Margaret Atwood - Edible Woman

BOOKS BY MARGARET ATWOOD

FICTION
The Edible Woman (1969)
Surfacing (1972)
Lady Oracle (1976)
Dancing Girls (1977)
Life Before Man (1979)
Bodily Harm (1981)
Murder in the Dark (1983)
Bluebeards Egg (1983)
The Handmaids Tale (1985)
Cats Eye (1988)
Wilderness Tips (1991)
Good Bones (1992)
The Robber Bride (1993)
Alias Grace (1996)
The Blind Assassin (2000)
Good Bones and Simple Murders (2001)
Oryx and Crake (2003)
The Penelopiad (2005)
The Tent (2006)
Moral Disorder (2006)
The Year of the Flood (2009)

FOR CHILDREN
Up in the Tree (1978)
Annas Pet (with Joyce Barkhouse) (1980)
For the Birds (1990)
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995)
Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003)
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004)

NON-FICTION
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)
Days of the Rebels 18151840 (1977)
Second Words (1982)
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1996)
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002)
Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 19822004 (2004)
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008)

POETRY
Double Persephone (1961)
The Circle Game (1966)
The Animals in That Country (1968)
The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)
Procedures for Underground (1970)
Power Politics (1971)
You Are Happy (1974)
Selected Poems (1976)
Two-Headed Poems (1978)
True Stories (1981)
Interlunar (1984)
Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 19761986 (1986)
Morning in the Burned House (1995)
The Door (2007)

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939, and grew up in northern Quebec and Ontario, and later in Toronto. She has lived in a number of cities in Canada, the U.S., and Europe.

Atwood is the author of more than forty books novels, short stories, poetry, non-fiction, and books for children. Her work is acclaimed internationally and has been published around the world. Her novels include The Handmaids Tale, Cats Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, and, most recently, The Year of the Flood. She has received many prestigious awards, including the Giller Prize (Canada), the Booker Prize (U.K.), the Premio Mondello (Italy), the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature (U.S.), Le Chevalier dans lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres (France), and the Prince of Asturias Award (Spain).

Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. She is a Vice President of International PEN. She and Gibson are the Joint Honorary Presidents of the Rare Bird Club within Birdlife International, and spend much time on conservation projects. For more information, please visit www.margaretatwood.ca.

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 gods 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 didnt 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 dont pay well: she wants to meet the artists. Last year, she told me, it was actors, but then she actually met some. Its 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 theyre still cavity-free. She ran one hand reflectively through her hair, which is long and red, or rather auburn. Could you imagine kissing one? Hed say Open wide beforehand. Theyre so bloody one-track.

It must have been awful, I said, refilling her glass. Couldnt you have changed the topic?

Ainsley raised her almost non-existent eyebrows, which hadnt been coloured in yet that morning. Of course not, she said. I pretended to be terribly interested. And naturally I didnt 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 isnt feeling well. I was magnanimous and didnt respond. Youd better eat something before you go to work, I said, its better when youve got something on your stomach.

Oh god, said Ainsley, I cant face it. Another day of machines and mouths. I havent had an interesting one since last month, when that lady sent back her toothbrush because the bristles were falling off. We found out shed been using Ajax.

I got so caught up in being efficient for Ainsleys benefit while complimenting myself on my moral superiority to her that I didnt realize how late it was until she reminded me. At the electric toothbrush company they dont 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 cru 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 shed been burying in the garden.