Summary

With the highest density of named-characters per-page in the collection to this point, “Real Women Have Bodies,” surprises the reader with, yet again, an unnamed, female, first-person narrator. Instead of reading for the story of the narrator like in “Inventory,” or “The Husband Stitch,” this story does not seem to be motivated in understanding the individual motivations of the narrator as much as it is in understanding the strange world that the narrator is placed within.

The story begins with the narrator working at a seemingly mid-to-high-end clothing store named Glam, described as “the view from inside a casket” (Location 1690). Glam sells specialty skirts and dresses like: “bright teal slips and dusky pink thunder-puff, the Bella series, the one the color of bees. Mermaid cuts in salt-flat white; trumpet-style in algae red; princess gowns in liver purple. The Ophelia, which looks...