Read Online The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood - Free Book Online

me – there seemed to be garbage bags in every corner, and the rest of the space was taken up by large pots and kettles, some clean, others not. “I don’t think there’s room in the kitchen,” I said. I stooped and began to skim the papers off the surface of the carpet, much as one would skim scum from a pond.
    “I don’t think you’d better do that,” he said. “Some of them aren’t mine. You might get them mixed up. We’d better go into the bedroom.” He slouched across to the hall and through an open doorway. Of necessity I followed him.
    The room was a white-walled oblong box, dark as the living room: the venetian blind was down here too. It was bare of furniture except for an ironing board with an iron on it, a chess set with a few scattered pieces in a corner of the room, a typewriter sitting on the floor, a cardboard carton which seemed to have dirty laundry in it and which he kicked into the closet as I came in, and a narrow bed. He pulled a grey army blanket over the tangle of sheets on the bed and crawled onto it, where he settled himself cross-legged, backed into the corner formed by the two walls. He switched on the reading lamp over the bed, took a cigarette from a pack which he replaced in his back pocket, lit it, and sat holding the cigarette before him, his hands cupped, like a starved buddha burning incense to itself.
    “All right,” he said.
    I sat down on the edge of the bed – there were no chairs – and began to go through the questionnaire with him. After I had asked each question he would lean his head back against the wall, close his eyes, and give the answer; then he would open his eyes again andwatch me with barely perceptible signs of concentration while I asked the next.
    When we got to the telephone commercial he went to the phone in the kitchen to dial the number. He stayed out there for what seemed to me a long time. I went to check, and found him listening with the receiver pressed to his ear and his mouth twisted in something that was almost a smile.
    “You’re only supposed to listen once,” I said reproachfully.
    He put down the receiver with reluctance. “Can I phone it after you go and listen some more?” he asked in the diffident but wheedling voice of a small child begging an extra cookie.
    “Yes,” I said, “but not next week, okay?” I didn’t want him blocking the line for the interviewers.
    We went back to the bedroom and resumed our respective postures. “Now I’m going to repeat some of the phrases from the commercial to you, and for each one I would like you to tell me what it makes you think of,” I said. This was the free-association part of the questionnaire, meant to test immediate responses to certain key phrases. “First, what about ‘Deep-down manly flavour’?”
    He threw his head back and closed his eyes. “Sweat,” he said, considering. “Canvas gym shoes. Underground locker rooms and jockstraps.”
    An interviewer is always supposed to write down the exact words of the answer, so I did. I thought about slipping this interview into the stack of real ones, to vary the monotony for one of the women with the crayons – Mrs. Weemers, perhaps, or Mrs. Gundridge. She’d read it out loud to the others, and they would remark that it took all kinds; the topic would be good for at least three coffee breaks.
    “Now what about ‘Long cool swallow’?”
    “Not much. Oh, wait a moment. It’s a bird, white, falling from a great height. Shot through the heart, in winter; the feathers coming off, drifting down.… This is just like those word-game tests theshrink gives you,” he said with his eyes open. “I always liked doing them. They’re better than the ones with pictures.”
    I said, “I expect they use the same principle. What about ‘Healthy hearty taste’?”
    He meditated for several minutes. “It’s heartburn,” he said. “Or no, that can’t be right.” His forehead wrinkled. “Now I see. It’s one of those cannibal