Chapter 20 19

19 "There's Jell-O, Carp, Peanut Butter and Honey, and Egg Salad," said Mrs. Grote, who almost slammed the plate of food under Marianne's nose, not on purpose, but For Marianne was sitting on the couch, and Mrs. Grote was standing. She wore a stiff corset and sat at a desk every day. Her muscles had become accustomed to that stiff posture, and she stood upright. , it was really difficult to bend forward to Marianne for a while. Marianne leaned back on a soft calico cushion and said, "Thanks, the jelly ones," she said, taking one. It was an office Christmas party, and it took place in the ladies' dining room, where, as Mrs. Gendridge put it, everyone could be "more comfortable."Indeed, being squeezed into such a small room, I still felt quite intimate, but everyone felt a little bit unhappy in their hearts.This year's Christmas is on Wednesday, which means that everyone has to go back to work on Friday, and this is the only day missing, otherwise, we can enjoy a long vacation consecutively.It was this, Marianne decided, that made Mrs. Grote somewhat happy, her eyes shining behind the lenses of her spectacles, and for the first time handing out sandwiches about the room.Marianne thought, as she watched her stiff figure move about the room, that she was going to see how much they were unhappy.

Office parties seem to be all about eating, talking about what's wrong with your body, where you can find a bargain, and so on.The food is brought by everyone themselves, and it is agreed in advance that each person should cook something.Marianne was also assigned to make petits fours, which she actually bought from the bakery, but replaced the paper bag, since she had felt much less inclined to cook herself these days.The food was piled on the table at one end of the dining room, and there was too much to eat, salads, sandwiches, assorted breads, desserts, biscuits, and pastries.But because each person brought the food, he had to taste a little of everything, and if he didn't eat it, the person who brought it would be unhappy.From time to time someone can be heard yelling, "Oh, Dorothy, I really want to try your orange and pineapple pancakes!" or "Lina, your delicious fruit trifle looks mouth-watering!" While talking, he stood up and walked slowly to the table, adding something to the paper plate in his hand.

Marianne guessed it wasn't like that before.Older colleagues still remember that Christmas parties used to be held by the whole company, and the company was much smaller than it is now, which sounds like an old saying now.Mrs. Pogue mumbled that years ago, the gentlemen upstairs came down to play, and they drank.But the company has developed rapidly, and now there are so many people, no one can know everyone, and the party has become uncontrollable.The aimless manager chased after the little girl in the copy department with her hands full of ink. The suppressed lust and dissatisfaction were expressed inappropriately. The elderly lady with a paper cup in her hand felt a little overwhelmed , even a little shocked.These days, in order to accommodate the enthusiasm of the whole company, each department holds a separate meeting, and Mrs. Gendridge said shortly after noon that it was more comfortable, just us ladies together, and everyone agreed in a vague murmur.

Marianne sat between two office maidens, and a third leaned on the arm of the couch.In this case, all three of them huddled together, which served as a kind of self-protection.They could not show off their children's cleverness as others did, or discuss such important topics as home decoration and furniture, or compare each other's husbands, describe his eccentricities or talk to their female companions in detail. Habit.They were preoccupied with other things, though Amy occasionally inserted a few words in the conversation about her own physical problems.Marianne understood that she was among them in an ambiguous position--they all knew that she would soon be married, and therefore considered her no longer really a single woman, and could no longer understand their problems.But in spite of their somewhat indifferent attitude to her, she preferred to sit with them rather than join those other circles.There was little movement in the room, except for those who carried the food trays, most of the people sat in small groups, changing seats now and then to join other circles.Only Mrs. Pogue kept wandering about, and it was her duty to have an amiable smile here, a word or two there, or a biscuit there.

