She walked further into the Park through the soft ankle-deep snow. Here and there it was criss-crossed by random trails of footprints, already silting over, but mostly it was smooth, untouched, the trunks of the bare trees coming straight up out of the snow as though it was seven feet deep and the trees had been stuck there like candles in the icing of a cake. Black candles.
She was near the round concrete pool that had a fountain in the summers but would be empty of water now, gradually filling instead with snow. She stopped to listen to the distant sounds of the city, which seemed to be moving in a circle around her; she felt quite safe. "You have to watch it," she said to herself, "you don't want to end up not taking baths." In the lunchroom she had felt for a moment dangerously close to some edge; now she found her own reactions rather silly. An office party was merely an office party. There were certain things that had to be got through between now and then, that was all: details, people, necessary events. After that it would be all right. She was almost ready to go back and wrap the presents; she was even hungry enough now to devour half a cow, dotted lines and all. But she wanted to stand for only one more minute with the snow sifting down here in this island, this calm open eye of silence....
"Hello," a voice said.
Marian was hardly startled. She turned: there was a figure seated on the far end of a bench in the darker shadow of some evergreen trees. She walked towards it.
It was Duncan, sitting hunched over, a cigarette glowing between his fingers. He must have been there for some time. The snow had settled on his hair and on the shoulders of his coat. His hand, when she took off her glove to touch it, was cold and wet.
She sat down beside him on the snow-covered bench. He flicked away his cigarette and turned towards her, and she undid the buttons of his overcoat and huddled herself inside it, in a space that smelled of damp cloth and stale cigarettes. He closed his arms around her back.
He was wearing a shaggy sweater. She stroked it with one of her hands as though it was a furry skin. Beneath it she could feel his spare body, the gaunt shape of a starved animal in time of famine. He nuzzled his wet face under her scarf and hair and coat collar, against her neck.
They sat without moving. The city, the time outside the white circle of the Park, had almost vanished. Marian felt her flesh gradually numbing; her feet had even ceased to ache. She pressed herself deeper into the furry surface; outside, the snow was falling. She could not begin the effort of getting up....
"You took a long time," he said quietly at last. "I've been expecting you."
Her body was beginning to shiver. "I have to go now," she said.
Against her neck she felt a convulsive movement of the muscles beneath his face.
20
Marian was walking slowly down the aisle, keeping pace with the gentle music that swelled and rippled around her. "Beans," she said. She found the kind marked "Vegetarian" and tossed two cans into her wire cart.
The music swung into a tinkly waltz; she proceeded down the aisle, trying to concentrate on her list. She resented the music because she knew why it was there: it was supposed to lull you into a euphoric trance, lower your sales resistance to the point at which all things are desirable. Every time she walked into the supermarket and heard the lilting sounds coming from the concealed loudspeakers she remembered an article she had read about cows who gave more milk when sweet music was played to them. But just because she knew what they were up to didn't mean she was immune. These days, if she wasn't careful, she found herself pushing the cart like a somnambulist, eyes fixed, swaying slightly, her hands twitching with the impulse to reach out and grab anything with a bright label. She had begun to defend herself with lists, which she printed in block letters before setting out, willing herself to buy nothing, however deceptively priced or subliminally packaged, except what was written there. When she was feeling unusually susceptible she would tick the things off the list with a pencil as an additional counter-charm.
But in some ways they would always be successful: they couldn't miss. You had to buy something sometime. She knew enough about it from the office to realize that the choice between, for instance, two brands of soap or two cans of tomato juice was not what could be called a rational one. In the products, the things themselves, there was no real difference. How did you choose then? You could only abandon yourself to the soothing music and make a random snatch. You let the thing in you that was supposed to respond to the labels just respond, whatever it was; maybe it had something to do with the pituitary gland. Which detergent had the best power symbol? Which tomato juice can had the sexiest-looking tomato on it, and did she care? Something in her must care; after all, she did choose eventually, doing precisely what some planner in a broadloomed office had hoped and predicted she would do. She had caught herself lately watching herself with an abstracted curiosity, to see what she would do.
