Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [80]
She was working at it the more assiduously because of the cataclysm that had taken place earlier in the day. The giant city-wide instant-tomato-juice taste test, in the offing since October but constantly delayed for further refinements, had been due to go out that morning. A record number of interviewers, almost the whole available crew, were to have descended on the unwary front porches of the housewives with cardboard trays on strings around their necks, like cigarette girls (privately, to Lucy, Marian had suggested bleaching them all and dressing them up in feathers and net stockings), carrying small paper cups of real canned tomato juice and small paper cups of instant-tomato-juice powder and small pitchers of water. The housewife was to take a sip of the real juice, watch the interviewer mix the Instant right before her astounded eyes, and then try the result, impressed, possibly, by its quickness and ease: “One Stir and You’re Sure!” said the tentative advertisement sketches. If they’d done it in October it might have worked.
Unfortunately the snow that had been withholding itself during five uniformly overclouded grey days had chosen that morning at ten o’clock to begin to fall, not in soft drifting flakes or even intermittent flurries, but in a regular driving blizzard. Mrs. Bogue had tried to get the higher-ups to postpone the test, but in vain. “We’re working with humans, not with machines,” she had said on the phone, her voice loud enough so that they could hear it through the closed door of her cubicle. “It’s utterly impossible out there!” But there was a deadline to be met. The thing had already been postponed for so long that it could be kept back no longer, and furthermore a delay of one day at this point would mean an actual delay of three because of the major inconvenience of Christmas. So Mrs. Bogue’s flock had been driven, bleating faintly, out into the storm.
For the rest of the morning the office had resembled the base of a mercy mission in a disaster area. Phone calls flooded in from the hapless interviewers. Their cars, antifreeze- and snow tire-less, balked and stalled, stranded themselves in blowing drifts, and slammed their doors on hands and their trunk lids on heads. The paper cups were far too light to withstand the force of the gale, and whirled away over the lanes and hedges, emptying their blood-red contents on the snow, on the interviewers, and, if the interviewers had actually made it as far as a front door, on the housewife herself. One interviewer had her whole tray ripped from her neck and lifted into the air like a kite; another had tried to shelter hers inside her coat, only to have it tipped and spewn against her body by the wind. From eleven o’clock on, the interviewers themselves had come straggling in, wild haired and smeared with red, to resign or explain or have their faith in themselves as scientific and efficient measurers of public opinion restored, depending on temperament; and Mrs. Bogue had had to cope in addition with the howls of rage from the broadloomed Olympics above who refused to recognize the existence of any storm not of their own making. The traces of the fray were still evident on her face as she moved among the eating women. When she was pretending to be flustered and