Other People's Houses(27)
Frances made a face, remembering the idiocy of her younger self. She’d stayed slender until she had kids, then she’d gained with each pregnancy and not completely lost, and now she was overweight in her midforties, with a muffin top that rivaled any artisanal bakery in town. And did she give a fuck? No, zero fucks given. Except for every thirty or forty minutes, when she would catch sight of herself in a store window or mirror and scowl inwardly, scolding herself for being lazy, fat, unattractive, old, past-it, unsexy, uninteresting, invisible yet glaringly, obesely obvious as she lumbered around the world, an insult to the media and good women everywhere. Yeah, apart from those punctuating moments of vicious self-criticism, zero fucks given.
But so far this morning, she felt fine. She had the opposite of body dysphoria, maybe. She looked at herself and basically thought she looked good. Body euphoria? It didn’t feel that good . . . The dogs loved her regardless, as they told her continuously, pressing their heads under her hands, gazing up at her . . . You’re fantastic, said their liquid eyes, their waving tails, we just can’t get over how terrific you are in every way, we’re so glad to have chosen you as our leader.
She pulled on her jeans, looked at her mom-butt in the mirror—seriously, how did she suddenly have such a wide ass, what was wrong with her—then pulled on a sweatshirt which covered it. See? No mom-butt here. Just a cool hoodie. Suck it, internal critic. Suck it all the way.
She headed down the stairs, the dogs apparently attempting to kill her at every step, pushing behind her in a clattering fall of fur and claws. She saw the cat sitting on the sofa, waiting. Ah, his smooth outline said, I see the servants are awake.
Frances put on the coffee, humming, then pulled the dogs’ dishes from the dishwasher, having let them both out the back door to take a shit she could step in later. Carlton the cat sauntered in, timing his arrival perfectly with Frances putting fresh kibble in his bowl, up on a counter where the dogs couldn’t get it. She loved this cat. He was old and predated everyone in the house except Michael. His purr was rusty and only for her, his fur slightly thicker and more matted than it had been when she’d brought him home from the shelter sixteen years earlier. The dogs were scared of him, his orange tiger stripes conveying danger just as they should, and he sauntered around the house unmolested.
The dogs came back in, the coffee dripped into the pot, the lights were on, she could hear Ava moving around upstairs, facing her own reflection in the bathroom mirror. Frances hoped her daughter saw how beautiful she was, but doubted it. She herself, like every woman she knew, only recognized her own youthful perfection in retrospect, with deep regret not for losing it but for not seeing it at the time. Frances tried to remember this every time she criticized herself—one day she would be eighty, God willing, and she was ready to bet she’d look at herself then and long for the strength and bone density of forty-six.
Frances thought of Anne. A few houses away she was also wandering around her kitchen, packing lunches (although she could be that mom, the one who assembled them the night before and only did the sandwich at the last minute, to prevent sogginess), drinking coffee, singing Beatles songs under her breath. Or maybe she was doing a light yoga workout, from memory, wearing strappy bamboo yoga wear that didn’t leave a mark on her flesh because she didn’t have any fat, because she worked it all off fucking a teenager and darting around like the cheating cow she was. Frances chided herself for being a bitch, and Ava came in.
“Morning, lovely,” said Frances.
“Yello,” replied her daughter, which was a neutral to medium-friendly response. Frances looked sideways at her, trying to gauge her mood. She’d left her alone the previous night, falling asleep herself before Ava had, which was a pretty common occurrence these days. Had she gotten over her bad mood, or was Frances still on her shit list?
Ava had the fridge door open. “Are you going to the store later?”
“Does the day have a Y in it?”
Ava smiled. “Can you get some more string cheese with the stuff wrapped around it?”
“Prosciutto?”
“Yeah.” She pulled out from the fridge, shutting the door. “I’m about to eat the last one.”
“Sure.” Frances made a mental note. Those particular snacks came from a different market from the usual one; she’d have to make a special trip. None of her family noticed the various efforts she made on their behalf, hunting for new foods for them to try, picking up their favorite flavors of this and that, pouncing on the rarities they favored, the Japanese candy, the artisanal brand of root beer, the slightly nicer-than-usual wine she picked out for Michael, though she didn’t like red wine herself.
Before there was Pinterest there were magazines that showed happy women providing beautiful things for their families to enjoy, and despite her intelligence she was just as much a sucker as anyone else. She wanted a bright yellow pitcher of wooden spoons on her white marble counter, she wanted tall French windows that looked out over green valleys, she wanted a pair of strappy ballet flats that ribboned up her slender calves as she romped about town in artfully shabby dungarees that somehow took twenty pounds off her. Instead she had a jar of dog-chewed wooden spoons, windows that hadn’t been washed since the first Obama administration, and if she’d put on a pair of dungarees she would have been mistaken for a plumber. A male plumber. However, she did maintain a world-class snack cupboard.