Lion's Share by Rochelle Rattner

succeed as a painter. You certainly proved her wrong,” said a trouble-making aunt who’d cornered Jana after her grandmother’s funeral eight years ago.
    â€œMy mother never said that,” Jana responded.
    â€œOf course she said that, dear. Your mother might not have told you, but she worried all the time.”
    â€œMy mother always knew I could do or be anything I wanted. She might not have wanted me to become a painter, but she never doubted I could succeed at it.” Jana walked away under the pretense of getting more wine.
    â€œWell, I think it was your mother said that. Maybe it was someone else,” her aunt continued, talking to no one.
    The bus must have hit a pothole. Jana woke with a start, her aunt’s words making her head swim. She remembered Natalie saying, years ago, in one of those rare moments of insight, that sometimes she felt as if her looks were all she had going for her. “My parents decided early on that I was the pretty one,” Nat said. “My sister was the smart one. I think we’ve both suffered—my sister was twenty-five before she had the courage to wear sexy clothes and jewelry, and look at everything I have to overcome before I buckle down and paint. Parents have no idea what they’re doing to kids when they say such things.”
    Was it possible? Jana’s parents had always encouraged her—they tacked her paintings on walls, gave her private art lessons, bragged to their friends about how creative she was. Yet she had no memory of them telling her she was pretty. They commented that she looked nice in one dress another aunt had bought her, a red Scottish plaid with false suspenders and a high collar; Jana could distinctly remember never wanting to wear that dress again. And her mother constantly complained that Jana didn’t know how to smile. Or was it that she never smiled? Maybe it was her mother who didn’t know how smile and, then, projected her insecurities onto her daughter; she’d done that with cooking, clothes, makeup …
    â€œYou have a wonderful body,” Ed cooed in her ear. In vain she searched the half-empty bus for a way to discredit his words. She hadn’t stood on her head and done tricks last night, she hadn’t tried to manipulate Ed into praising her. Here was someone actually telling her how good she was for practically no reason at all, merely for doing what she realized for the first time must have come naturally.
    She slid the window open and let herself breathe in the fresh country air. She tried again to remember one time when her parents had told her she was pretty, but all she could hear was her aunt’s nauseating Queens accent. All the mirrors were covered that day after Grandma’s funeral—there was no way Jana could see herself. Two paintings she had given her parents, amateurish still-lifes with extremely flat surfaces, were the only things in that room to distract one’s attention.

    Last week some of the Yaddo crowd had gone over to the old mineral springs that once supplied this town’s livelihood. They’d invited Jana to join them, but she’d declined—for all she knew, people skinny-dipped. Even if they wore bathing suits or wrapped towels around them, she didn’t want her body that exposed.
    Last week was before the ache set in. Curled up in Ed’s lap, her body had been twisted and turned in completely foreign ways. She got more exercise that night than she usually got lugging canvases around, and ever since, her muscles had been getting back at her, making her pay for all their years of disuse. First her chest and arms ached. Now her neck and shoulders were killing her. Still, she’d probably decline a trip to the springs even if she were invited—what was one night of feeling comfortable with your body, compared to years of keeping it buried under baggy pants and padded jackets?
    She sat alone in her room, idly massaging her