Normal Women (eBook)

Ainslie Hogarth (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
320 Seiten
Atlantic Books (Verlag)
978-1-80546-005-3 (ISBN)

Infos

New mother Dani has a lot going on. She's just moved back to her hometown, where her father was once known as the Garbage King; she's fed up of not being a manicure-sporting, perfectly coiffed Normal Woman; and most of all, she's worried that her seemingly healthy husband, Clark, will drop dead, leaving her and her new baby Lotte destitute. And then Dani discovers The Temple. Ostensibly a yoga center, The Temple and its guardian, Renata, are committed to helping people reach their full potential. And if that sometimes requires sex work, so be it. Finally, Dani has found something she could be good at, even great at - meaningful work that will protect her and Lotte from poverty, and provide true economic independence from Clark. But just as she's preparing to embrace this opportunity, Renata disappears, leaving Dani to step into another role entirely - detective. Darkly comic, sharply witty and fiercely smart, Normal Women asks how our societies truly value female labour - and what independence really means.

Ainslie Hogarth is the author of four novels, including Motherthing, a New York Times Best Book of 2022. She lives in Canada with her husband, kids, and little dog.

Textauszug

2

THEY’D BEEN LIVING in the city when they found out Dani was pregnant. A condo: one bedroom, plus a pitiful, windowless den, and a whole closet taken up by a washing machine and a dryer. They looked at a few houses in their neighborhood and beyond, almost all of them near dangerously run-down, hastily disguised with fresh paint and pot lights and still well out of their price range. They decided to revisit the matter of their inadequate housing after the baby was born. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad having an infant in a seven-hundred-square-foot sock drawer, sixty feet in the air.

“We’ll make it work!” Clark declared, with suspicious optimism. Almost as though he’d already known about the promotion he announced six months later. The real estate development company he worked for was opening a new office. In Metcalf, of all places. Dani’s hometown. An area positively booming thanks to the grand reopening of the Silver Waste Management Corporation (now known as the Silver Waste Management Campus, or SWMC around town), where innovative approaches to managing garbage had attracted a haughty crowd of environmental consultancies, AI think tanks, and tech start-ups, which, all together, began to resemble what people like Clark called a hub.

Naturally, the coffee shops appeared first. With a hermit crab’s entitlement, they began occupying the criminally small cubbyholes that developers like Clark carved from crumbling strips of brick storefront. They sold cortados in short brown cups and hot new literary fiction and austere notebooks and expensive espresso machines that would collect dust on the counters of hectic businessmen, checking their teeth for sesame seeds in the chrome dash before zipping out the door to grab a cortado before work.

And then there were the taco joints with takeout windows and vegan carnitas, where you could buy a jar of homemade salsa for $10, queso for $12.

And that pizza place with the graffiti walls and COWABUNGA signature pie to appeal to the nostalgic millennials, the former Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fans spending a fortune on real estate and nacho dips.

It was Dani’s father who’d started the original Silver Waste Management Corporation. Daniel “DJ” Silver, the Garbage King of Metcalf, even back then a sizeable kingdom of waste-processing innovation. At one time he employed almost the entire town, made more money than any single man could know what to do with or spend in his life. He sponsored Little League teams and bought decadent dinners for the soup kitchen every holiday; he supplied public schools with sports equipment, bought a trampoline for the musty downtown Y. There was a fountain named after him, his portrait above a plaque in city hall, and tales of his famously humble beginnings nurtured false hope in underprivileged children all over the county.

For a long time Dani didn’t know they were rich. She grew up in the same drafty old farmhouse her father had, where her mother still lived: a basement besieged by warm-blooded vermin, cold air gushing between warped bones. No one with money would have lived that way. But they did. Thirty years ago this unnecessary suffering signaled proof of DJ’s fine character; today locals thought Dani’s mother should feel ashamed to still be there—the woman who’d squandered his fortune, carrying on, unpunished, in his beloved family home.

Metcalf.

Dani squished her eyes shut.

Metcalf.

