Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [129]
She had not wanted to put those particular clothes back on but she had no choice. They dressed in silence, awkward in the narrow space of the room whose shabbiness was even more evident in the grey daylight, and furtively descended the stairs.
She looked at him now as he sat hunched over across the table from her, muffled again in his clothes. He had lit a cigarette and his eyes were watching the smoke. The eyes were closed to her, remote. The imprint left on her mind by the long famished body that had seemed in the darkness to consist of nothing but sharp crags and angles, the memory of its painfully defined almost skeletal ribcage, a pattern of ridges like a washboard, was fading as rapidly as any other transient impression on a soft surface. Whatever decision she had made had been forgotten, if indeed she had ever decided anything. It could have been an illusion, like the blue light on their skins. Something had been accomplished in his life though, she thought with a sense of weary competence; that was a small comfort; but for her nothing was permanent or finished. Peter was there, he hadn’t vanished; he was as real as the crumbs on the table, and she would have to act accordingly. She would have to go back. She had missed the morning bus but she could get the afternoon one, after talking to Peter, explaining. Or rather avoiding explanation. There was no real reason to explain because explanations involved causes and effects and this event had been neither. It had come from nowhere and it led nowhere, it was outside the chain. Suddenly it occurred to her that she hadn’t begun to pack.
She looked down at the menu. “Bacon and Eggs, Any Style,” she read. “Our Plump Tender Sausages.” She thought of pigs and chickens. She shifted hastily to “Toast.” Something moved in her throat. She closed the menu.
“What do you want?” Duncan asked.
“Nothing, I can’t eat anything,” she said, “I can’t eat anything at all. Not even a glass of orange juice.” It had finally happened at last then. Her body had cut itself off. The food circle had dwindled to a point, a black dot, closing everything outside.… She looked at the grease spot on the cover of the menu, almost whimpering with self-pity.
“You sure? Oh well then,” said Duncan with a trace of alacrity, “that means I can spend it all on me.”
When the waitress came back he ordered ham and eggs, which he proceeded to consume voraciously, and without apology or comment, before her very eyes. She watched him in misery. When he broke the eggs with his fork and their yellow centres ran viscously over the plate she turned her head away. She thought she was going to be sick.
“Well,” he said when he had paid the cheque and they were standing outside on the street, “thanks for everything. I’ve got to go home and get to work on my term paper.”
Marian thought of the cold fuel-oil and stale cigar smell there would be inside the bus. Then she thought of the dishes in the kitchen sink. The bus would get warm and stuffy as she travelled inside it along the highway, the tires making their high grinding whine. What was living, hidden and repulsive, down there among the plates and dirty glasses? She couldn’t go back.
“Duncan,” she said, “please don’t go.”
“Why? Is there more?”
“I can’t go back.”
He frowned down at her. “What do you expect me to do?” he asked. “You shouldn’t expect me to do anything. I want to go back to my shell. I’ve had enough so-called reality for now.”
“You don’t have to do anything, couldn’t you just …”
“No,” he said, “I don’t want to. You aren’t an escape any more, you’re too real. Something’s bothering you and you’d want to talk about it; I’d have to start worrying about you and all that, I haven’t time for it.”
She looked down at their four feet, standing in the trodden slush of the sidewalk. “I really can’t go back.”
He peered at her more closely. “Are you going to be sick?” he asked. “Don’t do that.”
She stood mutely before him. She could offer him no good reason for staying with her. There