She and the girls in the magazines have shared an uneasy one-sided relationship, a chronic push and pull of envy and pity, self-hatred and macrocosmic hatred, not knowing which was more corrosive. When she was young she believed it was only a matter of metamorphosis, and she’d become them. That’s what you did when you grew up.
Now they’re in the house, staring at her sullenly when she occupies or passes through the living room. Skin tanned and reflective. Legs and eyebrows arched and inviting. Lips parted in ecstatic gasps.
For a while, she didn’t understand their despondency. They were wrenchingly beautiful. They should be delighted, doing cartwheels, their only facial displeasure being cramping from smiling so goddamn much.
The perfume ad now in front of her is of a girl sitting in a fridge, her arms and legs perched along the twin door shelves. Look too quickly, you might not notice that her pale arms don’t connect at the shoulders, nor her legs to her seated torso, or that each division is announced by a knob of bone and a peek of ahi-red flesh. Or that the top rack passes through her neck, or that her head beads with moisture like a chilled ham. It just looks like she’s inviting you into her bosom.
Back onto the stack. Another back in her hands. She reads and slurps the last of the OJ.
She doesn’t even know what she is reading anymore, if you can call it that. More like identifying that the stove is hot and touching it anyway, resting her hand on it until her skin bubbles and pulls back like a sleeve. Is the mag in her hands Homemaking? Leisure? Fashion?
The sunglass ad now in front of her is of a blond model splayed out like a bronzed dead deer over the stairs of a sunlit plaza, encircled by a leering pack of impeccably suited men. Some are loosening their ties. One is licking his lips, his dark tongue glancing his artful stubble. The only thing she is wearing are turquoise heels, and of course, the sunglasses.
Page after page after page. Ratatatatatat. Strafing hyperbolic promises into her face.
These shoes will shape your abdominal muscles, reduce your cellulite.
These light-up bed sheets will prevent your date rape.
This douche will make you smell like vanilla for up to four weeks.
Cool off. Coca-Cola. Calm down. Valium. Get a grip on yourself. Midol. Shut up, a man is talking. DeBeers. The toxic slurry of commands said and unsaid sloshes around in her brain.
She turns to a tropical juice ad of a boy stuffing an opened banana into a girl’s mouth. The girl cradles more bananas under her arm, but these are plantains compared to the behemoth in her mouth, which she is receiving graciously, with a winsome smile. His smile is different. His teeth, a bared underbite. His cheeks flushed from laughing.
“Be thankful,” the ad says.
It starts as a tightening of her stomach. Not a flexing, but her body pulling into its center. Her upper and lower jaws are fusing then locking, her fingers are burrowing into their palms, her elbows are meeting her abdomen, the vessels in her arms are floating to the surface of her flesh like roots, her neck is collapsing as her head bows toward the floor, as her voice fills up the house like it’s the only thing in it, bare of furnishings, just a scream in a box.
When she comes to, she’s standing over the sink, her hand driving the rolled up magazine into the garbage disposal before it shudders, makes a perturbed noise, and cuts out.
“Jesus, Beddy.”
She jumps.
That voice. She’d know it anywhere. There’s nothing like it.
“Calm down,” it says. “You’ll have an aneurysm. Listen, you got anything to eat around here?”
It’s him. The opportunist. The leech. A damn traitor, really.
Void.