The office party seemed to consist largely of the consumption of food and the discussion of ailments and bargains. The food had all been brought by the ladies themselves: each of them had agreed to provide a certain item. Even Marian had been pressured into promising some chocolate brownies, which she had actually bought at a bakery and switched to a different bag. She had not felt much like cooking lately. The food was heaped on the table that stood at one end of the lunchroom - much more food than they needed really, salads and sandwiches and fancy breads and desserts and cookies and cakes. But since everyone had brought something, everyone had to eat at least some of everything, or else the contributor would feel slighted. From time to time one or another of the ladies would shriek, "Oh Dorothy, I just have to try some of your Orange-Pineapple Delight!" or "Lena, your Luscious Fruit Sponge looks just scrummy!" and heave to her feet and trundle to the table to refill her paper plate.
Marian gathered that it had not always been like this. For some of the older girls, there was a memory, fast fading to legend, of a time when the office party had been a company-wide event; that was when the company had been much smaller. In those far-off days, Mrs. Bogue said mistily, the men from upstairs had come down, and they even had drinks. But the office had expanded, finally things reached a stage at which nobody knew everybody any longer, and the parties started to get out of hand. Small ink-stained girls from Mimeo were pursued by wandering executives, there were untimely revelations of smouldering lusts and concealed resentments, and elderly ladies had a papercupful too much and hysterics. Now, in the interests of all-over office morale, each department had its own office party; and Mrs. Gundridge had volunteered earlier that afternoon that it was a lot comfier this way anyhow, just all us girls here together, a comment which had produced glutinous murmurs of assent.
Marian was sitting wedged between two of the office virgins; the third was perched on the arm of the chesterfield. In situations like this, the three of them huddled together for self-protection: they had no children whose cutenesses could be compared, no homes whose furnishings were of much importance, and no husbands, details of whose eccentricities and nasty habits could be exchanged. Their concerns were other, though Emmy occasionally contributed an anecdote about one of her illnesses to the general conversation. Marian was aware that her own status among them was doubtful - they knew that she was on the fringe of matrimony and therefore regarded her as no longer genuinely single, no longer able to empathize with their problems - but in spite of their slight coolness towards her she still preferred being with them to joining any of the other groups. There was little movement in the room. Apart from the platter-passers, most of the ladies remained seated, in various clusters and semicircles, re-clumping themselves every now and then by an exchange of chairs. Mrs. Bogue alone circulated, bestowing a sociable smile here, a mark of attention or a cookie there. It was her duty.
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 upset, she was really serene; but now, attempting serenity, she reminded Marian of a club lady in a flowered hat making a gracious speech of thanks, who has just felt a small many-legged creature scamper up her leg.
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 fo
r 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 to an invisible vine, hanging there in various stages of growth and decay ... in that case, thin elegant Lucy, sitting beside her, was merely at an earlier stage, a springtime green bump or nodule forming beneath the careful golden calyx of her hair....
She examined the women's bodies with interest, critically, as though she had never seen them before. And in a way she hadn't, they had just been there like everything else, desks, telephones, chairs, in the space of the office: objects viewed as outline and surface only. But now she could see the roll of fat pushed up across Mrs. Gundridge's back by the top of her corset, the ham-like bulge of thigh, the creases round the neck, the large porous cheeks; the blotch of varicose veins glimpsed at the back of one plump crossed leg, the way her jowls jellied when she chewed, her sweater a woolly teacosy over those rounded shoulders; and the others too, similar in structure but with varying proportions and textures of bumpy permanents and dune-like contours of breast and waist and hip; their fluidity sustained somewhere within by bones, without by a carapace of clothing and makeup. What peculiar creatures they were; and the continual flux between the outside and the inside, taking things in, giving them out, chewing, words, potato chips, burps, grease, hair, babies, milk, excrement, cookies, vomit, coffee, tomato juice, blood, tea, sweat, liquor, tears, and garbage....
For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be - or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick Sargasso Sea of femininity. She drew a deep breath, clenching her body and her mind back into her self like some tactile sea creature withdrawing its tentacles; she wanted something solid, clear: a man; she wanted Peter in the room so that she could put her hand out and hold on to him to keep from being sucked down. Lucy had a gold bangle on one arm. Marian focussed her eyes on it, concentrating on it as though she was drawing its hard gold circle around herself, a fixed barrier between herself and that liquid amorphous other.
She became aware of a silence in the room. The hen-yard gabble had ceased. She lifted her head: Mrs. Bogue was standing at the end of the room near the table, holding up her hand.
