Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [37]
I hesitated. Why was he doing this? It might be only the same formal motive that prompted him to open car doors – almost an automatic reflex – in which case I could accept the favour just as formally, with no danger; but what would it really involve if I got into the car? I studied him: he had clearly had too much to drink, though clearly also he was in near-perfect control of himself. His eyes were a little glazed, it was true, but he was holding his body stiffly upright.
“Well,” I said doubtfully, “really I’d rather walk. Though thank you just the same.”
“Oh come along Marian, don’t be childish,” he said brusquely, and took my arm.
I allowed myself to be led to the car and inserted into the front seat. I was, I think, reluctant; but I did not particularly want to get wet.
He got in and slammed his own door and started the motor. “Now perhaps you’ll tell me what all that nonsense was about,” he said angrily.
We turned a corner and the rain hit, blown against the windshield by sharp gusts of wind. At any moment we were going to have, as one of my great-aunts used to say, a trash-mover and a gully-washer.
“I didn’t request to be driven home,” I said, hedging. I was convinced that it hadn’t been nonsense, but also acutely aware that it would look very much like nonsense to any outside observer. I didn’t want to discuss it; in that direction there could only be a dead end. I sat up straight in the front seat, staring through a window out of which I could see little or nothing.
“Why the hell you had to ruin a perfectly good evening I’ll never know,” he said, ignoring my remark. There was a crack of thunder.
“I don’t seem to have ruined it much for you,” I said. “You were enjoying yourself enough.”
“Oh so that’s it. We weren’t entertaining you enough. Our conversation bored you, we weren’t paying enough attention to you. Well, next time we’ll know enough to save you the trouble of coming with us.”
This seemed to me quite unfair. After all, Len was my friend. “Len’s my friend, you know,” I said. My voice was beginning to quiver. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t want to talk with him a little myself when he’s just got back from England.” I knew even as I said it that Len was quite beside the point.
“Ainsley behaved herself properly, why couldn’t you? The trouble with you is,” he said savagely, “you’re just rejecting your femininity.”
His approval of Ainsley was a vicious goad. “Oh, SCREW my femininity,” I shouted. “Femininity has nothing to do with it. You were just being plain ordinary rude!” Unintentional bad manners was something Peter couldn’t stand to be accused of, and I knew it. It put him in the class of the people in the deodorant ads.
He glanced quickly over at me, his eyes narrowed as though he was taking aim. Then he gritted his teeth together and stepped murderously hard on the accelerator. By that time the rain was coming down in torrents: the road ahead, when it could be seen at all, looked like a solid sheet of water. When I made my thrust we’d been going down a hill, and at the suddenly increased speed the car skidded, turned two-and-a-quarter times round, slithered backwards down over someone’s inclined lawn, and came to a bone-jolting stop. I heard something snap.
“You maniac!” I wailed, when I had ricocheted off the glove-compartment and realized I wasn’t dead. “You’ll get us all killed!” I must have been thinking of myself as plural.
Peter rolled down the window and stuck his head out. Then he began to laugh. “I’ve trimmed their hedge a bit for them,” he said. He stepped on the gas. The wheels spun for an instant, churning up the mud of the lawn and leaving (as I later saw) two deep gouges, and with a grinding of gears we moved up over the edge of the lawn and back onto the road.
I was trembling now from a combination of fright, cold, and fury. “First you drag me