Clark sensed her reluctance, feelers sharpened by his trade. He leaned forward, slid his fingers between hers. “I know,” he said, forcing his way into her eye line. “Trust me, I know. But Dani, you’re not failing by going home. Quite the opposite. Honestly, that the idea of going back home has somehow been warped into failure, that’s got to be, I mean, I don’t know, you’re the philosopher, but that’s got to be by capitalist design, no?” Dani raised an eyebrow; he pressed harder. “Unmooring us from ourselves, our roots, making us wary of such easy and inexpensive peace. Boosting the illusion of this endless journey, endless growth, all so we can buy our idea of home instead. Create the void, then fill the void, right? You know, all that stuff. Look, the fact is, this is a huge promotion. And a fuck ton of money. The signing bonus alone is basically our down payment on a house. And you won’t have to work again at all if you don’t want to. You could just be with the baby.” He drew a long, meaningful look at her stomach. She rolled her eyes and shook an offended whinny from her snout as she tipped big, jiggling curds of scrambled egg onto their plates. “Except I don’t want to just stay home with the baby,” she said, setting the pan on the table and docking herself in her seat. At almost seven months pregnant, Dani’s belly was no longer even remotely adorable. She was a big, sweaty spectacle. Ample. Enormous. A reluctant god: Crowds parted for her on the sidewalk; bus seats materialized out of thin air. She accepted these grand genuflections hurriedly, without eye contact, hating every second of it but not wanting to seem ungrateful. She snatched a bite from her toast and left the crumbs where they landed.

Clark sat down across from her. He picked up his fork, speared a cherry tomato, glittering with salt, and pointed at her with it. “You know I didn’t mean it like that.” He slid the tomato off his fork with his teeth.

Clark didn’t know what he was talking about. He had no idea how he was supposed to mean it or how he wasn’t supposed to mean it. He knew he didn’t want to seem like a man who would prefer his wife to stay home with his child. He knew that.

And Dani didn’t really know what she wanted. She should feel proud to be a stay-at-home mother. She should feel lucky. It’s the hardest job in the world, that’s what everyone always said, and though Dani was sure the work itself was indeed very difficult—extremely difficult, possibly much more than she could even handle—she suspected that what made the job even harder was the utter lack of respect a person got for doing it, from assholes like her.

It wasn’t completely preposterous for Clark to have made this suggestion either. On the advice of the forum mothers, she’d put their unborn daughter’s name on all the daycare lists within reasonable walking distance from their condo—Six months pregnant? Girl, you’re already too late!—and then cried on and off all night picturing some aromatic administrator pulling her baby screaming from her arms, fists full of Dani’s jacket, refusing to let go, cortisol boiling scars into her as yet unmarred brain, all so Dani could, what, return to another pathetic office job? Some insignificant little company, disseminating worthless digital content for very little money, where the only thing she did with any care at all was ensure she was out the door at exactly five o’clock. Maybe if Dani were a human rights lawyer, performing good work for those who needed it; a dentist, securing a sound financial future for her family. Even if she simply enjoyed her work, at all, it might be different. But none of those things was the case. Despite identifying strongly as a feminist, Dani didn’t have a career. And while maybe she could technically be a feminist without financial independence, having to ask Clark for money certainly didn’t feel in the spirit of the thing.

“I just . . .” She prodded her scrambled eggs with her fork, struggling to come up with a reason they couldn’t move to Metcalf, but everything she thought of withered against the argument of more money, cheaper housing, her mother nearby. Anya. Her oldest friend. Probably still her best friend, really. “I’ve just got a bad feeling, Clark, about moving to Metcalf, I’ve got this”—she swallowed. “I’ve got this”—she swallowed again—“gulp-resistant lump in my throat. Honestly, it’s not going away.” She gulped, audibly, putting her neck and shoulders into it, making it hurt this time. She raised her fingers to her throat, pressed gently, feeling for the sea urchin that must surely be lodged there.

And Clark, a good person at the moment (sometimes he was a bad person), honored her nebulous dread; he raised the fingers not currently occupied by cutlery, a calming gesture, and cooed, “I understand. I really do. It’s different for you, to go back home, you’ve got your . . . legacy.” Dani winced. Embarrassed. It was fine for her to secretly believe she had any kind of legacy in Metcalf, but she didn’t want anyone else, even Clark, to know that she felt that way. If she did have any legacy, her continued absence was all that sustained it. A generation of Metcalfians who once knew her, paused from time to time to wonder whatever happened to that Danielle Silver. Where did she get away to? And the possibilities were endless. Because she’d been royalty, the Princess of Trash, vanished without a trace: A kind of Anastasia Romanov. A garbage Anastasia Romanov. If she returned now, they’d know exactly what happened to her: Whatever happened to that Danielle Silver? Oh, I just ran into her in the mall, actually, she was in line at Kernels, yes, just waiting her turn to purchase a small bit of popcorn, yes, a little treat for herself, yes, she deserves a little treat. That...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.1.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: A Certain Hunger • Bunny • feminist horror • Her Body and Other Parties • Literary Horror • mona awad • Nightbitch • Rachel Yoder • Stepford Wives
• ISBN-10: 1-80546-005-6 / 1805460056
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80546-005-3 / 9781805460053