A Pretty Face Alone in the evenings, when the light had drained from the slate roof of her small rural home, and when her husband was working late, Mary Gooch would perform a striptease for the stars at the open bedroom window: shifting out of rumpled bottoms, slipping off blousy top, liberating breasts, peeling panties, her creamy flesh spilling forth until she was completely, exquisitely nude. In the darkness, she'd beg her lover the wind to ravish her until she needed to grasp the sill for support. Then, inhaling the night like a post-coital cigarette, Mary would turn to face the mirror, who'd been watching all along. The mirror held the image Mary Gooch knew as herself, a forty-three-year-old brunette standing five and a half feet tall, so gilded with fat that hardly a bone from her skeleton could insinuate itself in her reflection. No hint of clavicle, no suggestion of scapula, no jag in her jaw, no scallop in her knee, no crest of ilium, no crook of knuckle, not a phalange in the smallest of her fingers. And no cords of muscle, either, as if she were enrobed by a subcutaneous duvet. Mary remembered, when she was nine years old, stepping off the scale in Dr. Ruttle's office and hearing him whisper the word to her slight mother, Irma. It was an unfamiliar word, but one she understood in the context of the fairy-tale world. Obeast. There were witches and warlocks. So must there be ogres and obeasts. Little big Mary wasn't confused by the diagnosis. It made sense to her child's mind that her body had become an outward manifestation of the starving animal in her gut. Such a pretty face. That was what people always said. When she was a child they made the comment to her mother, with tsk ing pity or stern reproach, depending on their individual natures. As she grew, the pitying, reproving people made the comment directly to Mary. Such a pretty face. Implied was the disgrace of her voluminous body, the squander of her green eyes and bow lips, her aquiline nose and deep-cleft chin and her soft skin, like risen dough, with no worry lines to speak of, which was remarkable because, when she wasn't eating, that's what Mary Gooch did. She worried about what she would eat and what she would not eat. When and where she would or wouldn't. She worried because she had too much or not nearly enough. She worried about hypertension, type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis, heart attack, stroke, osteoarthritis. The contempt of strangers. The mouths of babes. Sudden death. Protracted death. She worried all the more because all the worry made her sleepless, and in her dreamless hours hosted more worries, about her husband, Gooch, and the approach of their silver anniversary, about her menial job at Raymond Russell Drugstore and about her list, which she imagined not as Things to do but Things left undone . Weight is only numbers on a scale, she told herself, and her mirror just another point of view. Squinting at her naked reflection when the moon was waxing and the angle just right, Mary Gooch saw beauty in the poetry of her contours, in the expressive, expansive, edible flesh, and understood why an artist sketching nudes might find appealing the mountainous gut, and favour the pocked shore of sloping thigh, and enjoy the depth and shadow of pendulous breasts and multiple chins. A shape ample and sensuous, like the huge round vase handed down on the Brody side of the family, in which she arranged her ditch lilies in the spring. Or like the dunes of virgin snow on the hills beyond her home outside small-town Leaford. Mary wished to be a rebel against the tyranny of beauty but was instead a devotee, coveting its currency, devouring images in glossy magazines and broadcast TV, especially the kind that chronicled the lives of the rich and famous. She lingered over the body shots, outlining with her fingertips, lik Excerpted from The Wife's Tale by Lori Lansens All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.