Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [78]
“Don’t be idiotic,” Ainsley said. “It’s perfectly natural and beautiful. The relationship between mother and unborn child is the loveliest and closest in the world.” She was leaning in the doorway, gazing towards the window. “The most mutually balanced …”
“Nauseating!” interjected Len.
Ainsley turned on him angrily. “You’re displaying the classic symptoms of uterus envy. Where the hell do you think you came from, anyway? You’re not from Mars, you know, and it may be news but your mother didn’t find you under a cabbage plant in the garden either. You were all curled up inside somebody’s womb for nine months just like everybody else, and …”
Len’s face cringed. “Stop!” he cried. “Don’t remind me. I really can’t stand it, you’ll make me sick. Don’t come near me!” he yelped, as Ainsley took a step towards him. “You’re unclean!”
Marian decided he was becoming hysterical. He sat down on the arm of the chesterfield and covered his face with his hands. “She made me do it,” he muttered. “My own mother. We were having eggs for breakfast and I opened mine and there was, I swear there was a little chicken inside it, it wasn’t born yet, I didn’t want to touch it but she didn’t see, she didn’t see what was really there, she said Don’t be silly, it looks like an ordinary egg to me, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t and she made me eat it. And I know, I know there was a little beak and little claws and everything.…” He shuddered violently. “Horrible. Horrible, I can’t stand it,” he moaned, and his shoulders began to heave convulsively.
Marian blushed with embarrassment, but Ainsley gave a maternal coo of concern and hurried to the chesterfield. She sat down beside Len and put her arms around him, pulling him down so that he was resting half across her lap with his head against her shoulder. “There, there,” she soothed. Her hair fell down around their two faces like a veil, or, Marian thought, a web. She rocked her body gently. “There, there. It’s not going to be a little chicken anyway, it’s going to be a lovely nice baby. Nice baby.”
Marian walked out to the kitchen. She was coldly revolted: they were acting like a couple of infants. Ainsley was getting a layer of blubber on her soul already, she thought; aren’t hormones wonderful. Soon she would be fat all over. And Len had displayed something hidden, something she had never seen in him before. He had behaved like a white grub suddenly unearthed from its burrow and exposed to the light of day. A repulsive blinded writhing. It amazed her though that it had taken so little, really, to reduce him to that state. His shell had not been as thick and calloused as she had imagined. It was like that parlour trick they used to play with eggs: you put the egg endwise between your locked hands and squeezed it with all your might, and the egg wouldn’t break; it was so well balanced that you were exerting your force against yourself. But with only a slight shift, an angle, a re-adjustment of the pressure, the egg would crack, and skoosh, there you were with your shoes full of albumin.
Now Len’s delicate adjustment had been upset and he was being crushed. She wondered how he had ever managed to avoid the issue for so long, to persuade himself that his own much-vaunted sexual activities could have nothing whatever to do with the manufacture of children. What would he have done then if the situation had been as he first imagined it, and he had got Ainsley pregnant by accident? Would he have been able to play guilt off against a blamelessness based on no-intent-to-injure, have let them cancel each other out and escaped unscathed? Ainsley couldn’t have foreseen his reaction. But it was her decision that was responsible for this crisis. What was she going to do with him now? What should she do?
Oh well, she thought, it’s their problem, let them solve it; I’m well out of it anyway. She went into her bedroom and closed the door.
The next morning, however, when she opened her soft-boiled