Because of that troublesome incident earlier in the day, she is now working extra hard.Since October, the company has been preparing for a large-scale city-wide tasting survey of instant tomato juice, but the days dragged on because the planning was not perfect, and it was finally scheduled to go out this morning to conduct the survey .The company sent an unprecedented number of people, and almost all those who could go out to conduct research on those unprepared housewives. They were like cigarette girls with a cardboard food tray around their necks (Marian privately told Lucy they might as well have been bleached white and put on feather jackets and mesh stockings), What I hold in my hand are small paper cups containing canned tomato juice and instant tomato juice powder, and a small kettle.They let the housewives taste the real tomato juice first, and then mix the tomato juice powder with water in front of them, and then invite them to taste it. The housewives will be extremely surprised when they see that it is so simple and quick, and they will probably praise it repeatedly.The ad for the design reads: "A little stir and it's ready. If they had done it in October, it might have been a big hit.

Unfortunately, for five days in a row, there was no snow even though the sky was covered with dark clouds.It just so happened that it started snowing at ten o'clock this morning, and it wasn't snowflakes fluttering in the air, nor did it come and go, but the wind and snow were flying all over the sky.Mrs. Pogue tried to get the upstairs managers to agree to a later delay, but that was not granted. "Humans are not machines," she yelled into the phone so that her colleagues outside the cubicle could hear her, even though her door was closed, "how do you go out in this weather?" But the deadline has come and it has been delayed After such a long time, I can't delay any longer. Besides, if I don't go today, I will postpone it for another three days, because the next one is the Christmas holiday.So Mrs. Pogue and her crew were driven into the snowstorm despite their murmurs.

For the rest of the morning, the office was like a disaster relief center, with calls from hapless investigators.Although their cars are equipped with anti-freeze equipment, they do not have snow tires. Now it is difficult to move in the heavy snowstorm. Some of them are stuck in the snow and cannot move. Opened and hit on the head again.The paper cups are light in weight, and when the wind blows, they will fly over the driveway and hedges, spilling the tomato juice inside on the snow and on the investigators.Some investigators managed to get to the door of someone's house, and tomato juice was spilled on the housewife.A researcher had a paper plate around her neck that was blown into the air like a kite; another person covered the plate in his coat, and the plate overturned, and the wind blew the juice all over her body. yes.From eleven o'clock, people who went out came back one after another, only to see that everyone's hair was blown to a mess, and their bodies were covered with red stains.

After conducting this scientific and efficient field research on the public, I finally breathed a sigh of relief.Some people didn't say a word, some people explained, and some people felt very good about themselves.Mrs. Pogue also had to deal with the angry leadership upstairs in the carpeted office, who insisted that the storm and snow were all made up by those downstairs.Now she was walking around among the colleagues who were eating, her face still bearing the traces of the quarrel just now.While she had acted nervous and troubled, she had been quite calm; now, she seemed a little embarrassed to try to act nonchalant.Marianne couldn't help thinking that it was like a lady in a calico hat who just felt like a little animal was crawling on her leg got up and gave a gracious thank-you speech at a fraternity party.

Marianne, who had been absent-mindedly listening to several groups at once, decided not to listen any more, and let the hum of the room pass like a wind to her ears.She ate the jelly sandwich and got up to get a pastry.There was so much food on the table, the cakes were covered with yellowed meringue and icing syrup, these shiny and delicious things were made of hardened oil and sugar, she couldn't help but want to swallow them. go down.She took a muffin and returned to her seat.Lucy, who had just talked to Amy, turned her head to talk to Mi Li at this moment, and Marianne found that they were talking vigorously after sitting down.

"Well, of course they don't know what to do," said Lucy. "It's not easy for you to ask someone if you can take a bath first. I mean it would be a little rude." "London is really dirty too," said Millie sympathetically. "When you see men at night, the collars of their white shirts are all black, jet-black, all because of the smoke." "Well, that's the way it is, and it's getting worse until they're too embarrassed to invite friends in..." "Who is it?" asked Marianne. "Oh, it's a woman who lives with a friend of mine in England. She just refuses to take a bath. Everything else is fine, but she refuses to take a bath. She doesn't even wash her hair or change her clothes for a long time. No one else wants to be with her. Said, because in other respects she seemed perfectly normal, but clearly there must be something wrong with her."

