Her Body and Other Parties_Stories by Carmen Maria Machado

Author:Carmen Maria Machado [Machado, Carmen Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781555979805
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

“DELINQUENT”: Benson and the DA are both late to work, and smell like each other. Stabler sends in his resignation by express post.

“SMOKED”: The DA and Benson roast vegetables on the grill, laughing. The smoke rises up and up, drifts over the trees, curls past birds and rot and blooms. The city smells it. The city takes a breath.

REAL WOMEN HAVE BODIES

I used to think my place of employment, Glam, looked like the view from inside a casket. When you walk through the mall’s east wing, the entrance recedes like a black hole between a children’s photography studio and a white-walled boutique.

The lack of color is to show off the dresses. It terrifies our patrons into an existential crisis and then, a purchase. This is what Gizzy tells me, anyway. “The black,” she says, “reminds us that we are mortal and that youth is fleeting. Also, nothing makes pink taffeta pop like a dark void.”

At one end of the store is a mirror easily twice as tall as I am, rimmed by a baroque gold frame. Gizzy is so tall that she can dust the top of the giant mirror with only a small step stool. She is my mother’s age, maybe a little older, but her face is strangely youthful and unlined. She paints her mouth matte peach every day, so evenly and cleanly that if you look at her too hard, you feel faint. I think her eyeliner is tattooed on her lids.

My coworker Natalie thinks that Gizzy runs this store because she’s pining after her lost youth, which is her answer for why any “real adult” does anything she thinks is stupid. Natalie rolls her eyes behind Gizzy’s back and always rehangs the dresses a little roughly, like they’re to blame for the minimum wage or useless degrees or student debt. I follow behind her, smoothing out the skirts because I hate to see them ruffled any more than they have to be.

I know the truth. Not because I’m particularly perceptive or anything. I just overheard Gizzy talking on the phone once. I’ve seen the way she runs her hands over the dresses, the way her fingers linger on people’s skin. Her daughter is gone like the others, and there isn’t anything that she can do about it.

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