Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [68]
Marian’s first impulse was to go over and see whether it was a bad burn, and suggest remedies, butter or baking soda; but she decided against it. Instead she sat unmoving and said nothing.
He was looking at her now, expectantly but with a trace of hostility. “Aren’t you going to comfort me?” he asked.
“I don’t think,” she said, “that it’s really needed.”
“You’re right; I enjoy it though,” he said sadly. “And it does hurt.” He picked up the iron again.
When he had folded the last towel and pulled the plug out of the wall-socket he said, “That was a vigorous session, thanks for the clothes, but it wasn’t really enough. I’ll have to think of something else to do with the rest of the tension. I’m not a chronic ironer you know, I’m not hooked, it’s not one of the habits I ought to kick, but I go on these binges.” He came over and sat gingerly down beside her on the bed, and lit a cigarette. “This one started the day before yesterday when I dropped my term paper in a puddle on the kitchen floor and I had to dry it out and iron it. It was all typed and I couldn’t face typing it over again, plowing through all that verbiage, I’d start wanting to change everything. It came out okay, nothing blurred, but you could tell it had been ironed, I scorched one of the pages. But they can’t reasonably object, it would sound pretty silly to say, ‘We can’t accept a term paper that’s been ironed.’ So I turned it in and then of course I had to get rid of all that frenzy, so I ironed everything in the house that was clean. Then I had to go to the laundromat and wash some dirty things, that’s why I was sitting in that wretched movie, I was waiting for the clothes to get done. I got bored watching them churning around in there, that’s a bad sign, if I get bored with the laundromat even, what the hell am I going to do when I get bored with everything else? Then I ironed all the things I’d washed, and then I’d run out.”
“And then you phoned me,” Marian said. It irritated her slightly that he went on talking to himself, about himself, without giving much evidence that he even knew she was there.
“Oh. You. Yes. Then I phoned you. At least, I phoned your company. I remembered the name, I guess it was the switchboard girl I got, and I sort of described you to whoever it was for a while, I said you didn’t look like the usual kind of interviewer; and then they figured out who you were. You never told me your name.”
It had not occurred to Marian that she hadn’t told him her name. She had taken it for granted that he knew it all along.
Her introduction of a new subject seemed to have brought him to a standstill. He stared down at the floor, sucking on the end of his cigarette.
She found the silence disconcerting. “Why do you like ironing so much?” she asked. “I mean, apart from relieving tension and all that; but why ironing? Instead of maybe bowling, for instance?”
He drew his thin legs up and clasped his arms around his knees. “Ironing’s nice and simple,” he said. “I get all tangled up in words when I’m putting together those interminable papers, I’m on another one by the way, ‘Sado-Masochistic Patterns in Trollope,’ and ironing – well, you straighten things out and get them flat. God knows it isn’t because I’m neat and tidy; but there’s something about a flat surface.…” He had shifted his position and was contemplating her now. “Why don’t you let me touch up that blouse for you a bit while the iron’s still hot?” he said. “I’ll just