, her wheat germ, her orange juice, her special laxative and her enriched cereal on the table before sitting down.
“Ainsley,” Marian said, “do you think I’m normal?”
“Normal isn’t the same as average,” Ainsley said cryptically. “Nobody is normal.” She opened a paperback book and began to read, underlining with a red pencil.
Ainsley wouldn’t have been much help anyway. A couple of months ago she would have said it was something wrong with Marian’s sex life, which would have been ridiculous. Or some