Briefly, a Delicious Life by Nell Stevens

Author:Nell Stevens
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2022-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

GEORGE REMEMBERS

There’s a thick seam itching against George’s inner thigh. She wants to reach between her legs and scratch. She glances at other people on the street: nobody is looking at her, nobody would notice. Men do it all the time. And yet she finds herself incapable of making the movement; she imagines her grandmother watching her, imagines the scrutiny of every passerby. She cannot do it. The itch starts to feel like a burn.

The cost of wearing trousers: this niggling crotch irritant.

And this is the reward: that nobody looks twice at her as she hightails it across Paris in the rain. Her boots keep the water out and she adores them for it—sometimes wants to fall asleep in them because taking them off feels like a kind of defeat. They are solid, their iron heels thudding on the pavement. When she plants a step, the ground grips her back. She feels bigger now, and more justified. She can go anywhere.

Why did nobody tell her, she wonders. When she first arrived in Paris, she spent almost all the allowance from her husband on the kinds of clothes she saw Parisian ladies wearing: feathered hats that made it hard to turn your head quickly, brittle little pumps. But she tore through shoes and overshoes, petticoats, coats, and overcoats as though she was deliberately destroying them. The dresses got spattered in mud thrown up by vehicles in the street; the shoes wilted off her feet like dying flowers; the headwear was impossible from the start. Why did nobody tell her that the clothes she bought were made for sitting in, for stepping gingerly from drawing room to carriage and back? They were not made for marching along the Rue de Seine up to the river and into the Mazarine Library, or across the river to haggle over firewood at the market. Once, on her way to the salon of a person she knew only slightly, wearing a particularly complicated hat, fronds of which were constantly getting in her eyes, she ran into an old friend who looked at her quizzically and said, You look like a boy dressed up as a woman.

Why did nobody say: Take off that silly hat, George. Why didn’t they say: Men have been wearing boots all along, you know, with solid soles and metal heels; you should try it; you might like it. Why didn’t they say: Put on a pair of trousers and see how fast you can run with the wind between your legs—it will blow your mind.

Now, she is head to toe in thick gray cloth. The frock coat she ordered is long, in the fashionable style; it reaches her ankles. It flaps vaguely and generously around her lower half, transforming her buttocks and calves into an assumption of masculine flatness. From behind, she is confident, she looks the part. The front, admittedly, troubled her at first, where the coat flares open to reveal the air between her legs. There was this sudden hyperawareness

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