A Tale of Two Women

At the height of the war two women sat talking at the kitchen table, one tall one short and each reporting back on what they’d last heard from their husbands, those men now said to be dead or missing and although the marriages had been almost over it felt like they ought to rebegin or be beginning or maybe they should not have let things end after all, the revision setting in amidst the smell of vinegar from the chips that the short one picked at but which made the tall one feel sick, all her life listening to the stories of her own mother during a different war where the pickling vinegar shrivelled her fingertips and seeped through her pores the smell pervasive, there even in the bile that she vomited with her third child when the tall woman was still a girl, long before her own husband took himself off to escape their troubles that he itemised in argument as he packed, topmost being his resentment of her own statuesque form, how she flaunted it in spite of him and as the war drew on he disliked this more and more, so much so that he asked her not to wear heels and discouraged her from wearing stripes and told her to keep her hair down would she not go on piling it up on her head like that while the short woman had married a tall man and worn high shoes at all times even her slippers had little heels so that he wouldn’t put his back out bending to kiss her at night or so that he might kiss her again or even once in a while if only it didn’t inconvenience him, her body, how it was she said, how it had always been a thing he couldn’t change but tried until at last she kicked her shoes off under the table to show her bunioned malformed feet pinched from pleasing him or seeking to at the height of the conflict that had long been between them just before he left for something he called the real thing which had started out as simply another man’s fantasy and maybe each went off this way only because one wife happened to be short and the other tall for after all it wasn’t what they wanted, for a woman’s body to be like this something so out of their control not having considered the consequences or the physical inconvenience or what the other men would think about their own stature in light of the women they had once loved and later wed and now left for —— all those words in your head that you never said because you just wanted to put the thing to bed put the thing, not have him put the thing, best not speak of it their mothers whispered screwing the jars shut and rinsing the sick from the sink.