Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [90]
“He says they ought to grow up with a strong Father Image in the home,” she said when she had composed herself. “It’s good for them, it makes them normal, especially if they’re boys.”
“Well, but you sort of knew that before, didn’t you?” Marian asked.
“Oh no Marian, it’s really a lot more drastic. He has all kinds of statistics and everything. They’ve proved it scientifically.” She gulped. “If I have a little boy, he’s absolutely certain to turn into a hoho-ho-homosexual!” At this mention of the one category of man who had never shown the slightest interest in her, Ainsley’s large blue eyes filled with tears. Marian extended the kleenex, but Ainsley waved it away. She sat up and pushed back her hair.
“There’s got to be a way,” she said; her chin lifted, courageously.
21
They were holding hands as they went up the wide stone stairway and through the heavy doors, but they had to let go to pass through the turnstile. Once they were inside it didn’t seem right to take hands again. The churchlike atmosphere created by the high gold-mosaicked dome under which they were standing discouraged any such fleshly attempts, even if they involved only fingers, and the blue-uniformed and white-haired guard had frowned at them as he took her money. Marian connected the frown with dim recollections of two previous visits during all-day educational bus excursions to the city when she was in elementary school: perhaps it came with the price of admission.
“Come on,” Duncan said, almost in a whisper. “I’ll show you my favourite things.”
They climbed the spiral staircase, round and around the incongruous totem pole, up towards the geometrical curved ceiling. Marian had not been in this part of the Museum for so long that it seemed like something remembered from a not altogether pleasant dream, the kind you had when recovering from ether after having your tonsils out. When at university she had attended one class on the basement floor (Geology; it had been the only way to avoid Religious Knowledge, and she had felt surly towards rock specimens ever since), and occasionally she had gone to the Museum Coffee Shop on the main floor. But not up these marble stairs again, into the bowl-shaped space of air that looked almost solid now, shafted with dustmotes whenever the weak winter sunlight became positive enough through the narrow windows high above.
They paused for a minute to look over the balustrade. Down below a batch of schoolchildren was filing through the turnstile and going to pick up folding canvas chairs from the stack at the side of the rotunda, their bodies foreshortened by perspective. The shrill edges of their voices were dulled by the thick encircling space, so that they seemed even further away than they actually were.
“I hope they don’t come up here,” Duncan said as he pushed himself away from the marble railing. He tugged at her coatsleeve, turning and drawing her with him into one of the branching galleries. They walked slowly along the creaking parquet floor past the rows of glass cases.
She had been seeing Duncan frequently during the past three weeks, by collusion rather than by coincidence, as formerly. He was writing another term paper, he had told her, called “Monosyllables in Milton,” which was to be an intensive stylistic analysis done from a radical angle. He had been stuck on the opening sentence, “It is indeed highly significant that …” for two and a half weeks and, having exhausted the possibilities of the laundromat, he had felt a need for frequent escapes.
“Why don’t you find a female graduate student in English?” she had asked once when their two faces, reflected in a store window, had struck her as particularly ill matched. She looked like someone who was hired to take him out for walks.
“That wouldn’t be an escape,” he said, “they’re all writing term papers too; we’d have to discuss them. Besides,” he added morosely, “they don’t have enough breasts. Or,” he qualified after