Falling Angels by Barbara Gowdy

Author:Barbara Gowdy [Gowdy, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: C429, Extratorrents, Kat, Contemporary
ISBN: 9781443402293
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 1989-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

To make herself a worthier vessel of Jimmy, Norma goes on a diet and in a month loses fifteen pounds. By then her hair is long enough to tie back with an elastic band. That’s how she prefers it—brushed away from her face, appearing short from the front.

Her friends turn on her. The tall girl says that her legs are too thin for her body now, that when she was heavier, her body was in better proportion. The girl with acne says,“If I had a widow’s peak, I sure wouldn’t show it off.” And,“All you think about is yourself.”

While it’s true that Norma thinks a lot about who she is, it isn’t true that she puts herself before others. Always chiming through her head are Jimmy’s commandments to be kind. She never worried much about hurting her friends before, but she worries now. In spite of which she occasionally gives them the slip and walks down the corridors by herself, looking at pretty girls. She feels humbly entitled. She feels that God might grant her, who is not beautiful but who is moved by beauty, at least the pleasure of looking.

But it would never occur to her to change herself to attract pretty girls. Her weight loss is entirely for her brother, to house his spirit, and her longer hair is for their father. The fact that she is becoming more attractive to the rest of the world is so incidental that she doesn’t realize it. Nobody tells her.

Although their father doesn’t mention her hair again, she feels that he is well pleased with her for how she slaps tools in his palm like an operating-room nurse and for being a good listener. As they work, he tells stories about when he was a boy nicknamed Jumbo on account of his big ears, which Grandma Field boxed at least once a day for good measure. He says that just like Sandy he used to like resting his ear on an empty dinner plate. As they work, he is full of these surprising facts.

Away from the rec room, however, around the rest of the family, he is still gloomy and quiet. He forgets to buy a Christmas tree, and finally, on December twenty-fourth, Lou arrives home with a bent, pathetic little spruce that she dug up from someone’s lawn.

“If we’re lucky,” she says,“he’ll forget to buy us gifts too.”

He doesn’t. He gets them all out-of-style green-and-blue-plaid parkas, and for Lou and Sandy he also gets out-of-style patterned knee-socks.

Norma’s second gift is a red angora sweater.

“Gee, that’s not bad,” Sandy says in an amazed, envious voice.

“Try it on,” their father suggests, spreading his arms across the back of the chesterfield.

It’s too small. Norma knew it would be as soon as she saw it, but she goes into her bedroom and puts it on anyway. She can hardly glance at herself in the mirror. Big, disgusting. Screaming red. She tears the sweater off.

Why red? She never wears bright colours. And she never wears anything tight, he must notice that.

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