Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [135]
What am I going to put her on? she thought when she had finished. I’ll have to wash a dish. She unearthed a long platter from the very bottom of the stack of plates in the sink and scoured it thoroughly under the tap. It took quite a lot of detergent to get the scum off.
She tested the cake; it was done. She took it out of the oven and turned it upside down to cool.
She was glad Ainsley wasn’t home: she didn’t want any interference with what she was going to do. In fact it didn’t look as though Ainsley had been home at all. There was no sign of her green dress. In her room a suitcase was lying open on the bed where she must have left it the night before. Some of the surface flotsam was eddying into it, as though drawn by a vortex. Marian wondered in passing how Ainsley was ever going to cram the random contents of the room into anything as limited and rectilineal as a set of suitcases.
While the cake was cooling she went into the bedroom and tidied her hair, pulling it back and pinning it to get rid of the remains of the hairdresser’s convolutions. She felt lighthearted, almost dizzy: it must be the lack of sleep and the lack of food. She grinned into the mirror, showing her teeth.
The cake wasn’t cooling quickly enough. She refused to put it into the refrigerator though. It would pick up the smells. She took it out of the tin and set it on the clean platter, opened the kitchen window, and stuck it out on the snowy sill. She knew what happened to cakes that were iced warm – everything melted.
She wondered what time it was. Her watch was still on the top of the dresser where she had left it the day before but it had run down. She didn’t want to turn on Ainsley’s transistor, that would be too distracting. She was getting jittery already. There used to be a number you could phone … but anyway she would have to hurry.
She took the cake off the sill, felt it to see if it was cool enough, and put it on the kitchen table. Then she began to operate. With the two forks she pulled it in half through the middle. One half she placed flat side down on the platter. She scooped out part of it and made a head with the section she had taken out. Then she nipped in a waist at the sides. The other half she pulled into strips for the arms and legs. The spongy cake was pliable, easy to mould. She stuck all the separate members together with white icing, and used the rest of the icing to cover the shape she had constructed. It was bumpy in places and had too many crumbs in the skin, but it would do. She reinforced the feet and ankles with toothpicks.
Now she had a blank white body. It looked slightly obscene, lying there soft and sugary and featureless on the platter. She set about clothing it, filling the cake decorator with bright-pink icing. First she gave it a bikini, but that was too sparse. She filled in the midriff. Now it had an ordinary bathing suit, but that still wasn’t exactly what she wanted. She kept extending, adding to top and bottom, until she had a dress of sorts. In a burst of exuberance she added a row of ruffles around the neckline, and more ruffles at the hem of the dress. She made a smiling lush-lipped pink mouth and pink shoes to match. Finally she put five pink fingernails on each of the amorphous hands.
The cake looked peculiar with only a mouth and no hair or eyes. She rinsed out the cake decorator and filled it with chocolate icing. She drew a nose, and two large eyes, to which she appended many eyelashes and two eyebrows, one above each eye. For emphasis she made a line demarcating one leg from the other, and similar lines to separate the arms from the body. The hair took longer. It involved masses of intricate baroque scrolls and swirls, piled