Normal Women by Ainslie Hogarth EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author:Ainslie Hogarth
- Language: English
- Genre: Humorous Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
THEY’D ENDED UP slicing her open, which was great. She was sort of hoping for
a C-section. The stories Anya’s friends had shared about their incontinence,
their prolapses—one of the women, Ellen, describing the way a hunk of her
bladder or vaginal wall (who knows!) would slip down throughout the
course of the day. Bulge. She’d framed it as a minor irritation, easy enough
to poke back in, no different from enduring the day with a sock that keeps
slipping beneath your heel. Except it was every day. And it was body parts.
Very inside ones. Creeping out like some activated fungus. Which was why
pretty soon, Ellen explained, casually, hooking an invisible hair from her
mouth and tucking it behind her ear, she’d be looking into some sort of
scaffolding. A mesh—interlocking her fingers, miming weight—that would
hold it up for her. Like basketballs, piped in Dawn, another one of Anya’s
friends who Dani had recently met, in a high school gym equipment room,
remember?? Laughing, nodding. Though Ellen, Dawn, and Anya had all
gone to different high schools, the equipment rooms, with their suspended
basketballs and oily, low-frequency stench, were very much the same.
And Ellen, Dawn, and Anya had all heard of the mesh too. Because they
all knew someone, a woman, secretly held together by it. Dani wrapped her
mouth gracelessly around a blast of corn chips and wondered why the fuck
no one had told her about the mesh before she got pregnant.
“Well, Elaine had a fourth-degree tear,” Anya revealed, thumbing a
wayward gob of guacamole back onto her chip. Anya, in many ways the
worst of them, Dani’s oldest friend, who she loved like a sister but also
found unkind, judgmental, manipulative, competitive, and actually a bit
racist in ways she seemed to perceive as simply good sense: “Immigrants
are driving up the cost of living in the top cities, I’m sorry, but it’s true. If
you come here from somewhere else you should have to start in, I don’t
know, some middle-of-nowhere town that needs the economic push, you
know? It’s only fair. And it’s good for everyone.”
Anya had experienced both, a C-section and a vaginal birth, and though
the vaginal birth had been amazing, oh my god, it’d also left her with
chronic incontinence (Do you know that I piss myself? A little bit? Every
goddamn day?) as well as what the doctor referred to as sexual dysfunction,
which was so severe her husband, Bill, had taken up yoga. His back, once a
densely knit tapestry of chronic pain, was now limber as a river reed. We
should have stopped fucking years ago, he joked, and Anya nodded readily
—honestly, though, a hand on Dani’s arm, her tone edged with a
conspirator’s sincerity, he’s like a different person.
By almost every metric Anya was a very Normal Woman. At the very
least she engaged with the material trappings of their sex in a way that Dani
had never been able to—Anya exercised regularly, or at least complained
regularly about not exercising enough; she had defined triceps, lean thighs
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB