It wasn't only the feeling of being subject to rules I had no interest in and no part in making: you get adjusted to that at school. It was a kind of superstitious panic about the fact that I had actually signed my name, had put my signature to a magic document which seemed to bind me to a future so far ahead I couldn't think about it. Somewhere in front of me a self was waiting, preformed, a self who had worked during innumerable years for Seymour Surveys and was now receiving her reward. A pension. I foresaw a bleak room with a plug-in electric heater. […] I thought of my signature going into a file and the file going into a cabinet and the cabinet being shut away in a vault somewhere and locked.
The babies had been unplanned: Clara greeted her first pregnancy with astonishment that such a thing could happen to her, and her second with dismay; now, during her third, she had subsided into a grim but inert fatalism. Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.
[…] [Clara’s] own body seemed somehow beyond her, going its own way without reference to any direction of hers. I studied the pattern of bright flowers on the maternity smock she was wearing; the stylized petals and tendrils moved with her breathing, as though they were coming alive.
[Ainsley] gave me a disgusted look. “Every woman should have at least one baby.” She sounded like a voice on the radio saying that every woman should have at least one electric hair dryer. “It's even more important than sex. It fulfills your deepest femininity.” Ainsley is fond of paperback books by anthropologists about primitive cultures: there are several of them bogged down among the clothes on her floor. At her college they make you take courses in it.
The alarm clock startled me out of a dream in which I had looked down and seen my feet beginning to dissolve, like melting jelly, and had put on a pair of rubber boots just in time only to find that the ends of my fingers were turning transparent. I had started towards the mirror to see what was happening to my face, but at that point I woke up. I don't usually remember my dreams.
Maybe he had intended the bathtub as an expression of his personality. I tried thinking of ways to make that fit. Asceticism? A modern version of hair shirts or sitting on spikes? […] Or maybe it had been a reckless young-man gesture, like jumping into the swimming pool with your clothes on, or putting things on your head at parties. But this image didn't suit Peter either. I was glad there were no more of his group of old friends left to be married: next time he might have tried cramming us into a clothes closet, or an exotic posture in the kitchen sink.
Or maybe—and the thought was chilling—he had intended it as an expression of my personality. A new corridor of possibilities extended itself before me: did he really think of me as a lavatory fixture? What kind of a girl did he think I was?
“One shot, right through the heart. The rest of them got away. I picked it up and Trigger said, ‘You know how to gut them, you just slit her down the belly and give her a good hard shake and all the guts’ll fall out.’ So I whipped out my knife, good knife, German steel, and slit the belly and took her by the hind legs […] God it was funny. Lucky thing Trigger and me had the old cameras along, we got some good shots of the whole mess.”
After a while I noticed with mild curiosity that a large drop of something wet had materialized on the table near my hand. I poked it with my finger and smudged it around a little before I realized with horror that it was a tear. I must be crying then!
“Ainsley behaved herself properly, why couldn't you? The trouble with you is,” he said savagely, “you're just rejecting your femininity.” […]
He glanced quickly over at me, his eyes narrowed as though he was taking aim. Then he gritted his teeth together and stepped murderously hard on the accelerator. […] At the suddenly increased speed the car skidded, turned two-and-a-quarter times round, slithered backward down over someone’s inclined lawn, and came to a bone-jolting stop. I heard something snap.
“You maniac!” I wailed when I had ricocheted off the glove compartment and realized I wasn't dead. “You'll get us all killed!” I must have been thinking of myself as plural.
In his own warped way [Len] was a kind of inverted moralist. He liked to talk as though everyone was out for nothing but sex and money, but when anyone provided a demonstration of his theories in real life, he reacted with scalding critical invective. His blend of cynicism and idealism had a lot to do with his preference for “corrupting,” as he called it, greenish girls, as opposed to the more vine-ripened variety. The supposedly pure, the unobtainable was attractive to the idealist in him; but as soon as it had been obtained, the cynic viewed it as spoiled and threw it away. “She turned out to be just the same as all the rest of them,” he would remark sourly.
I must admit to being, against my will, slightly scandalized by those advertisements. They are so public. I wondered for the first few blocks what sort of person would have enough response to that advertisement to go and buy the object in question, and whether there had ever been a survey done on it. The female form, I thought, is supposed to appeal to men, not to women, and men don't usually buy girdles. Though perhaps the lithe young woman was a self-image; perhaps the purchasers thought they were getting their own youth and slenderness back in the package.
