Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [69]
“You mean the one I have on?”
“That’s the one,” he said. He unwound his arms from around his knees and stood up. “Here, you can wear my dressing gown. Don’t worry, I won’t peek.” He took a grey object out of the closet, handed it to her, and turned his back.
Marian stood for a moment, clutching the grey bundle, uncertain how to act. Doing as he suggested, she knew, was going to make her feel both uneasy and silly; but to say at this point, “No thank you, I’d rather not,” when the request was obviously harmless, would have made her feel even sillier. After a minute she found herself undoing the buttons, then slipping on the dressing gown. It was much too large for her: the sleeves came down over her hands and the bottom edge trailed along the floor.
“Here you are then,” she said.
She watched with a slight anxiety as he wielded the iron. This time the activity seemed more crucial, it was like a dangerous hand moving back and forth slowly an inch away, the cloth had been so recently next to her skin. If he burns it or anything though, she thought, I can always put on one of the others.
“There,” he said, “all done.” He unplugged the iron again and draped the blouse over the small end of the ironing board; he seemed to have forgotten that she was supposed to be wearing it. Then, unexpectedly, he came over to the bed, crawled onto it beside her, and stretched himself out on his back with his eyes closed and his arms behind his head.
“God,” he said, “all these distractions. How does one go on? It’s like term papers, you produce all that stuff and nothing is ever done with it, you just get a grade for it and heave it in the trash, you know that some other poor comma-counter is going to come along the year after you and have to do the same thing over again, it’s a treadmill, even ironing, you iron the damn things and then you wear them and they get all wrinkled again.”
“Well, and then you can iron them again, can’t you?” Marian said soothingly. “If they stayed neat you wouldn’t have anything to do.”
“Maybe I’d do something worthwhile for a change,” he said. His eyes were still closed. “Production-consumption. You begin to wonder whether it isn’t just a question of making one kind of garbage into another kind. The human mind was the last thing to be commercialized but they’re doing a good job of it now; what is the difference between the library stacks and one of those used-car graveyards? What bothers me though is that none of it is ever final; you can’t ever finish anything. I have this great plan for permanent leaves on trees, it’s a waste for them having to produce a new lot each year; and come to think of it there’s no reason at all why they have to be green, either; I’d have them white. Black trunks and white leaves. I can hardly wait till it snows, this city in the summer has altogether too much vegetation, it’s stifling, and then it all falls off and lies around in the gutters. The thing I like about the place I came from, it’s a mining town, there isn’t much of anything in it but at least it has no vegetation. A lot of people wouldn’t like it. It’s the smelting plants that do it, tall smokestacks reaching up into the sky and the smoke glows red at night, and the chemical fumes have burnt the trees for miles around, it’s barren, nothing but the barren rock, even grass won’t grow on most of it, and there are the slag-heaps too; where the water collects on the rock it’s a yellowish-brown from the chemicals. Nothing would grow there even if you planted it, I used to go out of the town and sit on the rocks, about this time of year, waiting for the snow.…”
Marian was sitting on the edge of the bed, bending slightly down towards his talking face, only half listening to the monotonous voice. She was studying the contours of his skull under the papery skin, wondering how anyone could be that thin and still remain alive. She did not want to touch him now, she was even slightly repelled by the hollowness of the eye sockets, the angular hinge of the jawbone