"Noodles," she said. She glanced up from her list just in time to avoid collision with a plump lady in frazzled muskrat. "Oh no, they've put another brand on the market." She knew the noodle business: several of her afternoons had been spent in stores in the Italian section, counting the endless varieties and brands of pasta. She glared at the noodles, stacks of them, identical in their cellopaks, then shut her eyes, shot out her hand and closed her fingers on a package. Any package.
"Lettuce, radishes, carrots, onions, tomatoes, parsley," she read from her list. Those would be easy: at least you could tell by looking at them, though some things came in bags or rubber-banded bunches arranged with some good and some bad in each, and the tomatoes, hothouse-pink and tasteless at this time of year, were prepackaged in cardboard and cellophane boxes of four. She steered her cart towards the vegetable area, where a slickly finished rustic wooden sign hung on the wall: "The Market Garden."
She picked listlessly through the vegetables. She used to be fond of a good salad but now she had to eat so many of them she was beginning to find them tiresome. She felt like a rabbit, crunching all the time on mounds of leafy greenery. How she longed to become again a carnivore, to gnaw on a good bone! Christmas dinner had been difficult. "Why Marian, you're not eating!" her mother had fussed when she had left the turkey untouched on her plate. She had said she wasn't hungry, and had eaten huge quantities of cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and mince pie when no one was looking. Her mother had set her strange loss of appetite down to overexcitement. She had thought of saying she had taken up a new religion that forbade her to eat meat, Yoga or Doukhobor or something, but it wouldn't have been a good idea: they had been pathetically eager to have the wedding in the family church. Their reaction though, as far as she could estimate the reactions of people who were now so remote from her, was less elated glee than a quiet, rather smug satisfaction, as though their fears about the effects of her university education, never stated but always apparent, had been calmed at last. They had probably been worried she would turn into a high-school teacher or a maiden aunt or a dope addict or a female executive, or that she would undergo some shocking physical transformation, like developing muscles and a deep voice or growing moss. She could picture the anxious consultations over cups of tea. But now, their approving eyes said, she was turning out all right after all. They had not met Peter, but for them he seemed to be merely the necessary X-factor. They were curious though: they continued to urge her to bring him home for the weekend soon. As she had moved around the town during those two cold days, visiting relatives, answering questions, she could not convince herself she was actually back in it.
"Kleenex," she said. She glanced with distaste at the different brands and colours offered - what difference did it make what you blew your nose on? - and at the fancy printed toilet paper - flowers and scrolls and polka dots. Pretty soon they would have it in gold, as though they wanted to pretend it was used for something quite different, like wrapping Christmas presents. There really wasn't a single human unpleasantness left that they had not managed to turn to their uses. What on earth was wrong with plain w
hite? At least it looked clean.
Her mother and her aunts of course had been interested in the wedding dress and the invitations and things like that. At the moment, listening to the electric violins and hesitating between two flavours of canned rice pudding - she had no reservations about eating that, it tasted so synthetic - she couldn't remember what they had all decided.
She looked at her watch: she didn't have much time. Luckily they were playing a tango. She wheeled rapidly towards the canned soup section, trying to shake the glaze out of her eyes. It was dangerous to stay in the supermarket too long. One of these days it would get her. She would be trapped past closing time, and they would find her in the morning propped against one of the shelves in an unbreakable coma, surrounded by all the pushcarts in the place heaped to overflowing with merchandise....
