The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood Page A

sitting at the kitchen table, eating frozen peas and smoked meat, the kind you boil for three minutes in the plastic packages. Peter had decided against going out for dinner.
    “Oh no,” I said, eager to defend Len, “quite the opposite.”
    Peter pushed his plate away. “Why can’t you ever
cook
anything?” he said petulantly.
    I was hurt: I considered this unfair. I like to cook, but I had been deliberately refraining at Peter’s for fear he would feel threatened. Besides, he had always liked smoked meat before, and it was perfectly nourishing. I was about to make a sharp comment, but repressed it. Peter after all was suffering. Instead I asked, “How was the wedding?”
    Peter groaned, leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and gazed inscrutably at the far wall. Then he got up and poured himself another gin-and-tonic. He tried pacing up and down in the kitchen, but it was too narrow, so he sat down again.
    “God,” he said, “poor Trigger. He looked terrible. How could he let himself be taken in like that?” He continued in a disjointed monologue in which Trigger was made to sound like the last of the Mohicans, noble and free, the last of the dinosaurs, destroyed by fate and lesser species, and the last of the dodos, too dumb to get away. Then he attacked the bride, accusing her of being predatory and malicious and of sucking poor Trigger into the domestic void (making me picture her as a vacuum-cleaner), and finally ground to a halt with several funereal predictions about his own solitary future. By solitary he meant without other single men.
    I swallowed the last of my frozen peas. I had heard this speech twice before, or something like it, and I knew there was nothing I could say. If I agreed with him it would only intensify his depression, and if I disagreed he would suspect me of siding with the bride. The first time I had been cheerful and maxim-like, and had attempted consolation. “Well, it’s done now,” I had said, “and maybe it’ll turnout to be a good thing in the end. After all, it isn’t as though she’s robbing the cradle. Isn’t he twenty-six?”
    “
I’m
twenty-six,” Peter had said moodily.
    So this time I said nothing, remarking to myself that it was a good thing Peter had got this speech over with early in the evening. I got up and dished him out some ice-cream, which he took as a sympathetic gesture, putting his arm round my waist and giving me a gloomy hug.
    “God, Marian,” he said, “I don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t understand. Most women wouldn’t, but you’re so sensible.”
    I leaned against him, stroking his hair while he ate his ice-cream.
    We left the car in one of the usual places, on a side street behind the Park Plaza. As we started to walk along I put my hand through Peter’s arm and he smiled down at me abstractedly. I smiled back at him – I was glad he was out of the teeth-gritting mood he had been in while driving – and he brought his other hand over and placed it on top of mine. I was going to bring my other hand up and place it on top of his, but I thought if I did then mine would be on top and he’d have to take his arm out from underneath so he’d have another hand to put on top of the heap, like those games at recess. I squeezed his arm affectionately instead.
    We reached the Park Plaza and Peter opened the plate-glass door for me as he always does. Peter is scrupulous about things like that; he opens car doors too. Sometimes I expect him to click his heels.
    While we waited for the elevator I watched our double image in the floor-to-ceiling mirror by the elevator doors. Peter was wearing one of his more subdued costumes, a brownish-green summer suit whose cut emphasized the functional spareness of his body. All his accessories matched.
    “I wonder if Len’s up there yet,” I said to him, keeping an eye on myself and talking to him in the mirror. I was thinking I was just about the right height for him.
    The elevator came and