Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [62]
“We don’t really know yet. We’re sort of considering Vivian Lynn, after my grandmother and Joe’s grandmother. Joe wanted to call her after me but I’ve never liked my own name much. It’s really marvellous though to have a man who’s just as pleased with a daughter as a son, so many men aren’t, you know, though maybe Joe wouldn’t be if he didn’t have one son already.”
Marian stared at the wall above Clara’s head, thinking that it was painted the same colour as the office. She almost expected to hear the sound of typewriters from beyond the curtains, but instead there were only the murmuring voices of the three other women and their visitors. When she came in she had noticed that one of them, the young one in the pink-lace bed jacket, had been sitting up working at a paint-by-numbers picture. Maybe she should have brought Clara something to do, instead of just flowers: it must be very tiresome lying around like that all day.
“Would you like me to bring you anything to read?” she asked, thinking as she did so how much she was sounding like the kind of ladies’-club member who makes a part-time career out of visiting the sick.
“Now that’s a kind thought. But really I don’t think I could concentrate enough, not for a while. I’ll either be sleeping, or,” she said in a lower voice, “listening to those other women. Maybe it’s the hospital atmosphere, but all they ever talk about are their miscarriages and their diseases. It makes you feel very sickly after a while: you start wondering when it’ll be your turn to get cancer of the breast or a ruptured tube, or miscarry quadruplets at half-weekly intervals; no kidding, that’s what happened to Mrs. Moase, the big one over there in the far corner. And christ they’re so calm about it, and they seem to think that each of their grisly little episodes is some kind of service medal: they haul them out and compare them and pile on the gory details, they’re really proud of them. It’s a positive gloating about pain. I even find myself producing a few of my own ailments, as though I have to compete. I wonder why women are so morbid?”
“Oh, some men are morbid too, I guess,” Marian said. Clara was talking a lot more, and a lot more quickly, than she usually did, and Marian found herself being surprised. During the later, more vegetable stage of Clara’s pregnancy she had tended to forget that Clara had a mind at all or any perceptive faculties above the merely sentient and sponge-like, since she had spent most of her time being absorbed in, or absorbed by, her tuberous abdomen. To have her observing, commenting like this, was a slight shock. It might be some kind of reaction, but it certainly wasn’t hysteria: she seemed thoroughly in control. Something to do with hormones maybe.
“Well, Joe certainly isn’t,” Clara said happily. “If he weren’t so un-morbid I don’t know how I’d ever manage. He’s so good about the children and the washing and everything, I don’t feel at all uneasy about leaving everything up to him at a time like this. I know he manages just as well as I would if I were there, though we’re having a bit of trouble with poor Arthur. He’s beautifully toilet-trained now, he uses his plastic potty almost every time, but he’s become a hoarder. He rolls the shit into little pellets and hides them places – like cupboards and bottom drawers. You have to watch him like a hawk. Once I found some in the refrigerator, and Joe tells me he just discovered a whole row of them hardening on the bathroom windowsill behind the curtain. He gets very upset when we throw them out. I can’t imagine why he does it; maybe he’ll grow up to be a banker.”
“Do you think it has anything to do with the new baby?” Marian said. “Jealousy perhaps?”
“Oh, probably,” Clara said, smiling serenely. She was twirling one of the