She steered towards the checkout counters. They were having another of their sales-promoting special programmes, some sort of contest that would send the winner on a three-day trip to Hawaii. There was a big poster over the front window, a semi-nude girl in a grass skirt and flowers, and beside it a small sign: PINEAPPLES, Three Cans 65C/. The cashier behind the counter had a paper garland around her neck; her orange mouth was chewing gum. Marian watched the mouth, the hypnotic movements of the jaws, the bumpy flesh of the cheeks with their surface of dark-pink makeup, the scaling lips through which glinted several rodent-yellow teeth working as with a life of their own. The cash register totalled her groceries.
The orange mouth opened. "Five twenty-nine," it said. "Just write your name and address on the receipt."
"No thanks," Marian said, "I don't want to go."
The girl shrugged her shoulders and turned away. "Excuse me, you forgot to give me my stamps," Marian said.
That was another thing, she thought as she hoisted the grocery bag and went through the electric-eye door into the slushy grey twilight. For a while she had refused them: it was another hidden way for them to make money. But they still made the money anyway, more of it; so she had begun accepting them and hiding them in kitchen drawers. Now, however, Ainsley was saving for a baby carrier, so she made a point of getting them. It was the least she could do for Ainsley. The flowery cardboard Hawaiian smiled at her as she trudged off towards the subway station.
Flowers. They had all wanted to know what kind of flowers she was going to carry. Marian herself was in favour of lilies; Lucy had suggested a cascade of pink tea roses and baby's breath. Ainsley had been scornful. "Well, I suppose you have to have a traditional wedding, since it's Peter," she had said. "But people are so hypocritical about flowers at weddings. Nobody wants to admit they're really fertility symbols. What about a giant sunflower or a sheaf of wheat? Or a cascade of mushrooms and cactuses, that would be quite genital, don't you think?" Peter didn't want to be involved in such decisions. "I'll leave all that sort of thing up to you," he would say with fondness when questioned seriously.
Lately she had been seeing more and more of Peter, but less and less of Peter alone. Now that she had been ringed he took pride in displaying her. He said he wanted her to really get to know some of his friends, and he had been taking her around with him to cocktail parties with the more official ones and to dinners and evening get-togethers with the intimates. She had even been to lunch with some lawyers, during which she had sat the whole time silent and smiling. The friends collectively were all well dressed and on the verge of being successful, and they all had wives who were also well dressed and on the verge of being successful. They were all anxious; they were all polite to her. Marian found it difficult to connect these sleek men with the happy hunters and champion beer drinkers that lived in Peter's memories of the past, but some of them were the same people. Ainsley referred to them as "the soap men," because once when Peter had come to pick Marian up he brought with him a friend who worked for a soap company. Marian's greatest apprehension about them was that she would get their names mixed up.
She wanted to be nice to them for Peter's sake; however, she had been feeling somewhat bombarded with them, and she had decided it was time for Peter to start really getting to know some of her friends. This was why she had asked Clara and Joe to dinner. She had been guilty of neglecting them anyway; though it was curious, she thought, how married people always assumed they were being neglected when you didn't phone them, even when they themselves had been too dug under to even think of phoning you. Peter had been recalcitrant; he had seen the inside of Clara's living room once.
As soon as she had issued the invitations she realized that the menu would be a major problem. She couldn't feed them milk and peanut butter and vitamin pills, or a salad with cottage cheese, she couldn't have fish because Peter didn't like it, but she couldn't serve meat either - because what would they all think when they saw her not eating any of it? She couldn't possibly explain; if she didn't understand it herself, how could she expect them to? In the past month the few forms that had been available to her had excluded themselves from her diet: hamburger after a funny story of Peter's about a friend of his who had got some analysed just for a joke and had discovered it contained ground-up mouse hairs; pork because Emmy during a coffee break had entertained them with an account of trichinosis and a lady she knew who got it - she mentioned the name with almost religious awe ("She ate it too pink in a restaurant, I'd never dare eat anything like that in a restaurant, just think, all those little things curled up in her muscles and they can't ever get them out"); and mutton and lamb because Duncan had told her the etymology of the word "giddy": it came, he said, from "gid," which was a loss of equilibrium in sheep caused by large white worms in their brains. Even hot dogs had been ruled out; after all, her stomach reasoned, they could mash up any old thing and stick it in there. In restaurants she could always hedge by ordering a salad, but that would never do for guests, not for dinner. And she couldn't serve them Vegetarian Baked Beans.