"Now that we're all gathered together here in this unofficial way," she said, smiling benignly, "I'd like to take this opportunity to make a very pleasant announcement. I've learned recently through the grapevine that one of our girls will soon be getting married. I'm sure we'll all wish Marian MacAlpin the very best in her new life."
There were preliminary squeals and chirps and burbles of excitement; then the whole mass rose up and descended upon her, deluging her with moist congratulations and chocolate-crumbed inquiries and little powdery initiatory kisses. Marian stood up, and was immediately pressed against the more-than-ample bosom of Mrs. Gundridge. She unstuck herself and backed against the wall; she was blushing, but more from anger than from modesty. Someone had let it slip; one of them had told on her; Millie, it must have been.
She said "Thank you" and "September" and "March," the only three words necessary for the questions they were asking. "Wonderful!" and "Marvellous!" cried the chorus. The office virgins remained aloof, smiling wistfully. Mrs. Bogue also stood aside. She had, by the tone of her speech, and by the mere fact of this public announcement coming without warning or prior consultation, made it clear to Marian that she would be expecting her to leave her job whether she wanted to or not. Marian knew, from rumour and from the banishment of a typist just after she had begun to work at the office, that Mrs. Bogue preferred her girls to be either unmarried or seasoned veterans with their liability to unpredictable pregnancies well in the past. Newly-weds, she had been heard to say, were inclined to be unstable. Mrs. Grot from Accounting kept at the rim of the circle too, her smile tight-lipped and acid. I bet her festive mood is quite spoiled now, Marian thought; I'm lost to the Pension Plan forever.
To emerge from the building and walk along the street in the cold air was like throwing open the window of an overheated and stuffy room. The wind had subsided. It was already dark, but the jangling light from the store windows and the Christmas decorations overhead, festoons and stars, made the snow that was falling, softly now, glow like the spray from a gigantic and artificially lit waterfall. Underfoot, there was less snow than she had anticipated. It was wet, trodden to a brown slush by the pedestrians. The blizzard had not started until after Marian had left for work that morning, and she wasn't wearing boots. Her shoes were soaked through by the time she had reached the subway station.
But in spite of her wet feet she got off the subway a stop before the right one. After that tea party she could not confront the apartment yet. Ainsley would come in and take up her infernal knitting; and there was the Christmas tree, a plastic table model in silver and azure. There were still the presents to be wrapped, lying on her bed; and her suitcase to be packed: early the next morning she had to leave on the bus for a two-day visit with her parents and their town and their relatives. When she thought of them at all, they no longer seemed to belong to her. The town and the people waited for her on some horizon, somewhere, unchanging, monolithic and grey, like the weathered stone ruins of an extinct civilization. She had bought all of the presents last weekend, shoving her way through the crowds that clamoured and shouted at the store counters, but she no longer felt like giving anybody anything. She felt even less like receiving, having to thank them all for things she didn't need and would never use; and it was no use telling herself, as she had been told all her life, that it was the spirit of the giver and not the value of the gift that counted. That was worse: all the paper tags with Love on them. The kind of love they were given with was also by now something she didn't need and would never use. It was archaic, sadly ornate, kept for some obscure nostalgic reason, like the photograph of a dead person.
She had been walking west but with little sense of direction along a street walled with stores and with elegant mannequins posturing in their bright glass cages. Now she had passed the final store and was walking in a darker space. As she approached the corner, she realized she had been heading toward the Park. She crossed th
e street and turned south, following the stream of cars. The Museum was on her left, its frieze of stone figures thrown into relief by the garish orange floodlights they seemed to be using more and more for night-lighting.
Peter had been a problem. She hadn't known what she ought to buy him. Clothes were out of the question, she had decided: he would always want to choose his own. What else was there? Something for the apartment, some household object, would be like making a gift to herself. She had finally settled on a handsome expensive technical book about cameras. She knew nothing about the subject but she had taken the word of the salesman, hoping that the book was one he didn't already have. She was glad he had hobbies: he would be less likely to get heart failure after retiring.
She was passing under the arching branches of the trees that grew within these nearby fences and seclusions of the university. The sidewalk was less trampled here, and the snow was deeper, above her ankles in some places. Her feet were aching with the cold. Just as she was beginning to wonder why she kept on walking, she had crossed the street again and was standing in the Park.
It was a huge dimly white island in the darkness of the night. The cars flowed around it, counter-clockwise; on the further side lay the buildings of the university, those places she thought she had known so well only half a year ago but which now radiated a faint hostility towards her through the cold air, a hostility she recognized as coming from herself: in some obscure way she was jealous of them. She would have liked them to have vanished when she left, but they had remained standing, kept going on, as indifferent to her absence as they had actually been, she supposed, to her presence.