A Bigamist's Daughter by Alice McDermott

Author:Alice McDermott
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1981-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Margaret Alice Greer, author of Gouged of Womanhood: Poems of Two Mastectomies, wants T-shirts. Her book is due to be published in June, and the woman feels that T-shirts printed with the title will help attract beach readers.

Elizabeth smiles at her across the desk, careful to keep her eyes on the woman’s face. “I’ll mention it to our publicity department,” she says. Hard drops of rain hit the window behind her.

Margaret Alice leans forward, puts one white hand on the desk, tentatively, long fingers open, like a bad actress pretending to be nervous. She is tall, homely as Lincoln, forty-nine, according to her bio. Recently divorced. Fading orange lipstick and long feet in flat black shoes. The collar of her navy-blue dress is lacy with dandruff. “It’s important that it sell well,” she says seriously, almost sternly. “I want it to be well read.”

Elizabeth holds her smile. She could say, flicking an ash like Groucho, Then send it to college, but instead she pushes the contract across the desk. “I’m sure it will be. Your work is very powerful. I especially like the recurrent images of fruits and flowers.” She makes her eyes wide, her handiest false gesture. “It’s very exciting.”

The woman closes her fingers, catching the words, and obediently pulls the contract toward her. There is a fogged place on the steel where her hand has rested, like breath on cold glass. On the floor beside her there is a lump of wet dry-cleaner’s bags, the color of phlegm. When she came in, she’d had them wrapped like gauze around her manuscript; had the manuscript clutched to her gouged chest like a rescued child. Now she reads the contract carefully, her head down, her elbow on the desk, her fingers moving through her thin bangs, shaking white scales onto each official page. Because of the clouds outside, the light in the office seems yellow and close.

Elizabeth flips through the manuscript once again. Titles like “Empty Cups,” “Treasure Chest,” “A Plucked Rose.” Ned will ask: Is this supposed to be funny? And she’ll tell him that the woman believes the poems have “clothed her suffering with nobility.” Ned, no doubt, will mention a certain naked king who also believed he was clothed in nobility, arrayed in gold. Pure gold.

The pages of the manuscript smell like Band-Aids.

When she looks up, the woman is writing out a check, smiling smugly. Now I know why it happened to me.

Despite herself, her eyes go to the woman’s chest, the two slight yet false breasts. She imagines the poor body beneath them (And why not? Margaret Alice would not be her first naked author), imagines the chest, gouged, torn, shiny with scars, as if the woman has embraced a burning meteor. Lifted her face and stretched out her arms to declare it a beautiful day and found herself a target. A victim of chance, circumstance, some gross practical joke.

Why me, Oh Lord? Why me?

Elizabeth leans forward, checking her own soft breasts against the edge of her desk.

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