Excerpt of She Makes It Look Easy by Marybeth Whalen

Ariel

I saw her years later in the grocery store near my house. I had to look twice to be sure it was her. She had lost weight, a lot of weight. Her collarbones jutted out from the neckline of her shirt like the framework of a building. When she spoke to the young woman accompanying her, her neck muscles pushed against her skin as though they were straining to break free. I thought of all our morn- ing walks together and had to stop myself from approaching to congratulate her. She always did want to be thinner.

Her hair wasn’t blonde anymore. It was the exact color of my second son’s hair, a mahogany red that I clearly remembered her exclaiming over as she stood in my kitchen shortly after we met. “I love this hair,” she had said, wrapping a single curl around her finger as my son squirmed and grimaced. “Do you know how much I’d have to pay to get hair this color?” she had said.

“But your hair’s a beautiful blonde,” I had offered. My own hair was auburn. I’d always wanted to be blonde.

She had shrugged, rolled her eyes. “Do you know how much I had to pay for hair this color?” she had said, laughing. And I, as always, had laughed with her.

Now, standing at a distance, it took me a moment to determine that the young woman with her was actually her older daughter. It appeared that the weight she had lost, her daughter had found. She slouched along beside her mom, a permanent sulk on her face, wearing skinny jeans that were not made for her figure and a T-shirt that read “I Didn’t Do It.” An unappealing white roll of flesh poked out between the jeans and the shirt. Her hair was no longer the blonde airy curls I remembered from back then, perennially clipped into ponytails with matching ribbons. Instead it was a dishwater blonde I imagined closely matched her mother’s real color, hanging dank and stringy around her acne-spotted face. I closed my eyes to block the longing I felt at the image of her at eight years old, radiating light and happiness. The girl I was looking at was not the same person. Yet she was.

I found myself tailing the two of them, watching her just like I used to when she was my neighbor, and I was fascinated—too fascinated—by her. Once, I had wanted to be just like her. Once, I would’ve done anything to be like her. As she pulled microwave popcorn and diet sodas from the shelf, I thought about the time when I knew her. Or, when I thought I knew her. There was still a part of me that wanted to talk to her, to ask the questions I never could get her to answer, just in case I might finally understand what drove her to do what she did. I wondered if I looked into her eyes if I would see a flicker of the person I once knew, or if I would just see blankness. I imagined a gaping absence that was always there, even when I chose not to see it.