Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [104]
24
All at once it was the day of Peter’s final party. Marian had spent the afternoon at the hairdresser’s: Peter had suggested that she might have something done with her hair. He had also hinted that perhaps she should buy a dress that was, as he put it, “not quite so mousy” as any she already owned, and she had duly bought one. It was short, red, and sequinned. She didn’t think it was really her, but the saleslady did. “It’s you, dear,” she had said, her voice positive.
It had needed an alteration so she had picked it up when she came from the hairdresser’s and was carrying it now in its pink and silver cardboard box as she walked towards the house across the slippery road, balancing her head on her neck as though she was a juggler with a fragile golden bubble. Even outside in the cold late-afternoon air she could smell the sweetly artificial perfume of the hairspray he had used to glue each strand in place. Though she’d asked him not to put on too much; but they never did what you wanted them to. They treated your head like a cake: something to be carefully iced and ornamented.
She usually did her hair herself, so she had got the name of the establishment from Lucy, thinking she would know about such places; but perhaps that had been a mistake. Lucy had a face and shape that almost demanded the artificial: nail polish and makeup and elaborate arrangements of hair blended into her, became part of her. Surely she would look peeled or amputated without them; whereas Marian had always thought that on her own body these things looked extra, stuck to her surface like patches or posters.
As soon as she had walked into the large pink room – everything had been pink and mauve, it was amazing how such frivolously feminine decorations could look at the same time so functional – she had felt as passive as though she was being admitted to a hospital to have an operation. She had checked her appointment with a mauve-haired young woman who despite her false eyelashes and iridescent talons was disturbingly nurse-like and efficient; then she had been delivered over to the waiting staff.
The shampoo girl wore a pink smock and had sweaty armpits and strong professional hands. Marian had closed her eyes, leaning back against the operating table, while her scalp was soaped and scraped and rinsed. She thought it would be a good idea if they would give anaesthetics to the patients, just put them to sleep while all these necessary physical details were taken care of; she didn’t enjoy feeling like a slab of flesh, an object.
Then they had strapped her into the chair – not really strapped in, but she couldn’t get up and go running out into the winter street with wet hair and a surgical cloth around her neck – and the doctor had set to work. A young man in a white smock who smelled of cologne and had deft spindly fingers and shoes with pointed toes. She had sat motionless, handing him the clamps, fascinated by the draped figure prisoned in the filigreed gold oval of the mirror and by the rack of gleaming instruments and bottled medicines on the counter in front of her. She couldn’t see what he was doing behind her back. Her whole body felt curiously paralysed.
When at last all the clamps and rollers and clips and pins were in place, and her head resembled a mutant hedgehog with a covering of rounded hairy appendages instead of spikes, she was led away and installed under a dryer and switched on. She looked sideways down the assembly line of women seated in identical mauve chairs under identical whirring mushroom-shaped machines. All that was visible was a row of strange creatures with legs of various shapes and hands that held magazines and heads that were metal domes. Inert; totally inert. Was this what she was being pushed towards, this compound of the simply vegetable and the simply mechanical? An electric mushroom.
She resigned herself to the necessity of endurance, and picked up a movie-star magazine from the stack at her elbow. A blonde woman with enormous breasts spoke to her from the back cover: