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MOLLIE FANCHER, MARVELOUS INVALID, LIVES WITHOUT FOOD!
- University of Pittsburgh Press
- Chapter
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M O L L I E F A N C H E R , M A R V E L O U S I N V A L I D , L I V E S W I T H O U T F O O D ! The first law of female compensation: nothing becomes nothing. Malice marriage’s rich dream (a certain Mr. Taylor whom you “ceased to regard with affection”), and you are caught instead forever faking a girl-body’s bone trance with systematic nightgown flutterings & psychic claims you wear sacramentally thin for fifty years, famous in your Brooklyn bed. Fifty years spilling beef tea from a thimble— your complexion blooms, a miracle. Neither is time starved by your refusal. Below your dim Victorian window’s view, horsecars are changed for electric trains and the gaslight’s hiss snuffed & replaced by a brighter insistence; the new century speed-reads its own name in black headlines and calls and calls though you won’t answer. Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:43 PM Page 54 Telephone, telegraph, transcontinental railway lines are laid like lashings of rank meat across a table— Aunt Susan shuffles in to prop your pillows. Thinking of food as ruin, Mollie, makes you pure and of a delicate, noble strain, a high-maintenance bed-case saint fashioning cobweb roses from bits of worsted. When you tire of this, you call for a sponge bath of alcohol vapors. In your slow fast, one truth: Aunt Susan, who wished to marry once, grows a dowager’s hump and must give up her life to care for you. Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:43 PM Page 55 ...