Marian is determined to be ordinary. She lays her head
gently on the shoulder of her serious fiancee and quietly awaits
marriage. But she didn''t count on an inner rebellion that would
rock her stable routine, and her digestion. Marriage a la mode,
Marian discovers, is something she literally can''t stomach ...The
Edible Woman is a funny, engaging novel about emotional
cannibalism, men and women, and desire to be consumed. ''Margaret
Atwood not only has a sense of humour, she has wit and style in
abundance ...a joy to read'' Good Housekeeping ''Written with a
brilliant angry energy'' Observer ''A witty, elegant, generous and
patient writer'' Punch
關於作者：
Margaret Atwood''s books have been published in over thirty
five countries. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize four
times and with Blind Assassin, won it in 2000. She lives in Toronto
with writer Graeme Gibson.
內容試閱：
1
I know I was all right on Friday when I got up; if anything I was
feeling more stolid than usual. When I went out to the kitchen to
get breakfast Ainsley was there, moping: she said she had been to a
bad party the night before. She swore there had been nothing but
dentistry students, which depressed her so much she had consoled
herself by getting drunk.
“You have no idea how soggy it is,” she said, “having to go
through twenty conversations about the insides of peoples’ mouths.
The most reaction I got out of them was when I described an abscess
I once had. They positively drooled. And most men look at something
besides your teeth, for god’s sake.”
She had a hangover, which put me in a cheerful mood – it made me
feel so healthy – and I poured her a glass of tomato juice and
briskly fixed her an Alka- Seltzer, listening and making
sympathetic noises while she complained.
“As if I didn’t get enough of that at work,” she said. Ainsley
has a job as a tester of defective electric toothbrushes for an
electric toothbrush company: a temporary job. What she is waiting
for is an opening in one of those little art galleries, even though
they don’t pay well: she wants to meet the artists. Last year, she
told me, it was actors, but then she actually met some. “It’s an
absolute fixation. I expect they all carry those bent mirrors
around in their coat pockets and peer into their own mouths every
time they go to the john to make sure they’re still cavity- free.”
She ran one hand reflectively through her hair, which is long and
red, or rather auburn. “Could you imagine kissing one? He’d say
‘Open wide’ beforehand. They’re so bloody one- track.”
“It must have been awful,” I said, refilling her glass. “Couldn’t
you have changed the topic?”
Ainsley raised her almost non- existent eyebrows, which hadn’t
been coloured in yet that morning. “Of course not,” she said. “I
pretended to be terribly interested. And naturally I didn’t let on
what my job was: those professional men get so huffy if you know
anything about their subject. You know, like Peter.”
Ainsley tends to make jabs at Peter, especially when she isn’t
feeling well. I was magnanimous and didn’t respond. “You’d better
eat something before you go to work,” I said, “it’s better when
you’ve got something on your stomach.”
“Oh god,” said Ainsley, “I can’t face it. Another day of machines
and mouths. I haven’t had an interesting one since last month, when
that lady sent back her toothbrush because the bristles were
falling off. We found out she’d been using Ajax.”
I got so caught up in being efficient for Ainsley’s benefit while
complimenting myself on my moral superiority to her that I didn’t
realize how late it was until she reminded me. At the electric
toothbrush company they don’t care what time you breeze in, but my
company thinks of itself as punctual. I had to skip the egg and
wash down a glass of milk and a bowl of cold cereal which I knew
would leave me hungry long before lunchtime. I chewed through a
piece of bread while Ainsley watched me in nauseated silence and
grabbed up my purse, leaving Ainsley to close the apartment door
behind me.
We live on the top floor of a large house in one of the older and
more genteel districts, in what I suppose used to be the servants’
quarters. This means there are two flights of stairs between us and
the front door, the higher flight narrow and slippery, the lower
one wide and carpeted but with stair rods that come loose. In the
high heels expected by the office I have to go down sideways,
clutching the bannister. That morning I made it safely past the
line of pioneer brass warming- pans strung on the wall of our
stairway, avoided catching myself on the many- pronged spinning
wheel on the second-floor landing, and sidestepped quickly down
past the ragged regimental flag behind glass and the row of oval-
framed ancestors that guard the first stairway. I was relieved to
see there was no one in the downstairs hall. On level ground I
strode towards the door, swerving to avoid the rubber plant on one
side and the hall table with the écru doily and the round brass
tray on the other. Behind the velvet curtain to the right I could
hear the child performing her morning penance at the piano. I
thought I was safe.
