The Edible Woman Read Online Free Page A

only need to get seven or eight men.”
    My lateness that morning had given her leverage. “Fine,” I said, “I’ll do them tomorrow.”
    “You’ll get overtime, of course,” Mrs. Bogue said as she walked away, leaving me wondering whether that had been a snide remark. Her voice is always so bland it’s hard to tell.
    I finished licking the envelopes, then got the beer questionnaires from Millie and went through the questions, looking for trouble-spots. The initial selection questions were standard enough. After that, the questions were designed to test listener response to a radio jingle, part of the advertising campaign for a new brand of beer one of the large companies was about to launch on the market. At a certain point the interviewer had to ask the respondent to pick up the telephone and dial a given number, whereupon the jingle would play itself to him over the phone. Then there were a number of questions asking the man how he liked the commercial, whether he thought it might influence his buying habits, and so on.
    I dialled the phone number. Since the survey wasn’t actually being conducted till the next week, someone might have forgotten to hook up the record, and I didn’t want to make an idiot of myself.
    After a preliminary ringing, buzzing and clicking a deep bass voice, accompanied by what sounded like an electric guitar, sang:
    Moose, Moose
,
From the land of pine and spruce
,
Tingly, heady, rough-and-ready…
.
    Then a speaking voice, almost as deep as the singer’s, intoned persuasively to background music,
    Any real man, on a real man’s holiday – hunting, fishing, or just plain old-fashioned relaxing – needs a beer with a healthy, hearty taste, a deep-down manly flavour. The first long cool swallow will tell you that Moose Beer is just what you’ve always wanted for true beer enjoyment. Put the tang of the wilderness in
YOUR
life today with a big satisfying glass of sturdy Moose Beer
.
    The singer resumed:
    Tingly, heady
,
Rough-and-ready
,
Moose, Moose, Moose, Moose
, BEER!!!
    and after a climax of sound the record clicked off. It was in satisfactory working order.
    I remembered the sketches I’d seen of the visual presentation, scheduled to appear in magazines and on posters: the label was to have a pair of antlers with a gun and a fishing rod crossed beneath them. The singing commercial was a reinforcement of this theme; Ididn’t think it was very original but I admired the subtlety of “just plain old-fashioned relaxing.” That was so the average beer-drinker, the slope-shouldered pot-bellied kind, would be able to feel a mystical identity with the plaid-jacketed sportsman shown in the pictures with his foot on a deer or scooping a trout into his net.
    I had got to the last page when the telephone rang. It was Peter. I could tell from the sound of his voice that something was wrong.
    “Listen, Marian, I can’t make it for dinner tonight.”
    “Oh?” I said, wanting further explanation. I was disappointed, I had been looking forward to dinner with Peter to cheer me up. Also I was hungry again. I had been eating in bits and pieces all day and I had been counting on something nourishing and substantial. This meant another of the T. V . dinners Ainsley and I kept for emergencies. “Has something happened?”
    “I know you’ll understand. Trigger” – his voice choked – “Trigger’s getting married.”
    “Oh,” I said. I thought of saying “That’s too bad,” but it didn’t seem adequate. There was no use in sympathizing as though for a minor mishap when it was really a national disaster. “Would you like me to come with you?” I asked, offering support.
    “God no,” he said, “that would be even worse. I’ll see you tomorrow. Okay?”
    When he had hung up I reflected upon the consequences. The most obvious one was that Peter would need careful handling the next evening. Trigger was one of Peter’s oldest friends; in fact, he had been the last of Peter’s