Amy's pale, narrow face turned immediately at the word "fault," and the story was told to her again. "So, what happened next?" Millie asked, licking the chocolate frosting off her fingers. "Well," said Lucy, nibbling gracefully on a small piece of shortbread, "it's a little scary to say, oh, she never changes her clothes, at least for three or four months, so you can imagine the smell." Got it." Everyone who heard it cried out in surprise, "Ah. It's terrible." Then she said: Well, it must have been at least two months.The person who lives with her is planning to have a showdown with her, asking her to wash it anyway, or move out altogether. I mean, ask her to go.But the strange thing is that one day after she came home, she took off all the clothes on her body from head to toe, lit a fire and burned them, and went to take a bath and comb herself. From then on, everything was normal, that's all. " "Well, this is really weird," Amy said with a little disappointment in her tone. She had hoped to hear that the woman had some serious illness, preferably an operation or something. "Of course, you know, the people over there are much more sloppy," Mier said with a well-informed tone. "But she came from this way," cried Lucy. "I mean she came from a good family and got a good upbringing, not that they didn't have a bathroom, they were always very clean." "Maybe it's just a phase that we all go through in some way," Millie said, with an open-minded tone. "She might just be immature, so far from home..." "I think there's something wrong with her," said Lucy, who was picking the raisins off the Christmas cake as she prepared to eat it. Marianne tossed the word "immature" over and over in her mind, like picking up an interesting pebble on the seashore and turning it over and over again.The word made her think of an ear of green corn, or some other fruit or vegetable.You are green at first, and then gradually turn yellow, which is called maturity.A dress designed for a mature figure.In other words, fat. She looked towards other colleagues in the room, and saw that everyone's mouths were opening and closing, either talking or eating.Here they are no different from other women who gather for an afternoon meal.Usually when they go to work, everyone looks like an office worker. It seems that there is a world of difference from the women they work with, those housewives, but now this difference is gone.They might as well have been dressed in house clothes, with curlers on their heads.Now, everyone is wearing dresses sewn for mature figures.They are all ripe, some are overripe very quickly, and some have begun to dry up.It seemed to her that they all had a stalk growing from their heads, hanging from an invisible vine, and that each was in a different stage of growth or decay... According to this view, the slender Lucy sitting beside her was just in In the early stage, she carefully maintained that blonde hair like a flower, under which a small blue bone is slowly forming... She watched her colleague's body with interest, and with a somewhat critical eye , as if you've never seen them before.In a sense, it is true. They are just like the desks, telephones, and chairs in the office. They just exist objectively with a certain shape and occupy a certain amount of space in the room.But now she saw Mrs. Gundridge's neck bulging above her bodice, her thighs fat as hams, her neck wrinkled, and her broad cheeks with fine pores. she was sitting with her legs crossed, and the varicose veins were visible on the back of one fat leg.When she chewed, her cheeks seemed to freeze, and the woolen sweater on her body covered her round shoulders, like a warm cover for a teapot.Others are essentially the same, only differing in degree and texture, such as permed hairstyles, breasts and rounded waist and buttocks, soft skin that is supported by bones inside the body, and outside It's all about clothes and makeup.What a queer bunch of creatures, chewing and exchanging with the outside world, things going in and things coming out, talking, potato chips, burps, grease, hair, small Dolls, milk, excrement, biscuits, vomit, coffee, tomato juice, blood, tea, candy, hard liquor, tears, garbage... for a moment, she felt that her mind With a lot of thoughts in her mind, she thought that these colleagues seemed to come out of the same mold, and their bodies were almost the same.Someday in the future, she will—no, she's already like everyone else.She was one of them, and her body was no different, mingling with the flesh, suffocating the air in the room adorned with perfumed flowers.The women formed a sea of ​​sargasso so thick that she felt suffocated.She took a deep breath and straightened herself up.Focus on yourself like an octopus retracting its tentacles in the sea.She needed something solid and clear, a