Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [130]
“Well,” he said, hesitating, “all right. But not for very long, okay?”
She nodded gratefully.
They walked north. “We can’t go to my place, you know,” he said. “They’d make a fuss.”
“I know.”
“Where do you want to go then?” he asked.
She hadn’t thought about that. Everything was impossible. She put her hands over her ears. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice rising towards hysteria, “I don’t know, I might as well go back.…”
“Oh come now,” he said genially, “no histrionics. We’ll go for a walk.” He pulled her hands away from her ears. “All right,” she said, letting herself be humoured.
As they walked Duncan swung their linked hands back and forth. His mood seemed to have changed from its breakfast sullenness to a certain vacant contentment. They were going uphill, away from the lake; the sidewalks were crowded with furred Saturday ladies trudging inexorably as icebreakers through the slush, brows furrowed with purpose, eyes glinting, shopping bags hung at either side to give them ballast. Marian and Duncan dodged past and around them, breaking hands when an especially threatening one bore down upon them. In the streets the cars fumed and splattered by. Pieces of soot fell from the grey air, heavy and moist as snowflakes.
“I need some clean air,” Duncan said when they had walked wordlessly for twenty minutes or so. “This is like being in a fishbowl full of dying pollywogs. Can you face a short subway ride?”
Marian nodded. The further away, she thought, the better.
They went down the nearest pastel-tiled chute, and after an interval smelling of damp wool and mothballs let themselves be carried up by the escalator and out again into daylight.
“Now we take the streetcar,” Duncan said. He seemed to know where he was going, for which Marian could only be thankful. He was leading her. He was in control.
On the streetcar they had to stand. Marian held on to one of the metal poles and stooped so she could see out the window. Over the top of a tea-cosy-shaped green and orange wool hat with large gold sequins sewed to it an unfamiliar landscape jolted past: stores first, then houses, then a bridge, then more houses. She had no idea what part of the city they were in.
Duncan reached over her head and pulled the cord. The streetcar ground to a halt and they squeezed their way towards the back and jumped down.
“Now we walk,” said Duncan. He turned down a side street. The houses were smaller and a little newer than the ones in Marian’s district, but they were still dark and tall, many with square pillared wooden porches, the paint grey or dingy white. The snow on the lawns was fresher here. They passed an old man shovelling a walk, the scrape of the shovel sounding strangely loud in the silent air. There was an abnormal number of cats. Marian thought of how the street would smell in the spring when the snow melted: earth, bulbs coming up, damp wood, last year’s leaves rotting, the winter’s accumulations of the cats who had thought they were being so clean and furtive as they scratched holes for themselves in the snow. Old people coming out of the grey doors with shovels, creaking over the lawns, burying things. Spring cleaning: a sense of purpose.
They crossed a street and began to go down a steep hill. All at once Duncan started to run, dragging Marian behind him as if she was a toboggan.
“Stop!” she called, alarmed at the loudness of her own voice. “I can’t run!” She felt the curtains in all the windows swaying perilously as they went past, as though each house contained a dour watcher.
“No!” Duncan shouted back at her. “We’re escaping! Come on!”
Under her arm a seam split. She had a vision of the red dress disintegrating in mid-air, falling in little scraps behind her in the snow, like feathers. They were off the sidewalk now, slithering down the road towards a fence; there was a yellow and black chequered sign that said “Danger.” She was afraid they would go splintering through the wooden fence and hurtle over an unseen edge, in slow motion almost, like movies of automobiles