“Once I went to the zoo and there was a cage with a frenzied armadillo in it going around in figure-eights […] They say all caged animals get that way when they're caged, it's a form of psychosis, and even if you set the animals free after they go like that they'll just run around in the same pattern. You read and read the material and after you've read the twentieth article you can't make any sense out of it anymore, and then you start thinking about the number of books that are published in any given year, in any given month, in any given week, and that's just too much. Words,” he said, looking in my direction finally but with his eyes strangely unfocused, as though he was really looking at a point several inches beneath my skin, “are beginning to lose their meanings.”
She could feel time eddying and curling almost visibly around her feet, rising around her, lifting her body in the office chair and bearing her, slowly and circuitously but with the inevitability of water moving downhill, towards the distant, not-so-distant-any-more day they had agreed on—in late March?—that would end this phase and begin another. Somewhere else, arrangements were being gradually made; the relatives were beginning to organize their forces and energies; it was all being taken care of, there was nothing for her to do. […] Now there was this day to get through: a landmark to be passed on the shore, a tree not much different from any of the others that could be distinguished from the rest only by being here rather than further back or further on, with no other purpose than to measure the distance traveled.
She saw [the Underwear Man] as wearing a business suit and a fairly conservative tie, diagonal stripes in brown and maroon; shoes well-shined. Perhaps his otherwise normal mind had been crazed into frenzy by the girdle advertisements on the buses: he was a victim of society.
[…] As she stepped into the street a new thought came to her. Maybe it was really Peter. Slipping out from his law office into the nearest phone booth to dial the number of housewives in Etobicoke. […] Perhaps this was his true self, the core of his personality, the central Peter who had been occupying her mind more and more lately. Perhaps this was what lay hidden under the surface, under the other surfaces, that secret identity which in spite of her many guesses and attempts and half-successes she was aware she had still not uncovered: he was really the Underwear Man.
“It's like term papers, you produce all that stuff and nothing is ever done with it, you just get a grade for it and heave it in the trash, you know that some other poor comma-counter is going to come along the year after you and have to do the same thing over again, it's a treadmill, even ironing, you iron the damn things and then you wear them and they get all wrinkled again.”
“Well, and then you can iron them again, can't you?” Marian said soothingly. “If they stayed neat you wouldn't have anything to do.”
“Maybe I do something worthwhile for a change,” [Duncan] said. […] “Production-consumption. You begin to wonder whether it isn't just a question of making one kind of garbage into another kind. The human mind was the last to be commercialized but they're doing a good job of it now.”
She watched the capable hands holding the knife and fork, slicing precisely with an exact adjustment of pressures. How skillfully he did it: no tearing, no ragged edges. And yet it was a violent action, cutting; and violence in connection with Peter seemed incongruous to her. Like the Moose Beer commercials, which had begun to appear everywhere […] The fisherman wading in the street, scooping the trout into his net was too tidy: he looked as though his hair had just been combed, a few strands glued neatly to his forehead to show he was wind-blown. And the fish also was unreal; it had no slime, no teeth, no smell; it was a clever toy, metal and enamel.
[…] She looked down at her half-eaten steak and suddenly saw it as a hunk of muscle. Blood-red. Part of a real cow that once moved and ate and was killed.
“She made me do it,” he muttered. “My own mother. We were having eggs for breakfast and I opened mine and there was, I swear there was a little chicken inside it, it wasn't born yet, I didn't want to touch it but she didn't see, she didn't see what was really there, she said Don't be silly, it looks like an ordinary egg but it wasn't it wasn't and she made me eat it. And I know, I know there was a little beak and little claws and everything…” He shuddered violently. “Horrible. Horrible, I can't stand it.”
[… When Marian] opened her soft-boiled egg and saw the yolk looking up at her with its one significant and accusing yellow eye, she found her mouth closing together like a frightened sea-anemone. It's living; it's alive, the muscles in her throat said, and tightened.
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 […] and the others too, similar in structure but with varying proportions and textures of bumpy permanence 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; in 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…
[…] 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.
