Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [118]
When they reached the living room, Marian saw that Leonard had been spotted at once by the office virgins as single and available. They had him backed against the wall in the neuter area now, two of them on the sides cutting off flank escape and the third, in front. He had one of his hands pressed against the wall for balance; the other held a glass stein full of beer. While they talked he shifted his gaze continually from face to face as though he didn’t want to remain looking for too long at any one of them. His own face, which was the flat whitish-grey colour of uncooked pie crust and oddly bloated, expressed a combination of sodden incredulity, boredom, and alarm. But they seemed to have pried a few words out of him, because Marian heard Lucy exclaim, “Television! How exciting!” while the others giggled tensely. Leonard swallowed a desperate mouthful of beer.
Marian was passing the ripe olives when she saw Joe coming towards her from the men’s territory. “Hi,” he said to her. “I’m very glad you asked us here tonight. Clara has so few chances to get out of the house.”
Both of them turned their eyes towards Clara, who was over at the sofa side of the room, talking with one of the soap-wives.
“I worry about her a lot, you know,” Joe continued. “I think it’s a lot harder for her than for most other women; I think it’s harder for any woman who’s been to university. She gets the idea she has a mind, her professors pay attention to what she has to say, they treat her like a thinking human being; when she gets married, her core gets invaded.…”
“Her what?” Marian asked.
“Her core. The centre of her personality, the thing she’s built up; her image of herself, if you like.”
“Oh. Yes,” said Marian.
“Her feminine role and her core are really in opposition, her feminine role demands passivity from her.…”
Marian had a fleeting vision of a large globular pastry, decorated with whipped cream and maraschino cherries, floating suspended in the air above Joe’s head.
“So she allows her core to get taken over by the husband. And when the kids come, she wakes up one morning and discovers she doesn’t have anything left inside, she’s hollow, she doesn’t know who she is any more; her core has been destroyed.” He shook his head gently and sipped at his drink. “I can see it happening with my own female students. But it would be futile to warn them.”
Marian turned to look at Clara where she stood talking, dressed in simple beige, her long hair a delicate pear-pale yellow. She wondered whether Joe had ever told Clara her core had been destroyed; she thought of apples and worms. As she watched, Clara made an emphatic gesture with one of her hands and a soap-wife stepped back looking shocked.
“Of course it doesn’t help to realize all that,” Joe was saying. “It happens, whether you realize it or not. Maybe women shouldn’t be allowed to go to university at all; then they wouldn’t always be feeling later on that they’ve missed out on the life of the mind. For instance when I suggest to Clara that she should go out and do something about it, like taking a night course, she just gives me a funny look.”
Marian looked up at Joe with an affection the precise flavour of which was blurred by the drinks she had had. She thought of him shuffling about the house in his undershirt, meditating on the life of the mind and doing the dishes and tearing the stamps raggedly off the envelopes; she wondered what he did with the stamps after that. She wanted to reach out and touch him, reassure him, tell him Clara’s core hadn’t really been destroyed and everything would be all right; she wanted to give him something. She thrust forward the plate she was holding. “Have an olive,” she said.
Behind Joe’s back the door was opened and Ainsley came through it. “Excuse me,” Marian said to Joe. She set the olives on the hi-fi set and