Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [38]
Peter was still laughing. His head was soaking wet, even from that brief exposure to the rain, and the hair was plastered down on his head, the water trickling from it over his face. “They’re going to see an alteration in their landscape gardening when they get up in the morning,” he chuckled. He seemed to find wilfully ruining other people’s property immensely funny.
“You seem to find wilfully ruining other people’s property immensely funny,” I said, with sarcasm.
“Oh, don’t be such a killjoy,” he replied pleasantly. His satisfaction with what he considered a forceful display of muscle was obvious. It irritated me that he should appropriate as his own the credit due to the back wheels of his car.
“Peter, why can’t you be serious? You’re just an overgrown adolescent.”
This he chose to disregard.
The car stopped jerkily. “Here we are,” he said.
I took hold of the door handle, intending, I think, to make a final unanswerable remark and dash for the house; but he put his hand on my arm. “Better wait until it lets up a bit.”
He turned the ignition key and the heartbeats of the windshield-wipers stopped. We sat silently, listening to the storm. It must have been right overhead; the lightning was dazzling and continuous, and each probing jagged fork was followed almost at once by a rending crash, like the trees of a whole forest splitting and falling. In the intervals of darkness we heard the rain pounding against the car; water was coming through in a fine spray around the edges of the closed windows.
“It’s a good thing I didn’t let you walk home,” Peter said in the tone of a man who has made a firm and proper decision. I could only agree.
During a long flickering moment of light I turned and saw him watching me, his face strangely shadowed, his eyes gleaming like an animal’s in the beam from a car headlight. His stare was intent, faintly ominous. Then he leaned towards me and said, “You’ve got some fluff. Hold still.” His hands fumbled against my head: he was awkwardly but with gentleness untangling a piece of dust that was caught in my hair.
I suddenly felt limp as a damp kleenex. I leaned my forehead against his and closed my eyes. His skin was cold and wet and his breath smelled of cognac.
“Open your eyes,” he said. I did: we still had our foreheads pressed together, and I found myself at the next bright instant gazing into a multitude of eyes.
“You’ve got eight eyes,” I said softly. We both laughed and he pulled me against him and kissed me. I put my arms around his back.
We rested quietly like that for some time in the centre of the storm. I was conscious only that I was very tired and that my body would not stop shivering. “I don’t know what I was doing tonight,” I murmured. He stroked my hair, forgiving, understanding, a little patronizing.
“Marian.” I could feel his neck swallow. I couldn’t tell now whether it was his body or my own that was shuddering; he tightened his arms around me. “How do you think we’d get on as … how do you think we’d be, married?”
I drew back from him.
A tremendous electric blue flash, very near, illuminated the inside of the car. As we stared at each other in that brief light I could see myself, small and oval, mirrored in his eyes.
10
When I woke up on Sunday morning – it was closer to Sunday afternoon – my mind was at first as empty as though someone had scooped out the inside of my skull like a cantaloupe and left me only the rind to think with. I looked around the room, scarcely recognizing it as a place I had ever been before. My clothes were scattered over the floor and draped and crumpled on the chairback like fragments left over from the explosion of some life-sized female scarecrow, and the inside of my mouth felt like a piece of cotton-wool stuffing. I got up and wavered out to the kitchen.
Clear sunshine and fresh air were shimmering in through the open kitchen window. Ainsley was up before me. She was leaning forward, concentrating on something