But before I reached the door it swung silently inward upon its
hinges, and I knew I was trapped. It was the lady down below. She
was wearing a pair of spotless gardening gloves and carrying a
trowel. I wondered who she’d been burying in the garden.
“Good morning, Miss MacAlpin,” she said.
“Good morning.” I nodded and smiled. I can never remember her
name, and neither can Ainsley; I suppose we have what they call a
mental block about it. I looked past her towards the street, but
she didn’t move out of the doorway.
“I was out last night,” she said. “At a meeting.” She has an
indirect way of going about things. I shifted from one foot to the
other and smiled again, hoping she would realize I was in a hurry.
“The child tells me there was another fire.”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly a fire,” I said. The child had taken
this mention of her name as an excuse to stop practising, and was
standing now in the velvet doorway of the parlour, staring at me.
She is a hulking creature of fifteen or so who is being sent to an
exclusive private girls’ school, and she has to wear a green tunic
with knee-socks to match. I’m sure she’s really quite normal, but
there’s something cretinous about the hair- ribbon perched up on
top of her gigantic body.
The lady down below took off one of her gloves and patted her
chignon. “Ah,” she said sweetly. “The child says there was a lot of
smoke.”
“Everything was under control,” I said, not smiling this time.
“It was just the pork chops.”
“Oh, I see,” she said. “Well, I do wish you would tell Miss Tewce
to try not to make quite so much smoke in future. I’m afraid it
upsets the child.” She holds Ainsley alone responsible for the
smoke, and seems to think she sends it out of her nostrils like a
dragon. But she never stops Ainsley in the hall to talk about it:
only me. I suspect she’s decided Ainsley isn’t respectable, whereas
I am. It’s probably the way we dress: Ainsley says I choose clothes
as though they’re a camouflage or a protective colouration, though
I can’t see anything wrong with that. She herself goes in for neon
pink.
Of course I missed the bus: as I crossed the lawn I could see it
disappearing across the bridge in a cloud of air pollution. While I
was standing under the tree – our street has many trees, all of
them enormous – waiting for the next bus, Ainsley came out of the
house and joined me. She’s a quick- change artist; I could never
put myself together in such a short time. She was looking a lot
healthier – possibly the effects of makeup, though you can never
tell with Ainsley – and she had her red hair piled up on top of her
head, as she always does when she goes to work. The rest of the
time she wears it down in straggles. She had on her orange and pink
sleeveless dress, which I judged was too tight across the hips. The
day was going to be hot and humid; already I could feel a private
atmosphere condensing around me like a plastic bag. Maybe I should
have worn a sleeveless dress too.
“She got me in the hall,” I said. “About the smoke.”
“The old bitch,” said Ainsley. “Why can’t she mind her own
business?” Ainsley doesn’t come from a small town as I do, so she’s
not as used to people being snoopy; on the other hand she’s not as
afraid of it either. She has no idea about the consequences.
“She’s not that old,” I said, glancing over at the curtained
windows of the house; though I knew she couldn’t hear us. “Besides,
it wasn’t her who noticed the smoke, it was the child. She was at a
meeting.”
“Probably the W.C.T.U.,” Ainsley said. “Or the I.O.D.E. I’ll bet
she wasn’t at a meeting at all; she was hiding behind that damn
velvet curtain, wanting us to think she was at a meeting so we’d
really do something. What she wants is an orgy.”
“Now Ainsley,” I said, “you’re being paranoid.” Ainsley is
convinced that the lady down below comes upstairs when we aren’t
there and looks round our apartment and is silently horrified, and
even suspects her of ruminating over our mail, though not of going
so far as to open it. It’s a fact that she sometimes answers the
front door for our visitors before they ring the bell. She must
think she’s within her rights to take precautions: when we first
considered renting the apartment she made it clear to us, by
discreet allusions to previous tenants, that whatever happened the
child’s innocence must not be corrupted, and that two young ladies
were surely more to be depended upon than two young men.
“I’m doing my best,” she had said, sighing and shaking her head.
She had intimated that her husband, whose portrait in oils hung
above the piano, had not left as much money as he should have. “Of
course you realize your apartment has no private entrance?” She had
been stressing the drawbacks rather than the advantages, almost as
though she didn’t want us to rent. I sa...
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