Normal Women by Ainslie Hogarth

Author:Ainslie Hogarth [Hogarth, Ainslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

18

As Dani stepped out of the shower, her chest felt warm and loose, like a just-worn T-shirt. She brushed her wet hair. An alarming number of strands clung desperately to her flicking fingers over the sink. Typical for a while, that’s what Ellen and Anya and Dawn told her, to shed this way after giving birth. The forums corroborated, offered recipes for topical serums, algae shakes. Has anyone tried spirulina? Think I’m getting some regrowth??? But also terrible gas!!! One forum mother had even opted to try cortisol shots in her head because she just couldn’t take it anymore, the stretch marks, the extra weight, the decimated crotch, and now this? Dani had followed the thread. The original poster updated. It hadn’t worked. Dani rinsed the hairs from her fingers, watched them swirl down the drain, and decided she’d buy some spirulina from the health-food store next week when she and Lotte visited the mall.

Standing at the sink, a towel wrapped snuggly around her chest, she laid out the instruments of her makeup routine, which, despite it being incredibly simple, she implemented rarely. Tinted moisturizer, nearly expired now so she applied it more generously, a race against the date. Some concealer thumbed beneath her eyes and over any other problem areas, then blended with an egg-shaped sponge so ancient and filthy that Dani had lunged across the room once to stop Lotte from even touching it.

Mascara, of course. The least anyone could do. She liked to get very close to the mirror, pull the brush through slowly so she could catch a glimpse of the frailty beneath her eyelids: how veiny, how pink, how shockingly round an eyeball is, just resting there in its vascular pink pocket. It gave her a thrill every time. She couldn’t believe how she used to handle her eyelids as a child, using her dirty fingers to fold them up and chase her mother around the house. Haley liked it. The thought speared into her mind. Was that why she’d done it? She could hear Haley laughing now as Bunny covered her eyes, shrieking, cowered in a corner, Dani howling with laughter too.

Try to remember her, Dani. I’ll help you. The more you have of her, the less angry you’ll be.

And Renata was right. Dani’s body was full of memories, her template for every kind of touch—tender, aggressive, playful—grafted into her body by Haley.

Bunny’s touch had been the first to fall short. Then Clark’s. But by that time she was used to it. By that time she’d learned that women weren’t entitled to be touched properly anyway.

Dani rubbed small firm circles into a tin of tinted lip balm she’d borrowed from an old coworker and apparently never returned. The small thefts between Normal Women—lip balms, tank tops, headbands, sandals, they all had too much stuff anyway, didn’t they? She remembered how Anya used to shoplift, rampantly, slithering silently into a dozen layers in the change rooms, shedding them later like snakeskin on her bedroom floor, selling them to classmates for half price.

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