man.She wished Peter was with her now, that she could reach out and grab him before she got sucked down to the bottom of the ocean. Lucy was wearing a gold bracelet, and Marianne was gazing at it intently, as if she wanted to protect herself from the hard gold ring as a protective covering, separating herself from the blurry shapes around her. She suddenly realized that the room was quiet, and the chattering stopped.She looked up and saw Mrs. Pogue standing at the edge of a table at one end of the room, one hand raised. Today we all get together and relax," she smiled amiably, "and I'm taking this opportunity to announce something great to all of you.Recently I got an inside tip that a colleague is getting married soon.Let us all regard Marianne McCubene as a happy marriage and everything going well. " There were screams, lip smacks, and excited hums from the crowd, and then the audience stood up and came forward to congratulate her one by one, with wet lips all over the sky and powdered faces. There were crumbs of chocolate; there were kisses, questions, and a lot of fun.Marian stood up, but was immediately squeezed onto Mrs. Gendridge's enormous breasts.She broke free and pressed herself against the wall, her face flushed with anger rather than embarrassment.Someone must have leaked the news, one of the three of them must have made the report, it must have been Millie. She kept saying "Thank you", "September" and "March", answering everyone's questions, these three words were enough.Everyone shouted "Great!", "Wonderful!" The three office maidens stood aside, smiling thoughtfully.Mrs. Pogue was also on the sidelines, and by the tone and manner of her speaking--her sudden announcement, without first mentioning or asking for her opinion, was an indication to Marianne that she was to resign, regardless of her Willing or not.Everyone in the office knew that Mrs. Pogue liked to use unmarried women, or middle-aged women who had already passed the childbearing period, so as to avoid the trouble of pregnancy. When Marianne first came to work, there was a typist because Married and forced to resign.She was heard to say that newlyweds are often unstable.Mrs. Grote from the accounting department was also standing far away, and she smiled awkwardly with her lips tightly pressed.Marianne thought, I'm pretty sure she's having a hard time right now, and can't get me into a pension plan anymore. Stepping out of the building into the cold air of the street was like opening the windows of an overheated, stuffy room.The wind had died down, the snow was drifting softly, it was already dark, and the lights from the Christmas friezes and stars in the shop windows and overhead shone on the snow like an artificially illuminated waterfall splash. The splashes that come out are so shiny.There was not as much snow on the ground as she had expected. After being trampled by pedestrians, it was only black, wet and dirty.It hadn't snowed yet when Marianne went to work, so she didn't wear her boots.By the time she walked to the subway station, her shoes were already soaked. Although her feet were warm and wet, she got off the bus one stop earlier.After this tea party, she felt only unable to go directly to her lodgings.Ainsley would come in, knitting baby clothes, and the silver and blue plastic Christmas tree that was on the table.The presents have not been wrapped yet, and they are all spread out on her bed, and her suitcase has not been packed yet. She will take the car home early tomorrow morning, using the two days off to visit her parents and other relatives.When she thought of them by chance, she felt that her hometown and relatives seemed to have nothing to do with her.Home and family were waiting for her somewhere on the horizon, the same old, gray monstrosity, like the ruins of some lost civilization, where only weathered rocks remained.She bought the gift last weekend, the store was packed and there was a lot of noise in front of the counter, but now she has no desire to give anyone, let alone accept Christmas presents, for something she doesn't need and never will You have to say thank you one by one for the things you don't need.Although she explained to herself (as she had been told since she was a child) that it was the affection, not the value of the gift, that mattered, it didn't work.She thought it was even worse because each gift had a little sticker that said "LOVE" attached to it.She now felt neither need nor ever need of such a gift of love.There's a bit of hypocrisy to this age-old custom, and it only helps to maintain a little nostalgia, like a photograph of the dead. She walked west along the street, not realizing which direction she was in.The streets are lined with shops, with mannequins in elegant poses in brightly lit windows.Now she passed the last store and