Read Online Amanda Bright @ Home by Danielle Crittenden - Free Book Online

attorney fashion, and she had agreed. It had seemed like an enlightened, egalitarian approach to a situation that was otherwise unthinkably traditional. Now it all struck Amanda as mad. Even Ellen and Kim had the wit to prepare themselves, while she, Amanda, had blithely thrown her lot in with Bob in every way, relying—so carelessly!—on the tenuous power of affection to carry her through these years of unemployment. Suddenly she felt like a tightrope walker who looks down and notices that she has been crossing without a net.
    “Well, I think you’re courageous, Christine,” Kim was saying. “I’ve sort of been thinking of getting my eyes done.”
    “Gosh,” exclaimed Ellen. “Maybe we should all go together. Make a field trip of it. I’ve always hated my nose.”
    Amanda struggled to pull herself up in her chair. “I don’t know. It just seems a lot to put yourself through—surgery.” She knew it was a retreat.
    “Spoken like a thirty-five-year-old.” Christine smiled. “You don’t have to worry yet. You have great skin.” She cast her eyes over Amanda appraisingly. “But have you ever thought about doing something with your hair?”
    That evening, Amanda toweled herself off in front of the bathroom mirror and studied her body from every angle. She turned sideways and backward. She raised her hair and let it tumble down. She moved in so closely she could see the grayish pores of her nose and then stepped back to judge the effect of her features as a whole. She tried to do this all without flinching, in the detached manner of an accountant logging assets and deficits. Perhaps it was the lighting—the unflattering brightness of the overhead light that cast some parts of her in high relief and others in shadow. Or maybe it was because she was focusing upon herself all at once, instead of in pieces, as she usually did, so that she could appreciate her nice calves and ignore her thighs. But the longer she looked, the worse her body appeared. When she finally turned away from the mirror Amanda wished she could wrap herself in a chador rather than this thin towel.
    Bob lay on their bed in his boxer shorts, reading legal briefs. He was frowning slightly and marking passages with a highlighter pen. He did not look up when Amanda padded past him to fetch her pajamas. Crouching self-consciously behind the open closet door, Amanda pulled on her night uniform (an oversized T-shirt of Bob’s, a pair of cotton sweatpants). What was Bob’s real opinion when she passed by him like she did just now? Did he quietly revile the sight of her loose buttocks? How often had his eyes traced the faint tributaries of stretch marks that riddled her belly? And what did he think of her breasts? … During their courtship, when Bob had greeted every newly unveiled attribute of hers with surprise and delight, he had been captivated by her young breasts. Years of being put to utilitarian use feeding babies had toughened her nipples and caused the breasts themselves to hang charmlessly, like week-old party balloons.
    She went to the bed and curled up uneasily beside him. Amanda waited for a single warm gesture that would banish her fears, that would make them seem hysterical and crazy. Bob continued marking his briefs. His bare chest rose methodically with his breathing; his gut, which had been firm when they met, rolled over the rim of his shorts. Occasionally Bob would announce that he needed to lose ten pounds, but he did nothing about it. Was Bob indifferent to the shape of his body—or indifferent to Amanda’s opinion of it?
    “Do I look okay?” she asked him.
    “Hmm?”
    “Do I look okay?”
    He paused his highlighter pen. “Don’t you feel well?”
    “I don’t mean that. I mean, do I look—do you still find me—attractive?”
    Bob adjusted his expression to one of lawyerly inscrutability, as he always did when he suspected Amanda of asking him a trick question. “Of course. Why do you ask?”
    “Really. I want to