The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood Page A

I would rather have gone home, but I didn’t want to cause Peter any more trouble that night. I sat up straight and folded my hands in my lap.
    We parked beside Len’s apartment building, which as far as I could tell at night was of the collapsing brown-brick ramshackle variety, with fire escapes down the outside. There was no elevator, just creaky stairs with dark wooden railings. We ascended in decorous couples.
    The apartment itself was tiny, only one main room with a bathroom opening to one side and a kitchen to the other. It was somewhat disarranged, with suitcases on the floor and books and clothes strewn about: Len evidently hadn’t finished moving into it yet. The bed was immediately to the left of the door, doubling as a chesterfield, and I kicked off my shoes and subsided onto it. My muscles had caught up with me and were beginning to ache with fatigue.
    Len poured the three of us generous shots of cognac, rummaged in the kitchen and managed to find some Coke for Ainsley, and put on a record. Then he and Peter began to fiddle with a couple of cameras, screwing various lenses onto them and peering through them and exchanging information about exposure times. I feltdeflated. I was filled with penitence, but there was no outlet for it. If I could be alone with Peter it would be different, I thought: he could forgive me.
    Ainsley was no help. I saw she was going to keep up her little-girls-should-be-seen-and-not-heard act, as the safest course to follow. She had settled into a round wicker basket-chair, like the one in Clara’s back yard except that this one had a quilted corduroy cover in egg-yolk yellow. I’d experienced those covers before. They’re kept on by elastic, and they have a habit of slipping off the edges of the chair if you wiggle around too much and closing up around you. Ainsley sat quite still though, holding her Coca-Cola glass in her lap and contemplating her own reflection on the brown surface inside it. She registered neither pleasure nor boredom; her inert patience was that of a pitcher-plant in a swamp with its hollow bulbous leaves half-filled with water, waiting for some insect to be attracted, drowned, and digested.
    I was leaning back against the wall, sipping at my cognac, the noise of voices and music slapping against me like waves. I suppose the pressure of my body had pushed the bed out a little; at any rate, without thinking much about anything I turned my head away from the room and looked down. I began to find something very attractive about the dark cool space between the bed and the wall.
    It would be quiet down there, I thought; and less humid. I set my glass down on the telephone table beside the bed and glanced quickly around the room. They were all engrossed: no one would notice.
    A minute later I was wedged sideways between the bed and the wall, out of sight but not at all comfortable. This will never do, I thought; I’ll have to go right underneath. It will be like a tent. It didn’t occur to me to scramble back up. I eased the bed out from the wall as noiselessly as I could, using my whole body as a lever, lifted the fringed border of the bedspread, and slid myself in like a letterthrough a slot. It was a tight fit: the slats were unusually low for a bed, and I was forced to lie absolutely flat against the floor. I inched the bed back flush with the wall.
    It was quite cramped. Also, there were large rolls and clusters of dust strewn thickly over the floor like chunks of mouldy bread (I thought indignantly, What a pig Len is! Doesn’t sweep under his bed, then re-considered: he hadn’t been living there long and some of the dust may have been left over from whoever lived there before). But the semi-darkness, tinted orange by the filter of the bedspread that curtained me on all four sides, and the coolness and the solitude were pleasant. The raucous music and staccato laughter and the droning voices reached me muffled by the mattress. In spite of the narrowness and