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. […] 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 broad-loomed office had hoped and predicted she would do.
Of course Duncan was making what they called “demands,” if only on her time and attention; but at least he wasn’t threatening her with some intangible gift in return. His complete self-centeredness was reassuring in a peculiar way. Thus, when he would murmur, with his lips touching her cheek, “You know, I don’t even like you very much,” it didn’t disturb her at all because she didn’t have to answer. But when Peter, with his mouth in approximately the same position, would whisper “I love you” and wait for the echo, she had to exert herself.
When at last all the clamps and rollers and pins were in place, and her head resembled a mutant hedgehog with a covering of rounded hairy appendages instead of spikes, she was led away and installed under a dryer and switched on. She looked sideways down the assembly-line of women seated in identical mauve chairs under identical whirring mushroom-shaped machines. All that was visible was a row of strange creatures with legs of various shapes and hands that held magazines and heads that were metal domes. Inert; totally inert. Was this what she was being pushed towards, this compound of the simply vegetable and the simply mechanical? An electric mushroom.
“I worry about her a lot, you know,” Joe continued. “I think it's a lot harder for her than for most other women; I think it's harder for any woman who's been to university. She gets the idea she has a mind, her professors pay attention to what she has to say, they treat her like a thinking human being; when she gets married, her core gets invaded…”
“Her what?” Marian asked.
“Her core. At the center of her personality, the thing she's built up; her image of herself, if you like.”
“Oh. Yes,” said Marian.
“Her feminine role and her core are really in opposition, her feminine role demands passivity from her…”
Marian had a fleeting vision of a large globular pastry, decorated with whipped cream and maraschino cherries, floating suspended in the air above Joe's head.
“Was that one of me?” she asked. She smiled at [Peter] in conciliation. She sensed her face as vastly spreading and papery and slightly dilapidated: a huge billboard smile, peeling away in flaps and patches, the metal surface beneath showing through […]
In the living room Peter was calling above the noise “Come on now, let's get a group portrait. Everybody altogether.” She had to hurry. Now there was the living room to negotiate. She would have to become less visible.
[…] She could not let him capture her this time. Once he pulled the trigger she would be stopped, fixed indissolubly in that gesture, that single stance, unable to move or change.
“You look delicious,” she told [the cake]. “Very appetizing. And that’s what will happen to you; that’s what you get for being food.” […]
She went into the kitchen and returned, bearing the platter in front of her, carefully and with reverence, as though she was carrying something sacred in a procession, an icon or the crown on a cushion in a play. She knelt, setting the platter on the coffee table in front of Peter.
“You've been trying to destroy me, haven't you,” she said. “You've been trying to assimilate me. But I've made you a substitute, something you'll like much better. This is what you really wanted all along, isn't it? I'll get you a fork.”
“Marian, what have you got there?” [Ainsley] walked over to see. “It's a woman—a woman made of cake!” She gave Marian a strange look.
Marian chewed and swallowed. “Have some,” she said, “it's really good. I made it this afternoon.”
Ainsley's mouth opened and closed, fishlike, as though she was trying to take down the full implication of what she saw. “Marian!” she exclaimed at last, with horror. “You're rejecting your femininity!”
[…] Marian looked back at her platter. The woman laid there, still smiling glassily, her legs gone. “Nonsense,” she said. “It's only a cake.” She plunged her fork into the carcass, neatly severing the body from the head.
I had just begun on the windows when the phone rang. It was Duncan. I was surprised; I had more or less forgotten about him. […]
I was irritated with him for not wanting to discuss what I was going to do myself. Now that I was thinking of myself in the first-person singular again I found my own situation much more interesting than his.
“Maybe Peter was trying to destroy me, or maybe I was trying to destroy him, or we were both trying to destroy each other, how's that? What does it matter, you're back to so-called reality, you're a consumer.”
“Incidentally,” I said, remembering, “would you like some cake?” I had half the torso and the head left over.
[…] It gave me a peculiar sense of satisfaction to see [Duncan] eat as if the work hadn't been wasted after all—although the cake was absorbed without exclamations of pleasure, even without noticeable expression. I smiled comfortably at him.
[…] He scraped the last chocolate curl up with his fork and pushed away the plate. “Thank you,” he said, licking his lips. “It was delicious.”