She had fallen back on a casserole, a mushroom-and-meatballs affair of her mother's which would disguise things effectively. "I'll turn off the lights and have candles," she thought, "and get them drunk on sherry first so they won't notice." She could dish herself a very small helping, eat the mushrooms, and roll the meatballs under one of the lettuce leaves from the accompanying salad. It wasn't an elegant solution but it was the best she could do.
Now, hurriedly slicing up the radishes for the salad, she was grateful for several things: that she had made the casserole the night before so all she had to do was stick it in the oven; that Clara and Joe were coming late, after they had put the children to bed; and that she could still eat salad. She was becoming more and more irritated by her body's decision to reject certain foods. She had tried to reason with it, had accused it of having frivolous whims, had coaxed it and tempted it, but it was adamant; and if she used force it rebelled. One incident like that in a restaurant had been enough. Peter had been terribly nice about it, of course; he'd driven her straight home and helped her up the stairs as though she was an invalid and insisted she must have the stomach flu; but also he had been embarrassed and (understandably) annoyed. From then on she had resolved to humour it. She had done everything it wanted, and had even bought it some vitamin pills to keep its proteins and minerals balanced. There was no sense in getting malnutrition. "The thing to do," she had told herself, "is to keep calm." At times when she had meditated on the question she had concluded that the stand it had taken was an ethical one: it simply refused to eat anything that had once been, or (like oysters on the half-shell) might still be living. But she faced each day with the forlorn hope that her body might change its mind.
She rubbed the wooden bowl with a half-clove of garlic and threw in the onion rings and the sliced radishes and the tomatoes, and tore up the lettuce. At the last minute she thought of adding a grated carrot to give it more colour. She took one from the refrigerator, located the peeler finally in the bread-box, and began to peel off the skin, holding the carrot by its leafy top.
She was watching her own hands and the peel
er and the curl of crisp orange skin. She became aware of the carrot. It's a root, she thought, it grows in the ground and sends up leaves. Then they come along and dig it up, maybe it even makes a sound, a scream too low for us to hear, but it doesn't die right away, it keeps on living, right now it's still alive....
She thought she felt it twist in her hands. She dropped it on the table. "Oh no," she said, almost crying. "Not this too!"
When they had finally gone, even Peter, who had kissed her on the cheek and said jokingly, "Darling, we're never going to be like that," Marian went out to the kitchen and scraped the plates into the garbage pail and stacked them in the sink. The dinner had not been a good idea. Clara and Joe hadn't been able to get a babysitter so they had brought the children, lugging them up the stairs and putting them to bed, two in Marian's room and one in Ainsley's. The children had wept and excreted, and the fact that the bathroom was down a flight of stairs didn't help. Clara carted them out to the living room to reassure them and change them; she had no qualms. Conversation had ceased. Marian hovered about, handing diaper pins and pretending to be helpful, but secretly wondering whether it would be bad taste to go down and get one of the many odour-killing devices from the lady down below's bathroom. Joe bustled about, whistling and bringing fresh supplies; Clara made apologetic remarks in Peter's direction. "Small children are like this, it's only shit. Perfectly natural, we all do it. Only," she said, joggling the youngest on her knee, "some of us have a sense of timing. Don't we, you little turd?"
Peter had pointedly opened a window; the room became ice cold. Marian served the sherry, despairingly. Peter was not getting the right impression, but she didn't know what could be done. She found herself wishing that Clara had a few more inhibitions. Clara didn't deny that her children stank, but neither did she take any pains to conceal it. She admitted it, she almost affirmed it; it was as though she wanted it to be appreciated.