Five Women Read Online Free PDF Page B

had weird problems. Her mother hadn’t gone on to a career, but Gara could. Maybe she would be a clinical psychologist. The case histories made her think about her own family.
    Her mother, May, was a pretty woman who had let herself get much too heavy. Although she did not cook, and the food prepared by their housekeeper was mediocre at best, she ate all the time. At dinner Gara had seen her mother eat half of an entire cake for dessert. In her well-tailored dark clothes, and her corsets with their hooks and zippers, May had a chunky, tubular look. It was when she was alone at home with her daughter, walking naked to and from the bath, that Gara saw the rolls of fat cascading down her mother’s ribs, the giant dimpled thighs tapering to tiny aching feet, the cellulite, the varicose veins and broken capillaries that astonished and repelled her. Somehow she was aware, if her mother was not, that her mother had put herself into this state to stay away from sex. Gara wasn’t sure how she knew, but she did.
    Astonishingly, her mother still had beautiful breasts. They were smallish and well-shaped and didn’t sag. Women in those days wore bras that made them look as if they had two ice-cream cones on their chests. But her mother confined herself in rounded brassieres with heavy wires underneath, not to attract attention but to avoid it. Those perfect, banished breasts and the abused body seemed to Gara to be the choice she herself would have when she grew up—she could be attractive or repellent, and it was up to her, as it had been up to her mother. She could exercise and diet and not be like her mother. They had the same build; she would have those pretty breasts. They would be a start. They would be her sex appeal. She would never not have sex.
    May thought Gara was beautiful, told her so often, and lived through her vicariously. It was important to her that her daughter be at her best all the time. So at twelve, Gara had high heels, makeup (which the students were not permitted to wear at school), a permanent, shaved legs, a bra with nothing to put in it, braces on her teeth, and a mouton coat. The quest for perfection had started the day she was born, but it was only on the day of her graduation that she became fully aware of it.
    At the graduation ceremony the girls would wear evening gowns, the boys would wear suits. Gara’s gown was peach-colored. The graduates would each have their name announced and receive a diploma from the principal. It was the most grownup thing Gara had ever done. She had also won first prize in the essay contest, “What Graduation Means to Me,” and would receive an additional certificate for this.
    â€œRitual and recognition,” she had written. “Acknowledgment of what we have so far achieved, and a step into the future to become who we will be.” She thought it had a nice ring to it.
    May was applying makeup to her daughter’s face—painstakingly, delicately, slowly—as if she were a child star about to go before the camera. Or as if she were a painting. Her mother was painting a picture. “We’re not allowed,” Gara said. “I’ll get killed.”
    â€œJust a little. You’re too pale.”
    Powder, rouge, lipstick, a touch of mascara. Gara scrutinized the mirror for any sign of a pimple or regrowth of the dreaded mustache her mother had made her have removed by painful electrolysis. She hoped no one would ever know she’d had such a disgusting thing as facial hair. She imagined the worst thing that could possibly happen to her. She would be arrested for some crime, and put into prison, and her mustache would grow back, and people would see it. She was relieved that such an event was unlikely.
    Graduation was in the school auditorium, and all the parents, siblings, and grandparents were there. Gara and the others were waiting behind the red velvet curtain to make their appearance. Her family was already sitting