Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [61]
“Oh rats!” she said to herself as she flung off her coat.
15
At four-thirty the next day Marian was walking along a hospital corridor searching for the right room. She had skipped her lunch hour, substituting a cheese-and-lettuce sandwich – a slice of plastic cheese between two pieces of solidified bubble-bath with several flaps of pallid greenery, brought in a cardboard carton by the restaurant take-out-order boy – for real food, so that she could leave the office an hour early, and had already spent half an hour buying the roses and getting to the hospital. Now she had only thirty minutes of visiting time in which to talk with Clara; she wondered whether they would be able to produce, between them, thirty minutes’ worth of conversation.
The doors of the rooms were standing open, and she had to pause in front of them and step almost into the rooms to read the numbers. From within each came the high-pitched bibblebobble of women talking together. At last she reached the right number, close to the end of the corridor.
Clara was lying diaphanously on a high white hospital bed, its raised back propping her in a half-sitting position. She was wearing a flannelette hospital gown. Her body under the sheet looked to Marian unnaturally thin; her pale hair was falling loosely over her shoulders.
“Well hi,” she said. “Come down to see the old mum at last, eh?”
Marian thrust her flowers forward in place of the guilty apologetic remark she should have made. Clara’s fragile fingers unwrapped the cornucopia of green paper from around them. “They’re lovely,” she said. “I’ll have to get that damn nurse to put them in some decent water. She’s just as likely to stick them in the bedpan if you don’t watch her.”
When selecting them, Marian had been uncertain whether to get deep-red ones, salmon pink, or white; she was a little sorry now that she had chosen the white. In some ways they went almost too well with Clara; in other ways not at all.
“Draw the curtains a bit,” Clara said in a low voice. There were three other women in the room and private conversation was obviously difficult.
When Marian had pulled the heavy canvas curtains that were attached by rings to a curved metal rod suspended like a large oval halo above the bed and had sat down on the visitor’s chair, she asked, “Well, how do you feel?”
“Oh marvellous; really marvellous. I watched the whole thing, it’s messy, all that blood and junk, but I’ve got to admit it’s sort of fascinating. Especially when the little bugger sticks its head out, and you finally know after carrying the damn thing around all that time what it looks like; I get so excited waiting to see, it’s like when you were little and you waited and waited and finally got to open your Christmas presents. Sometimes when I was pregnant I wished like hell we could just hatch them out of eggs, like the birds and so on; but there’s really something to be said for this method.” She picked up one of the white roses, and sniffed at it. “You really ought to try it sometime.”
Marian wondered how she could be so casual about it, as if she was recommending a handy trick for making fluffier pie crust or a new detergent. Of course it was something she had always planned to do, eventually; and Peter had begun to make remarks with paternal undertones. But in this room with these white-sheeted outstretched women the possibility was suddenly much too close. And then there was Ainsley. “Don’t rush me,” she said, smiling.
“Of course it hurts like hell,” Clara said smugly, “and they won’t give you anything till quite far along, because of the baby; but that’s the funny thing about pain. You can never remember it afterwards. I feel just marvellous now – I keep thinking I’ll get post-puerperal depression, like a lot of women do, but I never seem to; I save that till I have to get up and go home. It’s so nice to just lie here; I really feel marvellous.” She hitched herself up a little against the pillows.
Marian sat and smiled at her. She couldn’t