came into the shadows.As she approached the corner, she suddenly realized that the park was ahead.She crossed the road and followed the traffic south.To the left is the museum, where the stone statues on the roof stand out in blinding orange floodlights, which seem to be increasingly used for evening lighting these days. Peter was also a problem, she didn't know what to buy him as a gift.She understands that clothes are not acceptable, and he always has to choose his own clothes.What else can I give besides clothes?If you buy some household daily necessities, it's like a gift for yourself.In the end she bought an expensive professional book on cameras.She didn't know anything about it, but the salesman recommended it to her, and she only wished he didn't have the book.She was glad he still had some hobbies so that he wouldn't suffer from heart failure when he retired someday.She came to the university boulevard, and the nearby fences and the trees on the campus grew very large, and their branches crossed each other in the middle of the street, like arches.There are not many people walking on the sidewalk here, and the snow is relatively deep. In some places, it does not reach her ankles, and her feet are sick with the cold.Just when she was a little wondering why she kept walking forward, she crossed the road again and came to the park without knowing it. In the dark night, the park looks vaguely white, like an island, and cars drive around the park in a counterclockwise direction.On the other side of the park was the university building, a place she thought she was very familiar with half a year ago, but now in this freezing air, she felt that it seemed to harbor a faint hostility towards her. She realized that this hostility actually came from within herself, she was only vaguely jealous of it.She wished the school would disappear after she left, but it was still there, business as usual, indifferent to the loss of a student like her.She also knew that when she was an extra student, the school didn't really care. She continued walking into the park through ankle-deep, soft snow.From time to time, criss-cross footprints can be seen, and the footprints are covered with snowflakes.But most of it is flat and white, untrodden.The bare tree trunks stood in the snow like seven feet of snow, and the trunks looked like black candles stuck in icing. She approached the round concrete pool, where there was a fountain in summer, but now the water had already been drained, and the pool was covered with snow.She stopped and heard the distant noise from the city, which seemed to revolve around her, and she felt very safe. "You have to pay attention," she said to herself, "you don't want to get to the point where you don't even take a shower." In the company cafeteria, for a moment, she felt that her mentality was very dangerous, almost to the point of collapse. edge.Looking back now, she felt that her reaction was too stupid.Company parties are just parties after all.Between now and the wedding, some things are always inevitable. She has to worry about some details and deal with people, and some things cannot be avoided.After that it was business as usual.She was almost ready to go back to wrapping the presents, and she felt so hungry that she could eat half a cow, whether he had drawn the dotted line or not.Still, she wanted to stand just a little longer, watching the snowflakes come flying over the island, in the blinding silence... hello," said a voice. Marianne, not quite alarmed, turned her head to see a man sitting on the other side of a bench in the shadow of the holly.She walked over to him. Sitting hunched over was Duncan, a cigarette in his hand.He must have been sitting there for a while, with snow all over his hair and shoulders.When she took off the gloves and shook hands with him, his hands felt cold and wet. She sat down next to him on the snow-covered bench, and he dropped his cigarette and turned to her. She unbuttoned his overcoat, ducked her head inside, and smelled warm cloth and stale cigarettes.He put his arms around her back. He was wearing a rough sweater, and her hands stroked it like fur.She could feel his emaciated body under the clothes, the bony appearance of a starving animal in a famine.His warm and wet face got into the collar scarf under her hair and stuck to her neck. They sat motionless, and the city and time outside the white circle of the park had almost ceased to exist.Marianne felt her body grow numb and her feet no longer hurt.Her face was buried deeper into the furry clothes, and the snow was still falling outside.She felt unable to stand up... "It's been so long since you came," he finally said quietly, "I've been waiting for you." Her body trembled. "I have to go," she said. She felt a twitch in the muscles of his face on her neck.