What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty [47]
Alice couldn’t decide if she liked her flat new stomach or not. On the one hand, there was a distinct feeling of pride, like discovering a new skill. Look what I did! I’ve got a stomach like a supermodel! On the other hand, the feeling of hard bone under her skin gave her a slight feeling of revulsion, as if her flesh had been shaved away.
What did Nick think of this new skinny body? Perhaps he didn’t care. “So why the fuck did you ring me?”
Her breasts were a lot smaller, she noted, and not quite as perky. Actually, they were awful, elongated and sagging like socks down toward her stomach. She held them up in her hands and let them drop again. Oh, yuck. She didn’t like that at all. She missed her nice, round, cheerful, bobbing-about breasts.
Was it breast-feeding three children that had done this? And that would be perfectly fine if she had nostalgic memories of late nights sitting in a rocking chair with a downy-headed baby in her arms, except she didn’t. She was looking forward to breast-feeding. It was meant to happen in her future, not in her past.
Okay, forget the breasts. The face. It was time for the face.
She took a step closer to the mirror and held her breath.
At first it was a relief, because it was still her own Alice face looking dopily back at her. She wasn’t hideously deformed. She hadn’t grown horns. In fact, she quite liked her thinner face. It seemed to have more definition and made her eyes look bigger. Her eyebrows were perfectly shaped and her eyelashes were dark. She didn’t seem to have as many freckles. Her skin looked smooth and clear, although actually, there were quite a few funny, faint scratches on her face around her mouth and eyes. Maybe from when she fell over? She leaned in closer to examine them.
Oh.
They weren’t scratches. They were wrinkles, just like Elisabeth’s, maybe worse than Elisabeth’s. There were two deep grooves in between her eyes. When she stopped frowning they didn’t go away. There were little pouches of pink skin under her eyes, and Alice remembered how when she’d seen Jane yesterday she thought at first there was something wrong with her eyes. There had been nothing wrong with Jane; she was just ten years older.
She rubbed her fingertip over the fine scratchlike lines around her mouth and eyes as if she could just smear them away. They seemed wrong, as if they shouldn’t be there; thank you anyway, but I don’t think so, not for me, these don’t belong on my face.
She gave up and stood back from the mirror so she couldn’t see the wrinkles.
Her hair was still pulled back in the elastic band from the night before. She pulled it out and looked at it in the palm of her hand, amazed afresh that she didn’t even recognize the black hair band and had no memory of putting it in her hair.
Her hair fell just above her shoulders. She must have had it cut, as she suspected. What brought on that decision, she wondered. The color was different, too. It was bordering on blond rather than brown; a dark ashy sort of blond. It was messy from her night of tossing and turning, but then she ran her fingers through it and saw that it was cut in an elegant shape that curved around the neck, making it seem longer. It wasn’t her taste, but she had to admit it did suit her face better than any other haircut she’d had.
She’d grown up. That