Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [81]
Marian gave up half-listening to several conversations at once and let the sound of voices filling the room wash across her ears in a blur of meaningless syllables. She finished her jelly sandwich and went for a piece of cake. The loaded table made her feel gluttonous: all that abundance, all those meringues and icings and glazes, those coagulations of fats and sweets, that proliferation of rich glossy food. When she returned with a piece of sponge cake Lucy, who had been talking with Emmy, had turned and was now talking with Millie, so that after she had taken her place again Marian found herself in the middle of their conversation.
“Well naturally they just didn’t know what to do about it,” Lucy was saying. “You just don’t ask someone would they please take a bath. I mean it’s not very polite.”
“And London’s so dirty too,” Millie said sympathetically. “You see the men in the evenings, the collars of their white shirts are black, just black. It’s all the soot.”
“Yes well, and this went on and it got worse and worse, it was getting so bad they were ashamed to even ask their friends in.…”
“Who’s this?” Marian asked.
“Oh this girl who was living with some friends of mine in England and she just stopped washing. Nothing else was wrong with her, she just didn’t wash, even her hair even, or change her clothes or anything, for the longest time, and they didn’t want to say anything because she seemed perfectly normal in every other way, but obviously underneath it she must have been really sick.”
Emmy’s narrow peaked face swung round at the word “sick,” and the story was repeated to her.
“So what happened, then?” Millie asked, licking chocolate icing from her fingers.
“Well,” said Lucy, nibbling daintily at a morsel of shortcake, “it got pretty horrible. I mean, she was wearing the same clothes, you can imagine. And I guess it must have been three or four months.”
There was a murmur of “Oh no’s,” and she said, “Well, at least two. And they were just about to ask her for god’s sake either take a bath or move out. I mean, wouldn’t you? But one day she came home and just took off those clothes and burnt them, and had a bath and everything, and she’s been perfectly normal ever since. Just like that.”
“Well that is queer!” Emmy said in a disappointed voice. She had been expecting a severe illness, or perhaps even an operation.
“Of course they’re all a lot dirtier Over There, you know,” Millie said in a woman-of-the-world tone.
“But she was from Over Here!” Lucy exclaimed. “I mean she’d been brought up the right way, she was from a good family and all; it wasn’t as if they didn’t have a bathroom, they were always perfectly clean!”
“Maybe it was one of those things we sort of all go through,” said Millie philosophically. “Maybe she was just immature, and being away from home like that and all.…”
“I think she was sick,” Lucy said. She was picking the raisins out of a piece of Christmas cake, preparatory to eating it.
Marian’s mind grasped at the word “immature,” turning it over like a curious pebble found on a beach. It suggested an unripe ear of corn, and other things of a vegetable or fruitlike nature. You were green and then you ripened: became mature. Dresses for the mature figure. In other words, fat.
She looked around the room at all the women there, at the mouths opening and shutting, to talk or to eat. Here, sitting like any other group of women at an afternoon feast, they no longer had the varnish of officialdom that separated them, during regular office hours, from the vast anonymous ocean of housewives whose minds they were employed to explore. They could have been wearing housecoats and curlers. As it was, they all wore dresses for the mature figure. They were ripe, some rapidly becoming overripe, some already beginning to shrivel; she thought of them as attached by stems at the tops of their heads