Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [63]
Marian said, “We must all get together sometime, after you’re home and have got yourself organized again. I’m sure you’ll like him.”
“Well he looks awfully nice. Of course you never really know someone till you’ve been married to them for a while and discover some of their scruffier habits. I remember how upset I was when I realized for the first time that after all Joe wasn’t Jesus Christ. I don’t know what it was, probably some silly thing like finding out he’s crazy about Audrey Hepburn. Or that he’s a secret philatelist.”
“A what?” asked Marian. She didn’t know what it was but it sounded perverted.
“Stamp collecting. Not a real one of course, he tears them off the mail. Anyway it takes adjustment. Now,” she said, “I just think he’s one of the minor saints.”
Marian didn’t know what to say. She found Clara’s attitude towards Joe both complacent and embarrassing: it was sentimental, like the love stories in the back numbers of women’s magazines. Also she felt Clara was trying to give her some kind of oblique advice, and this was even more embarrassing. Poor Clara, she was the last person whose advice would be worth anything. Look at the mess she had blundered into: three children at her age. Peter and she were going into it with far fewer illusions. If Clara had slept with Joe before marriage she would have been much better able to cope afterwards.
“I think Joe’s a wonderful husband,” she said generously.
Clara gave a snort of laughter, then winced. “Oh. Screw. It hurts in the most ungodly places. No you don’t; you think we’re both shiftless and disorganized and you’d go bats if you lived in all that chaos; you can’t understand how we’ve survived without hating each other.” Her voice was perfectly good-natured.
Marian started to protest, thinking it was unfair of Clara to force the conversation out into the open like that; but a nurse popped her head through the doorway long enough to announce that the visiting time was up.
“If you want to see the baby,” Clara said as Marian was leaving, “you can probably get someone to tell you where they’ve stowed it. You can see them through a plate-glass window somewhere; they all look alike, but they’ll point out mine if you ask. If I were you I wouldn’t bother though, they aren’t very interesting at this stage. They look like red shrivelled prunes.”
“Maybe I’ll wait then,” said Marian.
It struck her as she went out the door that there had been something in Clara’s manner, especially in the slightly worried twist of her eyebrows once or twice, that had expressed concern; but concern about what, exactly, she didn’t know and couldn’t stop to puzzle over. She had the sense of having escaped, as if from a culvert or cave. She was glad she wasn’t Clara.
Now there was the rest of the day to unravel. She would eat quickly at the nearest restaurant she could find and by the time she was finished the traffic would have cleared somewhat, and she could rush home and grab some laundry. What on earth did she have that was fit to take? Perhaps a couple of blouses. She wondered whether a pleated skirt would do, that would keep him busy and she had one that needed pressing, but on second thought it was the wrong sort of thing, and surely too complicated anyway.
The hours before her were going to be, she felt, as convoluted as that hour in the afternoon during which Peter had called to arrange dinner and they had discussed at length – too great a length, she was afraid – where they were going to eat; and then after all that she had had to call him back and say, “I’m terribly sorry darling, but something really unavoidable has come up; can we put it off? Tomorrow maybe?” He had been peevish, but he couldn’t say much about it because he had just finished doing the same thing to her the